David Wohl sent another drawing of Volwrath from Demonik. Very cool. Perhaps a bit loud and will most likely be toned down so that the assorted protection tattoos and carvings in his body will show up but a great picture all the same. Brett Russell, the main man at Virtual Reality, sent out a new treatment for the backstory for Tiger Hill to okay before shooting it over to Majesco. And although this is unofficial and very possibly a bold faced lie, there’s a good chance Brett has been secretly shooting me copies of this document for a week.
Dean has hit page 90 on his Thunder pass and I must admit it’s pretty great. I have made three page-one rewrites previously. The story has changed a dozen times but the first draft centered around the New York Mob. We utterly reworked draft two which centered around a female weather girl. And then came a draft closely based on our current version. Although sixty percent of that previous story stayed we added some amazing elements for this current draft which required newly written pages. This time it was Dean who made the pass and again it is fantastic. No doubt this time the story is nailed.
Dean returns to “My Wife and Kids” Next week but will finish the draft this weekend. I’m rewriting behind him solidifying the locations, tightening, polishing and doing whatever character moments jump out as fun or unique. We have successfully created an A-List Thriller which is always the intention but rarely the end result.
We have a fantasy artist who has been waiting on stand-by for the draft. He’s going to do several concept drawings for us. I’m guessing we’ll send it to him next week and within the next two weeks we should be ready to shoot this thing to our agents.
Next week F.J. and I sit down to discuss Magnus. I never completed the outline to my liking so unless I nail that over the weekend, I’ll be going to the meeting with a jumbled story in my head. Still, I love what I have and that always helps. I’ve never gotten a job I wasn’t “stay-up-all-night” excited about.
The SciFi gig I’ll start next week. Mel and I are going out of town in two weeks so my goal will be to finish night one and shoot it to the producers for them to read and come up with notes while I’m gone. When I return I’ll address their notes and begin work on night two.
In the meantime, Mel and I are knee-deep within X-Files season two. I probably have no choice but to snatch season three sometime tomorrow as we are blazing through this thing. It’s a really good show. I never disappeared into it back during its primetime run. If it was on I would watch it but I never set my clock. Now I’m hooked. I think it has to do with the power attached to being able to simply load the next episode rather than being forced to wait a week.
Season one was amazing. This was a show that didn’t need to find itself. It knew what it was and what it was going to be as early as the pilot. Last night Melanie cried. It’s a powerful show. Scully had been abducted and returned two episodes later in a coma. That’s when Melvin Frohike showed up at the hospital. He’s one of the geeky Lone Gunmen known to assist Moulder and Scully from time to time. Frohike is the smallest and the geekiest and never hid his his infatuation with Scully. His showing up had Melanie in tears.
Goofy huh? Of all the moments to provoke an emotional outburst.
Tomorrow I’ll make another pass through Thunder’s current 90 pages. Yesterday’s pass was simply one to solidify the settings…make sure the geography was correct. Today’s pass will be fun. Maybe early in the afternoon Mel and I might go check out the new Borne flick or we could go see I Robot which we skipped last weekend. Then I wouldn’t mind seeing the new Harry Potter again.
I figured out a theory on Harry Potter. The theory is pretty simplistic. I’ve heard countless people complain about the first two films. And in just about every case they’d never read the books. The first two films were utterly loyal to the books. To the point that they even broke some of Hollywood’s rules. These same people love the third flick and say that’s because the books were second to the film this time. Not true. The books grow older with each publishing. Just as Harry and the kids grow older. Just as the readers grow older. The first book is a children’s book. Book three is a early teen’s book. And they keep getting older and older, darker and darker. I loved all three films. Each one more than the previous. But then, I’ve read the books.
Finally tomorrow night I think we have tentative plans with the Loreys. I want to say there was talk of getting together and fixing dinner together. If not our neighbors want to get together with us. I just learned last night that he’s a limo driver. Has his own stretch towncar parked out front. I’ve seen it a dozen times. Shame I didn’t know that two weeks ago. He could have driven us to Sarah Mac.
About six years ago, while I was working for Cunningham and a year or so before JX, Mel was bitten by a cat. Right in the knuckle. Because of a stupid fluke, the knuckle protected the infection from the injected antibiotics. Complications arose. There was talk of losing her arm if they didn’t take her into surgery immediately. After the surgery I was wasted. I remember sitting at the foot of Mel’s bed working on a script that had some moronic life or death deadline attached to it (in retrospect the script never went anywhere and sits on a shelf collecting dust to this day). No one from Cunningham Films came to visit. Only just now am I realizing I hold a grudge for that.
But Dean Riesner came. Every day if I remember correctly. I was spending the night in a chair at the foot of the bed and writing most of the day. Mel didn’t want to be alone. She’s never liked hospitals. Can’t think of anyone who does. Dean would relieve me each day. He’d drive from Encino to Sunset and Vermont every day at the ripe old age of 78 or 79 so that I could go home and get three or four hours sleep. He always showed up dressed to the nines. He always showed up with flowers.
There’s always a reason a woman cries if you have the balls to look deep enough.
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