The Rough Draft

It has been postulated that the key to happiness is reduced expectation. This could just be considered, “Being Canadian,” but I think it goes a little deeper than that, eh.

Currently, we live in a society where everything is just a click of a mouse away. Want that music go on Itunes. Want that video go and download the torrent for it. I say download the torrent because most people will watch a crap image as long as they don’t have to wait for the DVD. All in all, we’re pretty spoiled.

We’re encouraged to be like this. A consumer based capitalist society is required to operate like this but in our pursuit of cheaper and more available consumer goods, we’ve sort of thrown the baby out with the bath water. There are fewer and fewer of us who can, “Do stuff.” Now I was pretty much raised in a farming community. You had to be somewhat handy to survive. Every one of my friends could pretty much tear apart and rebuild whatever needed doing, myself included. Which has saved me more than a few bucks in the home appliance repair arena. In other words, if it breaks I fix it, I don’t buy another one.

Which inevitably brings me to writing.

Well what did you expect?

As it’s been pointed out, time and time again in this blog, not everybody makes it. Talent doesn’t always get you in the door. If you fall apart under the stress of a deadline, goodbye. If you don’t get what the producer really wants, goodbye. If you expect it to come easy… goodbye. Though on this last one, it can happen but it’s really rare.

On a rewrite gig, ultimately, you’re expected to fix the script. Sometimes all it needs is a bit of a polish, tidy up the dialogue here and there and you’re done. Not usually though. Nobody calls you because everything is going great and they want to catch up (well not if they’re a producer). They call you because they’ve got a big problem and they figure you’re the guy to fix / rebuild their script and get them to camera on the day. This almost always means a page one rewrite. If the script was a car, it’d be a mangled heap.

So you hoist on your tool belt and get to work, you’ve got a deadline remember. I’ve had to do this a few times. It’s sort of fun in a hanging over a shear drop by your fingernails sort of way. The important thing is you figure out the problem and get it done. I was brought a horrendous script to possibly rewrite last week. It took me two days to figure out the through line and how to make it work but I figured it out.

The project got passed on… C’est la vie.

I sure could have used the money…

One of the weird things about film, well destined more than weird, is that you have three sets of people in your life. The people you work with and know in film. The friends you grew up with and everybody else. The first group understand the ins and outs of your daily race to get stuff written, develop new material, lock down more money for any material out there, self promotion, etc. The next group, well they’re your friends, they want you to be happy and they worry your working yourself into an early grave what with the stress and all of achieving all the previous stuff. They sort of get how what you do works and if they don’t, they have the good sense to ask.

And then there’s the third group… Included in this group are most of your relatives, specifically your parents but mostly it’s made up of people who think you should get a real job or give up this hobby cause it’s making you so angry, depressed, whatever…

Now because I work in Canadian film, I also rock a day job. It’s not industry related though a bunch of my skills are transferable to special effects etc. Though I digress. Anyway, the people I spend my days with, don’t get the film thing and they certainly don’t get the writing thing. Which is fine, let me eat my lunch and glance through the communal newspaper in peace. If only it were so easy…

Today as I sat there reading an article on the rise of mental problems in our returning military, the accountant walked in. He saw me reading and remarked.

“So, you’re a reader. You’ve got to be a reader to be a writer.” I could have made with the nasty comment but in this guy’s case it’s like hitting a puppy. I once cornered him in his office during a somewhat passionate discussion about a pay issue. I didn’t mean to corner him but I’m big and he kept moving away from me.

“Yeah,” I replied and went back to reading / ignoring him.

What is it about people that lead them to believe that a degree makes them special and the rest of the planet luddites?

“Do you read?” I was asked this once before by a nice older English guy. I was working in a bookshop at the time. He thought about it. “Of course you do, you work in a bookshop.” He was looking for the latest Ludlum, which we didn’t have. I recommended, “The Main,” by Trevainian instead.

“I haven’t read this one,” I said, “but I’ve read pretty much everything else he’s done and I really like him.” He called the store owner later to say how much he enjoyed the book.

As a writer, you don’t have the luxury of putting people in boxes. I used to run a moving company, one day we moved an old German guy and his wife. Turns out he had been a Falshirmjeager (Paratrooper) who had taken part in the assault on Crete. Out of his platoon of twenty nine guys, only three survived the assault. He was a safety inspector for Worker’s Compensation. I met a trucker once who was smuggling guns to and from Russia. He seemed like a nice guy. One guy I worked with told me about his days as a pipeline welder during the boom years of the sixties and seventies and believe me, I’m putting some of that stuff in a film one day. Everybody has a story. It’s up to us to pull it out and make it work.

Yeah, I read, I write and I sell.

And sooner than you think, my accountant friend, I will be little more than a lingering smell and a fading memory.

So needless to say it’s all been a bit up and down lately. Life encroaches on the creative.

I had my MRI for my shoulder on Tuesday, hopefully I’ll find out the gritty details about how much damage I really did next week. All I can say is that it was both a painful, uncomfortable and loud experience.

So I came to a breakthrough of sorts on my current Drama spec. Like most breakthroughs, it’s so basic and obvious I’m kicking myself for not figuring it out sooner. Of course it all came to me just as I slung my leg over my motorbike. At least I had the ride to sort of figure things out. You don’t want to do much (any) day dreaming at the controls of a bike.

When I get blocked, I find a nap, a shower or a bike ride tend to kick things loose in my head. Sometimes I just sleep on stuff and let the rat of my subconscious gnaw away at the problem. Other times I’ll read or watch similar stories to see how that writer solved the problem. There’s a million ways to pick the lock on a story.

Tomorrow I’m going on a 500km ride around Lake Simcoe, I’m hoping to find some things worthy of snapping. At the very least, it’ll be a fun day ride.

One of Napoleon’s Generals was extolling the virtues of a man who had just made Field Marshall. How smart he was, how his troops loved him. Napoleon just looked at the General and said, “Yes, that’s all very good but is he lucky?”

There’s a lot of people who muck into this screen writing game. Some wait till they have lived a life and made it to retirement before writing that first script. It usually follows them into the grave. Some kids see it as a lark and bash some low rent shit out, they go up in smoke nicely. Though if their idea’s any good it has a longer half life than their career. Others try really hard but they lack the skills or talent to get read and what they write isn’t very good and so they too fade out after years of fruitless struggle.

In other words, this ain’t easy. Nor os it for the thin of skin or the faint of heart.

And yet, I read script after crappy script after crappy script. Some of whom have representation and I’m not talking about low rent rep either. Which is why when you read something good or at least talented, you jump on it like a fat kid on a Smartie. Cause it’s really rare, it’s like finding a diamond in an outhouse. And you will look for this stuff anywhere you can. I found a promising young writer online this week. A bit rough round the edges but her dialogue was good and that’s two thirds of the battle. This is of course rare. Most of the stuff I read? Well it just wasn’t very good.

In current news… We move still closer to getting the other half of our funding in place.