In The Flesh

A Feature-Length Screenplay

© (Amanda Maloney, 4/13/20)

Abstract

In The Flesh is a feature-length screenplay about the life of Marilyn Monroe. As an icon ​ whose death was riddled with mystery, there is a great deal about her that is unknown by the public. She lived out her life in the spotlight, but very few people really knew who Marilyn

Monroe was. This script unravels her past as she divulges her story to her final therapist, Dr.

Ralph Greenson. Much of their relationship in this script has been fabricated for dramatic effect.

However, there are many who believe that this man took advantage of her, and this story exposes him as a manipulative man who led to her inevitable downfall.

Executive Summary

The story begins with a young woman running wildly through the streets of Los Angeles.

It is a young Marilyn Monroe, currently known as Norma Jeane. She screams as faces appear all around her, and she runs towards the home she shares with then husband Jim Dougherty. As she recounts her tale of being chased to him, it is apparent that she is struggling with her insanity, as none of those men had truly been there.

We then fast-forward in time, and see an almost unrecognizable Marilyn sitting on a couch opposite psychoanalyst Dr. Ralph Greenson, whom she has been recounting this story to.

We understand that we are flashing back as Marilyn tells her life story to Greenson. All she wants is to be supplied with drugs, but he believes that he can help her more without them. He asks for one more session to prove that he can be of help to her, and she reluctantly agrees. When she returns, she tells him more about her relationship with Jim, and how she began modeling and acting.

Marilyn’s marriage quickly disintegrated once she decided to pursue an acting career. Jim only ever wanted her to be a housewife and mother, and to wait patiently for him to come home when he was overseas. However, Marilyn had a different plan for herself; one in which she would finally shine and be seen by the world. She knew she had something special, and those around her in the industry pushed for her to get every possible opportunity.

Jim gives Marilyn an ultimatum: him or her career. Upon recalling this with Dr.

Greenson, she becomes quite emotional. However, the emotion she expresses is not for the man she lost, but rather the strong woman she has lost since that day. Dr. Greenson promises to help her get back to who she was, and to help her find a balance between being Norma Jeane and

Marilyn Monroe.

After spending more time together, Dr. Greenson begins to prod into more personal aspects of Marilyn’s life. While at times she questions the nature of these questions, she ultimately trusts Dr. Greenson explicitly as they have built up a therapeutic alliance. He asks her many questions about her relationship with Joe DiMaggio, and she explores their tumultuous relationship. Dr. Greenson furiously scribbles notes, especially once she begins recounting their sexual encounters.

As the relationship between Dr. Greenson and Marilyn grows, their sessions begin to take place in locations other than his office. They start to meet in her home, and certainly are much more relaxed and comfortable than what we’ve previously seen. He also seems to have an extensive knowledge of her love life already, piquing Marilyn’s intrigue as to how he might know so much about her. He covers his tracks by explaining that as high-profile as she is, of course he would know about her life. He then asks about her to discuss her relationship with

Arthur Miller. He asks what it was that attracted her to him. Eventually, Dr. Greenson pushes

Marilyn too far, and she snaps. As she digs into old and hurtful memories, she can no longer take it, and lashes out. She flashes back to a horrific moment during her marriage to Arthur, and Dr.

Greenson comforts her.

After this emotional session, Dr. Greenson invites Marilyn to his home for an impromptu session while his family is out of town. She expresses her gratitude for him, and explains a previous therapeutic relationship in which she was locked in a sanitorium against her will. After spending so many hours together, Dr. Greenson doesn’t need her to explain everything that she’s feeling, he already knows. As she breaks down and paces around his home office, he comes up behind her and puts his hands on her body. The sexual tension that has been building between them thus far, reaches its peak, and they finally get together.

Marilyn’s depressive symptoms have faded significantly since undergoing psychoanalysis with Dr. Greenson, but while riding on a high from her new relationship, she begins to exhibit signs of mania. While on the beach with her dear friend, Pat Kennedy Lawford, she fakes drowning, just to scare Pat. When she meets with Joe at a bar, he becomes unnerved by her erratic behavior, and has an intervention with Pat to determine what’s wrong. They uncover the truth about her relationship with Dr. Greenson and attempt to intervene. Marilyn becomes outraged, and kicks them out of her home.

