Steve Mikals

Speak Monkey Speak began first as a novel, Man Seeking Monkey. Some knowledgeable readers liked it, but it didn’t go anywhere, despite my first lead taking me to a ten minute phone call with Linda Fairstein, the Central Park Five prosecutor, who writes a crime series. A New Orleans friend, Michael Begg, was working on screenplays, and he encouraged me to give that form a try. I kept the MSM title at first, and it won the Comedy Genre at the First LA Film and Script Festival. They sent me an award that read: Man Seeking Money, more plausible in their eyes. When I asked for a corrected replacement, they sent me the same -- Money. As the inner focus of the script evolved, I abandoned the want ad title for Speak Monkey Speak.

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The inspiration for it came from a few sources, notably the probability “teaser” How long would it take 100 monkeys on typewriters to type (accidentally, of course) something from Shakespeare? And also a short story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” The Borges story doubled the stakes for me: If a chimp typed Shakespeare, would it be a greater feat than the original?

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I ran with the advice Go with what you know. My ex-wife and I spent a lifetime collecting and selling books. And reading the best of the best in many fields, especially fiction and travel. For my wife, it was Middlemarch. Tellingly, for me it was Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard, and hard-boiled crime fiction, especially Geoge V. Higgins ‘ The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Pure poetry to my ears. The loan shark brothers Drew and Frank sprang from this.

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Good criticism is invaluable. I didn’t place at a film festival in Oaxaca, MX. One reader said my script seemed unfinished. The story ended in the book shop. They were right! Not much of an ending. By the time I took up the script again, the political landscape in America had changed, and I felt it was impossible and dishonest to ignore it. Thus the current version, with its reference to racial themes and history and the reception of outsiders.

Another critique I received was that the plot took too long to engage. I think this was a function of its beginnings as a novel, where you can make up your own rules. I corrected this recently by moving up the “train scene”. A rule of thumb I’d read was the plot should kick into gear somewhere around 8-10 minutes. I was watching the Gulf War movie Three Kings, with George Clooney, Ice Cube, Mark Wahlberg, and Spike Jonze. Sure enough, about eight minutes in, there it is: a small rolled up treasure map to Saddam’s gold sticking out of the naked butt cheeks of an Iraqi prisoner. Try to forget that!

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Going from a two hundred twenty page novel to a one hundred page screenplay was a valuable education in itself. My only rule was , Cut out whatever / whoever wasn’t essential to driving the story forward. I cut out half the plot and more than half the characters. I’m amazed at how easily you fall in love with your own characters, and how reluctant you can be to give them up. But sometimes they’ve got to go.

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I hope you enjoy reading Speak Monkey Speak. Perhaps we’ll both see it on a screen some day!