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 really is like behind the curtain.

In TODAY’S ISSUE, we decode the rich symbolism in the highly literary screenplay Hamnet.

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Like Arnold’s T-800 in The Terminator, we’re back from bouts of sleepless nights, demanding day jobs and epic vacations.

We didn’t do any Oscar coverage because we’re not carnivorous lapdogs. We do salute Ryan Coogler for Sinners and Paul Thomas Anderson for One Battle After Another for Best Original and Adapted screenplay, respectively.

Today, we explore the literary screenplay Hamnet and how writer/director Chloé Zhao and author Maggie O’Farrell heavily deploy symbolism in the script.

SYMBOLISM IN HAMNET

In 1952, Hemingway published his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Old Man and the Sea, the story of an aging Cuban fisherman and his battle to reel in a huge blue marlin larger than his boat.

Critics saw heavy literary tropes in the short book. It was an allegory. The Old Man and the marlin were symbols of larger Christian and existential themes.

Hemingway himself dismissed the overwrought literary talk: “There isn’t any symbolism, the sea is the sea, the old man is an old man, the sharks are all sharks, no better nor worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit.’”

In Hamnet, a story of two parents grieving their son, the symbolism isn’t “shit,” but the potent stuff of drama. Two weeks ago, Jesse Buckley won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her role as Agnes Shakespeare, who opens the script asleep beneath a giant tree and its circular roots.

In the script’s first image, a red egg is nestled on a bed of giant leaves, tree roots and a “hole in the wet forest floor, a dark, mysterious, bottomless void.”

This bottomless void is revisited throughout the script, especially in the death of Hamnet, Agnes and her husband Will Shakespeare's young son.

The screenwriters circle back to this image in the last scene of the script, where the red egg lies in the forest with a “crack on its hard shell,” symbolizing a “sign of rebirth.”

The opening and closing images are virtually the same, except for the crack in the red egg.

Unlike Hemingway, the screenwriters aren’t afraid of overt symbolism. The cracked egg represents the rebirth of Agnes, who achieves closure after Hamnet’s death when her husband biographically retells their son’s story onstage in the production of Hamlet.

For the screenwriters of Hamnet, sometimes a cigar is more than a cigar.

THIS WEEK IN DIE TRYING

• # of New Livers Needed After a Week in Cancún: 1
  

• Draft # Finished on Current Script & Sworn to Be the Last: 9
  

• Reads requested: 2

• Mood:  “The crisis is originality.” — Sony Film CEO Tom Rothman

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

Does Hollywood say it wants big-budget “visionary” scripts but refuses to develop or fund them?

Go aggro on the reply button. I read every response.

—Michael