Having a rough day today, and by the looks of things I'm not the only one.
I'm going on vacation starting this Thursday, and won't be back until the 26th. I'm going to my 20th college reunion! Until that time I'm trying to get as much work done as possible so I won't have to carry work with me on the plane.
Uh uh. Not gonna happen.
I'm going to be taking work with me on the plane, spreading it out before me and bothering the poor soul who has to sit next to me on the flight to Atlanta (I don't work on the short hop from Atlanta to Augusta. By the time the prop plane is up in the air, we're already on approach.) I don't do the laptop thing in the air either, so I bring a script and plenty of red pens.
This time, I'm bringing three scripts and plenty of pens.
THE SKULL - yes, I'm still rewriting it. Thank God, it's a spec or else I'd have blown twenty deadlines by now. Because it's a spec I could not bring it with me, but that isn't right either. Inspiration could hit, and I could solve the story's problems right away. It's funny how the simple ones you design to just crank out, somehow get mired in the mud.
THE KNIGHTMARE - Thanks to notes from Fun Joel, I have about seven or eight pages to cut out of this and five to add. That'll give me 110 pages of good serial-styled superheroics. The character was a product of Poverty Row's Titan Studios, which burned down in the early forties near Silverlake - Echo Park and the old Mack Sennett stages. Unfortunately, not a lot is known about Titan because they stored their negatives and business documents on the lot and everything went up in flames. From what little I've been able to research, Titan had a business plan of creating B-movie versions of bigger studios productions. If Universal released FRANKENSTEIN or THE MUMMY then Titan released PATCHWORK and SARCOPHAGUS to the little midwest and southern theater syndicates that couldn't afford Universal's rates. THE KNIGHTMARE, as far as I can tell was their only original creation, and the only serial in their (destroyed) library. If anyone has heard anything overseas about Titan Studio productions (apparently in the late thirties some prints were sent over on ships during Germany's blockade of Great Britain) then please let me know.
WOLFSBANE - my werewolf action script that was originally co-written with Jeff Miller. There's a producer swirling around this one and about to strike. I want to go over it to make sure it's ready. A tweak here. A sharpening of a claw there.
Welcome to the life of a pulp screenwriter. There's always something going on!
2 comments:
It's funny how the simple ones you design to just crank out, somehow get mired in the mud.
Discovered that myself recently on a recent D2DVD spec. I tried to keep it as simple as possible -- four teens lost in the woods (trying to figure out what's up with all the dead bodies, of course), most of the action takes place over a few hours, and I already had a great ending. Only problem was, my "great ending" just didn't work. Ended up rewriting it about six times.
Glad the notes helped, and hope the script grows even better! Didn't know it was based, albeit very loosely, on a true story though. Cool!
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