Any screenwriting professor will tell you that the backbone of a successful screenplay lies in its story: a carefully plotted-out structure; the appropriate peppering of conflict and resolution; a solid protagonist and antagonist. Yet often dialogue -- good, bad or campy -- is what we remember from our favorite films. 

I’ve been a fan of the high-school movie genre for as long as I can remember. Adolescence, for me, was a time of extremely heightened emotions, desires and drives. The tricky part in creating this teenage world on the page is the tendency to rely on the clichés of American high-school life. There’s the fat kid and the rich bitch. The loser and the jock. The bad girl and the band geek. And like most clichés, there’s a reason these characterizations exist -- walk the halls of many high schools, especially in suburbia, and you’ll see these “types” alive and well. Hell, just turn on one of MTV’s teen- reality series, and there they are.

High school is an easy target to parody or send up. Exploiting the conventions of the world is easy -- just treat the kids as the types they appear to be, exaggerate, throw in some pseudo-edgy dialogue, and voila. There have been some incredibly successful teen films that have done just that. But my inspiration for Dare lay in creating these teen characters as psychologically complex, conflicted individuals. My intent was to play with archetypes from high school movies past, celebrating the fun of the familiar -- Alexa the good girl, Ben the outsider, Johnny the bad boy -- and then gradually unmask them as evolving, quite specific human beings.

How my characters spoke was essential to who they are. An easy error to make as a screenwriter is to rely on a penchant for snappy dialogue, and then mistake it for authenticity in a character’s voice. I was certainly guilty of this at times in my writing process for Dare. It is difficult to get into a character’s head, to let his voice come from his essence and not only your (the writer’s) own desire to be both funny and move the action along. What I tried to do was establish my characters firmly in my own mind, both as people who I’ve observed in the world, and as constructs of my imagination.

Dare began as a short film, made in 2004, that director Adam Salky and I created in our first year of graduate film school at Columbia University. The short became popular and took on a life of its own, playing festivals around the world and eventually being acquired by Strand Releasing for their gay short compilation DVD Boys Life 5. The short film tells the story of Ben a.k.a. "Light Boy," the loner who runs tech for the school play, and Johnny, the handsome, rich, bad boy playing the lead. It details what happens one night when Ben gives Johnny a ride home, and the pair end up having an intense champagne-fueled interaction in Johnny’s swimming pool.

People loved the characters of Ben and Johnny in the short, and a lot was written about their affair, most of it speculation on what the future held for the two of them. My desire to expand the short script into a feature stemmed from my own interest in the characters, including Ben’s friend, aspiring actress and overachiever Alexa, a peripheral character in the short who ended up being my way into the feature.

The first scene of the full-length screenplay I wrote was one that took place immediately after Ben and Johnny’s encounter in the swimming pool (the cornerstone of the short). I was riding on Amtrak from my hometown of Philadelphia to my adopted city of New York. Quite furiously, I heard in my head a conversation between Ben and his best friend Alexa. I scribbled it down in my Filofax on some empty address pages with a hotel pen. The scene never changed through the (long) revision process of the Dare script -- we refer to it as “the coming-out scene.”

I was excited about depicting a closeted gay boy telling his long-time female best friend about his first sexual experience with a guy. And in my mind, I knew that this scene could be a jump-off point for a love triangle between the three characters. This love triangle was partly inspired by my own experiences as a teen (no comment), and perhaps was an unconscious homage to one of the benchmark films of the American high school genre, Rebel Without a Cause.

The dialogue in the coming-out scene is twisty and turny, and definitely has some bite -- but not because I set out to come up with a clever barb or provocative reveal. It came from my work on the characters first -- from tapping into who Ben and Alexa are. What is their relationship like? How do they talk to one another? There was a fine line between Ben’s need for acceptance and relief when he gets it, and his desire to stab Alexa (with a needle not a knife) in revealing to her that he, also, has had a sexual interaction with Johnny. The scene ended up being one of my favorites, both in the script and in the film, as played beautifully by Emmy Rossum (Alexa) and Ashley Springer (Ben).

As I mentioned, the pool scene between Ben and Johnny was the thrust of the short film. As such, I knew it had to be included in the feature. But I also knew it would be a mistake to try to completely re-create the exact energy and vibe of the short. It would also be impossible, artificial, and for me, boring. The short exists on its own. I love it and am proud of it. But a short film simply cannot explore characters substantially. It can provide a glimpse into a character’s head and soul in a tangible way, but subtlety is key -- a good short tantalizes and teases the audience just enough to draw them in and allow them some leeway in filling in the blanks.

I was recently asked by a journalist why I had rewritten the short’s swimming-pool scene for the feature. The scene in question, where Ben and Johnny are sitting poolside and have a challenging and sexually charged conversation, had almost NO dialogue changes from the short to the feature. (I did leave out one of the more popular lines from the short -- and one of my least favorite -- where Johnny says: “All I need is a bong hit and a blowjob and I’d be perfect.” Michael Cassidy, who played Johnny in the short, recently had a fan approach him after a theatre performance in New York and asked him to perform this line for her. He did.) But for the majority of the scene, the dialogue is word for word the same. I shared this with the journalist. He quickly glazed over and went on to his next question. But it raised an interesting point for me.

