THE NIGHT-BORN
By Jack London
CHARACTER NOTES
TREFETHAN: bald-headed and
dewlapped, miner, He’s the one telling the whole story, 47 and old. “Grizzled
mustache, the bald spot on his head, the puff-sacks under his eyes, the sagging
cheeks, the heavy dewlap, the general tiredness and staleness and fatness, all
the collapse and ruin of a man who had once been strong but who had lived too
easily and too well.”
MILNER: miner. Around the same
age as Trefethan.
BARDWELL: The guy who
pretty much starts TREFETHAN entire rant and gets stuck along for the
ride.
LUCY: she’s never
named in the story sadly but considering she’s the only female character it
makes it a bit easier. I LIED HER NAME IS LUCY WHAT DO YOU KNOW. Strong
willed and determined. Has an accent.
Page 1 (2 panels
Panel One: Show the outside of
the old Alta Inyo Club, probably in the more roguish parts of San Fran so look
for reference on the older run down places. The setting for the year is 1910 so
it’s relatively old and before both world wars so instead of cars show a cable
car. Also maybe some rebuilding after the huge fire 4 years earlier.
Panel Two: A look through and
open window, I’m picturing more of a bar scene than club. Lots of people
drinking but its all tense and no speech bubbles.
Page 2 (4 panels)
Panel One: Close up on the 3
leads and maybe a random Bartender. After all, someone has to be refilling
those drinks. MILNER and BARDWELL are amused at
TREFETHAN’s pink completion as he takes another sip.
Panel two: Focusing a panel on
TREFETHAN’s face now.
TREFETHAN: It was in 1898--I was
thirty-five then… Yes, I know you are adding it up. You're right. I'm
forty-seven now; look ten years more; and the doctors say--damn the doctors
anyway
Panel Three: Black creeps in
behind the panel as it shows a much younger TREFETHAN (use description below).
TREFETHAN’s words go in a box
during a flashback: But I was young. . . once. I was young twelve years ago,
and I had hair on top of my head, and my stomach was lean as a runner's, and
the longest day was none too long for me. I was a husky back there in '98. You
remember me, Milner. You knew me then. Wasn't I a pretty good bit of all right?
Panel 4: go back to present day
TREFETHAN who is a much more broken man.
TREFETHAN: Well, look at me now.
That's what the Goldstead did to me--God knows how many millions, but nothing
left in my soul... nor in my veins. The good red blood is gone. I am a
jellyfish, a huge, gross mass of oscillating protoplasm, a—a…"
Page 3 (3 panels)
Panel one: TREFETHAN takes a
long drink as the other two look on.
Panel two: MORE FLASHBACKS. Show
black.
BOX TREFETHAN: Women looked at
me then; and turned their heads to look a second time. Strange that I never
married. But the girl. That's what I started to tell you about. I met her a
thousand miles from anywhere, and then some. And she quoted to me those very
words of Thoreau that Bardwell quoted a moment ago--the ones about the day-born
gods and the night-born.
Panel 3: Huge picture of the
western lands aka the rockies. LANDSCAPPEEE.
BOX TREFETHAN: It was after I
had made my locations on Goldstead--and didn't know what a treasure-pot that
that trip creek was going to prove--that I made that trip east over the
Rockies, angling across to the Great Up North there the Rockies are something
more than a back-bone. They are a boundary, a dividing line, a wall impregnable
and unscalable. There is no intercourse across them, though, on occasion, from
the early days, wandering trappers have crossed them, though more were lost by
the way than ever came through. And that was precisely why I tackled the job.
It was a traverse any man would be proud to make. I am prouder of it right now
than anything else I have ever done.
TREFETHAN BOX (bottom of the
page):"It is an unknown land. Great stretches of it have never been
explored. There are big valleys there where the white man has never set foot,
and Indian tribes as primitive as ten thousand years ... almost, for they have
had some contact with the whites. Parties of them come out once in a while to
trade, and that is all. Even the Hudson Bay Company failed to find them and
farm them.
Page 4: (ONE PANEL)
Panel one: ANOTHER DETAILED
LANDSCAPE SO DESCRIBED BELOW.
BOX TREFETHAN: And now the girl.
I was coming up a stream--you'd call it a river in California--uncharted--and
unnamed. It was a noble valley, now shut in by high canyon walls, and again
opening out into beautiful stretches, wide and long, with pasture shoulder-high
in the bottoms, meadows dotted with flowers, and with clumps of
timberspruce--virgin and magnificent. The dogs were packing on their backs, and
were sore-footed and played out; while I was looking for any bunch of Indians
to get sleds and drivers from and go on with the first snow. It was late fall,
but the way those flowers persisted surprised me. I was supposed to be in sub-arctic
America, and high up among the buttresses of the Rockies, and yet there was
that everlasting spread of flowers. Some day the white settlers will be in
there and growing wheat down all that valley.
