Week 3 Creative Journal
Lajos Egri's Character Bone Structure: Bobby Driscoll
Note: The Bobby Driscoll who appears in my script is a supernatural reimagining of the real-life Bobby Driscoll. It blurs the facts of Bobby’s life with the fiction of my story. I am fascinated by the story of the child actor who voiced Peter Pan but would later find themselves in the grip of substance abuse and an addiction which would ultimately take their life in 1968 at age 31. Driscoll is truly a Lost Boy. An illustration of the delta between the wonderful dreams of the movies and the crushing reality of the world. Driscoll flew, but perhaps he flew too close to the sun. More Icarus than Pan. His story is one of voicing the boy who never grew up, but being the real-life boy who never exceeded the joyful reach of his childhood fame. In Driscoll’s life we find a vacuum inside of which we can tell a story. To this day still buried in a Pauper’s grave on Hart Island in New York harbor, Driscoll remains unrecognized by those who celebrate the legacy of Disney animation.
Based on my short story ‘The Pirates of Hart Island’, my screenplay ‘Lost Boy’ will open with the discovery of Driscoll’s body in an abandoned East Village tenement building, surrounded by empty beer bottles and religious pamphlets. Set in early 1968, it will open with the story of two boys who find Driscoll, establishing the context for what is later to happen in flashback, and will serve as the opening 3 minutes to a hypothetical film of Driscoll as a supernatural being consumed with a desire to remain young. Driscoll’s physical appearance shifts during the story, but I will describe Bobby as we find him at the opening of the script.
Physiology
Sex: Male
Age: 31 at the time our opening protagonists, the two boys, find him. Through the supernatural ritual in which John and Mike transfer their youth to Bobby, it is inferred that Bobby is much older than his human years, and has been harvesting children for much longer.
Height and Weight: Bobby retains some of the physical attributes of being a former child star. He doesn’t strike an imposing figure, but clearly shows the weight loss of sustained years of drug abuse and the recent gaps between periods of harvesting the young in order to regain his youth. He is 5’5” but only weighs 120 pounds.
Color of Hair, Eyes & Skin: His skin is gray and sallow, more like a thin tissue wrapped around his bones, with a junkie’s sunken eyes which still dart around a room. His hair is a matted, greasy crop and he’s unshaven, although he was never able to grow a beard. Despite it all, he retains the vibrant, sparkling blue eyes through which he experienced stardom as a child. The ritual by which Bobby harvests the futures of children proves dramatically restorative to Bobby’s complexion.
Posture: Slumped against the wall in the last moments of addiction, Bobby’s posture holds all the agony of a life shot into his arm. His fingers are crippled, his bones distorted through years of sleepless nights.
Appearance: Bobby is near death, but through it all we can still see traces of the handsome young movie star who played Peter Pan. The star is long faded, but retains many of the elements cherished by the public. He is filthy and his clothes hang off his shrunken body, but also his shrunken life. There is a deep sadness to his appearance, but the sadness is more ours than his. Bobby’s face holds all the hallmarks of a good-looking midwestern kid whom the world destroyed. In Bobby’s case it was fame and substance abuse which took him, but the real story is that it was lack of love and a deep desire, like Peter Pan, never to grow up.
Defects & Diseases: It’s never explicitly shown, but strongly inferred that Bobby is riddled with disease. His lifestyle as a junkie in Manhattan’s East Village at the tail end of the sixties, and his association with the hangers-on of Andy Warhol’s Factory have left him ravaged by infection. Beneath his clothes is a body covered in the sores and welts of dangerous sexual encounters and the experimentation which comes with trying to keep the party going. His knees are swollen, making him hobble, and his flying days are long behind him. He coughs himself to sleep, and the detritus which surrounds him bears the internal trauma marks of breathing blood.
Heredity: (Adapted from Wikipedia) Born Robert Cletus Driscoll in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the only child of Cletus Driscoll (1901–1969), an insulation salesman, and Isabelle (née Kratz; 1904–1981), a former schoolteacher. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Des Moines, Iowa, where they stayed until early 1943. The family moved to Los Angeles when a doctor advised the father to relocate to California because he was suffering from work-related handling of asbestos. Driscoll's parents were encouraged to help their son become a child performer in films. Their barber's son, an actor, got Bobby an audition at MGM for a role in the family drama Lost Angel (1943), which starred Margaret O'Brien. While on a tour across the studio lot, five-year-old Driscoll noticed a mock-up ship and asked where the water was. The director was impressed by the boy's curiosity and intelligence and chose him over 40 applicants.
