Has it been 4 months already?

It's been one of those summers (spring/summers?).  So, I'm still on the job hunt.  Since last I blogged, I worked for 9 days and did a curling music video.  It wasn't union, but it was still pretty legit (apparently, they showed it at the Playboy mansion).  I also curled in the Hollywood Blockbuster Bomspiel (see it's sorta movie/writing/pop culture related).  I curled one of the best games of my life against a team from Scotland and ended up losing on the last stone (I'm actually happy and not bitter).
But, back to the task at hand.  So, I hadn't been reading much in the way of scripts nor had I been writing much.  Although having been inspired by Cutaway, I "cutaway" the majority of DVD and book library.  Lean and mean, that's what I'm going for.  I also realized that writing (or the lottery, fingers crossed) might be the only way I can get out of the massive debt load I'm under (I mean I guess there's always the possibility that someone would hire me to do actual law work, but I'm not sure that would allow me curling schedule I aspire for).  I also cancelled my cable and am contemplating cancelling the internet.  Not that the internet is all that expensive, it's just kinda distracting and I have an iPhone, so I'll still be able to blog and tweet and email and stuff.
So, I'm back on the horse.  I wrote for 2 pomodoros today and spent another 2 finishing up reading the thing I have been plugging away at for months now: a transcript of the story meeting between George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Lawrence Kazdan for Raiders of the Lost Ark.  It's like 120 pages long.  I'm not sure how far along Lucas is in the process, but it feels like he's given it more thought than the others, but it's still really raw.  The two big things I got out of reading it was:
1)Your first idea is rarely the best:  In this case it took them about 5 pages to realize that the Nazi should have a part of the amulet burned on his hand instead of there being an out and out miscalculation.  they went through such ideas as mistranslation and not factoring in the change of the Earths orbit/tilt.  None as good as what they ended up with.
2)Just because you don't use it here, doesn't mean you won't use it:  There are two sequences that they initially talk about in this meeting that both appear in Temple of Doom.  They're both great sequences (most of the opening through the boat going down the mountain and the mine cars through the tunnels) and I'm glad they didn't just chuck them. They kept them around and used them in the sequel and I think they actually work better there).

SCRIPT FRENZY

So, as you may have ascertained, I have not been writing a lot as of late.  Between stressing out about not working and working, I just haven't been getting a lot of writing done.  So, when my friend Matt emailed me about Script Frenzy, I was instantly hooked.
Now, Script Frenzy is brought to you by the same people who do NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), but instead of writing 50,000 words (I think), you have to write 100 pages of script.  It can be comic book, screenplay, teleplay, or play (I think I got them all).
It starts 4/1 and goes to 4/30.  It may seem like tons of time until it starts, but in actuality, it's not much time at all, when I think about everything I have to do before then:
1) Finish the draft of Heisty that I am working on and probably do at least one polish on it.
2) Figure out which story I want to do next - I guess it's a good problem to have, having a lot of ideas for stories to write about, but I need to pick one and stick with it, which is the hard part.
3) Once I pick the idea I need to quickly write the story, then a treatment and then a fairly detailed outline, because when it comes time to start, 3+ pages a day is not easy when you don't know exactly where your story is going.  This is problem I had with Heisty - I just had a basic idea and started writing, so when the script came out to 60 pages, I just started randomly filling stuff in, and not really thinking about the story.

I've got the notecard app for the iPhone, as well as the screenplay app, so I'm going to go through both of those and my Moleskine, over the weekend and try and figure out which story will be the best, easiest, but most importantly, the story I will be the most excited about writing hardcore for a month.

I'll try and give you an idea as to what kinds of stories I'm considering over the weekend.  Here's a sneak peak: They're pretty much all genre films.

Day 14 - What a novel treatment

Brick (treatment/novella) - Rian Johnson

Since November is National Novel Writing Month (http://www.nanowrimo.org/), I thought I would take a quick look at the Brick treatment.  In a preface he talks about the reaosn he wanted to do it this way was because he was intentionally trying to get a Dashiell Hammett feel and he thought a prose pass would be the best way to do it.  I think it worked.  I wish I had read it prior to seeing the film, but the tone is there as is most of the unique dialogue traits.  The treatment is 76 pages long, so it's way longer than a traditionally treatment, but for a project like this that relies so much on tone and feel, it's was probably the way to go.
I had never really thought about using a treatment like that.  I had always thought they were tools for getting the story out.  Sorta like a fleshed out outline.  But, this is something more, this allowed Johnson to get the the feel of the story.  So, now I'm wondering if I should be using this as a way to get into the story.  Since it is National Novel Writing Month, I'm seriously considering trying to write one of my scripts as a novella, just to get the tone and feel right.  If nothing else it would be an interesting experiment.

Brick (Novella/Treatment/Screenplay): http://www.mypdfscripts.com/treatments/brick-treatmentnovella