Ivy and I worked on a story based on the true events of a family friend of her father’s. Her father’s friend in named Tom Wright and he was the photographer for The Who when they first started out. In fact, Tom was best friends with Pete Townshend-- the lead guitarist and creator of the band. As a great source of research, Ivy had her parents send her their copy of Tom Wright’s autobiographical book titled, “Roadwork: Rock and Roll Turned Inside-out.” Within that book we picked one story and then picked out moments of dialogue that were recorded in that book to use in our screenplay. Of course, at other times we used our own creative license.
For a long while, we wanted to tell the full story of Tom and Pete’s friendship, the creating of the band, and the adventures of The Who and their photographer. We figured it could work well if we did it in the style of My Grandmother Ironed the King’s Shirts. After all, that story had a great way of telling a story that had plot structure and that helped you get to know the characters. But in the end, we decided that with this story the audience could gain more access to these interesting characters by making the action live-- instead of past tense-- and using their dialogue-- as opposed to voice overs.
During the making of the screenplay, Ivy and I remarked a lot how interesting it was that Ivy’s father has been friends with Tom almost her whole life, and now she is writing a screenplay about him, yet she has actually not seen him very many times, since he works a lot and is often gone. This definitely affects how we write this script. Had Ivy known Tom personally, we may have written the story the way he tells it, or in a way that Ivy retells it-- much more like My Grandmother Ironed the King’s Shirts-- but instead of basing the story on memories, we based it on the autobiography. However, Ivy’s few interactions with Tom still played a part in the writing. She told me that Tom was the nicest person in the whole world, which is why we kept his dialogue kind, friendly, and free of sarcasm or the like. So in many ways, our story is a fusion work about Tom Wright through they eyes of Ivy Hutchison.
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