Vultures circle overhead.
Higher and beyond them, over the desert, a speck of bird is SEEN.
(Closer)
A FALCON is circling on a rising thermal.
Next day's rushes...
Back to the poem
THE BALLAD OF EMMA GOOD
A Screenplay Adaptation of an Original Work
by Red Slider © 1998
[note: This is the literary version of the screenplay, intended
to be read. A production version would contain considerably less
detail. In modern film making, such details are the prerogative
of the director - the Director)
FADE IN:
The SCREEN FADES INTO BLACK. Whatever
it is the darkness hides, you don't want to know. Not this time.
The BLACK takes on a penetrating vibrancy that quickens into menace.
An uninterpreted warning: Something streaks across the lens of
the eye. Scratches like sand, disappears like shadow. A stinging
uncertainty is left on the face of the darkness.
It scratches again. Suddenly the miles of safe, thick, surrounding
darkness are not safe. Their protections, merely tissue-thin membrane.
If there were a place to crawl deeper. . . but there isn't. It
is just the other side of our eyelids now and nothing, but nothing
can stop it.
EXT. DESERT SANDSTORM
A giant claw of darkness shreds the night and everywhere at once
the fragile safety net is torn. Furious confusion rages in every
direction.
HOWLING wind, SHRIEKING deafening SOUND. Stinging fury without
direction. Scalar, total.
Something is 'out there'. Something without depth or horizon that
vaguely appears and disappears.
The HOWLING and the sand close in once more. What was SEEN is
doubted; what was sensed, impossible to believe.
INT. DARKNESS
From that depth a single, unimpeachable witness speaks: the VOICE
of ORSON WELLS returns with one final message:
NARRATOR
What
rough beast, its hour come round at last.
A sudden explosion. A thick, oily black and orange fireball enveloping
the darkness. Inside of it, the bright flash of its origin dims
and fades.
EXT. DESERT VILLAGE - DAY
A Middle Eastern village stands terraced on a dark hillside -
a jumble of stone and mud dwellings. Beyond them, rising sand
dunes at the edge of a vast desert.
The only modern building in sight is a single-story school at
the base of the hill, behind a perimeter of school-yard fence
topped with a giant slinky of razorwire.
A BBC RADIO ANNOUNCER evenly intones the news of the day.
RADIO
ANNOUNCER (VO, static)
In
Bethlehem, today, thousands gather to
celebrate
the millennial Christmas day as. . .
EXT. DESERT EDGE
A clump of dark stuff against the white sand.
(Closer)
The clump of rags may be human forms. Some larger, some smaller.
Women? Children?
NEW ANGLE - ECU
Shredded schoolbooks, in Arabic. A patch of wet blue-black stuff,
dark cloth dripping thick liquid onto the white sand, a shadow
passing THROUGH SHOT, Some stuff like crimson jellyfish spattered
on a rock. Another scrap, in Hebrew this time, burned at the edges.
Another shadow passing through. An intimate view of horror. Another
shadow, passing.
The mangled wheel of a bicycle is free-wheeling, pieces of meat
clinging to the spokes. A fruit basket with dates, pomegranates,
oranges and olives. A brown oxford with a gelatinous eye in it.
Another shadow passing.
EXT. SAND DUNES - (MOVING)
The shadow bobs along the uneven surface of the sand, plunging
into small dips and hollows, moving up the side of a drift, then
down again; vanishing and reemerging on a higher slope. It rises
up the side of a high dune ridge until it crests and disappears.
A fine mist of sand blows from the ridge into the pale blue sky.
NEW ANGLE - SKYWARD
Vultures circle overhead.
Higher and beyond them, over the desert, a speck of bird is SEEN.
(Closer)
A FALCON is circling on a rising thermal.
Next day's rushes...
Back to the poem