Refining the Plot.
When deciding which of my ideas to pursue further, I decided it would be best to try and blend the elements of both premises for Love Nor Money and the premise for another of my ideas; Burning Daylight, into one single concept. The two options for Love Nor Money were as follows:
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OPTION A: A veteran Wild West shootist who is to be hanged for his crimes tells tales of his exploits to his cellmate, a budding outlaw, and how much he regrets them.
OPTION B: An outlaw visits a doctor after taking a bullet in a shootout, and at first he is proud of his exploits, but as the doctor begins to question his motivations and their outcomes, doubt is cast upon the outlaw's pride.
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And the concept for Burning Daylight was:
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A lone shootist wounded in a duel drags his injured horse through the desert, determined to get the both of them to safety and a doctor, and completely opposed to the concept of putting down or leaving the horse. As he travels he sees mirages of all the people he's killed, and they bring him to consider the consequences of his actions.
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I've taken my favourite elements from both and refined them into a single idea. Given the setting and content of the new concept, I also think it would be best to use the title Love Nor Money rather than Burning Daylight.
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The new plot is as follows:
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After taking a bullet in a duel, a shootist visits a doctor to have the bullet removed. Despite the doctor's insistence that the shootist keep the nature of his injury a secret, the shootist brags openly about his exploits. The doctor questions the shootist's motivations and actions, and as the shootist drinks more and more spirits to help with the pain of the surgery, and the doctor continues to cast doubt over his pride, he sees drunken hallucinations of his victims, some he hardly knew, and some he knew all too well, and he begins to question all that he's done.
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The most notable changes are that very little, if any, of the original option A has remained, and that the presence of the horse from Burning Daylight is completely absent. While I was very enthusiastic about making use of the horse, as it adds some much needed emotionality and humanisation to the outlaw character, I think that having a horse present in such an intimate way is an impossibility, and the horse couldn't be indoors, which would make the inclusion of almost any element from either idea for Love Nor Money significantly more difficult and contrived.
What's interesting about the new version of the plot is that now there's a question as to which version of the shootist character to use. In the original option A of Love Nor Money and the original plot for Burning Daylight, the shootist is deeply regretful of his past crimes and is tormented by them and their consequences. In the original option B for Love Nor Money, however, the outlaw is proud and boastful of his exploits. The problem is the new version of the plot retains both the doctor character to whom the outlaw boasts in the original option B as well as the mirages that the outlaw sees in the original Burning Daylight plot. By the nature of the mirages' presence, it would stand to reason that the new shootist character is tormented by his past, so it would be easy to use that version of the character. However, the purpose of the doctor's inclusion in the narrative is to bring the shootist's exploits to question and induce guilt in him, which isn't necessary if he's already guilt-ridden at the inception of the plot. By this nature I think it would be best to have the shootist character begin the story as boastful and proud, and only begin to see the mirages as the doctor begins to bring him to question himself.
Refining the Characters.
Jameson 'Iron Jamie' Pike.
I tried to find a name that strikes a sort of halfway-point between being very traditionally masculine and also very traditionally juvenile. Jameson Pike, I felt, struck a good balance, and the addition of the nickname 'Iron Jamie' is meant to make a point. The point in question is that Jameson isn't mature, but still perceives himself and is perceived by others as notably threatening. The idea is that the nickname works whether the audience infers that it was given to him by the public, or that he chose it himself. Which of these two options is the truth will never be revealed, but if Jameson gave himself the nickname it shows that he wants to be a legendary outlaw, and as such gave himself the moniker of 'iron' (i.e. a shooting iron), but still goes by his childhood nickname 'Jamie'. On the other hand, if the nickname was given to him by the public it's obvious from the 'iron' that his exploits have made him somewhat infamous, but also obvious from the public's choice to call him 'Jamie' rather than 'Jameson' or 'Pike' that he's still seen as rather young and inexperienced.
The Ghost of Horatio O'Shea.
The purpose of this first mirage isn't so much to show Jameson the impact of his crimes, or to establish their severity, but rather to make clear to Jameson that he can't escape what he's done, and to very plainly confront him with the fact that he has taken lives and that has consequences beyond his own victory. Up until this point Jameson has always viewed his transgressions as victories; simply winning a duel. The purpose of the first mirage is to make clear to him that the true nature of his crimes is murder.
