The latest step in my tv pilot is interesting. I came to a point where I didn't have anything left to write and for what should be fourty to fourty five pages (even though we are only graded on the first twenty). My first (first) draft weighed in at twenty seven pages, not great. Usually I skip over redoing a first draft and leap into a second draft, but this time, I thought unless it is very different, then there is little need to do a second draft yet. So I went over my work, reading it outloud, cutting and throwing in a couple extra ext's and int's whilst coming up with new scenes and figuring out the ad breaks/act breaks.
It is tough trying to keep on this one thing, no matter how many times this week I have told myself this week that I would be working on my final script and the tv drama, I don't think any work has come from it. I look for some sort of way to procrastinate, but I think everyone does that now, too many options. Thanks to some criticism on monday for the opening of my final script, I have got different ways to write scenes from my first (and terrible) draft and making them operate in a more original way.
Still suffering a bit of the cold I had from last week. Making me take a few steps back on everything. I'm growing weary of not being able to go to the gym.
There is a certain mood I have to be in to write well, the only thing I want to do is to write. So far I haven't had that since last week, which was a burst of energy in screenwriting that I haven't had for some time. This hasn't returned. This blog helps my mind prepare to write scripts, a warm-up. None of this is probably interesting.
I have been wondering for a while what person decided to come up with that compliment for writers, the "ear for dialogue" comment, because I've heard this thrown around by ‘critics’ for writers who are very different in their styles of writing dialogue. Tarantino, Sorkin, Mamet and Iannucci have differing styles when it comes to talking heads, but they've defiantly been given this compliment. But none of their styles fit together, so is this just a preference or do people talk like they're constantly popping "pick me ups" in Sorkin's neighbourhood? Tarantino is surrounded by people who like long philosophical conversations that include the odd interest in comics, music or film in order to bring across a person’s views? Mamet's neighbourhood is full of people repeating what they just said two more times?
As far as I am concerned, people write dialogue how they want the world to be, I write because it would be cool to talk like my characters (bar me not being quick witted enough), something exciting, writing something dramatic. We even take pieces of dialogues from films in order to freshen and give our lives some meaning. Possibly, because for some people, the people around them are fucking boring and too similar to them. Thus when they need to understand another person's views, they must have it made sense on the screen. Last night I watched Good Night and Good Luck, and that did the same thing for me, I had an experience because of what the characters had to say and how it is relevant to life today.
"It is my desire if not my duty to try to talk to you journeymen with some candor about what is happening in radio and television, and if what I say is responsible, I alone am responsible for the saying of it. Our history will be what we make of it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred year from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes of one week of all three networks, they will there find, recorded in black and white and in color, evidence of decadence, escapism, and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. We are are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable, and complacent. We have a built in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information; our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses, and recognize that television, in the main, is being use to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture, too late."
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