wilderworks

Playing Doctor MAGGIE There are better ways to play doctor. Ways that might actually make me feel better. JON Oh. You mean like Dr. Feel-Good. MAGGIE Yeah. JON I love that song. MAGGIE Yeah. And that “Sexual Healing” song is pretty good too. JON Is that Barry White? Barry White’s music makes me feel sexually inadequate. MAGGIE No, I think it’s Marvin Gaye. JON Oh. Well that’s not a very intimidating name.

Inspired by True Events: The Poo Flinger EXT. NEIGHBORHOOD STREET - DAY Maggie trudges along, walking the dog. She's got a coat over her robe, boots on, plus her ear-flap knit-cap. She carries a bright plastic baggy, full of dog doo. MAGGIE Bat-Man! The Bat-Man! Quit it. No! For no apparent reason, the dog keeps darting toward the street. She tugs on his leash, and he darts back. MAGGIE (CONT'D) C'mon! Get out of the street! An SUV stops at the stop-sign, just as Maggie reaches it. The dog darts out again, and Maggie yanks him back. MAGGIE (CONT'D) What is the matter with you today? The DRIVER of the SUV rolls her window down. It's a middle-aged woman with a massive superiority complex. DRIVER Why don't you quit yanking on that goddamn dog, you asshole? Maggie stops. Dumbfounded. Can't believe the gall. DRIVER (CONT'D) You're gonna break his neck! The SUV starts away. Maggie's brain slowly processes. MAGGIE ...

Irrational Anxieties Well, the blog visits are down 65% for the last two-week period; which means I'm averaging about zero visitors a day. Why do I look at these things? I know that it can only frustrate me, and clearly the size of an audience has nothing to do with the quality of the work! Clearly! To quote Bullets Over Broadway : SHELDON FLENDER Hey, look who's here! The big Broadway success. I don't write hits. My plays are art! They're written specifically to go unproduced. The decline in readership is discouraging not because it's unexpected, and certainly not because readership was the aim of the blog, but because the decline coincides with the premiere of the real aim of the blog: screenplay pages. Here it is, the main event. A new screenplay by J Wilder Konschak. *crickets* *crickets* *tumbleweed* *creepy religious militia settles in area* Sometimes, a fellow can't help but wonder whether he should be taking a hint. From Bullets O...

Horror Movie Viewing I'm thinking of changing the doctor's name again. In honor of The Abbott & Costello Show, I may name him Dr. Bacciagalupe. Or maybe just Dr. Galoup. INT. LIVING ROOM - SHORTLY LATER The four sit together in the dark, sipping drinks, watching a HORROR MOVIE on the big TV. DISSONANT MUSIC builds. Jon, Ollie, and Finch are tense, attention rapt - but Maggie is a zombie, eyes glazed, body slouched, barely upright. She looks like she's about to drool, she's so pale and spacey. LOUD MUSIC STING! The others JUMP. Finch lets loose a little shout. Ollie and Jon LAUGH at the great scare. But Maggie still glares glassy-eyed. She doesn't move at all. MAGGIE Why did he do that? I thought he was in love with her. Everyone freezes. The air is gone from the room. JON Honey, that wasn't her boyfriend. Maggie scowls at the screen, befuddled. MAGGIE But... Who was it? JON It was the Octopus Man. MAGGIE Ooooh. Righ...

Running Long, or Short on Gags? I'm running a page over again. I hope I can cut a page from the next segment to compensate, but I have my doubts. As usual, there will be a long phase of painful trimming at the end of this road. Here's the hard thing about writing a comedy alone: there is nothing more nerve-wracking and doubt-inducing than trying to guess which jokes to cut, having almost no feedback from an audience (and apparently, it's very hard to force detailed, joke-by-joke feedback from one's readership). Nobody, no writer, no one, can ever guess what joke will play - only readers and viewers - only the sharp reality of an audience - can say for sure. But you have to make a thousand Sophie's choices all the same, without a shred of useful input from experience or fact or any sort of guidelines. It's a time when self-delusion can be beneficial. You call it instinct, and you go with it. But it's a sickening sensation all the same. You may be...

