WEEK TWO: SCRIPT (currently not completed but first 7 pages)

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.