Celebration
May 10, 2010 Filed in: Adventures in Filmmaking | UCLA Master Class
It's 1:38 AM and I just typed “The End" on my new script, on page 104. Then I laughed out loud with joy, cranked up some upbeat music and started dancing in my tiny studio apartment.
The first draft is complete and I'm extremely pleased with it. It's my third feature-length screenplay, and I think it's the best thing I've written yet. It’s also the fastest I've written yet. I started outlining the story back in October 2009, when my UCLA Master Class in Film Writing began. It’s now eight months later and I have a complete screenplay.
I've been carrying this story in my head almost as long as a pregnant woman carries a baby in her womb, and now I've given birth, after many nights of staying up until 3 AM, thinking, writing, loving and hating in quiet solitude as the rest of the world seemed to sleep. As I wrote in the middle of the night, my mind would go to a dark place, a place I had to go to constantly in order to write this story.
I was accompanied in these late and lonely hours by dark and brooding rock music, from Pink Floyd to Pearl Jam to Ministry. Their songs provided a mental movie soundtrack that helped sustain the mood of the story. Maybe some of these songs will actually be in the soundtrack of the movie someday.
It should be fun taking the final pages of the script to my UCLA class. So far, the instructor Tom Lazarus has said that I'm a "phenomenal writer" and that it's turning out to be a "really good script". Some of the classmates’ reactions have been: "I love your script", "it's creepy", “very disturbing”, “you’re a sick man", “it scares the crap out of me”, "you're incredibly talented" and "I can't wait to see how it ends". Wonderful compliments, all of them.
The class ends in June, then I have all summer to rewrite and polish my script before UCLA sends it out to a literary agent on my behalf. Will this be the script that gets me industry attention? We'll see. There’s a lot of subjective taste and politics involved so I won’t hold my breath.
The first draft is complete and I'm extremely pleased with it. It's my third feature-length screenplay, and I think it's the best thing I've written yet. It’s also the fastest I've written yet. I started outlining the story back in October 2009, when my UCLA Master Class in Film Writing began. It’s now eight months later and I have a complete screenplay.
I've been carrying this story in my head almost as long as a pregnant woman carries a baby in her womb, and now I've given birth, after many nights of staying up until 3 AM, thinking, writing, loving and hating in quiet solitude as the rest of the world seemed to sleep. As I wrote in the middle of the night, my mind would go to a dark place, a place I had to go to constantly in order to write this story.
I was accompanied in these late and lonely hours by dark and brooding rock music, from Pink Floyd to Pearl Jam to Ministry. Their songs provided a mental movie soundtrack that helped sustain the mood of the story. Maybe some of these songs will actually be in the soundtrack of the movie someday.
It should be fun taking the final pages of the script to my UCLA class. So far, the instructor Tom Lazarus has said that I'm a "phenomenal writer" and that it's turning out to be a "really good script". Some of the classmates’ reactions have been: "I love your script", "it's creepy", “very disturbing”, “you’re a sick man", “it scares the crap out of me”, "you're incredibly talented" and "I can't wait to see how it ends". Wonderful compliments, all of them.
The class ends in June, then I have all summer to rewrite and polish my script before UCLA sends it out to a literary agent on my behalf. Will this be the script that gets me industry attention? We'll see. There’s a lot of subjective taste and politics involved so I won’t hold my breath.