I don’t believe in omens, superstitions, bad luck, tarot cards, séances, etc.
Not.
I just try not to think about them. So pretending it isn’t Friday the thirteenth, I’m making myself think about something else. Something fun like the movies.
Sometimes to beef up my income from writing or just to tweak my imagination, I work on a film. Nothing glamorous like directing or being a movie star. Usually it’s some kind of choreographic job : a senior prom, a nightclub scene, a dinner dance , a stage performance of a ballet or opera.
It’s interesting work, but the days can be long and tedious. There are big stretches between scenes when lighting people, cameramen, makeup and wardrobe departments go to work. But since you never know how long the changeover will take, you’re always “on call.” You can’t “lose” yourself in a good romance book, but you do have lots of good thinking time.
This movie is a Disney production about a little girl who loves ballet and looks up her father whom she’s never met. He’s an egotistical (in a friendly, funny Disney way) football star and he’s overwhelmed by this pip squeak who shows up on his doorstep. He doesn’t know anything about ballet, but takes her to a ballet, mainly because he doesn’t know what to do with her. He immediately comes to blows with the ballet teacher (young, pretty, single), who says she will only teach his daughter if he’ll be a tree in the upcoming production.
We’re seeing where this is going, right? Yep. The two of them fall in love and they all live happily ever after.
While I was sitting one day during a two hour changeover, I started thinking about how if you shifted the emphasis from the kid/father relationship to the adult relationship, you’d have all the trademarks of a romantic comedy. In the movie, the awful things that threaten their relationship is between father and kid instead of between the man and the woman. But it’s pretty much a love story.
It seems like so many novels, screenplays, television series are really about love and relationships even when the plot is about something else. So that got me to thinking that maybe it’s the romance that ties the story together.
I know I’m always as interested in the outcome of the romance as I am in the plot and I feel more satisfied at the end if that romance has a happy ending.
What do you think? Does love really make a story, as well as the world, go round?