15. A measly three pages since yesterday. But I did spend an hour negotiating a formal agreement that reasonably I’m happy with. There were moments that gave me some ‘Nam-style flashbacks but everyone’s still alive and still talking. It’s late afternoon now and we’re entertaining in the banquet hall so there’ll be no more writing [...]
INT. KEEP, FORTRESS MAMEA – NIGHT Our WRITER hunches over his desk, fingers flying over his KEYBOARD, head bopping to Charlie Parker. A particularly intense buzz of typing and he squints at his MONITOR -- ON MONITOR where a page count shows “12″. WRITER Yeah, baby! His CELLPHONE vibrates. ON CELLPHONE which shows “New txt [...]
I’ve got two months until we open. Working backwards from mid-June, I’ll have three weeks of rehearsal, leaving me with five weeks to write a script. But I don’t have five weeks to write a script. Did I neglect to mention that there’re two readings in the schedule? Part of the fixed-and-unmoveable-deadline package. The first [...]
Two months to jump-off, I call in the few favours I have remaining in this town. INT. THE PRODUCER’S OFFICE – DAY Our WRITER sits on a KINDERGARTEN STOOL in front of a MASSIVE DESK, behind which sits his PRODUCER. SUPER: “Thursday, 5 April” PRODUCER You what? Our Writer kneads a CLOTH CAP that somehow [...]
Last year, we took a gamble and tried out the first season of Forbrydelsen, a Danish police procedural. It’s twenty eps long and some licence is taken with the genre but hey, y’know, it’s European and there’s quite a bit of slack I cut for product from that part of the world. It was a [...]
I’m going to write a play. Oh, I’ve doodled in the past, I know, I know. But this play’s going up in mid-June. This year. Why theatre? you ask. Because I’ve threatened to do it a couple of times in this blog. And an opportunity arose. … Okay: I rashly – foolishly, even – accepted [...]
I’ve always had trouble with women. Women characters, that is. Making them walk and talk was reasonably straightforward. Whatever made them tick always seemed tantalisingly out of reach. In contrast, tortured (ex-)special forces guys, young idealistic lawyer-types, frustrated creatives – they’re no terrible stretch if one gets into a let’s pretend state of mind. In [...]
– you might ask about my last post about my new cans. In the heat of trying to be concise yet informative, finding the right pic to link, and struggling to remember my mental list of What I’ve learned… (which always seems to vanish when I sit down to blog), I completely forgot the reason [...]
A hand-me-down ipod nano has been a welcome running companion for the last couple of years. The stock bud earphones that came with it have taken a bit of a beating what with sweat and whatever inclement weather, and the sound was becoming increasingly crackly and intermittently mono. So I bought some reasonably priced but [...]
I hanker for the days of just doing it: here’s the environment, here’re the characters – See them walk! Action reveals character! Environment reveals theme! The days of just firing up the laptop, typing in FADE IN:, and seeing what happens next are long gone. Time is finite. Enthusiasm will carry one only so far. [...]
