Read-Thrus Rock!

Last night went much much better than I thought it would. It also ran over by about 2 hours, and if one of my actors hadn't had a 5 AM call we'd still be there fighting over the beat work right now. To every single one of them I have to give a big hats off. They all had sharp eyes, good instincts, and real committment to helping me get the work on its feet.

I have no idea when this piece is going to be shot. The director has up and moved across the country, the boat is sitting in the harbor just waiting, and the weather is a few weeks away from turning. But, for my purposes, I'm tightening up the turn at the bottom of the script, then passing the script off to the producer and moving on to greener passengers. My goal is to let things settle a bit before I start polishing. I came home last night and spent about an hour typing up my notes, writing thank you notes, and reviewing parts of the tape. I'm going to bed early, and when I get up tomorrow I'll pound out the revisions.

What I'd been hoping for is a little back and forth with the actors, an opportunity to find out where they were going emotionally to get to the place that I wanted them to end up, the good underbelly of filmmaking that as a writer you only experience by yourself. What I ended up with was far more than that. To anyone out there staging your own reading, I highly recommend you find actors who have done extensive stage work, who've done vocal training, movement training, and scene analysis workshops -- it makes everything so much easier. If you can also take at least one workshop/class in each of these subjects you'll be ahead of the curve.

We spent the majority of our time talking about the characters, their backstory, the beats that the actors felt didn't have enough underpining for them to build on top of, I found three missing beats, and a few beats that were out of order. I think the best thing that came out of the evening was a big shot to my confidence. Oh yeah, Diva rocks! Now if I can just get my feature to this place I might finally make this into a paying gig! LOL. Hopefully things will settle down enough for me to do that -- I hope all of you are doing well out there.

BIANCA: The book's subject isn't top-secret, I'm just not coherent enough about it to really lay the plot out. Basically, it's about a young woman coming to terms with her childhood. The particulars involve a beat-to-hell Volkswagon Fox, a bunch of baby dolls and a Korean hooker. That's all I can say for certain. Ask me again in December (my self-imposed deadline to get the first draft completed).