Under New Management

So. A half year in a nutshell…
 
Starting in November, everybody started to die. Relax. I have alibis.
 
I got my first private gigs last year. It was great to make an honest-to-goodness living wage without having the agency gorging itself on its cut. I got used to it fast. And just as fast, the jobs had ended on account of death.
 
By then, I had put off creative writing for nearly four years. I entered a collaboration with my best friend, Thomas, and by the time the ball was in my court, I was hypnotized by the strobe effect of life alternatively happening and not happening at an alarming rate. Time, so elusive, so menacing, so… gone.
 
I had reported. I had borne witness. There’s comfort in that, but not always fulfillment. At the same time, I was doing a lot of growing, and I started to learn–on a cellular level–the virtues of patience and perseverance, having already learned how to "let go" of the "things we cannot change."
 
And, again, Death… Death is the new Getting Pulled Over By the Cops. I have so much that I need to accomplish, so… no time like the present.
 
I took the sudden, nearly-universal dwindling of work as a gift, and concentrated on the next step that had been the stumbling block for all this time, the secret weapon of nearly every A-List Hollywood scriptwriter out there: the treatment.
 
A treatment is basically a condensed summary of the intended screenplay, usually about 10-20 pages. It is not only an important tool in crafting a story, it is a rundown that movie producers (not world-renown for their love of reading) could digest quickly, getting the gist without wasting too much of their precious time.
 
I’ve finished three full-length scripts without a treatment. And I wrote one treatment, post-script, when I was hustling for an agent. But, for the life of me, I couldn’t write a treatment BEFORE I wrote the script. The problem is that I usually do so much of my thinking during the writing process itself. The result has been a script that doesn’t necessarily click and snap like your average Netflix rental. Good scenes that aren’t always greater than the sum of its parts.
 
But I had time on my side, and a decent amount of savings. Some from the private gigs, some from a generous tax return, and a month’s free rent for helping out my landlady (will elaborate later).
 
Having peace of mind is invaluable to the process. God knows that I’m not adept at concentrating on more than one thing at a time. But I cracked the code, and I found myself an approach that made hatching out the story a lot easier.
 
A movie can be broken down into about 40 scenes. 10 for the first act, 20 for the second, 10 for the third. That means if I figured out just one scene a day, I would be able to spend the rest of the day doing research and thinking about the story as a whole, guilt free. It also meant that, Confucius willing, I could be done with the treatment in 40 days. I gave myself two months to tax day.
 
It’s finished. Thomas and I are gonna work out the details over the next two weeks so we could have something to show my former managers. If they’re into it, we’ll integrate their suggestions while writing out the script. If they’re not, we’ll do the mass mailing of one-sheets to every agent and manager in the LA area. And if nobody bites, still? Ridiculous… Do you even know who we are?!
 
By the time you read this, I’ll be on my way to Arizona to, among other things, hang out with Thomas and family so I could have one last mindless, therapeutic hurrah before facing the Triple-Headed Hydra of collaboration, full-time writing and, pray for me, looking for more work.
 
I had to neglect my OD commitments for some time now, but I’ll probably be writing in it a lot more in the near future. I thank all my loyal readers that stood by me, not just for their continued friendship, not just because I had been MIA for so long, but because they now know, some of you longer than others, that not only am I’m not Blonde Guy Pearce from Memento, I don’t even look like him all that much.

 

Not me.