Side Path
Key art
Order
Night. The service path behind a picture house, unlit, packed darker than the street. The screening is still letting out on the other side of the wall. Ellis Ward, forty-two, coat wet, is already on the path. He was cut from the credits. The name they cut is the one he has come here to say, once, where a microphone is not.
No music under the path. The score, if there is one, is on the street side of the wall and arrives as a muffled fact, not as his accompaniment. His shoe sounds different on the packed ground than it would on the pavement. That difference is how he knows he is not in the picture.
The edit
He says it between two doors. Neither door opens. He does not try the handles. A woman passes him going the other way, not from this picture, and he gives her the middle of the path. He walks to where the path gives out. He stops. He does not look back to see if a door reopened.
Hold him from behind. The doors stay bright and out of focus. Do not give the lens his face when he says the name. A face would make the name a performance. He is not performing. The woman who passes does not turn her head, and the camera does not turn it for her.
What is left
The picture can hold the doors and the fact of a man walking away. It will not hold the name, and it will not follow him home.
When he is home the coat will drip on a chair and he will not write the name down. That room is not this scenario. This scenario ends where the path gives out.
Scenario Editions