Writing Rascals

Prairie Rascals poster by Sarah McIntyre

This post contains some minor SPOILERS about Prairie Rascals, so you may want to watch the film first. You can find it here.

WAGONS ROLL

When Sarah Reeve and I started making our little films here at Bonehill, it wasn't because I was eager to get into screenwriting. I'm much more interested in the other bits of film making, like finding costumes and locations, working with the actors, and editing. But before you can get to those parts of the process you do need a screenplay, and since I'm the cheapest writer available, I write those myself.

Writing a screenplay - at least for the sort of micro-budget productions we're making - is not like writing a book. With a novel the problem is that there a thousand different paths the story could take. With a screenplay,  998 of those paths are blocked by large signs that say YOU CAN'T AFFORD THIS, so in a way it becomes much easier: your choices are made for you.*

When I set out to write a western, I knew we could afford no more than eight actors, and that they would have to spend most of their time out in the wilds - they couldn't mosey into Tombstone or Dodge City, they couldn't rob trains or banks, and the U.S.Cavalry would definitely not be riding to their rescue in the final reel. 

I also knew I wanted Rosanna Lambert as the heroine and Laura Frances Martin as the main villain. We'd enjoyed working with both of them in Gwenevere, but in that film they mostly had to stand around in woods looking Pre-Raphaelite, so I felt it owed it to them to give them a bit more to do this time.

I started out with a vague idea about having Rosanna as the lone survivor of a covered wagon which has been attacked and looted by Laura's outlaw band. But a covered wagon - even one that's been emptied and  burned out before the opening scene - would be a tricky thing to build, and then we'd have to find a stretch of open country to film it in, and transport it there. So I decided a simple homestead would be easier.**

From that came the story's opening act. The villains arrive at Frank Harper's shack looking to learn the whereabouts of the gold he stole and buried during the Civil War. I actually stole the gold myself, from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, but buried treasure makes such a good hook to hang a simple plot on that I couldn't resist it. Also, it gives Frank's widow Annie (Rosanna) a reason to go after the bad guys: she wants the gold for herself. That seemed a much better motive than to have her hunting them down for revenge, since revenge plots tend to be tragic, and would need Annie to be grief-stricken over her husband's death. Grief and tragedy are themes too heavy for us to handle in a western filmed in Devon, so I wanted to keep it light: she never much liked him and doesn't care he's dead: she just wants the money. 

Originally the project was called In The Pines***, but then I happened to read Dee Brown's book The American West and came across the term 'Prairie Rascal' - an uncomfortable-sounding type of bed found in early homesteads. Prairie Rascals was clearly a much better title, and it suited the more ironic, cynical turn that the story was taking.

BAD GUYS

The villains in the early drafts were your basic hairy varmints, in the employ of the cunning Cat Hannigan (Laura). I wasn't particularly happy with them, but I didn't have any better ideas... until I met Amanda Lindseth, and saw her performance as the villainess in our local panto. Then I realised that Cat didn't need a gang; she needed a little sister, even madder, badder, and more dangerous than herself. I wrote Amanda in as  Belle Hannigan, and instantly the story came to life. (The sisters' dialogue contains a few echoes of Mr Coldharbour and Mr Lint, the assassins in Thunder City, which I was writing around the same time, but I can't recall who said it first.)

Only one hairy heavy remained in the cast, and he wasn't connected to the Hannigans but was employed by the film's hero, a naive and idealistic young Yankee called Charles Doolittle III (Mylo Sermon), who has come to explore the Golden West and gets caught up in the Hannigans' shenanigans. His guide, Muldoon, quickly betrays him and sides with the sisters, spending the rest of the film as their hired gun.

While I was writing, I didn't know who would play Muldoon, but once we found Nicholas de Jasay it became clear that he would need to do more than just grunt and grumble - Nick is a superb actor, and he needed at least one good speech. So we made Muldoon a Civil War veteran (his costume already included a Confederate shell jacket I'd bought cheap from a re-enactment supplier), and Nick came up with a gruesome soliloquy for himself about gathering gold teeth from the dead after the Battle of Cedar Mountain: 

Amanda was so taken with that, we decided to add a scene where her character threatens Annie with some enthusiastic amateur dentistry of her own. We pretty much made it up on the spot, and it's one of my favourite bits of the film.

 

HORSE (NON)SENSE

You can't have a Western without horses, but I knew in advance they were going to be tricky. If you watch the film you'll probably notice that it's structured so that there are no horses in scenes involving dialogue, and certain characters never get on a horse at all – I didn't want anyone in the saddle who wasn't an experienced rider. Luckily Rosanna, Amanda, and Laura are all experienced riders... 

