Musing about Walking the Infinite

First off I was wondering what people think of this:

In WALKING THE INFINITE, Tom’s life’s devotion and dream was to finally get that promotion, the corner office, and all the perks. One night he was offered a chance to try it out, and it was everything he wanted and more. That more included a wife who wants a divorce, a boss with whom he’s having an affair, and the animosity of his coworkers. Tom now just wants to wake up from his dream turned nightmare.

Does this peak your interest? Is it too much, too little, or just right? Do you want a concluding question wondering how Tom gets back to his old life? These are just some of the things I’m working on to see if I let this go into the real world. The screenplay is ready for another try, I think, except for maybe the opening scene. I’m still not sold on it completely, so I am going to go back and make sure it really does serve not only it’s purpose, but also does it have the correct feel for the rest of the screenplay. I think visually it will hammer the point home, but I’m worried my discussion of it is a bit week. Here’s what I have (Please excuse the caps and formatting. I took it out of word and the copy lost all of it.):

FADE IN:

EXT. FIVE HUNDRED FEET ABOVE A BUSY CHICAGO STREET - NOON

People move along the sidewalks in a constant ebb and flow, like threads woven in a large tapestry.

EXT. TWO HUNDRED FEET ABOVE OUTDOOR FOOD CART - NOON

The lunch vender cart forms a dam in the tide of people flowing along the sidewalk, allowing those waiting in line not to be jostled by the steady stream.

EXT. OUTDOOR FOOD CART - NOON

TOM BRADLEY is getting a hotdog topped off with chili. He looks around at the crowd forcing their way past the cart and shakes his head. He plunges into the crowd and gets swept away in the wave of humanity.

EXT. BUSY STREET - NOON

Tom walks slowly, trying not to wear the chili as people hurriedly spill around him.

Time slows as Tom looks up and sees an image of himself, OTHER TOM, checking out an attractive woman passing by. Other Tom is wearing a severe suit with a blazing yellow tie. Tom looks to his right and sees another SELF IMAGE wearing a cowboy hat and carrying a guitar who waves at him.

A WOMAN comes through the crowd from behind Tom and bumps him, causing Tom to fumble his hotdog.

Time speeds back up and Other Tom and Self Image fade away as Tom spills the chili all down his front.

TOM
What the hell?

WOMAN
Watch where you’re going!

VISION TOM steps up out of thin air gets in the woman’s face.

VISION TOM
No, you watch where you’re going, you dumb…

The Vision Tom fades away. The Woman is still staring at Tom.

TOM
Sorry, I was daydreaming there.

The Woman shakes her head and walks away as Tom tries to clean up the mess with a small napkin.

Tom finishes and is about to cross the street when a BOOMING VOICE stops him.

BOOMING VOICE
You there. Have you ever walked the infinite?

What do you think? I’m thinking of getting rid of at least one other Tom to make it simpler to read, even though I would love to have a bunch of other Toms in the opening scene, just to show that something is different here. If someone wants to read it just let me know and I’ll send it to you. Also, if anyone has a good idea on how to shoot multiple Toms with stuff I have at my house (green screen (can get one), software (which one to use), Hi def camera) then maybe I would try shooting it here, but change it to a small town instead of Chicago (though I do like the idea of this being in Chicago).

Another crazy idea

I worry about me sometimes. I really do try to come up with normal stories, stories about everyday people, but for some reason my mind wanders into the bizarre department and shows me things that most people would just shake their heads at in disbelief. Me? I quickly write down the idea and try to figure out how to blow it up real big. My idea this time, without giving too much away since I don’t have it all down yet, is someone getting multiple personalities, but those personalities being positive and not trying to destroy the character’s life. How the character gets these personalities is a bit insane, but I was originally trying to come up with a good comedy, and nothing yells comedy like a buddy film, even if your buddies are all internal to the main character. Now before someone gets upset this isn’t going to be a classic psychosis, and I’m not going to belittle people who go through that form of hell. At least I hope that’s what it doesn’t come across as. I’ll see when I hand it out for people to read, if it gets that far. Right now I’m trying to figure out how many personalities I should allow him to acquire (yes I said acquire), and what does he have to do with them. The more I look at this and I tell myself this just is too silly, but I am sure Robert Klane thought the same thing about spending a weekend with a dead guy, and Weekend at Bernie’s was quite fun. (Don’t bring up the sequel.)

