It All Began With Wally - Part 3

Breaking up is hard to do. Painful as it was for Wally to send Edwin to the cutting room floor, he grudgingly accepted my advice that if his epic was going to be about the adventures of Lewis and Clark, the two men needed to be more than just a peripheral footnote in the plot.

His second draft opened with Lewis and Clark sitting around a campfire.

“So, Meriwether,” says William, “I understand that you are the private secretary to our third president, Thomas Jefferson.”

“Yes, that is right, William. It is a very interesting job.”

“I would think so, Meriwether. Though not as interesting as our current quest to search out a route to the Pacific Ocean and to gather important information about the Indian tribes that live there and the dangers that future explorers who follow in our footsteps will have in establishing settlements in the Far West.”

“Well, we have had a long winter of training and preparation, William. Next year will be 1804 and—“

NOTE TO FILE: Remind Wally not to use dialogue to explain things to the audience that the characters themselves already know. They also don’t need to keep repeating each other’s names if they’re the only two in the scene.

By page 79, Lewis and Clark arrive at a trading camp and encounter a wily French trapper named Charbonneau.

“Allo meez-yours,” says Charbonneau. “Vellcomb to zee bess tradings post in zay ree-jione. Vood zah foors be of inter-ahst for zah freegid treks to zee Paceefic?”

“No, thank you,” replies Meriwether who speaks perfect French. “But who is yonder beautiful squaw starring at us in wonder and who looks quite young and appears to be heavily pregnant?”

“Zat eez my wife – Zakajaweejia.”

I send Wally an email and ask him why Charbonneau’s phonetically scribed lines read like Peppy la Pue.

“I just want to be helpful to the actors,” he brightly replies.