12.04.06
‘So, after he starts to strangle her, she whips out a straightrazor and opens up a few veins’
Testament to the power of ideas. Heather called me last night, saying she had gotten a real honest-to-goodness screenwriter interested in the Serial Killer movie idea we had talked about last week. I’m amazed that the idea was so potent and that she wants to help get this from a nugget of an idea that I’ve been kicking around for years to a viable script.
Sadly, I know as much about screenwriting as I do tensor calculus, and she took it upon herself to approach a friend of hers, John, who does know about such things. She called, excitedly telling me about the new direction our project was going to take…
Hmmm, our project? Nice to be invited for the first meeting. I grabbed a six-pack and headed over, only to find that our screenwriter had some emergency to attend to and wouldn’t be joining us. We started talking and soon the ideas came forth in a flood that couldn’t be stopped. Character sketches, plot twists and twisted motivations. We called John and had a speakerphone conference, relating all of our fiendishly evil ideas while he tried to teach us esoteric fundamentals, like 3 act structure and things like ‘plot development’. When he got off the call, we went back into our character sketches, figuring out how our killers got their motivation.
Sweet jeebus fuck, I thought I had a warped brain. My psycho writing partner outdid me in quite a few areas, and when we started talking about using a cruciform as a branding iron, I knew we were in for some serious shit. Funny how she normally comes acroos as so sweet and nice, and she’s describing how one of our characters was sexually abused by his older sister and forced to ‘marry’ her… I got to the point that if we had some real life person that was being influenced by our writing (ala ‘Stranger than Fiction’) we would most certainly be sent to the lowest circles of Hell for the sheer suffering our characters would endure…
We had gotten to a point where we run into a bit of a block, trying to work in a Tarantino-esque cop when we decided to back off and let the evenings progress marinate for a bit. I ducked into the bathroom for a quick bladder relief, trying to listen to her talk over the toilet flushing. As I left the bathroom, trying to pick up the thread again, I heard her say something about ‘can’t wait to see it on film.’ I ask her to repeat what she just said.
Sweet Merciful Patron Saint of Film making. She wants to film this beast. Here I was thinking this was more of an exercise (she ran into a block in her novel) and this was an experiment in collaboration and writing practice. Or, at best, something we could turn around and sell, and if it was ever filmed, would garner us a writing credit. Nope. She wants Laurel Films to shoot this. And considering she’s on the board, she has quite a bit of say in what will get produced. I was hit by a powerful little vision of being on the set, filming something I thought of, and we wrote - and ye gods, it was more than a little tantalizing, not only seeing it shot, but editing it and seeing it on the screen. That my friends will be the ultimate goal of my film career.
