JESS

July 2009.
There is a message on the answering machine from Jessica Loveland. She sounds nice. I phone her back. She is nice. We have a conversation about the script and how the development process should work. First order of business is to get 117 pages down to about 95. She asks how long it has been since I last seriously looked at it. She’s pleased it’s been a couple of years, as it’s a lot easier to spot where you can tighten stuff up if it’s not super fresh in your head and you’re not being the precious auteur acting like a mother grizzly bear and her cub. She sends over her original coverage from when it was wending it’s way through the competition which is pretty detailed, and reading through it again, I can see she has spotted all of the weak points that I sussed and a few others besides. She also mentions that everyone has mentioned changing the start, but no-one has mentioned changing the end, which is apparently the reverse of the way this usually plays out. No idea if that is an indication of anything at all. I’ve also been busted on not making any choices. In Jess’s words – the script is jam packed with ideas which is its strength but also its weakness. In successive drafts, we need to prioritize these ideas.
Suitably armed I head off to make some changes, and promise to try to have another draft in a fortnight
Karen is away in Utah on business, so I plan to spend the whole weekend writing. Come 5.30 on Friday I power down at work, and fire up the home PC. Nothing doing. This PC was probably last cutting edge at around the time that Alan Turing cracked the Engima code, and it has chosen this moment (can’t fault it on dramatic timing) to lay down, wiggle it’s little electronic feet in the air and die.
The script software that I use – Sophocles does not run on Mac’s so I go online and download Final Draft – a couple of hundred dollars well spent. I then have no choice but to start typing the whole thing out again from scratch. The Apple Mac is a thing of beauty but it’s wireless keyboard is not designed for a major bolus of typing. For one thing, I type like John Bonham played drums and there is no action on the keyboard to get my rhythm going. For another thing, it appears to be designed around the hands of a small child and my big chubby Shrek fingers keep slapping down in the wrong place. This is going to be painful – I move the Mac down to the kitchen, fire up the coffee percolator, nip down to the shop, load up on ciggies, chocolate and Red Bull and get going.
I’m about ten pages in when I notice something. Namely that I have not yet cut anything but I have already saved half a page. I print out one sheet and compare. It turns out that the dialogue margins on Sophocles are slightly narrower than they are in Final Draft. Nine characters by my count. So assuming I keep going out this rate I can save five to ten pages without changing a thing. I write until six in the morning and then crash out until noon. I finally finish up ar around 10pm Saturday night. Have factored in all the changes for this round and am one page over the magic number. Close enough for government business. Am so wired at this point, that everything seems to have a vapour trail. I go down to the pub for a quick pint to get the circadian rhythms back on track. I should mention that in a village of 2000 people, nothing stays secret for very long, so while I am having a chat with Bruce the landlord, when someone comes over and asks me if I would be interested in writing the village panto. Now I know I’ve made the big time.