Interview (Part 4): Callie Bloem and Christopher Ewing

My interview with the 2022 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winners.

Callie Bloem and Christopher Ewing wrote the original screenplay “Tape 22” which won a 2022 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with the couple about their creative backgrounds, their award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl Award has meant to them.

Today in Part 4 of a 6-part series to run each day through Saturday, Callie and Chris provide insights into several of the memorable characters in their script Tape 22.

Scott: I want to talk to you about the structure of the story because it’s a conventional screenplay structure. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way at all, because I have no problem with three‑act structure. You know … Aristotle.

By the end of Act One, there’s the protagonist Hutch. He knows what he wants to do. He’s going to try and bring Sam back to life. You got the classic active protagonist with a conscious goal. Act Two is him pursuing that goal, and then you got the big all‑is‑lost moment, the reversal at the end of Act Two, then into Act Three.

The thing is, this is why I love scripts like this because they can be conventional in terms of three act structure, but if the characters are unique and compelling, and the situation’s interesting, the story can feel fresh and have a unique structure.

Callie: We knew what the general structure was going to be when we started to make our scriptment. We knew it was going to be that standard three‑act structure.

Christopher: Our process has been to watch movies and read so many screenplays that almost is just…

Callie: Second nature.

Christopher: That it comes out of us sitting down writing that rough outline. I know we intentionally did a few things that hopefully felt surprising, bringing some characters in later than you might normally, or we have a sequence where we leave the main storyline and go to a brand‑new location around that midpoint.

We tried to break it up a little bit, but we always wanted to make sure that we were following that Pixar model of a really, really strong narrative structure, because I don’t think that’s necessarily the thing that we most gravitate towards. We love writing character, writing dialogue, and playing with these ideas.

By us sticking with a relatively strong structure, it allowed us to keep everything on the rails and not go off in a million different directions.

Scott: One of the things you did I thought was interesting was what I call Passing the Baton. The script has a series of female characters Hutch interacts with. It’s like, “OK, he’s going to be with this character for this sequence, and then the baton is going to get passed to this character for this sequence.” They’re shifting because some of them disappear for 30, 40 pages or 20 pages, and then come back.

I’d like to get your impressions of these characters. This is a way to avoid getting too much into the plot, but want to let people know that these characters are so interesting. There’s this character named Jenny or aka Jenny Three. Here’s how she’s introduced:

“Hutch turns and stares at Jenny Three mid‑30s. The human equivalent of an emotional support rabbit, never leaves home without her trusty young‑mom fanny pack.”

What’s Jenny Three’s deal, and what’s her function in the story?

Callie: Jenny Three was Sam’s best friend. Jenny Three is one of my favorites. This is very much inspired by our preschool time when we were writing this and we were with a lot of preschool parents.

Christopher: Jenny Three is Jenny Three because in Hutch’s world, Jenny Three is the third most important Jenny in his life.

Scott: One left and went to Chicago, then one went to Fox News, and they just stop talking about it.

Christopher: Exactly.

Callie: She very much represents someone who is at a crossroads in life and is settling into this routine that she’s not necessarily thriving in, and she’s trying to be there for Hutch and be that support rabbit. It’s not working out well.

Christopher: She and her wife are deep in the dark dungeons of…

Callie: Of sleep training.

Christopher: …sleep training their infant.

Scott: Sleep training.

Christopher: We’re like, “What’s the worst thing we could do to these people? Oh, here we go. Sleep training.”

Scott: Here’s another baton passing female character, Lainie. Her introduction:

“Hutch opens the front door and finds Lainie Juniper, 27, oozing pop star charisma, even in her totally, intentionally chill sweatpants and hundred dollar metal band tour tee.”

What’s Lainey like and what’s her function in the story?

Christopher: From the outside, she’s the most successful character. She’s a rising pop star. She’s on the cover of magazines and/or blogs. What she is there is to do is remind Hutch of everything that Sam accomplished, but also everything that she could have continued to do had she survived because Lainie is Sam’s big success story.

It’s like, if the one greatest things that you accomplished in your life was walking around and would show up randomly at your door to find their guitar. She’s the walking reminder of what Sam could have been, and also a reminder that Sam is no longer there, at least until Hutch finds the tape.

We also love the idea of having someone that could be a musical presence in the script that is making music that’s up to the minute, very much the music of 2022, or 2023, or whenever we go into production on this movie. We love the idea of being able to collaborate with someone to bring Lainie’s music to life.

Scott: Then there’s Joette. All your character introductions are good, but this one is especially so:

“She’s like Linda Hamilton in T2 that got sidetracked in Portland before she could save the world from self‑aware future robots.”

