One crafty writer’s never-say-die quest to tell a story for the page or screen.

Hey! I’m that guy trying to sell my latest screenplay, publish it as a novel or die trying.

In DIE TRYING, you will get an unvarnished look at a bitterly honest writer struggling to make it. No name-dropping or Hollywood phoniness. Just the facts ma’am on what the media landscape is really like behind the curtain.

In TODAY’S ISSUE, we look at the transformation from script to screen of the Academy Award-winning film Hamnet.

Artificial Intelligence learns by pattern recognition. Or, “by being exposed to large amounts of data and finding statistical regularities (patterns),” as Anthropic’s Claude chatbot puts it.

What happens when the machine is confronted by blackness or no learned patterns? According to Claude, “the model will map it to the nearest pattern it does know” and “[t]his can lead to confident-sounding but wrong answers — a problem called hallucination.”

In the film Hamnet, writer/director Chloé Zhao avoids hallucinating by distilling the patterns and symbols from the script she co-wrote with the book’s author, Maggie O’Farrell, to confront the ultimate blackness, that of death.

 HAMNET & PATTERNS

The film Hamnet opens with the camera craning down from the green canopy of trees toward Agnes, a young woman asleep at the base of a tree next to a black pit besetting the twisted tree roots.

In the script, there is opera and a red egg that is “nesting on a bed of fallen leaves, surrounded by circular tree roots.”

The movie 86’s the red egg symbol and finds our heroine, curled up like an egg, awakening to her hawk on a nearby tree branch.

In the last scene of the script, the red egg in the forest reappears, but with a “crack on its hard shell.” It is a “symbol of rebirth.”

The film ends with a simple cut to black after her dead son turns away from her and disappears into blackness.

The cut to black is more powerful than the overwrought cracked egg symbol. In translating the Hamnet script to screen, Zhao distills the many potent symbols into a legible pattern of signs that we can read as a mother moving on from grief after her son’s death.

Both film and script get extensive mileage out of the conceit of turning back. When “Will” Shakespeare first meets Agnes, she rebuffs him, but then asks him to tell her story because he is good with words.

Will obliges with the Orpheus myth, where the Greek god is able to escort his beloved Eurydice from the underworld with the condition that he never turns back to look at her, or she will be permanently imprisoned in the underworld.

Throughout the film, Zhao replays this plant. For example, when Will and Agnes marry, the husband dutifully turns back to look lovingly at his bride. At the end, Hamnet, their young son, turns back to look at his mother, either as a ghost or a figment of her imagination, before crossing into the void.

In the script, “[t]here is her boy. He has been waiting for her. He has been waiting for her so she can let him go.”

The movie then cuts from her watching him to a black screen. The pattern is over. The meaning is made clear. The final cut to black ends the movie and the mother’s grief.

We, like an AI model, seek meaning in the unfathomable blackness through pattern recognition. We find meaning in the cut to black. We can make sense of the pattern of signs, symbols and conceits deployed by the filmmakers to contribute meaning to totemic pillars of death, grief and the inability to fathom the void beyond its inky black hole.

THIS WEEK IN DIE TRYING

• Time Spent Marketing Current Script Going Perm in a Phone Call: 12 Minutes
  

• Page Count on Seth Harp’s The Fort Bragg Cartel for New Script Research: 93
  

• Films Watched: 1 (Hamnet)

• Mood: “My plan was to keep moving. Never slow down. Keep the car aimed straight ahead through the rain like a Cruise missile…“—Hunter S. Thompson

If you’re reading this because you write, read, develop or sell scripts:

Do you find pattern recognition or grief in your mountain of a slush pile?

Lemme know.

—Michael