Screenwriting 101

I know very little about screenwriting. I'm not letting it deter me, as I suspect that most people who try this game don't know shit about it. Or they know all the tricks and techniques that someone like Robert McKee sells them. I ain't exactly knocking the latter approach, but right now I'm working with the sort of hubris that comes from a person who has seen all the Coen Brothers and Tarantino films and also happens to have a masters degree in creative writing. I just gotta kill a character in a darkly comic way and I'm in, right?

Anyway, as I've experienced in my also-quite-brief time trying to write for theatre, it's tough to know exactly what direction the script is going to take once it gets into the hands of the folks I intend to collaborate with. I don't know what we'll have to work with in the way of location, actors, etc. So in one rare fit of "I must write a stage direction here" -- something I focus on with the same intensity I reserve for drinking Squirt (see previous post) -- I have written this stage direction based on my complete ignorance of just where this thing is going to be shot:

They continue to drink and finish their whiskies. Time passes. Joe plays pool (or darts, shuffleboard, touchscreen, sticks his dick in a hole in the wall -- whatever the location has to offer).

And that, my friends, is the kind of writing that tens of thousands of dollars worth of student loans and a small alcohol problem can buy you.