Indelible Freckles

A while back, Amit made the mistake of posting one of his mouth-watering recipes and, after a sustained campaign of a little arm-twisting and a lot of cajoling, he kindly allowed himself to not only travel all the way across town to have lunch with our family, but make it for us, too.

(Hell, if you’re gonna post your fave recipes, some prey-driven reader’s gonna catch you up, bud. Anyway.)

He arrives with lunch, we half-joke that he can go now, we get stuck in to lunch with noises of anticipation… then appreciation - it’s a damned fine meal we tell Amit, pooh-poohing his modest protestations. And then –

– The Girl excuses herself to get a glass of milk –

– The Goddess excuses Herself to blow Her nose –

– The Boy grovelled to his sister for a glass of milk for him, too, puh-lease –

– and, unable to control my sinuses any more, I whipped out my hanky and blew as discreetly as I could.

A bit hot, is it? our guest chef ventures with a straight face.

The thing was, in consideration of our non-Indian palates, he’d made the meal ‘mild’.

We thought we knew ‘mild’. We have monthly family outings to Asian and Indian restaurants where we order and enjoy meals that ranged from ‘medium’ to ‘hot’. How spicy could our very considerate Indian-born guest’s cooking be?

We learned a few things that day:

• one person’s mild is another’s medium-hot;
• Amit has so made himself this family’s curry king;
• and the local ethnic restaurants have been taking our palates for a ride.

Buried somewhere in this post is a moral about knowing your audience. Or the juggling of thinking you know your audience when your audience has their own idea of what you’re presenting them with.

Thanks to The Goddess, the moral is: pushing your audience means you’re engaging with them. Engage with them and they’ll look forward to your next presentation.

(And Amit lives a whole lot closer now. We look forward to his next recipe posting.)

Saw the trailer for the Watchmen film the other day.

It got me pretty excited. I suspect the faithfulness of the visuals to the source material is a big factor, though the voice-overs sounded a bit undercooked.

Although Terry Gilliam, and then Paul Greengrass, had been attached to direct this monstrous adaptation in the last couple of decades, it’s taken Zack Snyder to bring it this far. I haven’t seen Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead; not really my cuppa. I kinda/sorta/maybe was going to see 300 when it first came out but was quite disappointed by the graphic novel I borrowed from my friendly local in preparation for my viewing. Maybe, one very rainy day/week/month, I will might try either/both.

Anyhoo - wait a minute: I’ve got scripts of Watchmen - a 2003 Hayter draft and an undated Tse draft.

Some… measured anticipation has replaced the excitement.

I had, in my post-trailer, pre-blog-post-drafting excitement, already typed -

- but I was a bit hasty. It’s a big ask to condense a complex twelve-issue limited series into a two-hour adventure. (C’mon: it’s got superheroes - whether we like it or not, if it’s going to be a superhero movie, it has to be a kind of adventure.) And now, thanks to Mr Slevin, I can’t get this out of my head:

It’s eight-nine months away. Let’s see how I feel then, eh?

After threatening to, I followed through.

Ah, Mr Hilton. I really should’ve taken the hint when you wrote:

I finished a first draft last week. It’s what I call a working first draft - a partially muscled skeleton of a script that I don’t show anyone for fear of their never reading my scripts again. I think one of William Goldman’s Screentrade Adventures - or was it Stephen King’s On Writing? - had a name for it. Can’t find the reference. Anyway:

• I have completed a draft;
• it has a beginning, middle and end;
• and I’m still excited by the idea behind it.

While I was typing out the epilogue, I found I had a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye - touching reminders of why I’m so attached to the story. It was great. If When I have that effect on the reader a few drafts from now, I’ll be pretty effin’ stoked.

The current draft is a pretty measly 85 pages long. The story’s a 120 page kind of script. The missing pages are currently in the form of, at best -

- or, at worst -

This week is time-out from the script. I’ve got my work cut out for me.

And I can’t wait.

(Big-ass fedora-tips to Mr August and Nima Yousefi for making the above scrippets available.)

Okay. Alright.

So I blogged about a chicken - and a dead one at that - and tried to pass it off as being about supporting characters by bookending it with some weak-ass scriptwriting observations. It’s just that, in the aftermath of Wallace’s sudden departure, The Goddess said, If we’re like this over a chicken we’ve only known six months, we’re gonna be a mess when The Dog karks it.

