Characters with Hearts of Gold

I’ve been playing with Magic Bullet Looks, but I’m still working on the blog entry. My AfterEffects trial ran out before I could get into some serious work with it, so I’ll have to see if I can get a new trial installed to play with it. There’s a lesson for you: never install a trial until you’re positive you can actually get time to play with it!

Meanwhile, here is this week’s (or last week’s) entry.

I’ve been tardy about getting my testing done because I’ve been busy writing scripts. We’re still a few shy of having enough to look at, pick a few, and shoot a select few.

I have the advantage of writing for two main characters that are well established, and we’ve steadily added a pool of recurring characters that live in Miller & Mullet’s world, so I don’t have to look too far to find foes, foils, or friends. I’ve used them in the scripts for the shorts, and Mullet’s used them for the comic book scripts, so we’re working with the same materials, and we’re fleshing out characters that we can continue to develop.

Several of these supporting players date back from the Babysitters script. Two of them, Officer Bob and The Shark, first appeared in Babysitters (played by Teige Reid and Dave Pearce, respectively), and they (the characters) have since appeared in our comic book series, Miller & Mullet in Space, although they don’t resemble Teige or Dave very much. Officer Bob is a corrupt cop or ex-cop, and The Shark is a hustler and conman usually involved in Bob’s schemes. These guys are natural villains in Miller & Mullet’s world. Morally, Miller isn’t much different from these people, but he lacks the ability to pull off a scheme—or at least come up with something that actually works. From a writer’s perspective, it is a lot of fun to have three swindlers locked in a room together, and I expect that we’ll see more of them going forward. Between Babysitters and the two issues of the comic book, these two are our most fleshed-out villains.

Two other characters we’ve repeated are Honey and The Pimp, both of them appearing in Babysitters. Ron Fromstein played The Pimp and Tasha May Currie played Honey. These characters haven’t appeared in the comic books yet, but they play important roles in the lives of Miller in particular.

Honey is the prostitute with a heart of gold, or at least our version of that cliché. If she’s a reluctant prostitute that the cliché requires, we don’t see that part of her character as she’s quite enthusiastic—or at least willing to provide service—when Miller appears (we’ve never shown her with other johns, so that might be the next step if we want to play with the cliché). Honey probably loves Miller, but she doesn’t hesitate to beat him savagely when he rips her off. Yet her feelings for Miller allow him to take advantage of her (before she retaliates). A strange, sadistic relationship, to be sure.

The Pimp, Honey’s “boss,” is a vicious psychopath who hates Miller and carries a corkscrew as his primary weapon. Honey and The Pimp haven’t appeared in the comic books, but I’ve written them into a couple of scripts.

There is no shortage of people we can bring back from any of the movies or comics—these four are the most important recurring characters in the stories we’ve written so far, and I expect that they’ll continue to remain important.

Another character who has never appeared on-screen is Miller & Mullet’s agent, Larry. Larry seems to get them work, albeit birthday parties and other jobs they’d like to leave behind for greener pastures. We’ll have to put Larry directly into a story at some point, although the idea of an unseen recurring character is interesting, too—think of Charlie of Charlie’s Angels.

I’ve written three or four scripts that include a blind person as a character. In Babysitters, we had Humphries, a blind person (played by a rampaging Sandy Jobin-Bevans) who Miller robs to pay Officer Bob and The Shark. In a couple of shorts, I’ve written other blind characters as foils who get caught up in various misadventures courtesy of our heroes. In these cases, the characters are more vulnerable than the average person is, so you save some exposition by not having to explain why they’re trapped in the situation with Miller & Mullet—it’s as obvious as the white cane and dark glasses that they’re using. I’m not taking out any prejudice against blind people, honest: I have a white cane that a blind friend donated to the cause, so we can come up with a blind person with a white cane. If I had access to a wheelchair or one of those clunky hearing aids from the 1950’s, I would certainly create physically challenged and deaf characters.

There are some other characters I’d love to have in our shorts, too. If I could get a police uniform or two, we’d have natural bad guys or foils. Give me a clergyman’s collar or nun’s habit, a firefighter’s bunker suit and I’ll make use of them. The thing about no-budget filmmaking is, of course, you don’t necessarily have the budget to dress the cast as you’d want, so you have to make do with what you can get access to. In Babysitters, we bought a police officer’s blue shirt for one scene, but otherwise we’ve never supplied a costume (my favourite costume is still the bright red marching band jacket that Steve Chamberlain thought his jockey character should wear while he doped a horse). Of course, if we weren’t trying to keep the world around Miller & Mullet realistic, we could adopt more deliberately unrealistic standards for costumes, like kiddie hats and plastic raincoats to portray firefighers, but we’ve chosen a different direction for the shorts.

Next time, I’ll either get on with the evaluations or I’ll write about finding props in the garbage….