blog

Circumstantial flummery from a would-be spoonbean hustler.

news and notes 9.29.06

from the loose change rattling around in my head…

Pooks hooked me up with a very awesome screenwriting blog that I had not stumbled across before – Mystery Man on Film – who immediately got my attention when he called out that scripts and screenwriting blogs should act more like their film counterparts. Playing it close to the vest is all good in poker – which by the way I was playing a few days ago and pulled the most amazing 5-9 straight out of my ass, it was really a thing of beauty- but close to the vest in writing can be sort of laughable. So I may try my hand at some more indepth script reviews as I read things coming across my path. Those of you only visit the blog to find out if I’m still breathing and/or in jail, mental asylum, political office will have to tolerate it. Hijinks continue to ensue at regular intervals.

I’ve somehow ended up back on Nickel & Dime, as I languidly dash for October 30th for a small NC festival. Mind recently has been geared for plotting Gallows Gulch, working out minutiua, but deadlines are kinda the godsend for actually making progress, so now drafting N&D again. It’s weird, time does some weeeird things to what you’ve written. I worked damned hard from January to April 26th 2006 to get that script in shape for Nicholl. I got coverage, workshopped, and every single day went over it. And about March, with the help of some coverage, I realized I was banking on some flawed major elements. So I start hammering out new ideas, new locales, new action, and realized that draft wasn’t going to make the May deadline, so I set it aside and worked on the flawed draft and tried to clean it up as best as possible. My eye was twitching, I was thinking all the time, and I knew I needed to let it rest for a while. This is the one thing I fail miserably at as a writer- I cannot leave anything alone. I knew I needed to take a break, but that May deadline was getting close and it wasn’t just going to fix itself- and the thought of not entering seemed like laziness and failure and blah blah blah. So. Now, after a few months of not working on it, the Nicholl dink and playing with other scripts, it’s amazingly obvious this needs to get established earlier, that needs more support, etc. And since I’m at it, I might as well gut that flawed chunk of story and replace with something hopefully stronger, better, faster, smarter… The rewrites. never. end. But there’s a new deadline in place, and so I’ll make another hefty push and hope that I’m improving it rather than tinkering it into oblivion.

It’s occured to me that Dick Cheney = Mr. Potter from ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’. Mostly due to Jack Straw’s comments about the Bush Administration working against Colin Powell in the quagmire of Iraq. The NPR report I heard made some mention of agendas and such and all of a sudden I just thought – ‘scurvy little spider’. So I think it’s worth saying:

You sit around here and you spin your little webs and you think the whole world revolves around you and your money. Well, it doesn’t, Mr. Potter. In the whole vast configuration of things, I’d say you were nothing but a scurvy little spider.

Unfortunately, I don’t see any Clarence-types floating around to change things any time soon. Heck, an Acme Safe would even do the trick.

And since it’s almost October the world of baseball seems to be forecasting the Apocalypse. I’m still going with the Mets mostly because they seem to be the only franchise left playing something that resembles baseball. I don’t know what the hell is going on with Detroit, but if the Twins fall I’ll look forward to a Tigers/Mets series. In other news the Hell is expecting a cold front next week…