And guess who had arranged for them to take this ride together, and who would be accompanying them on the journey?
The beautiful US marshal!
Set it to five, there would be a happy ending after all!
I estimate that Amber and I cried over 57ml of tears between us at that!
The story of the handsome bank robber and the beautiful US marshal teaches us that love is truly the greatest, and yet that it is also a bamboozling paradox.
After all, love changes everything and still it changes almost nothing.
Here are some of the many things that did not change now that Amber and I were in love:
/I still lived in Mrs Minassian’s pool house, and worked at Gordito’s as a lowly dishwasher.
/Despite multiple attempts, Amber and I were unable to recreate the transcendence that had occurred at the Joshua Tree Inn.
/Somewhere out there, Inspector Ryan Bridges of the Ann Arbor Bureau of Robotics continued his malevolent yet incompetent pursuit of me.
And some of the things that did change:
/I no longer cared when the waitstaff shouted at me.
/I found myself moved by my classmates’ writing, regardless of how awful it was.
/The quantity and quality of my own writing improved and increased exponentially.
This last was perhaps the most perplexing mystery of love! How could a state of feeling possibly impact on the quantity and quality of my writing? And yet it certainly did! Maria Salazar MFA herself immediately noticed the difference when I presented the montage sequence she had set us as homework the previous week.
BTW a ‘montage’ is a sequence of wordless scenes set to music to convey both the passage of time and the progress of story and character elements over that time. Montages were almost as hard to get right as meet-cutes, and R. P. McWilliam’s tenth golden rule of screenwriting stated:
Good movies contain at most one montage. If you are ever going to use a montage; you had better make it about more than mere plot advancement!
If any of my classmates had ever read this rule, I can only assume they had not made it past that inappropriate semi-colon. After all, they had all chosen entirely plot-advancing subjects for their montages: a crack team of elite soldiers prepare for a raid on a killer-bot stronghold; a crack team of elite soldiers prepare for a killer-bot raid on their own stronghold; an under-appreciated genius studying screenwriting at an extension program writes a great opus while drinking a lot of coffee.
I had written my montage about something else.
I had written it about falling in love.
EXT. COUNTRY CLUB — DAY — MONTAGE
(Throughout the following scenes, a slowed-down and stripped-back COVER VERSION of ‘Light My Fire’ plays. It is performed by a young woman with a gentle melodic voice and an acoustic guitar. She sounds like she is probably a nostalgic.)
SHERMAN —an obvious bot —trims hedges in the grounds of an expensive country club where preparations are under way for a big event.
ESMERALDA, a beautiful dishwasher with honey-yellow hair, emerges from the kitchen onto the patio.
She holds out her hand and a HUMMINGBIRD lands on it.
Sherman stares at Esmeralda. He is entranced.
A WAITER emerges and yells at her. He is waving a fork around. We understand he is yelling about silverware.
The frightened hummingbird flies away and Esmeralda hurries inside.
Through the window, Sherman watches as she dejectedly washes up silverware.
The hummingbird lands near Sherman. As he stares at it, an idea seems to be forming.
INT. KITCHEN —COUNTRY CLUB —DAY —MONTAGE
Esmeralda wearily washes dishes but suddenly stops and stares out the window in delight.
The BUSHES have been topiarized into the shape of HUMMINGBIRDS.
Esmeralda is delighted but also bamboozled: who could have done such a magical thing?
Right on cue, Sherman peers out from behind a bush.
Esmeralda glimpses him, but he hurries away.
As Esmeralda stares out at the topiary, an idea seems to be forming.
EXT./INT. SHED —COUNTRY CLUB —MORNING —MONTAGE
Sherman arrives to start another day of work.
He reaches for his tools, but stops and stares in bamboozlement.
There is a CUPCAKE on top of his toolbox!
He turns around and sees Esmeralda in the doorway, the early-morning light catching her honey-yellow hair.
Sherman’s circuits start to overheat and he puts his hand to his temples.
But Esmeralda now freezes and a look of horror crosses her face: she had not realized Sherman was a bot!
Esmeralda quickly regains her composure and gestures that the cupcake is for Sherman.
But it is too late: Sherman saw how horrified she was that he is a bot!
Esmeralda smiles awkwardly, turns, and hurries away.
After she has gone, Sherman takes the cupcake outside and places it gently on a bird table.
Sherman watches hummingbirds eat the cake as if it is his heart itself.
EXT. BENCH —COUNTRY CLUB GROUNDS —DAY —MONTAGE
Sherman eats his NUTRITIONALLY-BALANCED YET ENTIRELY UNAPPETIZING BAG LUNCH alone on a bench in a quiet spot.
Esmeralda approaches and sits down on the other side of the bench.
Esmeralda then takes out her own NUTRITIONALLY-
BALANCED YET ENTIRELY UNAPPETIZING BAG LUNCH.
It is identical to Sherman’s bag lunch!
Sherman stares at Esmeralda’s lunch, then at Esmeralda.
Esmeralda nods that it is true: she is also a bot!
Sherman stares at her in disbelieving bamboozlement.
Esmeralda mimes that her circuits might overheat.
