"24" and April Revisions

And the polishing-of-older-scripts continues...

"24" is one of my fave shows, and one of the best television series of all time. It succeeds so greatly because it takes all the B action movie standards - Heroic Good Guys, Terrorists With A Plot, Government Conspiracy - and filters them through a topical reality. (To quote Kiefer's favorite word of all time, it adds "gravitas" to them.) Also, it always has a political layer - Presidents, VP's, First Ladies and First Families that adds even more complexity to the arching storylines

I wanted to write an action script captured the spirit of the show. Not necessarily written in real time, but over the course of a single day, like John Woo's "BROKEN ARROW."

All in all, this is a very good genre action script, with a female protagonist to boot. Let's hope it gets made one day!

Late March/Early April, More Polishing...

After rewriting/polishing the sports comedy, I still had several days remaining in March to work on something. I divide projects up by months: "I'll finish this by the end of this month; start this draft the next month." Psychologically, it helps my brain to focus. Knowing I only have x-amount of days to finish a project, my creativity turns into a laser, locked in on completing it. Otherwise, I'd be scattershot - writing here and there - turning a single screenplay into a year-long endeavor. (It's amazing how creatively freeing it is when you shackle your mind with time limits.)

So, I took out a neo-noir, suspense thriller that I had in my drawer. Its muse drew from the superior John Dahl neo-noir "RED ROCK WEST." I love that flick and used that as...well, the muse. I'd completed a rough draft, polish and another draft in which I had a marked-up hard copy of revisions. Thumbing through the pages that would need to be changed in Final Draft and comparing them to how many writing days I had left in March - it was doable.

Some pages remained completely untouched. Others, the revisions on the marked-up hard copy were fine. And, others, I had to revise the hard copy revisions.

All and all, I got it done. It's also caused me to go through my files and see what other scripts need a read-over for a possible polish.