What to update the blog with today?

I wanted to update today since I figure if anyone is looking at this blog they would like to see something new. I originally was going to do a rant about the sanctity of human life, but that got to be too depressing, so I decided to put it off for now. (I was getting too depressed just writing it.) I was then going to talk about Secretaries Day (I’m sorry, Adminstrative Professionals Day), but that also fell through. I even thought about doing a top ten list of why sleep deprivation was good for you. Of course I fell asleep at number ten, so that didn’t work out too well either. I tried to figure out if I was lame enough to write in my blog about trying to come with something to write in my blog. As you can see the answer is yes. I usually come up with a general idea on my way into work. I have a half hour commute, so I have enough time to generate an idea. I then let it stew for a bit as I get the morning going. Soon I hit a problem that either is tough to solve or that I don’t want to solve for work and that lets me jump over to blog writing. I usually bang it out in a few minutes (bet you already figured that one out from the quality of writing) and then return to work feeling I’ve at least done some writing today, even if it wasn’t towards one of my writing projects. So far it’s been fun to talk to myself. I figure someday I might see a couple of visitors, but in the meantime I can talk to myself and not have people think I’m crazy or have a blue tooth headset embedded into my skull.

Banging against Hollywood’s door

I am a complete outsider, at least with respect to Hollywood. This is a huge problem since I enjoy writing screenplays. Now there is a ton of advice about getting in, but that is problematic at best since a lot of it is either contrary or I am unable to pursue that course of action. Now this could be a call to give up, to just fold up my tent and try something else, but I don’t want to do that. I was allowing Becky to read Walking the Infinite for the about fortieth time and something amazing happened. She laughed a lot more. This story isn’t a comedy, but I wanted to inject humor into it to give the characters depth and it seems to have worked. So now I ask myself this as I finish my rewrite; how do I approach that beast that is Hollywood to see if they will even take a sniff at it. I’m going to place it in the appropriate festivals, but that’s just a surrogate, something to try to get external validation that my writing is sufficient. I don’t have any answers yet, but that’s what I am thinking as I get done with this rewrite, more confident that this script might be finally ready to move along.

Memorable words

Ever wonder about certain phrases? I personally wonder about the “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” Was this popular at some time? Did someone wake up one day and start bragging to their friends, “Hey you want to know something? There must be six or seven ways to skin a cat.” They must have been impressed and repeated it to their friends. Pretty soon someone shortened it since they couldn’t remember the exact number of ways, so they threw in the many and TaDa, a catch phrase was born. I love cats, so I don’t use that particular one, but can you imagine how cool it would be to like invent one that everybody uses, that will outlive you, and probably mean something totally different in the future? Shakespeare made up a ton of words, many of them in use today. He made up cool words like discontent, circumstantial, eyeball, and varied just to name a few. He was doing this in a time where it was quite common to try to create a word when the perfect word didn’t seem to be available. Today with our spell checkers and grammar police I bet this practice would have been frowned upon, or at the very least considered to be flawed (another made up Shakespeare word). I want to do this someday. I figure a new word might have much more staying power, but I think I could be happy with a phrase. Either way I want to be able to say I created that. Just as long as it doesn’t get used too much.

Whimsy

There are a lot of words that aren’t used a lot in the dictionary, and today I want to focus on one in particular, whimsy. The American Heritage Dictionary gives two definitions.

1) An odd, or fanciful idea. A whim.
2) A quaint and fanciful quality.

There are other definitions in other dictionaries that art not as flattering. I’ve always liked the word whimsy. (That won’t surprise any of my friends.) I think in the day of twenty-four slash seven coverage of everything that we are too focused on the facts. (I could dispute whether those are really facts at all, but that’s another post.) A little more whimsy in our lives would be a good stress relief from this constant coverage. So please, take whimsy back out and use it. Take it around the block. Show others its good qualities, and maybe we can get some of that magic back in our everyday lives.

I don’t understand

My PhD adviser told me something when I first started out, which he kept repeating for all my doctoral work, “It’s only simple because you don’t understand it.” He was using it in the context of some research idea we grad students would come up with, thinking it was a slam dunk. In reality the idea would turn out to be either much more difficult because of the details, or just so outrageously wrong that it would have been a very wild, long, and costly goose chase. I think this applies to most things out there. I have an arrogance that I think I could learn anything, given some time and someone to teach me. To be honest I believe this is true for everybody, just that you might need more or less time depending on your particular gifts. Nice idea, right? Is it accurate? It depends on your definition.