And I looked at The Dog -

- and flashed on my earlier ramblings about her.

… Best not to think about it.

Anyway, I was going to post about the use/misuse/abuse/un-use of supporting characters but I ended up drafting something about finishing the first draft of a script.

Introducing new supporting characters to an existing narrative is a challenge: they have to have a good reason to join up; they have to add value; and they better be damned interesting.

That’s pretty much how I felt when The Goddess decided to get some chickens - real chickens - earlier in the year.

So.

• Good reason to join up? Because The Goddess said.
• Do they add value? They lay eggs, silly.
• Are they interesting? See below.

I never expected The Chickens to be interesting. They arrived stringy and without combs, and with the promise of egg-laying still a few months away.

As I struggled to adjust to a growing menagerie - there’s the beginnings of a post on the The Worm Farm somewhere on the hard-drive - an endless loop of Sesame Street’s what-comes-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg tormented me during my waking hours. I had to find a place - like a pigeonchicken-hole in My World for them. In a feeble attempt to describe our homestead as Fortress Mamea, having established The Dog as our Rapid Deployment Force and The Cat as a Spec/Black Ops unit, maybe the fowl were our CAP. But it never really fit.

As summer slushed to autumn, and autumn torrented into winter, specific personalities emerged from these creatures whose brains could not be larger than my thumb.

The Light Brown One was flighty from day one, and is still nervous to this day. ‘N.S.’ best describes this one.

The Dark Brown One was the demanding one - the one most likely to flutter up and get first dibs on what you had in your hand.

And the Mid-Brown One was the adventurous, curious one - the first to try a grasshopper, and the first to discover flight (ie., to the top of the fence that separated their ‘meadow’ from the rest of the property).

The Mid-Brown One - Wallace - was killed today. One of the neighbourhood dogs - a pure-bred mastiff - escaped his keep and the first we saw was him with a mouthful of very dead chicken. We’ve met the mastiff on a number of occasions: he’s a sweetie with an overabundance of slobber; and his owner is very conscientious about keeping his dog under control.

It was an accident: a dog got loose, saw something moving rapidly, gave chase, and that was all she wrote.

It’s shitty that it was the one with personality that got killed.

It’s ridiculous that I’m committing a post to a damned chicken that I was at pains not to get too close to.

But that’s how it is with supporting characters. Sometimes they get under your skin. You get to like them. And when they’re gone, you miss them and all their stupid little idiosyncrasies.

Having read Rod Hilton’s The Dark Knight - The Abridged Script, I am definitely leaving the cave to watch it on the big screen.

So - in my true spare time, of course - I’m exploring the lastest distraction idea which, on the face of it, seems to offer an intriguing (high-concept) premise within an achievable (ultra-low) budget.

Burning questions are sketched out: who is it about? what needs to happen? does it make sense?

  Yes - I know what it’s about.
  Yes - I know what happens.
  But it’s not making sense.

I try rushing the idea from one-sentence idea to one-page concept in a lazy attempt to resolve the nonsensicalness. Uh-uh. No matter how creative I try to be, one plus two plus three will not equal the five that I want.

I refuse to be cowed.

  The idea is nifty.
  The concept is almost there.
  The budget is appealing.

Time, I suppose, to approach this with the patience and persistence of water on stone a spoilt child whining for some parental attention.

Regular as clockwork: I’m two-thirds into a note- and aside-pepperedriddled first draft and bam! I’ve got an idea for another story.

I’m not worried about my current script because it’s moving.

Nor am I worried about being distracted - once I’ve racked up my minimum page-count for the day, I’m a free agent.

I think… I’m just glad I’m still getting ideas. I’m still getting turned on by the potential of new stories, and still loving it when the creative juices my writing mojo I can just make shit up.

(This post, I suspect, was brought to you by four straight days of no rain.)

Chicago Sun Times film critic - and a cinephile’s cinephile - Roger Ebert has joined the blogosphere with an online journal.

For those who’ve only read his reviews - and if you haven’t, try these two on for size - this recent post is a great intro to Mr Ebert’s blog.