[laughter]

Christopher: Joette’s my absolute favorite character in the entire screenplay. Joette is the artist who recorded Sam’s favorite song. She is the recording artist that used to be in a band called Screaming Dream Girl, which is very hard to pronounce when you say it out loud.

She was this riot girl, brilliant musician who at the end of the ’90s and in the early 2000s broke through a glass ceiling and was set to be the next big thing, but she has some trouble. She has trouble working with her label, trouble with being sexually assaulted on stage.

She fights back and is who she is without any filter, which makes for amazing art, but it makes her life a little more difficult. She winds up making one album that bombs, and she also suffers a terrible personal tragedy that gets her stuck. If Hutch is on pause, then Joette is on eternal loop.

She finds herself doing the same thing over and over and over again without coming to any different conclusion. She’s the Ghost of Christmas Past of our movie, where she’s coming to…Actually, I guess she’s the Ghost of Christmas Future because she’s showing Hutch, if Hutch goes in a certain direction with his grief, he could become Joette.

Scott: End up like her.

Christopher: Exactly.

Scott: It’s like how Joseph Campbell talks about the journey the hero goes on as a journey they need to take. That extends beyond Hutch. It’s like all these characters need to go on this journey, including Clementine.

We get a few hints of this character earlier, but we don’t see her until 60 or so in the script. How would you describe Clementine and what her function is in the story?

Christopher: What we loved is that Clementine is representative of another path that Sam and Hutch’s life could have taken. Clementine is Sam’s daughter from a previous relationship who she gave up for adoption many, many years ago. Then Sam has spent her life forgetting about this, or trying to at least.

Clementine comes back into Hutch’s life after Sam has died. Clementine, she’s in love with this idea of her mom. She only knows about Sam from what she’s read on the Internet, and she’s decided that she needs to talk to Hutch to find out who Sam really was.

Like all children, Clementine is a little bit 50 percent carbon copy of Sam. It again puts Hutch in this weird situation where now here’s a different version of Sam that’s coming back to life, in a way, that’s coming to him.

It also opens up some possibilities that maybe Sam hadn’t been quite as truthful with herself about her feelings, about having kids and having Clementine and putting career first. Clementine gets to be this big can of worms for everybody. The best is that she’s a fun 15‑year‑old who happens into this weird metaphysical situation that she is barely aware of, but…

Callie: She’s just a walking representation of the hard choices that people have to make sometimes.

Christopher: Also a 15‑year‑old, that’s exactly the time when you most get into music and you start finding yourself. We thought that having a character that age would show all the other characters like, “Oh, this is what it’s like to fall in love with music and have a crush on somebody for the first time, and love skateboarding more than anything else.”

She’s like, all of music is, is trying to be that 15‑year‑old version of yourself. That’s all he’s trying to do.

Scott: The skateboard I think pays off pretty nicely, because there’s a metaphor sitting in the backyard of Hutch’s house, this swimming pool that got cracked by the earthquake, which is like OK. It’s just sitting there like he is and the tectonic plates of his psyche and all that.

He fixes it up and then there’s a big skateboard party there. That’s a nice little…

Brings to mind though, I used to own a house in Laurel Canyon. Laurel Canyon in the ’60s and ’70s was the place for music and LA. It’s like all the bands. Crosby, Stills and Nash, Joni Mitchell, Jim Morrison, The Monkeys, they all lived up there.

I was curious whether that played it at all? You were thinking about the location because Laurel Canyon has got this.

Christopher: 100 percent. Just like those stories about like, Frank Zappa would walk out into the middle of the street and play his guitar and Neil Young would go hang out with him in the middle of the street. It feels like such an idealized thing…It’s crazy to think that that ever happened.

Also, we don’t have that music story as much anymore. You don’t randomly see Billy Eilish hanging out with Taylor Swift in the middle of a street playing guitars. There’s something about that time period that feels really special. It also makes you feel life is very different in 2022 than it was then.

Scott: I got to say, because I follow David Crosby on Twitter. He tweeted today, “Yesterday I was sitting around playing with some people. Today we got together to jam. You know what, I think may have got a band and I’m going to head out on tour.”

Christopher: It is still that life for David Crosby.

Editorial note: The interview was conducted a few months before David Crosby’s death.

Tomorrow in Part 5, Callie and Chris share what it was like winning the Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

For Part 2, go here.

For Part 3, go here.

Callie and Chris are repped by Grandview.

For my interviews with every Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner since 2012, go here.

For my interviews with Black List writers, go here.