SCRIPT WRITING: KNOW WHEN TO END, Part 3

A script writing master class produced an original piece of work that’s still in progress.

I took the class after buying and reading books about script writing and beating the odds in Hollywood.

Part 3 follows Part 2.

Part 3:

Jimmy, with the help of his sergeant, disappeared with no way of tracing their whereabouts.

The old career man had planned on retiring, but WWII changed his plans.

Jimmy helped change his plans.

The sergeant was a man who tolerated the army, who turned idiots into functioning soldiers wherever he found them.

Then he met Jimmy in his airplane mechanics class and plans changed.

After years of getting recruits up to speed on the latest technology, the sergeant had resigned himself to a predicable future.

Maybe he’d find a little piece of land and build a house and a porch suited for a rocking chair.

Or, he’d rent an apartment near a base so he could spend his retirement money there.

Then along came Jimmy, a kid from the right side of the tracks who knew how to build things that didn’t need tracks.

The old sergeant felt like a kid again, opening up to the possibility that he had more to do.

Instead of fading away like other old soldiers, the sergeant made a few phone calls, life changing phone calls, that may pay off.

Or not pay off, but the sergeant played his hunch.

Do You Get Seasick?

The sergeant’s phone calls were an attempt to hide in plain sight.

With a few adjustments in their personnel files, the sergeant and Jimmy were assigned to the USS Hornet, an aircraft carrier.

Just two more airplane mechanics on board a ship waiting for orders.

After the sergeant talked with an old friend and showed him the work Jimmy had done, he was cleared to work on the big planes being loaded onto the Hornet.

Their work centered on the navigation system which Jimmy tuned up with skills he’d learned in England.

One pilot in on the plans asked Jimmy to do the same thing on a smaller plane for a test run. Jimmy Dolittle took it up for an inspection and landed with a full approval.

While they were at sea, Jimmy rigged sixteen B-25’s with his advanced work, taught the navigators how to use it, and watched them take off.

War In The Pacific

From then on, Jimmy’s sergeant kept them ahead of the search by using his network of connections.

They bounced from island invasion to island invasion, all bound in secrecy for the them and the troops.

Jimmy became a good luck charm to the fliers and the crews who swore to never mention him or the work he did for them.

The old sergeant’s role was one of being his handler.

Two years later they made their last landing on an island in the Mariannas called Tinian.

They showed up early to see the layout of the future airbases for B-29’s.

At first they lived in tents. Jimmy stayed in his tent after most everyone else had moved into more permanent housing.

Tent life gave him the solitude to continue the work he’d started years ago in his father’s lab, and college.

One day he returned to his tent to find a robber inside.

He saw movement, then peaked through the front flap to see someone’s back leaning over his research files.

Several cans of food lay out on one side of the tent.

When he opened the tent flap and stepped inside, the person turned around.

2: Script Writing Goals

Jimmy stood a few arm lengths away from the most beautiful young woman he’d ever seen.

And she held the biggest knife he’d ever seen in front of her.

Jimmy slowly stepped to the side of the tent with the cans of food and gathered them in a shirt and set it by the tent front.

He waved her out. She picked up the food and left.

Jimmy looked at the file she’d had in her hands and saw something new.

He’d been having trouble making one of his electrical diagrams work correctly. The woman had added to it. The more Jimmy looked at it, the more he realized she’d made the connections for him.

From then on he gathered extra cans of food for her, and left files out he was working on.

On returning to the tent over the next weeks he found her working on his research.

But she always had her knife next to her.

Part 4: The Caves Of Tinian.