Right now I’m not feeling too smart today. I want to begin writing my musical, but two things are stopping me. The first is time. Family and personal life right now is insane. I’ve also got competing interests between the unnamed musical, Walking the Infinite (which I need to get ready for the Nichols), and trying to find the people to shoot a short I wrote. That’s not counting the programming I need to get done for my project with a friend of mine in Germany. Okay, so the time thing could definitely get in the way, but you know what is getting more in the way? Fear. What’s weird is it’s not the normal fear of starting a new story, but the fear that this is a totally new medium. I don’t understand the structure on the page of a screenplay. I hate not knowing. I don’t understand the amount of work that, even when I get this together, it will take to show someone else the material. I don’t know if I really am ready to take all this on. I love my concept. It has a satisfying (at least so far to me) main character arc. Most of my characters have needs that are easily identifiable. (I say most since two of my characters are mostly comedy relief, but even they have needs, just that they will never be met.) It’s got good drama elements. The other fear is that it might be a bit campy, but then again sometimes that’s what gives musicals their charm.

So it comes down to setting priorities and working them out. Not an easy task, but once I’ve overcome my fear I should be able to take baby steps forward and see with wonder what’s on the other side.

Damn bugs!

I’ve been officially bitten by that musical bug again. A quick bit of background first. I was dropping my wife off at work while I was in grad school and was listening to NPR’s Morning Addition on the way home. My wife, at the time, had a 45 minute commute to work (and remember I live in a rural area, so that’s quite a distance, not the three blocks if you live in LA). So while I was driving home I heard a story about the lack of new musicals being created. There was a lot about how the cost was prohibitive, that it was almost impossible to break into the business, etc., but what stuck with me was here was an opportunity. I love to sing, I enjoy writing, so it seemed a natural. All I needed was an idea. By the time I got back to school (I was working on PhD in physics at the time.) I had come up with my idea. I would place my whole musical inside a company at the middle management level. Why, you may ask, would you ever want to do that? The answer is simple; everyone can relate in some manner or form with dealing with management. It is a universal “evil” that I could lampoon. So, without giving too much away yet (though I might publish chunks of it here for feedback) my main character gets promoted to middle management and thinks he’s made it. This gives me my fish out of water and allows the other characters to play off of him. I was excited. I wrote a few of the songs and got to writing my outline. I love my outlines. They really get me focused and ready to go. I finished my outline in a couple of weeks and then my hard drive died. I was devastated. Luckily the songs were in a different notebook, but all the work on the book (the story and play portion of a musical) was gone. I couldn’t get up the energy to start it back up, that and my thesis needed to be written, so I put the whole idea away and said maybe some day. Occasionally I would take it out, dust it off, look sadly at it, and then file it back under ideas. Now it’s back out and I think it will have a better chance at surviving, and I can thank going to “Once Upon a Mattress” for giving me that bug.

By the way, if someone has a good idea for a name of a musical about middle management please let me know. If I use it I can name a character after you, so how’s that for motivation. Of course that means people need to be reading this. Oh well, you never know. I’ll leave you with a bit of lyrics from one of the numbers (and this is copywrited, so I’m not worried publishing it.) The tune is very marchy (think 76 trombones marchy)

Don’t be a yes man,
But never say no!
Push away the paperwork
As far as it will go,
And put off doing work,
For as long as you can,
And you will be a great middle man (or woman)!

Everyone has their own life

This has come as quite a shock to. Everyone has their own life. They are not there just to serve my purposes. I know, I realize in real life this is totally true, but I never thought about it in my writing. I went to see a musical this weekend, “Once Upon a Mattress”. The high school theater troupe did an awesome job with it, including the set design. I am always amazed what can be done with a shoestring budget and some talented people. There will always be a place for live theater, no matter how life like movies get. There is something ethereal about the amount of energy and actor or actress can project into their audience that can not be duplicated on the silver screen. Attending made me want to do two things. The first was of course relive my memories of being in a musical and find a community group that is putting one together and join. That won’t happen anytime soon with a two year old and another child at six months. I couldn’t put my wife through me not being there for work and play rehearsals. Nope, that one goes on the back burner for now. The second one is clearing off my dusty idea of a musical I had started to write about eight years ago. I was telling a friend of mine about it before the show about it and he still had some chuckles, so it may have potential. If not, I want to write something that can be done on a typical high school or college auditorium. I don’t care about the money making potential, though I wouldn’t turn it away either. I just think having musicals that scale to that environment well because they are designed for that size would be cool. Also, I am of the opinion that upscaling a production is probably easier than cutting down on stage presence. If that’s the case Broadway can still come calling and I wouldn’t miss a beat.

