Target one has been destroyed. My Irish beauty, the script I spent three years on has undergone its first major overhaul, and it’s now complete. Finito. Until the next draft. I won’t have a chance to look at it again until sometime into April. Because it’s on to the next project!
Which is actually three. I enumerated them in an earlier post, so I won’t go into them all. I will say I met with the producer who is interested in the feature script I’m working on. I went over the full treatment, after which he breathed deeply, and said he thought it was really solid. I promised him the script in a month and a half.
Boy, am I brazen…
So the short film project. Came about as I was contemplating the fact that I haven’t directed anything in forever, and that Progeny was quickly approaching. Progeny is my film festival of choice; apparently I’m unable to not get accepted to it, which boosts the ego a fair bit. The other side is that I’m 4 for 4 on winning awards, so statistically, I have the minerals to keep plopping out cinematic turds, putting a fancy title sequence on them, and calling them “films.”
Then again, that’s what Hollywood’s all about, right?
I’d had a short film idea a while back that I had started writing and quickly abandoned because its hook was lame and contrived. After discussing the possibility of doing a short film with the roommate Tim, I remembered my uber-lame 5-pager and retrieved it from the lost-and-found, opened it up, and recalled why it was so lame.
The only thing that’s survived are two names. But in a quick sit-down brainstorm session with Tim, we managed to churn out a story so twisted and perverse it makes Seven look like a French Impressionistic painting of a flower-covered pond, filmed to the sounds of Claude Debussy with a soft-light filter, and a shot of horse tranquilizer administered to your face, for good measure. I’m actually still writing it, but will be done by tonight. Casting has begun for two actresses, one lead and one supporting, and Tim and I will be holding auditions on Saturday.
We move fast when we have to, even when we’re not wearing pants. We will, however, be wearing pants on Saturday…
When we sent out the casting notice, I never suspected we’d be getting actual females. I mean, I knew we’d be getting females, but in what might be a twist of horrible irony, the casting call was exclusively for females, most of whom submitted headshots and/or body shots, which came through in stunning clarity. The realization that if I were a pervert, this would be a top-notch way to pick up girls, was somewhat alarming. Once I got over the initial surreality of it, the I put things into professional fun gear. This is starting out like a real production, with a small crew, a lighting kit, and real actors. I suppose I might be foolish for diving into directing a short film when there’s no money in it and no real hope of attracting attentions wtih it (even if it’s good), and no compensation for time spent on it–it’s sort of a lame duck when you look at it like that.
But it’s good experience, both for me as a producer and director (and writer) but also as a movie fanatic–I think I’ve become jaded about movies in general, having not seen very many good ones last year, and this experience might help instill some of that old love, not because it’s mine, but because it reflects a maxim of Hollywood that’s been in effect for as long as movies have existed: No one in Hollywood watches movies.
It’s because they’re too busy making them.