Horatio was a victim of Jameson's; a man whom he duelled after Jameson refused to pay his chips after losing to O'Shea in a game of five-finger fillet.
The Ghost of Margaret Pike.
It's important that the final mirage be the most significant, as its purpose isn't so much to motivate the change in Jameson's morality, but rather to solidify his newfound realisation that what he's done was wrong. While the first mirage is someone very alien to Jameson, this one needs to be someone very personal, somebody whose loss has affected Jameson more than he cares to admit, and in a way that brings him to realise just how much pain he's inflicted on others. I wanted to make this character as close to Jameson as possible, a family member or love interest, but the problem inherent there is that I also wanted Jameson to be a redeemable character and, given his nature as someone who engages in duels, it didn't make sense for him to have duelled with any such character is he had a loving relationship with them.
I've decided to make the final mirage Jameson's mother, and to have her death not a result of Jameson, but a result of someone like Jameson. I think my favourite idea for her backstory is that Jameson's father was engaged in a duel and his mother jumped in the way of the gunshot. This way Jameson needs to confront the deaths of both of his parents with only one of them needing to appear on-screen.
Doctor Hannibal Forsythe.
The real purpose for the doctor's inclusion is to give voice to a righteous morality for Jameson to battle against, but I don't want Forsythe to become a one-dimensional character. Beside the odd intrusive or defensive question from Jameson, I want the film to include details that give more depth to Forsythe, as a way of the lending more credence to his advice and his experienced nature. Most of these details won't be provided through dialogue, however, not just because I think that giving every detail of a story or character through speech is lazy, but also because I think it would be a poor and unlikeable character trait for Forsythe to justify his wisdom at every turn by pulling examples from his life of how he's grown, I find that juvenile and self-aggrandising. I think what will be better is to create a character whose morality is so steadfast that he's immediately trusted by the audience, and to provide non-verbal clues throughout the set dressing as to what exactly he's been through.
The Ghost of Ezra Bowers.
The second mirage needs to be more impactful than the first, while still remaining relatively distant from Jameson himself. The purpose of this mirage is not so much to show Jameson the kind of pain he's caused others, but just to make him away that any pain has been caused at all. The family member of one of Jameson's victims seems like the best option for achieving this impact, as it forces him to confront the consequences of his actions without having to experience their impact. I do intend to have him feel those emotions directly, but not until the third mirage, as I'd rather ease Jameson into the concept of the confrontation only to drop him very suddenly in the deep end, rather than have too steady a progression of severity from the first mirage to the last.
Ezra Bowers is the father of Thomas Bowers, a victim of Jameson's, whom Jameson duelled because Bowers vomited on his shoes in a drunken stupor in a saloon. The reason I gave Bowers this backstory is because I felt it was important to show that Jameson called people to duel, and did so for petty reasons. Unlike O'Shea, who rightly called Jameson to duel after Jameson refused to pay his due (the point here being that, while Jameson didn't always initiate the duels, he was duelled with for genuine reasons), the duel with Bowers was initiated by Jameson for a reason that certainly doesn't warrant a fight to the death, and was also initiated with Jameson fully aware that his opponent was blind drunk. It was a cruel act and a dishonest victory.
A Cowboy's Carol.
A comparison I've noticed while coming up with the characters is the similarity of the premise to Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. The similarity wasn't intentional, so the dilemma with which I'm now confronted is whether to lean into the parallels and feature some homages to Dickens' novel, or whether to try and steer Love Nor Money further away from the similarities wherever possible.
I made clear when writing the S.W.O.T. analysis for Solstice that I'd like to do my best to make the project completely original, but I do feel that Love Nor Money is distinct enough from A Christmas Carol to warrant 'original' status, so, in the interest of ensuring that the film remain as original as possible in terms of plot, the issue comes to one of simply embracing the opportunities for allusion, as inspiration from and homage to literary sources can prove to be very beneficial for a film if utilised correctly.
After some deliberation motivated by the necessity to reduce my pursued options down to only three concepts for the Specialist Study presentation, I've had to eliminate three of my six concept candidates.
I felt that Love Nor Money was one of the weaker ideas, so it's been eliminated from the running and I won't be furthering the pre-production.