Eddie Whitlock's Blog: Reader and Writer - Posts Tagged "blindness"

If opinions are like anuses (everybody has one), then what are ideas like? I don't have a good analogy for that yet.

Here's the problem: Sometimes I come up with great ideas, but someone else comes up with the same idea and is successful with it before I can get my act together with it.

Case in point: Blindword. This was the idea I had for a horror film a few years ago. Basically, I have always had a fear of going blind and I thought it would make for a good horror story. I wanted - at the time - to make a short (30 minute) film so I wrote a script that could be shot very inexpensively. Here is the opening of the script:

Blindworld
by
Eddie Whitlock

Scene: Alfred, our protagonist, is sitting down on the floor. We see him from behind. He fumbles for a can of food and, using a can opener tied around his neck, opens it.

We see him putting his fingers into the can and bringing them to his lips to taste. He then begins to eat the food as we view the area around him.

We are in a food pantry where groceries are bagged and distributed to the needy. There are shelves of canned goods, a sorting table and a metal folding chair.

As Alfred finishes the can of food, we return to him and see him staring ahead. We can see now that he is blind. He is messy from his eating. He wipes his mouth on his sleeve. He stands up and feels his way toward the door. We see him exit.

(Dissolve/transition with red bugs to form title credit.)

Scene: Alfred is outside. We see him in a squatting position behind an obstruction. There is a noise that prompts him to jump up and pull up his pants.

Alfred
(Yelling) Paki! (He staggers forward and stumbles. He almost falls.) Paki?! (A large dog crosses the yard, stops for a moment to look at Alfred, then continues out of our field of vision.) Paki! (For a long moment, he stands quietly listening for a response)

Scene: Alfred is inside the food pantry again. He is lying in a makeshift bed. He is dozing off. We close in to a close up of his face.

The story then backs up and shows us Alfred before the plague - it was started via a bioweapon - and his attempt to prepare for it. He has a girlfriend named Paki.

Their story of trying to hold on to one another in a world without sight was, I think, the best thing I have written.

And as I was working toward getting it to film...

A good friend tells me he has heard a movie is being made very similar to my idea. It turned out that Jose Saramago had written a book about this idea ahead of me (barely) and it was being filmed with Julianne Moore as the lead.

Dammit.

I put "Blindworld" on the shelf, totally disgusted that a well-known author had beat me to the idea and that now - with a movie version being done - my story would seem to be a rip-off of his.

I finally did get around to seeing the movie. This is what Rotten Tomatoes had to say about the film version of BLINDNESS: This allegorical disaster film about society's reaction to mass blindness is mottled and self-satisfied; provocative but not as interesting as its premise implies.

"Not as interesting as its premise implies" is accurate, unfortunately. It's also the kiss-of-death to my desire to make this idea work. I think there's nothing worse than being an also-ran to a failure.

I still don't have an answer to my quest for an analogy for ideas. I'm kind of afraid that if I come up with something, it will turn out that someone already beat me to it.