P1
Script: Behind Bars Pilot (Section B) – Amy Maher
P2
Having pitched our vision for the tone and style of the limited series Behind Bars and getting to exercise that through section B of the script was truly rewarding. In drafting the script, I began to see what we envisioned unfold in my writing, with the American Western crossed with the melancholy of the Australian gothic expressed through a dramedy, and I hope audience’s will notice and celebrate this strange marriage of styles. We wanted to address divisions in class and rural living through a primarily comedic lens, and I think having this overarching motive across the writers’ room will offer a sense of continuity across sections A, B and C of the Pilot.
If I was to keep working on the pilot script, I would brief the other writers first in how my piece sits in the world of Barrel and if it flows well from and into other sections of the script. We managed to flesh out a clear world of Barrel and solid main characters, but with so many creative writers in the room, we were bound to see things slightly differently. When workshopping drafts of scripts in class, I noticed that many of us envisioned the characters we’ve created in our own way, whether that be a character’s sexuality or their accent and demeanour. In my own draft, I felt that I didn’t have much room to give each character their own personality but tried my best to do that through language and short descriptions of costume and behaviour. This was effective when introducing Boss, but I wrote with the assumption that audiences had already developed an idea of what Josh, Kyle and Mercedes look like and how they behave, so I could’ve been more descriptive in character-specific scenes.
In terms of collaboration, I feel that we were successful in all including our own bit to a mammoth of a project. Some voices were louder than others during both the ideation and writing stages and I often didn’t bother chiming in as there were already so many good ideas getting thrown around, but fortunately, no good idea was shot down – at least not immediately. For a group of mostly first-time screenwriters who weren’t super familiar with prison dramas, myself included, we managed to put together a world unlike anything else on screen, as guest Lucy Schmidt noted (personal communication, 2023). Weeks spent on world building and character development has been effective in moulding together our final collaborative project, as we’re able to present “the world before the plot” to our audience (Jones 2017). Barrel, inspired by Bairnsdale and other rural towns in Australia, feels like a real place, and having created a feeling of familiarity to place in our work is an achievement worth commending.
References
Jones M (2017) ‘New Voices, New Spaces’, (YouTube website) 16 October, accessed 4 September 2023 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpULZQtGNuQc>