Wrestling with ideas
I went in to work fairly late today and the extra available brain capacity in the morning meant that I could ponder some things that have been troubling me about Bear Town and actually do some writing for the first time in about a week. I went to the Chapters bookstore at Avenue Road in Toronto and picked up a copy of Writing the Comedy Film: Make 'em Laugh which I'd highly recommend if you're writing a comedy script. The book is fairly well laid out and (unlike a lot of film writing books I've read) has a number of writing exercises that I actually found useful. I sped through most of the book in about an hour and I'm happy to report it made me rethink several scenes in Bear Town that had been bothering me and gave me some ideas how to eliminate some of the minor characters that aren't really necessary in the story.
Today I was also thinking about a key sequence in Bear Town that involves a wrestling ring. In the current working draft of the screenplay, there are two wrestling matches seen in the film, one that's fairly short near the beginning of the film that's really just there as a backdrop for a scene and to set up a big pay-off near the end of the film. In the first match, a large steroid-popping Wrestler (not named yet) takes on a much smaller, much skinnier opponent. Since the earliest drafts of Bear Town this character has always been referred to as "The Masked Marvel." Originally I had envisioned a tacky red and gold lame costume with a Lone Ranger-style mask for him. Today it dawned on me that it might be fun to make him a Luchador.
In case you're not familiar with wrestling, a "Luchador" is a masked wrestler from Lucha Libre (Mexican Wrestling). Pro Wrestling is a revered tradition in Mexico and almost all the wrestlers wear masks. The masks are rooted in early Hispanic times, part of a cultural tradition that dates all the way back to the ancient Aztecs. The masks are meant to be both symbolic and mystical - they are supposed to reveal the personality of the wrestler. The masks are considered so important that the biggest main event matches in Lucha Libre are often "mask vs. mask" where the loser must unmask and reveal his identity so that he can publicly surrender his mask to the winner.
With all this in mind - mostly to amuse myself - I decided to design an appropriately styled mask for our "Masked Marvel." I found a few websites with some good pictures of Lucha Libre masks by searching in the pictures area of Google. I also found two web stores that sell commercial reproductions of some of the famous Mexican Wrestler masks, www.anymask.com and hollywoodwebshop.com (search under "Mexican Wrestling Masks" if you go there to look).
The popular `80s M.U.S.C.L.E. toys.
I created a number of possible mask designs (see the sketches above) but I'm leaning towards something in the style of the popular 80s M.U.S.C.L.E. rubber figure toys. For the uninitiated, (probably anyone who wasn't a pre-teen boy in the late 80s) M.U.S.C.L.E. was a very cool line of 200+ tiny pink rubber wrestling figures manufactured by Mattel. Like so many popular toys, M.U.S.C.L.E. was based on a popular Japanese TV show and comic strip about wrestlers endowed with superhuman powers called Kinnikuman. I think Mattel recently relaunched the M.U.S.C.L.E. line in North America, part of the 80s revival that seems to be going on.
Today I was also thinking about a key sequence in Bear Town that involves a wrestling ring. In the current working draft of the screenplay, there are two wrestling matches seen in the film, one that's fairly short near the beginning of the film that's really just there as a backdrop for a scene and to set up a big pay-off near the end of the film. In the first match, a large steroid-popping Wrestler (not named yet) takes on a much smaller, much skinnier opponent. Since the earliest drafts of Bear Town this character has always been referred to as "The Masked Marvel." Originally I had envisioned a tacky red and gold lame costume with a Lone Ranger-style mask for him. Today it dawned on me that it might be fun to make him a Luchador.In case you're not familiar with wrestling, a "Luchador" is a masked wrestler from Lucha Libre (Mexican Wrestling). Pro Wrestling is a revered tradition in Mexico and almost all the wrestlers wear masks. The masks are rooted in early Hispanic times, part of a cultural tradition that dates all the way back to the ancient Aztecs. The masks are meant to be both symbolic and mystical - they are supposed to reveal the personality of the wrestler. The masks are considered so important that the biggest main event matches in Lucha Libre are often "mask vs. mask" where the loser must unmask and reveal his identity so that he can publicly surrender his mask to the winner.
With all this in mind - mostly to amuse myself - I decided to design an appropriately styled mask for our "Masked Marvel." I found a few websites with some good pictures of Lucha Libre masks by searching in the pictures area of Google. I also found two web stores that sell commercial reproductions of some of the famous Mexican Wrestler masks, www.anymask.com and hollywoodwebshop.com (search under "Mexican Wrestling Masks" if you go there to look).
The popular `80s M.U.S.C.L.E. toys.
I created a number of possible mask designs (see the sketches above) but I'm leaning towards something in the style of the popular 80s M.U.S.C.L.E. rubber figure toys. For the uninitiated, (probably anyone who wasn't a pre-teen boy in the late 80s) M.U.S.C.L.E. was a very cool line of 200+ tiny pink rubber wrestling figures manufactured by Mattel. Like so many popular toys, M.U.S.C.L.E. was based on a popular Japanese TV show and comic strip about wrestlers endowed with superhuman powers called Kinnikuman. I think Mattel recently relaunched the M.U.S.C.L.E. line in North America, part of the 80s revival that seems to be going on.
Posted by Andrew at 3:57 AM | Permalink
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