She Grazed Horses On Concrete - Screenplay

Screenplay

Milka Zimková's (b. 1951, Okružná) collection of short stories She Grazed Horses on Concrete (Pásla kone na betóne, 1980) was an instant success and has been republished least six times through the 2000s. Documentary film director Fero Fenič wrote a literary-narrative screenplay on themes from the last of the fifteen stories, "A Ticket to Heaven" (Vstupenka do neba), but when he began to work with Zimková on a shooting script, she disagreed with his bleak take on the story and the demotion of Johanka's character to a supporting role and refused him as the film's potential director. Fenič stuck to his approach and directed his reworked screenplay under the title A Juice Novel (Džusový román, 1984, released 1988) at the Barrandov Studios.

Zimková then found an accommodating co-writer in Uher who knew her from her roles in his three previous films. Their screenplay absorbed several of the themes and characters from her debut in fiction, but apart from that, there is little resemblance between the book's self-contained tales and the film's integrated storyline. Zimková said that the title was a phrase used in her village to describe someone who had happiness within reach and then lost it. That local meaning would not have been recognized by most viewers, though. It is a line from a waggish folk song. It continues "she bathed in razor blades..." and depicts a woman acting out impracticable feats. Zimková was key in the film's outcome: she was the author of the original book, co-wrote the screenplay, was familiar with the region where the story took place, and took on the leading role of Johanka.