Marilyn finds comfort only in the solace of her relationship, until she finds a series of notes from their sessions that prove he had been looking for information to get her to sleep with him the entire time. His housekeeper, who he had hired to help out at Marilyn’s home, calls him to let him know that she came home enraged. He figures out that she has discovered his secret, and shows up at her home to blackmail her into staying with him.

Things begin to seriously unravel from this point. Marilyn goes in search of drugs, and gets fired from her movie with 20th Century Fox due to her erratic behavior and constant drugged up stupor. When she loses everything, she resorts to ingesting a large amount of pills, and winds up in the hospital. Everyone she calls is either unavailable, or unwilling to come to her aid, leaving her to call Dr. Greenson for help. He takes her home, but she has a psychotic break once there, believing someone to be drowning her in the bathtub. Dr. Greenson tells the housekeeper to administer an enema, but it unfortunately was too lethal of a dose of drugs into her system. When Dr. Greenson arrives, the pair cover-up the scene before the police can arrive.

In the end, everyone watches the funeral from their homes, while Joe delivers a beautiful eulogy.

Marilyn’s life was filled with pain and hardship, and she was constantly taken advantage of. I wanted to tell this story to show how looking outward for love only results in pain. Had

Marilyn learned to love who she really was, despite not receiving that love from her family or the men in her life, she might have avoided toxic relationships, and lived a longer and more fulfilled life. I hope that the audience can relate to her search for love and meaning, and her curiosity about the world.

Table of Contents

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………. ii

Executive Summary……………………………………………………………………………. iii

Chapter 1: The Research……………………………………………………………………... vii

Chapter 2: The Process……………………………………………………………………….... x

Chapter 3: The Impact……………………………………………………………………….. xiv

Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………… xvi

Chapter 1

The Research

I first came to love Marilyn Monroe upon watching the television show Smash in 2012. ​ ​ The show centered around two women who were battling for the role of a lifetime to play

Marilyn in a Broadway musical. I have rewatched this show many times over the years, and have always loved its depiction of Marilyn as more than just an icon. The world remembers her as a sex-symbol who changed the standards of body image and sexiness in her time. She is remembered as a woman with a serious drug problem, who tragically died too young from a barbiturate overdose. I have never been fascinated by a celebrity because of who they are on the red carpet or in movies. I am much more intrigued by who someone is when their facade is stripped away. When you look at who Marilyn Monroe was on a bare-bones level, you find a woman filled with love for the world, who was never quite given that same level of love in return. It is one thing to be admired by the masses, and Mairlyn certainly was. However, while she adored her fans, and certainly craved the attention, it was never enough to keep away the hollowness that she felt within her.

I relate to Marilyn as I have struggled to form healthy and meaningful relationships with the father-figures in my life. She desperately needed these relationships to feel whole, and without them, there would always be a hole in her heart. I know how that can feel, and I have understood many of her life choices that were in response to this feeling. I know that the way she handled her emotions was not always the best route, but it has helped me to feel less alone in my situation. I know that there are so many people in the world who do not have the picture-perfect family. Films often portray the best possible scenarios in life, and tie everything up beautifully in the end. However, that is not real life, and it only makes people wish more for a life that is unattainable. I wanted to write this story to show the real and raw emotions of a woman desperate for that missing piece in her life, just like so many of us.

In order to truly do justice to this story about such a complicated woman, I knew that I would have to do extensive research. I read two biographies with very different perspectives and voices. I read Marilyn Monroe The Biography by Donald Spoto and The Secret Life of Marilyn ​ ​ ​ Monroe by J. Randy Taraborrelli. I learned a great deal about Marilyn’s childhood. Although I ​ ​ ​ do not spend much time on her early family life in the script, it informed all of my decisions about who she was as a character, and therefore all of her decisions and actions. Marilyn, who was once known as Norma Jeane, had a tumultuous upbringing. Her mother, Gladys, who was never quite certain who the father was, abandoned her at an early age, leaving her with nearby neighbors. These neighbors took her in and loved her as their own. Occasionally, Gladys would have a psychotic break and try to kidnap Marilyn, which made things all the more confusing for her. Years later, Gladys believed herself to be capable of taking care of Marilyn. They lived together for a short while before she was dropped off with a new set of family members. She did well there for a time until the man of the house took advantage of her sexually. Instead of returning her to Gladys or her original foster family, she was placed in an orphanage. All of these moments in her childhood shaped who she was as an adult. It explains why she was so desperate to truly be known and loved.

Marilyn’s death was officially ruled a probable suicide by barbiturate overdose.

