correctDirection Studios

I know that Mark and I are doing scriptfrenzy this year but something dawned on me yesterday evening;

So I started two days ago, leaping into the first act of what I thought was a fun idea – ‘Bear Ball’. It’s the story of a kid who grows up in Illinois in the 1950′s with the dream of playing for the Chicago Cubs. It’s a feel-good-family-coming-of-age-baseball-comedy and the main character is a brown bear. Now, I thought that was, a) hilarious and b) easy to write and I was right¹ but I caught myself doing the one thing that I hate to do – writing pages without actually writing the movie!

Lots of people disagree with this but from experience I find that when you leap into something and start ‘writing’ right away the end product is usually bunk. You have no real direction and no real clue where your story is going. At least, I never do.

I also know that I can ‘write’ a feature in less than a week so long as my prep has been good enough. Eddy 3 took less than a week to actually sit down a write and I’m very, very proud of that. So the panic that inevitably sets in when you sign up for the first time is misplaced. If anything you shouldn’t start to put the words down in final draft right away. You are setting yourself up to write bunk.

So today I scrapped the pages I wrote and went back to the Maverick and Slater film that I’ve always wanted to write but never got around to doing it. It’s about human trafficking, standing up for what you believe in and the death of a real hero. The concept of death of the hero in modern society, not an actual death of the hero in the story. Both cops make it through to the last page. Or do they?

Yes they do.

So, if you would like to read it, here is what I wrote in the first ten minutes on April 1 as part of my over excitement of signing up to scriptfrenzy:

Continue reading scriptfrenzy

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