Raindance Writers' Lab, 2nd Edition

1   Introduction

 

I DIDN'T GO to film school. I went to art school. I started out in movies working as a scenic artist. It was after I had done this job as a crewmember on nearly seventy features and countless hundreds of commercials that I began to work on screenplays. I have no formal training in movies.

I come from a small Protestant community just outside Toronto. My forebears forsook modern changes: everything from electricity to zippers. You might know them as Amish. As a child I was told that the Devil lived in the cinema. One day while waiting for a farm repair at the blacksmith, I saw the cinema on the high street. I had noticed the cinema before, but ignored it, because of what my family had taught me. But on that hot spring day it ...