Back to Roots

Three years ago, one of my friends and I were pitching around ideas for films that we could make as easy, cheap, commercial horrors. We came up with an idea that was pretty good, we thought, and decided it would just be a good story, bad script, and throw a porn star in it to sell it and move on.

Funny thing happened, the story got to be actually GOOD* (*again, whenever I use the term GOOD, it's something WE think is good). He was working in Rome for a bit, and coincidentally, much of the script ended up having some roots in the orthodoxy split of the catholic church - so I thought I'd go soak up some Original Catholicism to bring it to the script. Then the story got deeper.

Then we hired a writer to write the script based on our treatment. He had great ideas, but they were HIS ideas, and not the ideas we had paid him to write. The draft of the script he turned in, we dumped. Story sat for another year.

We brought in another writer to work on it. He was really excited after reading the character profiles and the treatment, and is a pretty prolific and fast writer. Months went by, with nothing. Until we finally pinned him down, and he said he was intimidated by trying to make it all work in one script. OK, that was writer #2.

So, the hell with it. I've written a script. They're hard. They suck. More importantly, my first script sucked. My second one was actually a lot better, but a 20 page short and not a feature like the first one. I read "Story" by Robert McKee as a yearly ritual. I'll take a tackle at it - in all the free time I have.


Funny thing though when you steep in a story for 3 years. It gets under your skin. And this has. The last 2 weeks have been a joy of rediscovery of characters, of huge, gigantic, gaping holes in the story, of characters shallower than Paris Hilton - but an underlying, rock solid story, that really is pretty damn cool. Thankfully, our treatment also had somewhere around 120 scenes - way too many. Cut, cut, cut, combine, combine, change, expand, contract - go back to the characters, the story, create the legends based in character and not simply circumstance and the reactions to circumstance. This is an attempt at creating an entirely new legend.... and at least in my head... it is working.

When it's done, my partners may hate it. It may have too much backstory, but the backstory IS so rich, and key to making the whole thing work on so many levels - and as of right now, I've remapped and created new scenes and functions and stuff that takes us solidly to the mid Act II climax, and will have the end of Act II mapped out by Friday.

There are 3x5 cards taped all over my wall. For a guy who's as digital as I usually am, I'm finding it much easier to sketch and notate and move stuff around and get big pictures of it all in a very analog way. A legal pad, notecards, sharpies, tape, and highlighters. I'm enjoying every minute of it.