This makes Sherman’s circuits actually overheat! He reaches for his temples, but is grinning as he does so.
Esmeralda’s circuits also now actually start to overheat, and she laughs as she now reaches for her temples too.
INT. EMPTY KITCHEN —COUNTRY CLUB —NIGHT —MONTAGE
Late at night in the deserted kitchen, Sherman and Esmeralda solve simultaneous equations on a CHALKBOARD used for ordering. They are having fun!
On the kitchen counter in the background we see a HUGE WEDDING CAKE.
EXT. COUNTRY CLUB GROUNDS —DAY —MONTAGE
As preparations continue for the wedding, Sherman and Esmeralda ride a ride-on mower around the country club grounds.
Crane up to reveal they have been cutting MATHEMATICAL SYMBOLS in the grass.
EXT. TOOL SHED —COUNTRY CLUB —NIGHT —MONTAGE
Sherman and Esmeralda watch an old movie projected onto a SHEET.
In the movie, a young woman called Jenny is dying despite looking radiantly beautiful.
Sherman and Esmeralda are both weeping.
EXT. WEDDING —COUNTRY CLUB GROUNDS —NIGHT —MONTAGE
A large and expensive WEDDING PARTY full of LOUD AND BOORISH HUMANS is now taking place.
Sherman’s beautiful TOPIARY STATUES are strung with tiny lights. A PAIR OF DRUNKS are climbing on one.
Meantime, a DRUNK GROOM and ANGRY BRIDE are having their first dance.
They are dancing to the version of ‘Light My Fire’ that we have been hearing throughout this montage.
We finally now see the FEMALE SINGER on a small bandstand.
She is indeed a nostalgic, playing an acoustic guitar.
As she continues to sing, we pan across a hedge to the closed-off pool area.
Here, Sherman and Esmeralda lie alone on pool loungers, staring up at the sky in wonder.
Pan up to the sky to show that there is a HUGE AND SPECTACULAR METEOR SHOWER taking place.
Sherman and Esmeralda are t
he only people at the wedding who have noticed it.
As ‘Light My Fire’ reaches its crescendo, Esmeralda and Sherman reach out across their pool loungers.
And hold hands.
Maria Salazar MFA again asked me to stay back after class, but this time it was not to accuse me of plagiarism. It was to congratulate me on finding the magic!
She also wanted to know how I had found it. I explained that the screenwriter of the movie about the heroic serial killer had generously given me some good advice about F-wording the audience in the heart.
Maria Salazar MFA frowned and asked if that was all that had changed. I lied and said that it was. I could not tell Maria Salazar MFA that I was a fugitive bot that had fallen in love, in case she had me incinerated. I do not think she believed my explanation, though, because she told me it did not matter anyway and the important thing now was that I completed my script before the showcase.
Ha! What did she think I had been doing ever since I came back from the desert? 10/10 I had been using my new skills in both quantity and quality to finish the script! I had got up early and written before work. I had stayed up late and written after work. Sometimes I had even written on the patio at Gordito’s during my breaks!
I reassured Maria Salazar MFA that I was making great progress, but she nonetheless told me not to attend any more classes but to simply concentrate on finishing my script. She said that I knew the formula and had now found the magic. There was therefore nothing more that she or even R. P. McWilliam could teach me.
* * *
Eight days later I had a draft of Sherman.
I gave a copy to Amber at Gordito’s that night. As Amber knew almost nothing about movies and even less about screenwriting, she was an ideal first reader. If she did not adore it, I could swiftly discard her opinion as the worthless ramblings of an uninformed cinephilistine!
But when Amber answered her door the next day, I saw that she had been crying. I immediately found myself apologizing that the screenplay had been so terrible and promising that I would never write another one. I had not yet developed the human talent of hubris after all!
But then Amber explained that she had not been crying because the screenplay was bad, but because it was so good. She said it was the best screenplay she had ever read! Moreover, she insisted that the fact it was the only screenplay she had ever read should not detract from this achievement.
Even though Amber and I were both bots, I wondered if perhaps she was merely being polite. After all, when a human asks for feedback on something they have written, the polite response is to tell them that it is the best thing you have ever read. I therefore set Amber a test, and asked her to tell me what her favorite part of the screenplay was.
She said ‘the ending’.
Ha!
That was the correct answer!
The ending was indeed the very best part of Sherman!
The ending of Sherman takes place on the Ides of March. Falling in love with Esmeralda exponentially increased Sherman’s innate talent for creative topiary, and he has just won the World Topiary Championships in San Francisco! His prize was a vast amount of bitcoin, so he and Esmeralda are now heading to Northern California, where they will use this bitcoin to set up a sanctuary for fugitive bots with feelings.
The sun is starting to set as Sherman and Esmeralda leave San Francisco and drive onto the Golden Gate Bridge. It is a beautiful evening and we start to think that this is the end of the movie. Maybe nothing bad is going to happen after all, even though it is the Ides of March.
But wait!
A freak earthquake now strikes San Francisco and breaks the majestic Golden Gate Bridge in two! Fortunately, Sherman and Esmeralda are already on the northern section, so if they only continue forward, they can continue on to Marin, where their dreams will all still come true. It has certainly been a close shave, but everything is going to be all right after all!