”A child lives in a world of its own, so, logically, a successful story for children must strike a chord in that world; possibly involve something he would like to do if he had the chance, like fly with his own wings or go down a rabbit hole, but above all, it must be something he can understand. Anything a child understands, chances are he will enjoy. However, everyone seems to enjoy these successful, so-called children’s stories. For instance, you’ll never meet a truthful person who says he doesn’t like movie cartoons, especially a man. Someone said that women were always women, and men were always children.” (Bobby Driscoll)
Sociology
Class: Bobby’s upbringing in the lower middle-class suburbs of Des Moines, Iowa proved helpful during his rise to fame as a child star, and gave him a humble wholesomeness which would prove spellbinding to millions of fans. Yet as an adult he has become a bum. Despite his association with the upper reaches of the art world and Warhol’s circle, he begs for money as much as scraps of food, and lives every day for the simple purpose of his next hit.
“I became a beatnik and a bum. I had no residence. My clothes were at my parents’ [house] but I didn’t live anywhere. My personality had suffered during my marriage and I was trying to recoup it.” (Bobby Driscoll)
Occupation: Bobby’s relationship with work is one of trauma. He still holds a deep desire to return to the movies, despite being discarded by the studio system. In recent years he’s found himself as an extra in underground experimental arthouse movies, and has even begun to create his own artwork collages. All of the money he had as a child has gone into his arm, and anything he does manage to get still goes the same way.
“I had everything. I was earning more than $50,000 a year, working steadily with good parts. Then I started putting all my spare time in my arm. I’m not really sure why I started using narcotics. I was 17 when I first experimented with the stuff. In no time at all I was using whatever was available, mostly heroin, because I had the money to pay for it.” (Bobby Driscoll)
Education: Bobby’s fame was so bright and so early that he never had time for school, despite the efforts of his parents to continue his education in parallel with his filming schedule. As such, he is bright, but more a graduate of the school of life than book smart. This has made him intensely resourceful, but deeply reliant upon the resources of others. Bobby is deeply eloquent and articulate, skills which have served him well in life, but he is keen to hide his lack of education, especially in the artistic circles in which he now moves.
Home Life: Driven by a deep desire for a life better than the ones they had been given, Bobby’s parents were keen to exploit any and all opportunities to leverage their son’s abilities to further their own lifestyle. His father’s background in insulation sales would drive him to move from selling insurance, to selling his son.
“I wish I could say that my childhood was a happy one, but I wouldn’t be honest. I was lonely most of the time. A child actor’s childhood is not a normal one. People continually saying ‘What a cute little boy!’ creates innate conceit. But the adulation is only one part of it … Other kids prove themselves once, but I had to prove myself twice with everyone.” (Bobby Driscoll)
“Bobby Driscoll had a very rough childhood. I know that his father used to whack him around a lot, when he was very young. His parents used to lock him in the closet all night. He’d have to sit there in the dark.” (Childhood friend Russ Tamblyn)
Marital Status: Bobby is divorced, and he has spent his life in pursuit of the genuine love which was absent during his childhood. Raised on the synthetic love which comes with fandom, he would spend his life looking for a partner uninterested in exploiting him, but he would never find her. On December 3, 1956, Bobby eloped with his girlfriend, Marilyn Verna Rush (whom he met at a party in Manhattan Beach), after around 5-6 months of dating, in Mexico to avoid their parents’ objections. This marriage was later annulled and not legally recognized. They were apart for some months. However, the couple was re-wed in a Los Angeles ceremony on March 8, 1957. After the wedding, he relocated to Santa Monica and began working as a clerk in a haberdashery in Pacific Palisades to support his marriage. Sometime in August, Bobby has his first child, a son named Daniel, who becomes the first of three children. Sometime in 1960, Bobby was separated from Marilyn, which later in the year resulted in a divorce. A day after Bobby’s 23rd birthday, his third child named, Katherine, a daughter, was born.
Religion: Bobby was raised Catholic, and was married in a Catholic ceremony. He has long lapsed but we find his body surrounded by religious literature from the nearby Church of Heavenly Rest on 5th Avenue.
Race & Nationality: Despite his gray skin, Bobby is a caucasian American.
Place in community: Once the center of the turning world, Bobby is now a distant outsider. Any friends he may have are also in the grip of addiction, and more transactional than cordial. As such, despite all the fame and adulation he’s experienced in his life, he remains as we find him, alone.
