(The second best sports movie ever made, "SLAP SHOT." The first, of course, is "BULL DURHAM.")I'm on p.79 - four pages ahead of schedule. Fantastic. As I suspected, this will turn out to be about a 100 page script. I should have this (very) rough, first-words-on paper draft completed by the end of the day on October 1st.
I don't know if I've addressed this in an older post. (I don't feel like going back and looking it up. I'll pretend I haven't.) This process is very freeing. Since I've only given myself a month to bang out a (very) rough first draft, I'm not trying to come up with the best line, scene or sequence before moving onto the next. Instead, if the line is good/funny enough, and if the scene carries us enough to the next scene, I move on.
I'm only able to do this because:
1. I already had a general idea of the shape of the story before I started. I knew the form it was going to take. Like an architect sketching out a house before drawing the actual blueprint.
2. I knew the genre I wanted to play in and the overall tone of the screenplay, which was a mix of Ron Shelton and broader sports comedies, like "MAJOR LEAGUE." (The original "THE BAD NEWS BEARS" also figures into the mix.)
Normally, I outline, outline, outline, until I have the equivalent of a coloring book picture that only needs to colored in - i.e., the writing of the screenplay. That's because I'm either starting entirely from scratch, or only have a seed of an idea, or a scrap of inspiration, that needs to be wholly expanded and developed. In this case, I have about 4 outlines of scripts that I never got around to writing; each for 100-110 page screenplays, and the writing days until December 31st to get out about 400 pages - or, 4 (very) rough drafts of 100-or-so page screenplays. Timing-wise, this works out.
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