INDELIBLE FRECKLES

Okay, I’ve met one deadline, I’ve pushed another, and this website is three years old.

Because my hair length is kinda tied to the pushed deadline, the silhouette has left George Hamilton territory and is moving at pace into Farrah Fawcett Land. Ten days. Piece of piss.

And yes: three years. Two hundred and thirty posts. One hundred and eighty nine comments. A small but growing New Zild online community of screenwriters.  Over half a million hits to date (granted, a lot of the spikes were when the @dfmamea.com addresses and blog comments were being offered se xxi al nite lonnng).

Life is good.  Good vibes to you all.

Final page count: 56 pages including cover page.

Wrote through the night and flicked it through at 8:32 this morning. Yay.

The Goddess is heading out this evening so I could collapse into bed at oh, 7pm or something ridiculous, or, in anticipation of the premiere of Tom Fontana’s The Philanthropist, I could sneak an ep or three of Oz.

… Nope. Started this post at 6-ish and… fell asleep at the keyboard.  It’s almost seven already.

To borrow from the lovely Daily Screenwriter (and a nod to Phill Barron):

• 16 June – Receive email from producer about a one-hour concept I pitched oh, almost a year ago: If you’re able to get me a first draft by June 26th…. Collapse to floor laughing/crying.*
• 17 June – Rearrange workload. Start outlining (current fashion is to write in block letters on recycled paper).
• 19 June – 22 pages of handwritten notes. Count ‘em and weep.
• 20 June – 4 pages (plus title page).
• 21 June – 6 pages.
• 23 June – 22 pages.
• 24 June – 42 pages.

I only have tomorrow to finish it off but the numbers (and rate of progression) are heartening. And I’m taking a rain check on parts 2 and 4 of the McRae Cranial Therapy.

Just remembered this post was gonna be about superstition and how my hair is so long I think I look like George Hamilton… until my reflections and silhouette show that the hair is really more Krusty the Clown.

Next post. Maybe.

*  I already have a 30 June feature deadline to meet.

Another live update from Planet DFMamea.

Finished a draft earlier this afternoon, saved it, did a quickie back-up of all my working directories and documents to a flash drive – and the Powerbook had a bit of a kernel panic:

Time for a full backup. Forty-five minutes, it said. That was an hour ago. In that time I’ve played fetch with The Dog, re-upped The Chickens, and picked up WALL-E for some family Friday night viewing. (The children have seen it, us adults haven’t – and since we adults are paying, we choose.) I also reported an idiot on a Vespa.

Meantime, the backup’s been sitting at 25 minutes for the past ten minutes.

Scratch that: sixteen minutes, it says now.

Suppose I could power up the Windoze laptop.

But would I still feel like A WRITER?

Okay this isn’t post-dated.

I’ve got fifteen minutes spare.

How quickly can I cut and paste and make sense?

• How about ten best film endings? (Fedora-tip: Infinite Monkeys by way of The Incomparable.)
• I’ve been a fan of Dylan Horrocks since Hicksville (a phase of forcing myself to try some homegrown comics fare). He’s got a blog. With serials and stories, too! Recommended for civilians and comic aficionados alike.
• PhD student Gareth James is very generously sharing some of the fruits of his research into the history of HBO original programming, 1997-2007 at Gareth On…. (Fedora-tip: Lynden Barber.)

Time’s up already. Must be a slow linker.

Deadlines.

Love ‘em. Loathe ‘em.

Got ‘em.

If I blog between now and the new month, it’ll be an admission of failure. Or a cry for help. Or just some post-dated posts that I’ve set up to keep my online presence up in my uh, absence.

Of course I’ll be back – if Mr Molloy can post about his blog’s first birthday, I absolutely must for this blog’s approaching third anniversary. Not that I’m competitive or anything.

Found myself pitching a couple of shows not long ago. I thought it was a meet and greet. Nah-ah.

One pitch was just one that had been bouncing around my head for the past while – let’s call it the I’m Cool About This Pitch. The other is one I’m quite sweet on – the I’m Hot About This Pitch.

The Cool Pitch: A depressed and suicidal multihyphenate is given five million dollars with which to make her debut feature.

The Hot Pitch: A year in the life of genetically engineered soldiers.

Guess which one they liked more? Guess which one I promised to write up within eighteen hours? Sigh*.

I should learn to be more aware of my audience: given the choice between a period of time with super-soldiers/planarian-worms/domesticated-chickens, and a personal, identifiable journey from darkness into light, they went for the unwritten and undeveloped pitch.

* Mental note for the next Hot Pitch: Private First Class Ray Gunn awakens one morning to discover he is the ultimate soldier. Nothing can stop, hurt or kill him. His imagination is the limit. One day, he stops taking orders….

Remember? “How much worse more insulting can it get?”

Sigh.

We here at Fortress Mamea caught a couple of episodes Wallander this month. The cinematography is gorgeous. The acting, particularly from lead Kenneth Branagh, is unsurprisingly excellent. The first 45 to 60 minutes of each ep have set mood and tone beautifully, and I’m wanting to get to the bottom of the case du jour, but the remaining minutes have left me… very cool.

• Your protagonist is the only person who can see all witnesses and possible suspects, necessitating a whole lot of to- and fro-ing. Check.
• Surrounding your offender on all sides with cops pointing guns. Check.
• Entering a suspicious location on one’s own without calling for backup. Check.
• Leaving a vital witness in a rural safe house while you go outside to investigate the arrival of a suspicious vehicle in thick fog. Check.
• Racing to a certain destination without calling it in at all and then, upon arriving, waiting in plain and obvious sight for your prime suspect to maybe/possibly/probably arrive. Check.

I was too angry after the second ep to contemplate watching the final of the season.

But I’m a compleatist at heart.

How much worse more insulting can it get?

I met with a couple of young writers a few weeks back. They’d completed two drafts, each event accompanied by a sense of fulfilment and great achievement. And after each draft, they’d met with someone like their reader or script consultant or mentor, and their pride and joy, their fruit of sleepless nights, arguments, compromises and exhilarating flights of co-writing, was taken apart in front of their eyes.

They admitted that maybe they were floundering a little. After a few carefully worded questions, I could see they were angry, too. It’s all so bloody personal, they said tightly.

No, it’s not, I told them. It’s never about you. It’s about what you’ve written. Whereupon I joined their reader, et al, in field-stripping their script, along with the following spiel.

Having been on the receiving end of feedback and notes countless times, -. There – right there: ‘on the receiving end’.

That’s the wrong way to look at it: readers don’t have it in for you the writer. They want to like what you given them.

It takes no effort at all to declare a script brilliant or needs work or sucks, and hang up walk away.

A reader – a true reader – puts in time and thought into studying your script. As a nail-gnawing writer awaiting feedback, all you might see of this reading process is the report, laying out what works (and what doesn’t), and most importantly, why it works (or doesn’t).

When I’m wearing my reading hat, the better (or worse) the script, I can turn it around in a few hours; but if it’s damaged (but not irrevocably), or passionate (but muddled), I can easily spend double that time on it. You want numbers? Okay. Let’s say, for a better (or worse) kind of script, it takes me an hour or so to read it, another hour to mull it over, then an hour to formulate what I’m going to say to the writer. That’s three hours minimum that I’m not writing. And if it’s not better (or worse)… don’t tell my manager.

Anyway, back to our young writers where, after I’d laid their script bare, they said, Okay. Um. Thanks. After a few more carefully worded questions, however, I got them started on disputing my feedback.

That’s the spirit! I cried in my besht Connery voishe – but that’s for another post.