Nora The Screenplay by Charles J Harwood

This easy to read screenplay is centred around the fickle yet pervading aura of celebrity culture in Western society. Biographies are published about lives that have hardly begun and the media tell the audience what they need to read, plugging only an airbrushed and commercial view of what is real. Incidentally, the screenplay is being adapted into a novel on my other blog.

Story of Celebrity Culture

The other extreme is often written about, the woman with 10 husbands or a story about the man who committed the biggest tax fraud. We don’t hear about the in-between, the ordinary and very real lives of people struggling with everyday problems. I decided I would bring the lives of two such people together. Vince is a playboy millionaire and owner of a string of nightclubs. He is the sort of celebrity who has a publishing deal with a top magazine to print a series of exclusives about his private life that in fact are a promotional ruse. His teeth are airbrushed white and his skin is flawless. Everything goes his way with oily ease.

Fifteen Minutes of Fame

Vince is often spotted walking from one of his nightclubs arm-in-arm with a mysterious and attractive lady. This whets the appetite of the paparazzi. Could this be The One for such an eligible bachelor? But little known to his female subjects, Vince and his PA Leon have an arrangement going. How long will the fifteen-minutes-of-fame last for each unsuspecting female? And what will they do with their lives afterwards?

Culture Clash and Sycophants

This is where ex-nurse Nancy comes into the story. Her difficult life has forged a series of gritty and old fashioned values that Vince would find contemptible. She is ashamed of her alcoholic mother and shabby home. But she had learned to hide her identity behind a party dress and a cheap makeover in the local salon. She finds herself the unlikely subject of Vince’s photoshoot as they walk side by side from his nightclub.

Story of a Car Crash

Nancy finds herself out of her depth once inside Vince’s car and Leon drives off. Their dry and surreptitious humour forged from their rich lifestyle brings her past into sharp contrast. The result is a bizarre exchange between people from vastly different worlds.

Screenplay on Modern Life

Nora the Screenplay on Kindle

But the lives of all 3 characters are about the change when the car crashes, killing Leon and cementing the lives of Nancy and Vince. From thereon, Nancy’s brittle persona, Nora fuels the story. Nora is not about to allow Vince’s recovery to go as he had planned. She has a harsh brand of rehab that is not to Vince’s tastes and for the first time in his life, Vince is about to learn one of life’s lessons the hard way – the Nora way.

After several redrafts, the story dialogue developed snappy exchanges charged with subtext and conflicting emotions. This Kindle screenplay has been formatted for easy reading. Formatting text in a screenplay format is not possible in an Epub, as the running text will appear different on various readers. I decided to denote action description in italics, character cue as bold and dialogue in “normal black.”

The paperback version of Nora The Screenplay is formatted like a screenplay. It measures 8x5in and is 102 pages long. My screenplay can also be found on other platforms including Kobo, Sony and Apple as well as Kindle.

Related Screenplay Articles on this Site

Read the novel serialisation of Nora on my other blog
My other screenplay A Hard Lesson
Tips on writing a screenplay