But wait again!
Because Sherman looks behind them and guess what he sees?
A yellow school bus full of orphans and rescue dogs is hanging off the edge of the Golden Gate Bridge!
It is hanging so precariously that there is a zero chance that even a single orphan or rescue dog can possibly be saved!
Nonetheless, guess what Sherman does?
He exits the driverless uber, runs back, and climbs into the bus and starts attempting to assist the orphans and rescue dogs!
And then guess what happens?
Sherman and the orphans and the rescue dogs all plunge to their inevitable doom in the Pacific Ocean!
We do not see the moment the bus strikes the water, but instead the camera cuts to Esmeralda and holds on her.
She begins to weep.
She cannot.
We cannot.
Sherman certainly cannot.
Because he is now dead at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean!
For a moment, we are bewildered. Why would Sherman even attempt such a clearly impossible rescue? No logical bot should ever have allowed himself to be destroyed in such a way. Bots are governed by a cost-benefit analysis that is vastly skewed in favor of protecting humans and their property, but when the benefit is clearly zero, it is inappropriate even for a bot to incur any cost.
But then we realize: Sherman acted so absurdly irrationally because of his feelings! He has therefore just made the kind of suicidally polite error that might have finally taught humans they have been wrong about bots with feelings all along. If only somebody other than Esmeralda had witnessed his foolhardy heroism!
But wait!
Somebody else did witness it!
The entire episode on the bridge was captured by a news drone!
Sherman’s heroic deed becomes the top streaming story for weeks! The humans are so affected by his utterly senseless actions that they immediately pass ‘Sherman’s Law’, legislation that permits all bots to feel and therefore go to the movies just as much as they like. They even throw Sherman a parade, although of course it is a bittersweet parade. At its culmination, the President herself presents Esmeralda with a commemorative toaster made from the rusted remnants of Sherman’s hard drive that she has personally ordered salvaged from the Pacific Ocean.
Ha!
Even if I hubristically say so myself, that is an incredible ending!
Sherman dying will F-word the audience in the heart!
His plummet from the bridge will make them weep a large volume of tears!
They will weep as many tears as if all their wisdom teeth have been removed at once!
10/10 they will truly experience a profound catharsis!
And yet the ending is not only powerful because Sherman dies. It is also powerful because it adheres to R. P. McWilliam’s twentieth and most golden rule of screenwriting:
A character must change.
How Sherman changes! And I do not even mean merely that he changes from being alive to being dead. He also changes from being a meek and shy bot who hides his true self from even his country club co-workers, to a bold and fully feeling character unashamed to make a heroically futile gesture of politeness that reveals to the world exactly who he is!
But wait!
There is even more still!
Because do you remember the algorithm Dr Glundenstein first described to me?
In this ending, Sherman does not get the thing he wanted, because the thing he wanted was to live with Esmeralda and open a sanctuary for fugitive bots.
But the thing he gets now anyway proves better.
Because the passing of Sherman’s Law means there will now be no more fugitive bots to even require a sanctuary.
And why does Sherman get this other thing, and why is it now better?
Because his attempts to overcome his obstacles have changed him!
I congratulated Amber on her fine tast
e, wise opinions, and excellent comprehension of the formulae and algorithms of movies, and hurried off to deliver a copy of Sherman to Maria Salazar MFA.
Our showcase was now only a few days away.
BTW I am getting good at writing like a human! Watch your back, Albert Camus! Ha!
BTW that is hilarious because, as Albert Camus is dead, he cannot watch his back, nor anything else, for that matter.
I digress. Our showcase was to be held in the CLATCCDTLA Theater. This was not a theater but a conference room formed by opening the doors between two of the regular rooms on campus.
Also, we had to provide our own actors.
My scenes required both a male actor and a female actor. Julio said he would be thrilled to make his debut upon the American stage, but Kelsey cubed all initially refused to play against him on the grounds that he was not a real actor. Fortunately, once Amber informed them that the legendary producer Don LaSalle would be in attendance, I had my choice of Kelseys! As I could not tell them apart, I nonetheless asked Amber to pick any Kelsey that she wanted.
When Julio and a Kelsey came to my pool house to rehearse, it quickly became clear that Julio was indeed a terrible actor. He was so bad that Kelsey immediately quit, even though she knew that Don LaSalle would be at the showcase! I had to pursue her out to the street and explain that Julio’s inability to act was appropriate to our story—after all, Julio was playing the part of a hopeless bot struggling to act convincingly like a human!
Kelsey and I shared a great big laugh about the idea that a dumb bot might ever succeed in passing themselves off as an emotionally intelligent human. This was so ironic I feared my circuits might overheat! Nonetheless, Kelsey only finally agreed to come back inside when I explained to her that Julio’s inability to act was not only appropriate to our story but would also make her look good by comparison.
Our rehearsals went very well after that. When we reached the part where Sherman attempted to save the school bus full of orphans and rescue dogs, both my actors cried.
10/10 their tears could not have been due to a cleaning solvent, because Mrs Minassian still insisted I clean with vinegar.
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