Screenplay Rewrites

Rewrites, rewrites, rewrites.  They make my stomache turn.  In a good, roller-coastery sort of way, but turn just the same.

And here’s why - It’s all about the script.  Everything.  Particularly in little fish land where you don’t have the money to hide a shitty script behind big stars, special effects or huge action sequences that you can cut into a slick trailer and trick people into making all of your money back in the first weekend before they tell their friends how crapilicious it is. 

A good script can make or break you.  And make your struggle of getting your film made that much easier or more difficult.  (Not to mention determine whether or not you get to make a second one.)

For example, if you hand a script to an actor and he loves it you could have an attachment that could in turn secure your finance.  You send a brilliant script around town, you may not get an agent right away but if you know how to use buzz properly (which you better know how to do in this town) you could hardly be in a better spot.  And even in production, if people love the script they’re making they will work that much harder for you.  And the obvious of course – no one ever really wants to have their name on a stinker.

Now if you’re a big production company with a development team you’ve got lots of scripts “in development” and lots of people working towards making them as good as they can be.  Not true when you’re a one or two man band.  The little guy is gambling everything on one or two projects because there are unfortunately only 24 hours in a day and a limit to what one person can do.  So those projects must be right.   Or at least as right as you can possibly make them.

This week I got a new draft from my writer of the script we’re trying to deliver by the end of this week.  It’s not quite there yet but we’re getting close.  Really close.  Excitingly close.  Up-side-down loop-to-loop kind of close.  No way to tell which way it’ll actually go, you never really can tell, but I’m doing whatever I can to push it in the right direction.

This is the reason I am still awake at 11pm ichatting with my writer half way around the world.  When you get on a roll it’s so much fun!  And, as I’m hopefully going to find out in the next few days, can turn out great results.

The thing about rewrites is that they are the cheapest place to make mistakes and changes.  None of which has to be done publicly.

So you know that slightly nauseous feeling you get when you read a script and think, very very quietly to yourself, “F*ck if I make the change I think needs to be made it’s going to take weeks to work out the domino effects.”   Ignore that voice at your peril.  Embrace the rewrite.  It only gets harder to fix things the further along the road you go.  And much more public.