However, there is much about the night she died that is shrouded in mystery. One of the biographies that I read believed in the theory of her overdose, however, the other believed that Marilyn was murdered. After looking at the mysterious events and timeline of the night she died,

I too believe that her death was an accidental homicide.I also read a book filled with Marilyn’s own notes and messages. This allowed me to gain insight into her mind, rather than reading about someone else’s interpretation of her life.

Not only did I watch a number of documentaries about her life, but I closely studied the movies that she was in. I wanted to understand the allure, and the fascination that people had with her from watching her films. She was notoriously difficult to work with on set due to her belief that she was never good enough and would easily get frustrated, along with the times that she was under the influence of drugs or alcohol. However, it is clear why she was continuously hired in spite of that. She glows on screen, and is completely mesmerizing to watch. She doesn’t seem to be acting, but rather becomes the character that is seen on screen.

I learned from my screenwriting professor that before writing, it is important to watch

“roadmap films,” or films that are similar in nature to what I would be writing about. I watched biopics that had been made about other celebrities. These films included Rocketman, Bohemian ​ Rhapsody, Judy, and many others. I then watched films that had already been made about ​ Marilyn, such as My Week With Marilyn and The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe. I also spent a ​ ​ ​ ​ great deal of time reading The Hollywood Standard to learn how to properly format some of the ​ ​ trickier scenes that I had written, such as the flashbacks and dream sequences.

Chapter 2

The Process

Once I had compiled all of my research over the course of the summer, I enrolled in a feature screenwriting course to grow my writing skills and learn the best way to navigate the writing process. I soon began writing the fifteen beats of my script, which mapped out the structure of the film. All films have the same basic structure, with specific beats to hit at certain pages of the script. It is similar to an expository structure with a rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution, but much more fleshed out. This proved to be extremely helpful later in the writing process when I needed to look back at what I was originally thinking, and make sure

I was still on track. My fifteen beats changed slightly throughout the process, as I would begin writing and find that the actions of the characters would be different from how I originally envisioned them.

It was extremely important to me to truly get to know my characters, and let their actions guide my writing. A common writing mistake is only connecting to a main character, and having the others fall flat and become two dimensional. When I would write a scene, I would try to see it from every character’s perspective. Although I felt that Marilyn’s actions came to me the easiest, I pushed myself to consider what each and every character was feeling, and how it would affect their actions.

Another common writing mistake is letting writerly wants override the desires of the characters. I would write a scene, and upon rereading it, I would find that it didn’t quite make sense within the world that I was writing. I had to truly know the people that I was writing in order to tell a believable story. Due to the fact that I had done such a great deal of researching prior to writing, there were many aspects of Marilyn’s life that I wanted to include into the script.

However, I found that when I would try to write such a scene, it would feel clunky, and not quite warranted. I had to learn to put aside what I wanted to see in the script, and only include moments that felt necessary to the story, and that were essential to what the characters would be talking about and doing.

The biggest challenge for me while writing was learning about subtext. In real life, people rarely say exactly what they mean. They don’t jump right into a difficult conversation, nor do they explicitly state what’s on their minds. There are always hidden meanings behind what people say, with little subtleties. When writing, I often found myself creating scenes in which the characters would be extremely transparent with what angered them, or what they were currently experiencing. However, my professor/advisor taught me to make the conversation about something else entirely. In one of the scenes, I wrote about a zen garden that sat on Dr.

Greenson’s desk. As Marilyn played with it, she made a mess of the sand everywhere, and Dr.

Greenson was unnerved by it. Something as simple as this showed how Marilyn was loopy on drugs, and that Dr. Greenson liked to be in control and have everything just-so.

The feature-length screenwriting class that I enrolled in was taught by Professor Ben

Frahm. I had previously taken a course with him, and felt that he was incredibly knowledgeable.

I had always thought that the most important part of writing was storytelling, but he helped me to understand that without a proper structure, the story would always fall flat. Once we had completed our fifteen beats, he would look them over to ensure that the moments matched the format. We then were told to write up a treatment, which was essentially a more fleshed out fifteen beats, detailing specifics of what would occur at each structure point. We read these aloud in front of the class, and received suggestions, feedback, and critiques. It was also extremely beneficial to test the level of interest in my story. Although Marilyn Monroe is a well-known icon, it has been so long since her passing, and I was worried that people would no longer be invested in a story about her life. However, it was relieving to see how much of an interest my classmates had in her life story, especially one that had yet to be told.

