From Page to Screen - WRAP: Warwick Research Archive Portal ...

In the Business District of Downtown Anywhere, for example, we find the street poet
Duncan Z. McGregor, who wakes up one morning in his usual alley and finds a forgotten
sonnet in his pocket that he wrote the night before (under the influence of a
considerable amount of alcohol). He likes it and, pleased with this start for the day,
pushes his trolley through the streets. There he is approached by a young woman. He a)
avoids her and runs away, into another alley where he finds a mysterious dead (but
beautiful!) woman. He decides to run away again. Or to call the police? Or to have a closer
look at the body (after all it is that of an attractive female)? In which case he finds a
diamond ring next to her...
Or, b) Hewaits for the woman, who throws herselfto the ground, swears etemallove and
starts to kiss his feet. Slightly embarrassed, he gives her last night's sonnet, hoping that
that will get her offthe ground and away from his shoes. He leaves and nothing happens.
Or he leaves and she calls out his name and turns out to be a long forgotten acquaintance
from his past life before the days on the street. They have breakfast together and when
he carefully tries out the name he believes to remember is hers, she faints - or does not
react at all...
Or, c) does he talk to the woman, who wears strange clothes and invites him to join her
at an ashram? He can then decline the offer, or think about it and tty to touch her (to
find out that she is really a man) or decide to take up the offer and make his way to the
bus-stop (to bump into an old friend ofhis who is in trouble)...
In Westmoreland, the well-off end oftown, Heather, a call girl is on her way to visit her
twin sister Wanda, who is married to a bank manager for their regular monthly coffee­
time chat. Bored with the regularity of these meetings, she thinks of breaking the date
and...either turns round or nevertheless visits her sister as planned.
Like similar collaborative projects, storylines in Stories From Downtown Anywhere are so
twisted and complex that they are virtually impossible to summarise. Even with only a
handful of starting points and only two or three possible developments at the end of
each piece, the number of links grows rapidly. Not all the links actually exist at the
moment; some, though having been defined by the previous author, carty an E (for
Empty) and are an invitation to readers to fill them with their ideas and send their 50 0 ­
word contributions to Charles Deemer, the "Editor-in-Chief" ofthe project. An editorial
Chapter 4 - page 164