Posting Has Been Slight These are the times when one hour a morning simply isn't even in the ballpark of sufficient time to be a writer. Problem scenes take vast amounts of trial and error, and the next scenes have been big fat problems. I found them painfully boring and, for lack of a better word, domesticated . I don't want to watch nice, friendly people being nice and friendly to one another. Where is the drama in that? The comedy? In the end, this ALL went out the window. The Engaged Couple INT. KITCHEN - EVENING Jon is at the range, cutting vegetables, when Maggie enters, still in her work clothes. MAGGIE Hey. I didn't know you were gonna cook. I was gonna make the salmon. JON I started the salmon, but I chickened out... and made chicken! MAGGIE Oh, yummy. We're having puns. JON You think the guests will like it? MAGGIE Oh. Good question... You probably could've prepared a slightly higher class of joke. For example, you could hav...

Here's how I spent my morning - writing another scene that will never make it into the screenplay, another scene that I find quite charming. I simply have no reason to spend this long introducing a character we don't need to meet at all. At present, we'll never see him again. Regular States INT. DOCTOR'S OFFICE - BREAK ROOM - DAY Maggie sits on the counter by the sink, eating a yogurt. Her employer, DR. PUGLISI, has his foot up on a chair, putting a penny in his penny loafer. He's an older man, short, balding, powerful. PUGLISI So, it's his parents' house you're moving into? You'll be living on his turf? MAGGIE Nah, they bought it when he was in high school. He never lived there. When they retired to North Carolina, they transferred the remaining mortgage to him. PUGLISI Ridiculous! Why would anyone retire to NORTH Carolina? If you're gonna pick a state to live in, you should pick one of the regular ones. MAGGIE Regular? ...

First A certain someone gave me an unelaborated nasty look when she read one of the first lines in my first scene of Sick Day , a line describing the hero as someone that should be featured in a Playboy spread called "Girls of the Big Earthquake." Now I'm barely five pages into this thing and I'm already doubting my early favorite line. I can't avoid the truth: there's something about the phrase that I like. I like both the verbal turn (trading "Big Ten" for "Big Earthquake"), especially since it comes right at the end of the phrase, and I also love the image of a Playboy spread of smiling woman covered in white dust, with cuts and bruises, standing outside of rubble. But, I can't avoid this truth either: it's suicide to take unnecessary risks on the first five or ten pages; an early stinker can kill the whole mood. Second The third act suddenly strikes me as not nearly crazy enough. Perhaps it's because I've been ...

Today is the big day. I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Westwood. It's called It's A Grind Coffee House . This is not a "shop" that serves coffee, this is a "house" where coffee lives. Which makes it disturbing that I should burst in and devour it in its home. In any case, the parking situation is less than ideal. There was a metered spot immediately in front, and it was a dollar an hour, so I fed it an hour's worth of quarters. The coffee was about $4. Which still puts me at a significant advantage, financially, over Norm's. I see there is also a parking garage; I'll have to explore the parking options when my hour is up. In any case, today is the big day. I have my outline. I'm not going to persist with the treatment. I'm going to start writing the screenplay. It opens with my main character, Maggie, sitting in an ER waiting room, looking like a wreck. I've taken some notes for the description of her. I'm trying to find ...

It took two months longer than scheduled, but it is finally done. I have a full outline for my next feature screenplay, Sick Day. The trick was simple, as always:  I used some scrap paper and scribbled all day at work, moving and tinkering. Adding page-counts helped me focus and judge importance. I realized that a spreadsheet would be the best way to transfer it to digital form, and it works perfectly, flexible but crisp. So, there it is, my answer to the grouped movements that I analyzed in Groundhog Day and War of the Roses ... Speaking of which, I should probably publish that War of the Roses break-down that I did...

Fake Real Problems Easter weekend found me performing the role of Charlie Kaufman in a presentation of the voice-over monologues from Adaptation , brilliantly delivered, full of the self-loathing and crippling doubt that made it famous, three shows a day. Click on those links up there. I'm not sure I'll be posting what I wrote while in that role. Yes, I started this blog to record the process of screenwriting. And yes, those carefully constructed rants of despair are certainly an aspect of it - at least for me, and apparently for Charlie Kaufman, too. But no, I don't think I'll be sharing them just now. Not without some sort of framing device or additional perspective to add. They require something more to make them less... redundant. One thing is for sure: I'm going to start keeping track of these profoundly angry times. I have two on record now. I'm curious whether they are periodic, and if so, whether I can predict them. I'd like to know when th...

