Chronicles 59 - On the Road Again

I'm travelling again. In the US at the moment with day job stuff but also will be meeting up, along with the director, with the NYC producer for my black comedy.

In the meatime I finished the second draft of the second historical drama assignment project. The producer wasn't so happy with the characterization on the first draft and he had quite extensive notes, pages of emails, but I carefully went through them, ignored one or two notes that I didn't agree with and worked on the rest, which were, on the whole, good comments.

After delivering the second draft the producer called me the next day and was very happy with it. Surprisingly enough my character changes were not that massive, tweaks really, but tweaks that shifted the way the character bounced off the page. He now wants me to do a quick rewrite and get it out to directors. He actually wanted me to do a quick rewrite before the WGA strike was due to end but I was just too busy preparing for my trip. It's not a big rewrite, just a few hours work I guess.

I'm becoming a bit cynical with the whole "let's get the script out to directors ASAP" because in reality it's very much a 'hurry up and wait' situation. Directors can take months and months to read. The producer wanted me to print a CAA release form one Saturday morning and then rush to the post office to send the script to an A list director. This was frigging months ago. My guess, he'll never read the script.

Apart from all this writing activity the play ended in January with one good review and one rave review which was great. I'm not too happy with the script but it seems people enjoyed it and laughed a lot. My mother-in-law made an interesting comment, she said "Nothing really happens but you are never bored and it's very funny" which I was kind of happy with. I wanted to get a Waiting For Godot feel for the play. I just think it could be tighter and deeper dramatically.

In the meantime the producer has given me another project to look at, the adaptation of an unpublished book for an animation feature so I need to read that as well as do a revision on the historical assignment.

In the meantime there's been a delay (predictably) in the financing of the rom-com due to the global credit squeeze. This is the big problem in indie-financing, it takes so frigging long to get a project off the ground that you end up riding the crest of a market-force/circumstance wave, governments change tax-laws, recessions happen, actors die, yes Heath Ledger (R.I.P) was also on our cast list...you get the picture.

This all leads to my recurring conclusion that getting a film made is nothing short of a miracle!

Ciao for now.

SWU - swunderwoods[at]yahoo[dot]co[uk]