It was helpful to have a semester in which I had specific deadlines that I had to meet. I am extremely self motivated, however, I found that there were times when I wouldn’t write until

I felt inspiration hit. The fact that I had deadlines to meet kept me from procrastinating, and made me push through, even when I felt uninspired. We had two large deadlines throughout the semester. I was able to have a fellow student read through the first half of my script, and I did the same for her. Getting feedback from someone before handing in a section to my professor helped me to fix some of the simple formatting mistakes that I had made. I found that formatting correctly was a bit of a learning curve, especially when I was writing flashbacks and dream sequences. Luckily, I had a great textbook to refer to whenever I had questions, and the software,

Final Draft, was user-friendly.

When the semester had ended, I had completed the first draft, but I knew that I would still need help from my professor/advisor. He agreed to meet with me weekly to review portions of my rewrite. I would email him sections a few days prior to meeting, and he would always sit with me and give me helpful critiques. It can sometimes be difficult to see mistakes you might have made while writing when you are so close to the material. However, Professor Frahm was always so kind and helpful. He never made me feel badly about my work, and was always constructive in his feedback. Once I had written the entire first draft of my screenplay, I did a subtext check. I found that many parts of my script lacked depth, as the characters stated everything that they were feeling to one another. It is important that the characters feel relatable to the readers or audience.

Even though this is a movie, it is based on real life, and the characters have to feel real in order for the audience to buy into such a wild story.

Chapter 3

The Impact

Marilyn Monroe will forever be an important figure in the history of Hollywood as she influenced so many of the strong women who changed the face of the industry. She is well known for changing what was seen as sexy at the time. Prior to her influence, women in film had to be tiny to be considered sexy. Marilyn was much more voluptuous, and opened the door for so many more women to come through and make their mark on the film industry.

Unfortunately, she was never taken seriously in her time. She desperately desired to be given a serious role to challenge herself. She worked with incredibly talented people to grow her skills, such as the highly respected method acting coach Lee Strasberg. Unfortunately, 20th

Century Fox continued to give her a series of dumb blonde roles. Even her husband, Arthur

Miller, who created a role in his film The Misfits just for her, did not do her any favors with the ​ ​ character choices.

Marilyn was sorely misunderstood in her time, however, the world still carries a fascination with her nearly sixty years after her death. People seem to enjoy learning about complicated people, and Marilyn certainly was complicated. She had a desperate desire to be known and loved, and these are such basic desires that we all carry with us. Although few know of her tragic life experiences, her love for life and innate charm are mesmerizing to this day.

Writing this script has drastically and permanently altered my life. I had never imagined myself working as a screenwriter, and instead was looking to pursue a career in production.

However, I knew that I had this story inside of me, and I am so grateful to have had such an incredible professor/advisor to pull it out of me, and help me to reach my potential. I now know that I love writing, and I have thought of a number of stories that I want to tell and share with the world in my own unique voice. I know that I can make a career out of writing if I continue to push myself and grow my abilities.

Throughout my entire life, I have always wanted to create works of art that help people in some way. My greatest hope is that this script can be made into a film, and that even one person who watches it feels that they can relate to Marilyn’s story or find inspiration from her and her life. Much of my script touches on the mental health difficulties that Marilyn struggled with.

These struggles affected her personal relationships, her work, and her sanity. Due to the fact that her mother had a history of mental illness, Marilyn was always terrified for her sanity, never wanting to lose her grip on reality. I desperately felt the need to include this aspect of her life in my script to show how difficult struggling with mental health can be, and how finding the right people to support you is essential.

Finally, Marilyn was always taken advantage of by the men in the industry. She was so desperate to be given a chance, that she let people stomp all over her. Although this was decades ago, women are still being taken advantage of as they try to achieve their dreams. As someone hoping to break into this industry, I have been so grateful to the women who have made the

#MeToo Movement happen, and who have exposed the men who have taken advantage of them.

I believe that women in the industry will relate to Marilyn’s character, and women everywhere will understand her better after these powerful movements.

Works Cited

Taraborrelli, J. Randy. Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe. PAN Books, 2018. ​ ​

Spoto, Donald. Marilyn Monroe: the Biography. Cooper Square Press, 2001. ​ ​

Monroe, Marilyn, et al. Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ​ ​ 2012.

Riley, Christopher. The Hollywood Standard: the Complete and Authoritative Guide to Script ​ Format and Style. M. Wiese Productions, 2005. ​