Bored It drizzled on the drive down, but not even enough to wash away the dry white smear on my windshield. It's another overcast day, but this one has less charm than the first one, somehow. Perhaps this is all becoming routine, and the small daily variations are losing their power to excite. On that theme,I had pancakes today. They're always fantastic. But the coffee is a little weak, and the crowd is a little noisy. For a couple days, I've been constructing the movie in outline form on a website called checkvist . And now, having worked on it for another morning, I can say for confidently: it is tedious, and not helpful. I'm losing information, and I'm wasting time encoding the story into an outline form. I'm too methodical to make a sloppy outline, and I'm too bored to finish a thorough one. The only realization I've come to while doing it? I probably don't need Jon to go to work on the first day. And that means Maggie's poo-fli...

I worked all weekend on the treatment for Sick Day , but I only made it slightly into the second act. Starting yesterday afternoon, after I made dinner, the exhaustive detail of the thing started to weigh on me. I took a nap and felt exhausted by the size of it. It will be a thirty-page scriptment at this rate, and I simply don't know whether that is for the best or not. Moving backward through time, Unpredictable had a full treatment, but it was so overlong, plot-wise, that it was vastly and explosively revised as I wrote the screenplay. By the end, the script and the treatment has diverged in very serious ways. That was okay. The only problem was, the script was also okay. Nothing more. I can't afford to do that again. With Gravedigger's Son , I'd written and re-written that treatment a hundred times, several times from scratch. I'd tried writing it as a novel. I'd started on the script as many as three times before realizing that I'd missed the boat ...

Is This What's Been Missing? This evening, I followed my own instruction and I scribbled down everything I knew about Sick Day. I did so in the sloppiest, most freeform manner I could muster. I put Fletch Lives on Netflix streaming, which chased away my intellect completely, and I doodled down the movie. Until that moment, I'd honestly forgotten about all the scribbling and doodling I've done on my past screenplays. But tonight, in pieces, I remembered sitting in the LA courthouse hallway, waiting through at jury duty, drawing circles around ideas for Zaniness Ensues . I remembered sitting in backseat of my car, in the rain, on break from my all-night hospital job, scribbling as quickly as I could in cursive, until I sorted out Blaring Static . I remembered laying on my stomach on the carpet, drawing lines all over dozens of notebook pages, until I cracked the third act of Storybook Park , which became Gravedigger's Son . I remembered the rush I felt each...

Inexplicable Resistance I can't make myself think about this screenplay. (I'm giving it the codename Sick Day  for the blog). I feel like I'm trying to give my dog a pill. I feel like I'm trying to clip the cat's claws. I want to hold my brain down and make it think about this thing, but it snarls and snaps and kicks away, and then it hides under the couch and growls softly for hours. Not even a treat will lure it out. Not even opening and closing the front door. It wants absolutely nothing to do with this script. Look at it! Look at this brain! It chooses to discuss its inability to to discuss the screenplay rather than actually discuss the screenplay! These are advanced, professional avoidance tactics, here. It's possible I'm still adjusting to nicotine deprivation. It's possible my brain is atrophied by a tedious routine, by a dirty apartment and a cluttered room, by these lengthening commute-times and overburdened work-days, by all this...

Here's a little scene that will never make it into the final script, but which came to me while I was thinking through the possibility of a bath scene during that first night, when Jon is taking care of Maggie. Peace in Our Time, Jon... INT. BATHROOM - NIGHT Jon turns the faucet, adding more hot water to Maggie's cooling bath. She is lying back with a washcloth folded on her forehead, looking very wan. JON Do you think the hot water makes the cold water hotter, or you think the cold water makes the hot water colder? MAGGIE I think they make each other more middle temperature. JON That's the boringest possible answer. You totally science'd me. He stares at her. One would imagine he's contemplating sexy thoughts. But no. JON (CONT'D) People don't act much like they're 75% water, do they? MAGGIE I feel like I'm 99% snot. Does that count? JON Cold people make hot people even hotter, and hot people make cold people eve...

Someone posted on Facebook: "Does anyone know if you can get acupuncture if you're allergic to nickel?" I was tempted to respond, "Don't risk it unless a medical professional is present - and an acupuncturist doesn't count." The placebo effect is a big part of healing. Finding ways to trigger it is not a bad thing. But taking risks with allergies, and infections, and paying someone handsomely in the process -- that shouldn't be acceptable behavior for a thinking person. As a result of this posting, I've been reflecting on the sham triumvirate: homeopathy, chiropractic, and acupuncture. I've been searching double-blind placebo-controlled studies on all three, trying to determine how confident I should be in my disdain. So far, it looks like I should be pretty confident. Now, I'm doing a movie with a flu-stricken character who believes in alternative remedies. Should I say something about these practices? Mock them...