Shooting the horsey scenes really made me realise how all the horses you see in real movies must be specially trained - it turns out that if there's one thing a regular horse dislikes, it's being made to hang about for ages and then repeat short sequences of movement over and over again, and of course that's just what making a film involves. But we had good horses, and patient horse wranglers, and although we only had one take of most of the horse shots, the gods of low-budget movie-making were on our side, and let us get what we needed. The final shot, where the sun and clouds lined up at just the right moment, felt like a miracle.

If I had the chance to remake Prairie Rascals with a proper budget the first thing I would do is give Charles and Muldoon horses to ride, and a pack-mule or maybe a wagon to carry all Charles's luggage. As it is, Charles is on a walking tour of the West, which seems pretty unlikely, but he is an eccentric, and it made the difference between a film we could afford to make and one that we couldn't.

Laura and Amanda enjoyed their short riding scene so much that they wanted to keep going, so we took them to a nearby field and filmed them galloping to and fro for a while. It wasn't scripted, and didn't think at the time that there would be a place in the film for those shots, but when I was editing I found that they worked pretty well intercut with the shots of Frank at work in his field. The film now starts with a lingering shot of empty grassland and then a thunder of hooves as the sisters sweep by. 

 

PARTING SHOTS

The screenplay also included a couple of 'optional extra' scenes that would be nice to have, but which could be dropped and written around if the budget or energy run out. In the end, I think we filmed them all. (Amanda and Rosanna could simply tussle over the gun here,' I wrote at one point, 'or we could do a massive fight with people falling into the lake'. Which do you think they decided on?) One scene which I felt very doubtful about when I typed it into the screenplay is a sort of coda  to the story, in which Annie travels back east and is taken in by Doolittle's wealthy family. I had no idea where we would film it, but Amanda (a tirelessly enthusiastic co-producer as well as a top-notch villain) arranged a location grander than anything I'd imagined, and it's hard to imagine the film without those scenes now. 

When I had the screenplay almost ready to go, I showed it to Brian Mitchell (who, along with his writing partner Joseph Nixon, is one of the very best writers I know). He liked it, but suggested a couple of small improvements, and one major one. Still fighting the last war, I'd made the story end like Gwenevere, with Annie wandering off alone into the wilderness. Brian said that she and Charles should ride off into the sunset together, and of course he was right. It's a far more romantic ending, and it feels very upbeat as Nick Riddle's music swells to final crescendo on the soundtrack. But it' also has a cynical undertow - our heroes have ended up as outlaws, no better than the villains they've been fighting.

Finally, the end credits. You need to include a lot of those if you're going to thank everyone involved, but of course audiences don't want to sit through a list of unfamiliar names. So I decided the end credits should be laid over stills and out-takes to make a little film of their own, and Brian and I wrote a song to accompany them. I'd imagined it being sung by a young Bob Dylan,**** but Brian has arranged it to sound like the thigh slappin', whip-crackin' theme song from a 1950s TV show based on our characters' (highly sanitised) exploits. It also allows us to mention a whole bunch of those things we couldn't afford: I packed in as many posses, train robberies, and Old West place names as I could.

    Some say the lawmen shot ‘em down on a street in Tupelo
    Some say they settled down in peace beyond the Ohio
    Some say they crossed the Rio Grande into old Mexico
    And they’ll always be the Prairie Rascals! 

Charles and Annie ride into the sunset, with Charles played in this one shot by Africa Lambert.

THE END

 *The same things happen when you start filming. If you wonder why we used a particular camera angle, it's probably because all the alternatives would have shown houses or passing cars. It's oddly freeing to be constrained in this way.

**It still wasn't that easy. The original plan was to mock up our old field shelter as the exterior, and shoot the interiors in a neighbour's barn. But when we put the false front on the field shelter we realised that we could shoot the interiors in there too - it was very cramped, but it connects the outside scenes to the indoor ones much better than if we'd been faking it. A stovepipe made from a bit of old plastic guttering with a smoke pellet shoved up it helps to make it look lived-in.  And there was enough wood left over to build a second version of the front, which we burned down.

***The title of an American folk song. Nick Riddle has done a beautiful arrangement of it which appears on the soundtrack, during the campfire scene.

****'they'll always BEEEEE the PREEEEEERIE RASCALS' (Big harmonica break.) It kind of fits to the tune of Shelter from the Storm.