The most unlikely movie scene ever in the history of Hollywood (at least in my humble opinion) has to be the closing scene of Stand By Me, the Rob Reiner film based on a short story by Stephen King. Maybe you remember the film. It’s a quest/coming-of-age story about four boys in Smalltown, U.S.A. circa 1959 who set out to find the body of a boy rumoured to have been struck by a train.
One of the boys, Gordie Lachance, frames the story with his narration years later. Gordie has grown up and become a successful writer. His narration sets up Stand By Me as a fictional memoir. We dive into the story with Gordie as a child, we share his adventure, we share his ordeals, and we share the lessons learned. Then, with our pearl of wisdom in hand, we return to present time and join the grownup Gordie in his office. This is where we witness something so improbable, so unrealistic, so far-fetched that it stretches credulity to the point of rupture: as the narrator draws the story to a close, we watch him type the final period, we see it appear on the computer screen, and then we watch the narrator turn off the computer. He has finished writing his story and now he can go do something else.
Really? He’s been plonking away on his keyboard and now he’s done? Are you frigging kidding me? What about the rewrites? What about the edits? What about the tinkering, the agonizing, the self-doubt? Only in the movies could we find a writer who is so robotic that he can type straight through a story from beginning to end and say “I’m done” with the last period. As for the rest of us, it’s on to draft two.