The First Try

My first attempt at screenwriting began with an idea for SPCN. Well, it wasn't so much a script idea, but a process. Well... oh, I'll explain.

One of Samahang's biggest endeavors is a high school outreach project called SPACE. SPACE goes to three high schools, Belmont, Marshall, and Eagle Rock, which are all embedded in Filipino communities around LA. I had attended the high school sites several times and was always impressed at how engaging the high school students were. They were sharp, smart, witty, passionate; these students were amazing! If you ever speak any SPACE staff about their students, doesn't matter who, they will absolutely gush! In particular, if you spoke to any of the peer advisors who do one-on-ones, they particularly are humbled by the stories the students have to tell them.

I was always fascinated by the richness of the stories within these communities, and I felt that a wider audience would share in my appreciation for them. But something told me that a typical Culture Night interpretation would be subject to a lot of the cliches I wanted to avoid. So the light bulb went on: have the high school students write the script for SPCN.

Well, most ideas usually SOUND good. But logistical problems, and distractions, and class, and all the other excuses I could make, well yeah, it never happened. But I was still fascinated by telling a story set in P-Town, and as I thought about a compelling story about youth, I thought about one of my favorite movies, West Side Story. Yeah, the rival gang/unrequited love thing is also pretty cliche, but it does provide a strong, compelling conflict that can drive a movie.

So I thought about writing West Side Story set in P-Town, but it needed to be tweaked. So I thought, "well, how about West Side Story, but unlike the gangs having conflicting cultural backgrounds, what if Tony and Riff were the ones who came from different backgrounds? And what if the biggest threats to the protagonist weren't the rival gangs, but the rivals within his OWN gang? So that foundation, combined with a lot of reading and dissecting a UCLA research paper on Satanas by Nonoy Alsaybar, came my first screenplay, the Kidz of Echo Park.

After I finished the first draft, I sent the script to whomever I could to read. Friends, actors, community leaders. I even did a table read in P-Town to hear the flow of it. Overall I got good reviews. I felt confident I wrote a strong script. It seemed like I was ready to move forward.

BUT, there were several issues that didn't settle with me. First of all, I had no script advisors who had actual experience IN a gang. I called on community folk for help, but just couldn't get anything. From the people who were close to me, they guessed that my problem was that I had not established the relationship or the trust, a trust that could take years to build, before I could get an honest perspective on my movie. Secondly, after the table read, I felt like although I could move forward and find amateur actors, the search for the right people would be incredibly difficult. I wanted to take the route and find professional union actors. But using union actors costs money. A LOT of money. Money that I didn't have. And thirdly, I had no film experience. No cred that I could actually pull this out.

So unless I wanted to take ten years out of my life to do the necessary fundraising and relationship building I needed (No.) or I were to sell to a major studio so I could get the money, but they could change and rearrange my story however they saw fit (Hell no!!!), this project was not going meet my vision. I loved the script, I wanted to do this movie badly, but for now, it had to be shelved. I had to go into a new direction. I had to start over.