wilderworks

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

Yeah, coffee shops, I'm talking to you. Particularly coffee shops in the vicinity of Century City. It's swell that so many of you are open at 7AM. It's fantastic that you have nice furniture with comfortable workspaces and free wifi. But this is Los Angeles. If you put a sign in your tiny parking lot that says parking is limited to, say, 20 minutes, or hell, even 45 minutes, then I can't spend my morning there, working and buying your coffee and snacks, now can I? And thus, I end up at Norm's. Where the spoon is a different length every day. You'd think they'd have bought the spoons in bulk.

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

I got sick last Friday and stayed home from work. I don't know if I was authentically infected with something, or just suffering from extremely bad allergies, general exhaustion, and a profound lack of will power. But there was no rousing me from bed all that day. That night, I stayed up late working on a "steam punk" costume for Alli, for a wedding she would attend Saturday morning. The awful truth is, I don't absolutely love these super-cute themed social activities. It sometimes seems like a lot of childless folks treating their existential ennui with tossed-off arts-n-crafts. Worse, they often strike me as somewhat self-congratulatory. Like, " Look how clever and creative we are! Take another picture. Facebook will love this! " Like, folks proudly taking the path less traveled by walking continuously one foot to the left of the more traveled path. Like, everyone making boat-rocking gestures while staying as stone-still as possible. " But i

In LA, we have no weather. It's sunny and warm almost all of the time. For the most part, the weather is predictable and reliable. It's so agreeable, I've mostly forgotten that weather is a thing that happens. And thus, having been denied that outlet to deliver its reminders, here, it is instead through the traffic that the Universe makes its indifferent and chaotic nature known. The weather is almost always nice, so the Universe orchestrates the traffic to shout: "I'm still capricious and cruel, folks - and don't you forget about it!"  What a lousy drive. How much longer can I tolerate a life that it this bare-faced random, this boldly arbitrary? A person deserves the illusion of meaning and sense! If the traffic can't even bother to put on a show of making sense, well, then ... I'll do something, I tell you. I will do one hell of a something.

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...

What's Up With the Finger? Yesterday evening, when I arrived home, the power was out in my building. I walked Baker and checked out the neighborhood. I took some pictures of LADWP cones and broken electrical pipes, but there were no trucks or crew-persons to photograph. When I returned to building, many of the neighbors were out in the hall, because they were desperately bored, having already been deprived of their television and internet for an eternity lasting upwards of forty minutes. The halls were very dark. It's a bit of a walk in my building, from the entrance to my door. And on my floor, there lives a gigantic mammal. She appears to be part Dalmatian, part Great Dane, part Prehistoric Hippopotamus. She is energetic and nosy and, as best I can tell, entirely unspoiled by human discipline. This is probably the hippo in her. She is also spotted, which is the Dalmation, and has floppy jowls and big pointy ears, which is Great Dane. I believe her name is Bella.

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