Political affiliation: Bobby has no affiliation other than to those who would enable him.
Amusements: Bobby has a single source of amusement, the spike which he puts into his arm every evening. Lately he has begun to spend time at a nearby catholic church, and has begun to take home some of their literature. He will occasionally read the film industry’s trade papers, but even through the fog of addiction, knows that it is unhealthy for him.
Psychology
Sex Life & Moral Standards: Rumors have always circulated around when Bobby’s first sexual experience took place, with many buried inferences of abuse inside the studio system as a child. As an adult he always enjoyed a healthy sex life, fathering three children. But as his marriage collapsed and he moved to New York, his sexual experiences changed from amorous to transactional, and his moral standards declined. Hustling for the cash he would put into his arm, sex became a means to an end, and the love which had eluded him for so long, now just a synthetic means of making the rent.
Personal Premise & Aambition: Bobby’s ambition is simple. To remain young. But the crushing tide of adulthood has meant that despite his close association in the public imagination with Peter Pan, he was indeed the boy who had to grow up. In his youth he knew fame, and enjoyed the adulation of millions, but as his star faded and the studio system turned their backs on him, the roles dried up as much as he lost his baby fat and his voice dropped. Bobby will do anything to remain young. His addiction keeps the demons at a distance, but he’s unable to see that he himself has become the very demon he feared the most. It’s not the drugs which calm his fears, it’s the supernatural harvesting of children which provides the restorative medicament that turns back time. By taking the youth of others, he consumes it for himself with growing appetite and violence inside of a ritual of luring children into abandoned buildings.
Frustrations & Chief Disappointments: Bobby is truly a Lost Boy. Someone defined by who they were. Beloved by a studio system which would discard him as easily as they had embraced him, he harbors a deep resentment against the only source of love he ever found in life, the movies. He has spent his life in pursuit of the one thing he thinks he can never recapture, the love of the millions who adored him as a child.
Temperament: Bobby’s temperament dances to a junkie’s rhythm. Stable and coherent when under the influence. Violent and destructive when it wears off. The optimistic boy who never learned to grow up has transformed into the adult who seeks to recapture their youth through the harvesting of others’ futures. He is deeply distrustful of others, despite his need to be surrounded by them, and a lifetime of lies has forged him into a grotesque husk of a human.
“A newspaper clipping says the ‘First Human in Walt Disney Films is Now the First Human To Be Treated for Narcotics as an Illness, Not a Crime.’ And so, Bobby goes off to the penitentiary, and I communicated with him, and the first letter that he sent me from the penitentiary says, ‘There are no nurses here’. They lied to him.” (George Herms, Friend)
Attitude Toward Life: Bobby is resourceful, and has retained much of the exuberance of his childhood, despite the deep desire to hold on to the past. He finds it easy to talk to others, but is naturally distrustful of their motives.
“I have found that memories are not very useful. I was carried on a silver platter and then dumped into the garbage can.” (Bobby Driscoll)
Complexes: Bobby is terrified of growing old. The cockiness of his portrayal and real-life behavior as Peter Pan has given way to the ravages of time and developed into a deep cynicism about the world. His obsession with the past motives him to reclaim it by stealing the futures of other children. Luring the curious who would seek to understand the myths which have sprung up around him.,
“I really feared people. The other kids didn’t accept me. They treated me as one apart. I tried desperately to be one of the gang. When they rejected me, I fought back, became belligerent and cocky and was afraid all the time.” (Bobby Driscoll)
Extrovert, Introvert or Ambivert: The more harvesting Bobby generates, the more extraverted he becomes, but his life as a junkie between harvests manifests a deep and melancholy introversion which proves crippling both mentally and physically.
Abilities: Retaining much of his original role as Peter Pan, Bobby is able to levitate in real-life, something his victims get to experience in the final moments of their short lives.
Qualities: Bobby is highly imaginative in his attempts to lure others towards him, often seeding myths about Peter Pan within local communities, and baiting the traps of gossip over many years until the curious cannot resist any longer.
I.Q. Despite his lack of formal education, Bobby was a smart kid, and remains smart through his addiction. He has a the capacity to be eloquent and capable of holding informed, insightful conversations with others.
Generative Ai Renderings of Bobby in The East Village
One Page Scene: Bobby’s Conflict
Here a restored and rejuvenated Bobby must choose between his addiction to drugs and his supernatural addiction to harvesting the young. Just like Peter Pan, in the end he doesn’t make a decision at all, and chooses both.