I did learn one other thing while watching the musical. All the parts, even some of the minor ones, had their own lives to live and conflicts to resolve. Due to the size of the production some of the conflicts were a bit shallow for the storyteller in me, but I can see why they had to be to keep the musical within an appropriate time frame. Still, you could see why everyone was doing what they were doing. What was funny was a lot of the dialog was “on the nose”, but I didn’t get taken out of the moment because these people were still being true to themselves, and the lives they were living. I’m going to have to go through Walking the Infinite and make sure my characters have lives, and try to bring that out a bit more. I don’t want to add a lot of length, but if I can make each character become more identifiable then I will have added a lot of depth.

Projects, projects, projects

Before I get into my projects I am looking for some advice. I want to try to get a pool of local talent to shoot short films. Something that one weekend a month we get together and just have some fun. I was thinking about going through the local arts council, but I was looking for suggestions from others who are from small areas that are not LA. The village I live in in upstate New York is really small. I do have the possibility for college students, but since summer is coming up in a couple short weeks I will lose that pool for a while. I can try to get high schoolers, but I am worried about the whole parents signing off thing. In my last production we had one such person and that worked really well, but then again I work with her father. Holding an open audition is another thing. Also this whole thing has to be volunteer. I have no funds to pay actors. Any ideas on agreements that can be written up such that if something we shoot makes any money (fat chance of that, but you have to dream) everyone shares? Is that even allowed? I know there is guild minimums for things, but we aren’t guild. Heck, we aren’t even formed yet. I’m probably getting way ahead of myself. Anyway, any advice would be welcome.

As for the writing front I’m trying to figure out how to tweak my main project, Walking the Infinite. Most of it works, but I’m worried about my main characters arc. Before the arc was strong, but the character wasn’t someone you could root for. It wasn’t that he was bad, but he was very very passive. The movie was basically for him to learn about how to be more in control of his own life. It just seemed flat. I changed it around some and now he’s more like an average person, so he’s easier to identify with, which is good. The bad is there is less of an incentive for him to change in the movie. This is important since the movie is Groundhog Day esque. I introduced a different motivation for change, something more subtle, but I’m worried people won’t be able to see it.

Other than that I need to either start something new or dust off a different project from the past and fix it. Maybe today I’ll look through my old stuff and see which may be closest to being ready and hit it hard. I’ll let you know what I did on Monday.

As the phrase turns

I have a file on my computer that I store witty pieces of dialog I either hear or say, hoping that I will use them some day in my writing. What’s funny is that while I keep adding to that sheet, I usually don’t pull what’s in there into my work. Why is that? I think there are two reasons. The first is that I forget that it’s there. It’s simple to remember when I hear something. I get excited and I can’t wait to add it to the list. When I am writing though I get so focused on the story at hand that I forget to look at the sheet till the story is done, and that’s where reason two hits. The phrase is really good, but only in the right context. What I wrote won’t fit, and that means modifying the story a lot just to get in that good piece of dialog. That is too much work for what could be little reward. I’ve decided before I write my next project I am going to read through my list, and then work on my outline (I love outlines, they are shorter than first drafts and hopefully save you just as much work). This will keep those gems fresh in my mind, allowing me to place them into my work to help it sparkle.

You might ask what brings this up. I was talking with my very good friend V (who should start posting on her blog again so I can link to it.) and we were talking about raising kids and the phrase came up, “Puberty conquers all”. Now I love this phrase. Maybe it’s one of those you had to be there, but I think even if it’s one of those I can create the scene such that you are there, then you can enjoy the phrase too. At least that’s if I can get off my duff and get writing again. Right now I’m rewriting and getting some scripts ready for the Nicholls and the Austin Film Festival, as well as trying to come up with another short I can shoot. Now if I can just fit in work and my wife and kids I’ll be all set.

By the way, the more phrases the better so if you have some/any please leave them in the comments. Who knows, maybe you’ll see/hear it someday.