Dialogue, by itself, is devoid of life and meaning. As writers, we can never totally get our intended inflections across to the readers of our scripts. And as proven by the above exchange, the interpretation of actors and the larger context can make the exact same scene into a totally different beast. The pool scene in the short is quicker, full of sexuality and tension, thrilling. In the feature it becomes more about the intentions of the characters, about Johnny’s vulnerability and Ben’s desire, a desire that verges at moments on both anger and affection. So as a screenwriter, most especially with dialogue, you are both powerful and powerless. You have the ability to put words into the mouths of actors, but none to direct their readings or control the context. It is both exciting and frightening as hell. And most of all, it is very hard to let go.

But that is my job.

I got very lucky with Dare. Adam (the director) and I were close collaborators. And as one of the producers, I had a voice in casting, was always on-set to share my opinions, and was even involved in post-production. I had some of the finest actors around performing my characters. The role of Grant Matson (played by Alan Cumming), the semi-famous actor and alum of the kids’ prep school who returns to challenge Alexa, was originally written for a woman. I always had Parker Posey in mind for it. I had directed a reading of a play in New York just before Dare went into pre-production that starred Alan and Matthew Broderick. Alan and I became fast friends and started chatting via our MacBooks. He was on the road in the U.K. and I was in a funky rental apartment in the Philly suburbs gearing up for filming. Alan read the screenplay and really responded to it -- his insight was helpful. We even brainstormed actresses to play “Grace Matson.” Lo and behold, through a series of ingenious ideas from our producers Mary Jane Skalski and Jason Orans and casting director Kerry Barden, “Grace” became “Grant” and Alan appeared on set to perform.

Alan tore into the role of Grant Matson so ferociously, I got goosebumps on set. My longtime friend Sandra Bernhard gives a quietly shaded and subtle dramatic performance as a psychiatrist in a role I wrote specifically for her. And Zach Gilford, who we literally cast one week before shooting -- after a very different actor dropped out -- went deep to create Johnny in an emotionally affecting performance that went beyond what words on a page can convey. This was my first time out as a feature screenplay writer. And I can’t wait until Dare officially enters the world on November 13th, in theaters in L.A. and New York City to start. I’m even more excited as I work on new projects. I am eager to tackle a fiction literary adaptation for film and also to bring my love for dialogue to television. Especially, I will keep creating stories for and about teens that follow my belief that it’s possible for content to be fun and commercial, while still being smart, emotionally grounded, and edgy. I think teens are hungrier for this than realized.

A bunch of my favorite lines of dialogue did indeed get cut out of the feature. Some I think have disappeared for the better, while others I fought for tooth and nail (and lost). Here’s one of my favorites that Ashley Springer nailed as Ben: “Are you deluded or just stupid? She said she wanted to f**k you not marry you.”

Another from the same scene had Emmy Rossum at her most vicious also telling Johnny: “So take a look. I’m the good girl whose virginity you took and he’s the repressed queer who sucked you off in a swimming pool.”

And yeah I know it’s rated R, but so was Heathers, so it would definitely rock my world if some teenager started quoting Dare in the hallways. Ain’t nothing like a good ol’ nasty line of dialogue from a high school movie.

(Not for young teens, but older ones, Rooney Mara’s Courtney has a line I’d repeat: “I guess that’s what happens when you discover the power of a d**k.”)

Check out Dare when it comes out. Write me and let me know if you have any favorite lines of your own.

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Philadelphia-born filmmaker/theater director David Brind hasdirected three short films, including Twenty Dollar Drinks starring SandraBernhard and Tony-Award winner Cady Huffman, which premiered incompetition at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival. 

Additionally, David wrote and produced the award-winningshort film Dare, which, after playing over 50 film festivals worldwide,was picked up by Strand Releasing as part of Boys' Life 5, a successfulseries of gay-themed short films, available on DVD nationwide andcurrently airing on MTV’s LOGO network. 

Returning to his theater roots, David directed SandraBernhard in her one-woman show titled Sandra Bernhard: Everything Bad andBeautiful, which ran for four months off- Broadway at the Daryl RothTheater in 2006. Brind restaged the show at the Prince Music Theater inPhiladelphia in January 2007. He also participated as a director inthe summer 2006, 2007 and 2008 benefit performances of “The A-Train Plays”at New World. Brind directed Cady Huffman in her first one-woman show,which premiered at the Ars Nova Theater and later played at Birdland JazzClub in 2007. And most recently, he directed a reading of playwrightJerome Kass’ Love Song that featured Matthew Broderick and Alan Cumming. 

Brind received his B.A from Yale University as a doublemajor in Theater Studies and American Studies. He received his MFA inScreenwriting from Columbia University’s Graduate Film Program. Upcomingprojects include a screenplay adaptation of William Wright’s non-fictionbook Harvard’s Secret Court (St. Martin’s Press.) 

Photos: Image Entertainment 

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