Page 5: (4 Panels)
Panel one: FLASH BACK. MORE
MOUNTAINNNSSSS this time with Dogs and Native Americans. COOL.
BOX TREFETHAN: And then I lifted
a smoke, and heard the barking of the dogs--Indian dogs--and came into camp.
Panel two: INDIAN CAMP.
BOX TREFETHAN: There must have
been five hundred of them, proper Indians at that, and I could see by the
jerking-frames that the fall hunting had been good.
PANEL THREE: MEETING LUCY WHO
APPARENTLY HAS A NAME. COOL.
BOX TREFETHAN: And then I met
her--Lucy. That was her name. Sign language--that was all we could talk with,
till they led me to a big fly--you know, half a tent, open on the one side
where a campfire burned.
PANEL FOUR: INSIDE TENT, Full
scene pic with both of them.
TREFETHAN: It was all of
moose-skins, this fly--moose-skins, smoke-cured, hand-rubbed, and golden-brown.
Under it everything was neat and orderly as no Indian camp ever was. The bed
was laid on fresh spruce boughs. There were furs galore, and on top of all was
a robe of swanskins--white swan-skins--I have never seen anything like that
robe.
Page 6: (3 panels)
Panel 1: FULL PAGE LUCY.
BOX TREFETHAN: And on top of it,
sitting cross-legged, was Lucy. She was nut-brown. I have called her a girl.
But she was not. She was a woman, a nut-brown woman, an Amazon, a full-blooded,
full-bodied woman, and royal ripe.
Panel 2: Small and at the
bottomish…
BOX TREFETHAN: And her eyes were
blue.
BOX TREFETHAN: That's what took
me off my feet--her eyes--blue, not China blue, but deep blue, like the sea and
sky all melted into one, and very wise. More than that, they had laughter in
them--warm laughter, sun-warm and human, very human, and . . . shall I say
feminine? They were. They were a woman's eyes, a proper woman's eyes. You know
what that means. Can I say more? Also, in those blue eyes were, at the same
time, a wild unrest, a wistful yearning, and a repose, an absolute repose, a
sort of all-wise and philosophical calm.
Panel 3: BACK TO THE PRESENT
WHERE WERE GET A SHOT OF TREFETHAN. WOO.
TREFETHAN: You fellows think I
am screwed. I'm not. This is only my fifth since dinner. I am dead sober. I am
solemn. I sit here now side by side with my sacred youth. It is not I--'old'
Trefethan--that talks; it is my youth, and it is my youth that says those were
the most wonderful eyes I have ever seen--so very calm, so very restless; so
very wise, so very curious; so very old, so very young; so satisfied and yet
yearning so wistfully. Boys, I can't describe them. When I have told you about
her, you may know better for yourselves.
Page 7 (4 panels)
PANEL ONE: BACK IN TIMEEE AGAIN.
LUCY holding out her hand to TREFETHAN.
LUCY: Stranger, I'm real glad to
see you.
BOX TREFETHAN: I leave it to
you--that sharp, frontier, Western tang of speech. Picture my sensations. It
was a woman, a white woman, but that tang! It was amazing that it should be a
white woman, here, beyond the last boundary of the world--but the tang. I tell
you, it hurt. It was like the stab of a flatted note. And yet, let me tell you,
that woman was a poet. You shall see."
PANEL 2: A MONTOGE OF EVERYTHING
LUCY IS DOING BELOW. HOW FUN.
BOX TREFETHAN: She dismissed the
Indians. And, by Jove, they went. They took her orders and followed her blind.
She was hi-yu skookam chief. She told the bucks to make a camp for me and to
take care of my dogs. And they did, too. And they knew enough not to get away
with as much as a moccasin-lace of my outfit. She was a regular
She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, and I want to tell you it chilled me to the marrow,
sent those little thrills Marathoning up and down my spinal column, meeting a
white woman out there at the head of a tribe of savages a thousand miles the
other side of No Man's Land.
Panel 3: Just a picture of Lucy.
No need to be complicated. Maybe gesturing for TREFETHAN to sit next to her?
LUCY: Stranger, I reckon you're
sure the first white that ever set foot in this valley. Set down an' talk a
spell, and then we'll have a bite to eat. Which way might you be comin’?
Panel 4: The two siting there
chatting as described below.
BOX TREFETHAN: There it was,
that tang again. But from now to the end of the yarn I want you to forget it. I
tell you I forgot it, sitting there on the edge of that swan-skin robe and
listening and looking at the most wonderful woman that ever stepped out of the
pages of Thoreau or of any other man's book.
