Miss Me?

I haven't been blogging so much this week. I've been spending my spare time trying to finish my latest screenplay/opus Donkey Style. I'm right at the end, which is usually the most difficult part to write, but since this is a twisty crime thriller thing, I kind of had to figure the ending out first. So it's going a little easier than it might have otherwise.

The weird thing is, I've never written a script with a deadline in mind before. It has always been a leisurely activity. Like old-timey baseball. A gentleman's game where the time limits don't matter. If a script takes me two years to finish, well, that was two years well spent.

But now, there's this actual person waiting in an actual office building not far from here to read my script. Seriously. She even sent me an e-mail yesterday asking for it as soon as it was done. This is great, but also kind of difficult to mentally deal with. I'm now writing...for an audience. This stuff isn't just going to sit on my hard drive, snuggled tightly between the bit torrent South Park episodes and the Ashlee Simpson mp3's until years from now when I'm feeling nostalgic and want to read something old of mine.

The other thing I've been grappling with after winning this screenplay contest is what to do with my old, more amateurish scripts. It has taken me a little under a decade to get decent at this screenwriting thing, so there are lots of "missing link" style scripts, ideas with promise that just don't add up to anything. This potential manager lady has asked me for other writing samples, and I may send her a few things, but they don't exactly show off my abilities at their best.

Some of them are basically great high-concept premises that I totally fumble in execution. Like this one, BOOM!, that I'd have to rewrite for a number of reasons. Mainly because, in the time since I wrote BOOM!, Ben Stiller played the exact same character I had written for the villain in Dodgeball. Seriously, it's eerie. Before Dodgeball even existed, I had written a script about a group of guys that want to bring down an obnoxious, sneering, pompous fitness celebrity who opened a huge gym in their hometown.

So, yeah, I'd have to rethink that one from basically the beginning, and I couldn't send it around town, really, because everyone would think I'm some lame-ass trying to rip off Dodgeball. Actually, now that I think about it, Dodgeball was a huge hit. I could probably get some meetings in this town just by telling everyone I INTENTIONALLY WANT to rip off Dodgeball. Or, failing that, Diary of a Mad Black Woman.