wilderworks

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...

1095 Days Later... Three years ago, a producer gave us $5000. I'll call him Sheldon. (It's not his real name). In exchange, he entered into a "joint-venture" production of a short film based on my script, and won a three-year option on my feature-length screenplay. We'll pretend the name of that script was Zaniness Ensues.  It wasn't a great deal, but a starving man doesn't turn his nose up at a stinky Twinkie. When I signed, I made sure the dates all said January 2007, so the contract would extend 1095 days from cashing the check. Over the last months of 2009, Sheldon discussed that impending expiration date on at least two occasions. January came and went. No word from Sheldon. I was free. I started making plans. I had control of my screenplay and my short film again. I would finish the edit and send it to competitions. I would cash-in my few connections and get a packet out to agents, a packet including Zaniness Ensues . I  would leverage...

So, on Monday I was supposed to go with a producer to the American Film Market to pitch my feature screenplay (we'll call it Zaniness Ensues ) to a few production companies, studios, and distributors, seeking funding. I was ready to actually kick off my career at long last -- my first real industry meetings. But turns out there's a writer's strike, and I couldn't cross the picketline to become a scab. I couldn't negotiate or pitch or discuss or write -- or else I'd be blacklisted and banned by the union. Ah, the birthday curse strikes again. But, all the same, I met with him on Sunday, before the midnight deadline. I prepared him as best I could, and he went around Monday without me. Word is, if he can push the right parties hard enough to get a domestic distribution promise, there are a few parties that might be interested in putting up the money to produce it. Of course, I can't turn the option into a sale until this is all over... but none of th...

My first two years out of college, I wrote five feature-length screenplays. I'd written endless skits, I'd written 21 episodes of television, but I'd never written a feature-length screenplay before. I started writing the first, Intelligence in the last months of college. I finished writing the fifth, A Darkling Plane , in my first months back from Harlem. I thought, if it didn't do the trick, I was probably done. It didn't do the trick. In my third year out of college, I was back home. I traveled around hanging Christmas decorations. I moved to California. And I finished one screenplay, Storybook Park . I felt, if it didn't do the trick, I was probably done. It didn't do the trick. This time, I hit a bump. For two years, I haven't written any new features. For two years, I didn't even start one. I kept tearing up the old scripts, starting on vast revisions that lost steam half-way through. I failed to fix Storybook Park , then I failed ...

I've gotten a good bit done over the last week or so. I finished a revision of Zaniness Ensues , my blog codename for the short that I intend to film, my big plan to break in as a writer/director, and I'm pretty happy with it. The old crew seems to approve, and the guys at work also approved, which was a surprise and a relief. I feel very good about it, and as a thank-you, I spent too much time today working on a "Paul Giamatti War Machine" animation. I also finished another segment of the Just Us League Behind the Scenes, though I'm still waiting on interview footage of Benni and Shaun, and also Shaun's brother's video footage. I'm hoping it will fill out the early parts of the day, where I have gaps. While laying around, I worked out a few kinks in my mental outline for the feature-length version of Zaniness Ensues . It will tap into some experiences of my own, and give the story a nice twist. Structurally, I've been thinking a lot abo...