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Recently I've been getting to know my characters for a potential screenplay. You know the drill-get to understand their background, childhood experiences that shape the content of their character, their dreams, their nightmares, religion and politics, their eye color and on and on. Interestingly, there's a dead father whose influence on three of the characters forms the heart of the story. So-I've got to delineate the father's character as sharply as those appearing in flesh and blood on camera.
It got me thinking how often a character in a film or play never appears-yet we get to know him/her through the dialogue, actions and conflicts of those on screen. If you've read or seen a production of Arthur Miller's The Price, you get to know the father from the conflict of two very different sons and how their relationship to a dead father influenced their decisions about the future.
Think of Hamlet. We never meet his father, save for the ghostly appearances. Yet, we certainly gain keen insight into his influence through Hamlet's tormented self-analysis and disgust for an uncle's marriage to his mother. In the film, Barbershop, the father is also an important character, even though he, too, is dead when the story unfolds and does not appear in a single frame of film save for his portrait on the barbershop wall.
We take for granted how vital it is to know characters who people our scripts. It's equally important to know characters that may not appear on screen yet are pivotal to plot-the man who wasn't there. So, next time you're working on characterization, don't forget to flesh out those characters who don't appear in a single scene, yet who, in reality, hang over every scene like humid air on a sultry summer night.
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