Well the first 2 days have passed of my writing quest and I'm optimistic about my chances with screenwriting. My original plan of waking up at 9am every morning has failed of course, with me waking up between 10-12pm. I'm not too concerned about it yet, but I haven't been able to go to sleep till about 4am-ish, so I think I'm ok for now as long as I wake up and immediately do something writing-related. You can probably thank Howard Stern for that, because of his show that goes live here on the West Coast at 3am so I always stay up and listen to the first hour while laying down and eventually I fall asleep.
But I'm hopeful because on my first day of hitting the outline, I started out writing a treatment. I was amazed that I wrote a one page treatment so fast within an hour. That's one more page than I've really written with purpose in the last 6 years, so I'm excited as shit! With the treatment, I probably beated out the first 30 or so pages of the story which has given me a clear sense of where it's going. Oh, and just so you know, the story I'm writing is a high-concept comedy. I usually don't lean toward comedies in my writing, but I feel so good about this one that I can almost hear it whispering to me, "write me, write me". If I had to describe it, it's PINEAPPLE EXPRESS meets DUMB & DUMBER meets ROAD TRIP. It's a great concept with familiar territory, so as long as I spend the time and execute it well, it should turn out funny as fuck, AND with purpose.
Last night, I also read MANUSCRIPT by Paul Grellong. It was an interesting look at three friends in New York trying to make a name for themselves in the book publishing world as authors. This script was also on the Blacklist I believe in 2008. It's a well-written script, with crisp dialogue and descriptions of a noir-like New York. I was actually happy about reading this ten pages in because I could tell this was a real writer with something real to say. However, I believe Mr. Grellong comes from the TV world as an Executive Story Editor on LAW & ORDER: SVU(per is IMDB page if that's him). Why I bring this up is because while reading the spec, I could totally tell he was a TV writer. The story moved at a very slow pace with no real sense of cinematics at all. By page 30, I almost wanted to stop reading it, but the writing was so good, I had to keep going. The characters seem shot out of an SVU or SIX FEET UNDER-like show. A few of the scenes had me loving this spec, but as it kept going, it seemed more like a one hour drama. I couldn't invest myself in these characters and root for any of them. They all seemed like pretentious assholes anyway. So I believe Mr. Grellong, because comes he from TV, hampered the screenplay a bit with his neurotic characters you would typically find on a TV show. The dialogue, although brilliant at times, seems way over the top, too pretentious for any audience to latch onto, and not real enough for me. Think DAWSON'S CREEK, but in New York, and it's about authors, and there you go. And I loved DAWSON'S CREEK(one of the rare perfect pilots in TV history, IMO), but it should tell you that this story is meant for TV and not a film. I give the script a B-, for it's pretentious characters and setting.
Other than that, I played too much Call of Duty: Black Ops last nite:/
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