Free a movie...and a Book by Daniel Wagner Page A

the script, change your character. Is that really so hard to see?” He shook his head for a beat. “What happens if you put a guy full of self-pity and a guy that tackles life like a panther into the same situation? Does the story end the same way?”
    “No.”
    “You’re right. It’s not the same story. You need a weak guy, someone that gives in fast, someone that gets sore about everything, in a loser story. And you need someone that jumps at life with excitement, someone that never gives in, someone with ideas, in a winner story . . . You need a mean guy to be hated, and you need a guy with integrity to be loved.”
    Jim was now looking at Andy.
    “Those are the rules. In writing—
and life
. I guess they teach this stuff in writing school, or if they don’t, they should.”
    Jim kept looking at Andy for a while. “Let’s get the boat and get them back.” Then he said, “We can’t waste time.”
    Music starts to play, and we float over the surface of
the ocean.

46.
    The water is calm and peaceful, and the sun is shining through some light mist; it must be morning.
With a picture like this on the screen, one just wants
to take a breath of the fresh air.
    We approach a raft floating on the surface of the
water.
    We cut to Lou and Liz on the handmade raft. Liz
is sitting on the edge, letting her legs dangle into the
water. Lou is sitting against the pole in the middle of
the raft, looking in the opposite direction.
    “I was once on vacation, with a friend,” said Liz. “And we ate only ice cream for the entire week. That’s about all. Girls don’t do stuff like that all the time.” She started to stir the water with her legs, looking down.
    “Uncle Andy says that’s healthy.”
    “Who’s Uncle Andy?”
    “My father’s brother. He has these crazy ideas all the time. He lives from his ideas, basically. He sells them,” said Lou. “He also eats only ice cream for a couple of days sometimes. Do you know why?”
    Liz had stopped looking down at her circling feet for a moment and was now looking over her shoulder to Lou. “Because he likes it?”
    “For one thing, he probably likes it,” said Lou, rubbing the back of his head against the pole. “But he also believes that that way the body starts to appreciate normal food again. He thinks the body can know what healthy food is only if it knows what unhealthy food is. And if you give your body only the most tender treatment, it gets spoiled and takes it for granted. But if you sometimes give it something to cope with—like eating only ice cream for a couple of days, I guess—then it starts to deal with it and begins to appreciate normal food again.”
    “It’s possible. We didn’t get sick on the vacation. We didn’t even gain weight,” Liz said, and pushed down on the wood with her arms, observing how her side of the raft sank a little then came up again.
    “He also says it’s healthy to get drunk once in a while. Just to give the body something to think about. He always has these opinions. He used to kid my father because he hates cold water. Uncle Andy said no
body
likes cold water, but that you shouldn’t care. Just jump in and look how the bastard reacts—that’s the way he talks,” said Lou, amused. “He says if you treat your body only with great care, it gets lazy. And a lazy body causes you pain all the time, since it knows it can manipulate you that way to keep comfortable.”
    “In a way, he’s probably right. It sounds sort of extreme, though,” said Liz. She lifted her feet out of the water, touching them to gauge their temperature. Then she put one foot next to the other and covered them with her hands.
    “He says depressed people don’t treat their bodies like that. Depressed people try to keep their bodies comfortable. That’s the whole trouble, Andy says. He has so many opinions, it’s almost like a religion—some crazy religion, though,” Lou said, and turned his head to see what Liz was doing.
    She didn’t see