I think most screenplays that are padded into novels turn out to be anemic novels at best; a movie script is a simplified form of storytelling because it is external—it cannot go inside a character and feel what that character feels, nor can it deal very effectively with ideas of any complexity.
This was not yet a shooting script; it was a second or perhaps third draft, and because of minor revisions it contained a few loose threads, unnecessary characters and incomplete thoughts. Those probably would have been caught by the writer on the next go-round, or by a director or producer, or at least by a script supervisor on the set. In the present situation, however, if the reader should chance upon an incongruity or mistake, please blame it not on the writer—never on the writer!—but on the Optical-Character-Recognition scanner that rendered the script into computer-editable form.
The Marksman is an action-suspense story, in which changes in the main character are triggered by violent events. It contains very short scenes and jump-cuts; I haven’t tried to smooth them over. It does not confine itself to the viewpoint of any single character in a scene, as narrative fiction ought to do. It makes leaps in logic, understanding that actors can bridge those by creating appropriate shifts in the ways their characters change their minds about one another and therefore change the ways they behave with one another. It asks the reader to become camera and microphone—to imagine and visualize the people and events that are depicted in blueprint form—and it provides plenty of leeway for the stunt wranglers and FX enthusiasts who have become the tail that wags the dog of commercial cinematic storytelling. All this may make more work for the reader; I hope it does not harm the story.
—Brian Garfield
Los Angeles: October 2002
A Beginning …
On a sagging cot in a flyspecked room in an inner-city flophouse, a man tosses and turns. In his sleep he’s hearing a racket of combat—explosions, automatic weapons, screams. Against his eyelids images flash like the intermittent flare of artillery on a battlefield at night.
He pushes the half-awake nightmare away. The effort is enough to exhaust him. After a few moments his breathing steadies and he rises in a sweat, disoriented for a moment before he recognizes his drab surroundings.
He hasn’t shaved in a while. His brown hair is stringy. There’s a wicked long scar across his temple; the old wound makes his head ache—makes him wince when he bends over to get into his rumpled old clothes.
C. W. Radford—that’s his name. He’s got the remains of a good constitution but he looks barely one step up from a homeless tramp. The jeans and work-shirt are threadbare. His shoes are utterly worn out. He laces them up with bovine listlessness. The headache makes him dizzy.
In the rickety bedside drawer is a small case that was designed to be a diabetic’s insulin kit—its ersatz leather worn away at the corners now, cardboard showing through the edges. He flips open its lid on loose hinges to expose the syringe within, and the small rubber-topped bottle with its prescription labeclass="underline" “every four hours as needed for pain.”
Radford draws liquid into the syringe and injects himself with its needle.
Radford trudges across a filthy street in a bitterly silent part of the city—beat-up cars and derelicts human and inanimate. The corner is dominated by an all-night joint, Charlie’s Cafe—in its original incarnation a drive-in burger joint; subsequently expanded to a quarter-block sprawl of counters and Naugahyde booths, all of it much the worse for wear now—neon beer ads in the windows.
A dealer, wearing a wild shock of red hair and clothed in what used to be combat fatigues, transacts business with a skinny teenage girl. Radford glances at the two of them, shifts his glance away and continues walking toward Charlie’s Cafe.
With the deftness of a sleight-of-hand artist the dealer pockets the girl’s money, looks warily around and slips her a tiny package. When she hurries away, the dealer sizes up Radford with a bellicose challenge but Radford shuffles past, appearing to ignore him.
Reflections glitter off the license plate on a parked van—7734 OL—and above the plate two men sitting in the van watch Radford. They both wear shirts, no jackets; collars unbuttoned, ties at half mast. The guy in the passenger seat is polished, neat, fortyish and smoking a cigarillo. Next to him the driver bats ineffectually at the smoke. This driver is big, tough, a body-builder. The van is a custom camping job—drapes etc.
It would appear that Radford gives them no more attention than he gave the redheaded dealer.
The two guys in the van watch while Radford approaches the side door of the cafe. The guy with the cigarillo has a file-folder open in his hand; in it is a printout dossier—he squints against the curling smoke to see a military mug-shot photo of a younger, neater Radford clipped to the file.
Radford climbs up onto the curb as if it’s only another step half way along a wearisome journey up a mountain-high pyramid. As he turns painfully toward the door of the cafe, a young dude comes rushing out of the alley, flailing an expensive attaché case in one hand and a heavy Glock automatic pistol in the other.
The dude is immaculate in a flashy tailored suit—the uniform of a drug wholesaler or a pimp, or both—but he’s hardly more than a child: a teenage kid trying to look like a big shot.
Radford stops. The dude is right in front of him, arm’s length. He’s laughing hysterically but behind the laughter the dude is able to make an instantaneous judgment: he dismisses Radford and wheels, grinning, laughing, and aims his automatic back at the alley. He’s wild: spaced out.
A pursuing policeman runs into sight—sees the dude; reacts, skids, ducks, and the dude’s shot goes wild overhead.
A lot of noise now, people dodging to cover and shouting inarticulate warnings—the two guys in the van dive beneath their dashboard out of sight and the dealer flattens himself back against a wall as if trying to press himself back through it into invisibility, and Radford stands bolt still.
The dude laughs on, full of wild bravado. He is trying to steady himself to take aim on the policeman when the sound of screeching tires brings his head whipping around in time to see a squad car squealing to a slithery stop behind him.
The dude’s gun swivels to meet the new challenge as two cops pop open the doors of their unit and brace their weapons across the tops of door and car, aiming at the dude.
One cop says, “Drop the gun.”
The other gestures. “On your knees, asshole. And then on your face. Now.”
Radford stands unmoving, without expression, while across the street the redheaded dealer slides around a corner like an eel and disappears. Radford appears to pay more attention to that than to the confrontation between dude and cops.
“Drop it, asshole!”
Now there’s the policeman at the corner—the one who was chasing the dude on foot—and there’s the pair of cops at the car, and there’s the dude, and they’ve all got their handguns up but the dude can’t quite decide which of them to aim at and he swings his pistol back and forth, first one cop and then another, and presently he stops with his finger whitening on the trigger and the muzzle of the Glock leveled toward Radford’s scarred forehead.
Radford faces the gun with utter indifference.
The cops hesitate, probably fearful that any move could get the bystander shot dead.
The dude keeps laughing. His head whips around in a frantic effort to keep all the cops in view. His arm wavers; he starts to drop into a crouch and his automatic goes off—