When I finish a screenplay, I send it off to a couple of old film school friends for notes. While I know in my head that there's no avoiding this step of the writing process, in my heart I am convinced they won't have any. I picture them writing back at once to report that this is my best sript to date, that it couldn't possibly be a first draft, that it is a heartbreaking work of straggering genius and I should stand my ground from here on in and never, ever allow anyone to change a word no matter how many points they were offering on the back end.In the interim, I take another pass through the draft myself. Just a light proofread, I tell myself, a spellcheck, really, though I inevitably tweak a line here and there. Eventually I'll happen upon an entire passage that doesn't quite work; I'll combine two minor characters and pair down a bloated scene I ultimately come to view as one belonging in some other movie on some other screen in a totally different multi-plex on the other side of town!
No longer able to accept the existence of the earlier travesty I've released into the universe, I immediately e-mail my friends the perfected version, alerting them in the subject line to "DELETE NOW AND READ THIS ONE!!!" I figure if I use enough exclamation points they might actually do this. My failure to over-punctuate will surely result in their investing time in reading the now irrelevant original draft for the sole purpose of mocking me.
Usually, though, they write back and say no problem, since they hadn't gotten to it anyway, and did I mind if they took a few extra days. Their mom had unexpectdly popped into town, or their kid had come down with another ugly case of head lice, or they had an exciting new project of their own to pitch out of the blue.
I have no choice but to kill time by taking another pass of my own, during which I discover an even more disturbing host of gaping flaws. It turns out that the whole structure is off kilter, and that I've quite possibly delivered the whole ridiculous tale in the wrong genre!DELETE DELETE DELETE!!!!!!!! I e-mail my friends. READ ATTACHED ROM COM VS. EARLIER POLITICAL THRILLER&#$*%#$@!#%$%$!!!!!
This dance may repeat several more times until the friends carve out some time in their busy, itchy, mother-loving schedules to return a set of backhanded compliments. Oh, their notes might appear to be helpful and positive—the hero, though annoying, is an "original," the dialogue, though confusing, is classically "Julie"—lurking beneath the surface is a clear attack on my unfortunate choice of career. On the heels of nitpicky questions on "surplus characters," "unclear themes" and "fun but redundant" exchanges of dialogue, comes the inevitable introduction of the dreaded "tone problem." Underlying the final reminder that "this is just one person's opinion" lies the blunt suggestion that I trash the entire ill-conceived project before wasting another minute trying to pull it out of the crapper.
I blame the advent of word processing technology for my spectacular artistic failures.
If Ernest Hemingway had wanted to cut, paste and redistribute his lovingly crafted passages, he'd have had to get out an actual pair of scissors. It wouldn't have been a good idea for him to have such a sharp object within reach, given the fact that he was suicidal, quick to anger and drunk every day by noon. Visit the Hemingway House in Key West and the guides will proudly confirm his disciplined working and drinking schedule. He sat down to write every day at dawn, putting in six gut wrenching hours on the nose before retiring to a bar stool across the street at Sloppy Joe's.
Maybe that's what I need. A schedule, I mean, not a descructive alcoholic lifestyle that results in my early death. I need salty air, and a couple of swaying coconut palms keeping time with the sound of waves lapping the shoreline. I need an old Smith Corona with a bell-ringing return bar and keys sticky enough to wear out my hands by lunch. If only my life looked more like that of a literary giant—if I wore more hand-knotted fisherman's sweaters, and had snow white hair and whisky breath—my film school buddies wouldn't dare trifle with my greatness. And I would never again be plagued by the pesky need to write.
