I was woken up by a call this morning, from a production person, who told me we had a call tomorrow at 19:30 for a sequence in a nightclub. I confirmed and went back to sleep. Later, I was woken again by a call telling me that the sequence was cancelled, and that it might not be filmed until mid-December. An email even later told me that she’d be in touch to keep me updated on call times for next week.

I was supposed to get the finished script on Monday, and I haven’t seen it yet. I’m worried about that, since I need time to mentally prepare, find my character’s center and motivation, and so on. They should be happy I’m not a method actor, or I’d have to spend two months like some idiot thug on the streets of Mexico City to “get into character”.

Writing’s going well, character studies are done, and I’m pretty happy with them, treatment is about 50% done, with all turning points and climax nailed down, mostly a matter of filling in the blanks, setting up a couple of auxiliary characters, etc. It should be done this week. My girlfriend’s going away for a few days on Friday morning, that should give me the time to finish up the treatment.

I’m up late, or early, perhaps, reading the script. I have a reading tomorrow afternoon at 2, and Alex wanted “feedback and ideas”, especially from me. It’s two thirty in the morning, I’m tired, I feel uninspired, and I have fuck all in the way of ideas and feedback, except for “your dialogue should be less expository”, and “maybe I could do something else instead of farting this guy in the face”. For some reason, I don’t think that’s what he’s looking for. I’ll have to reread this fucking thing one more time and try to pick out a few things that I want to suggest changes to, and ignore the rest, I think, it’s the only way I’m going to have something useful.

On a more positive note, yesterday night I wrote seven pages of notes/treatment for my other horror idea. It’s becoming quite substantial, and I feel like I’m starting to know the characters and the setting well. I also have the beginnings of a treatment, at least in terms of inciting incident, major turning points, etc. The ending is what’s most open at the moment, and I expect I’ll have to rework a lot of other stuff after the ending falls into place. But all in all, it’s looking good, I think.

Today in the afternoon I wrote three pages of notes and character study for my mexploitation screenplay. It feels good to get going with it again, and it feels like it’s going to work, too. In general, actually doing several pages of writing per day makes me feel immensely good. After weeks of thinking/procrastination, things are starting to flow.

Now, for another rereading.

Pretty much all screenwriting books and teachers will tell you to do your homework and research, and also to write down your ideas when they occur to you, especially if they’re not applicable to your current project. Personally, I find it a bit hard to write my ideas down in a form I’m satisfied with before I’ve done some research and let them churn around in my head for a bit. Today, I did a round of research and wrote some 5 pages of notes for an idea I had a few weeks ago. It led me to research, through the wonderful Wikipedia, topics as disparate as debutante balls, language isolates, caves, the ancient pueblo peoples, the Manchu language, acrolects, and a few other things. All for the same story idea, which is actually surprisingly simple and coherent. All of a sudden, a bunch of things you’ve known about for a while just come together in a new, strange way. It’s fun, especially since I’m the kind of person who actually reads random encyclopedia entries for entertainment. And I have the feeling that it might actually work as the kind of creepy, intellectual cosmic horror that I enjoy. Think of it as Lovecraft meets Focault’s Pendulum, protagonized by a linguist doing field work in the jungles of Mexico.

So that’s one idea written down, and I can feel that it’s not invading my thoughts so much now. I have another one which is also separate from the project I’m supposed to be working on, so I guess I’ll do that one next. Writing ideas out makes them crystallize too, although I’m often worried that they seem banal. It’s sort of like what happens when you tell people your dreams. They seem significant and highly weird when you wake up and the experience is fresh, but then they become trivial, flat, and uninteresting when you try to tell them to someone else. Although Hans Petter recently characterized my dreams as “Lovecraftian”, and that’s got to count for something.

As I work on my own mexploitation screenplay, I’m reading some screenwriting books. I’ve read some before, and I think I have a good idea of how structure works, etc., but it’s good to review. I got two of the most essential books a while back, Syd Field’s Screenplay and Robert McKee’s Story. Screenplay is perhaps most known for being the first text to formalize modern three act structure, when it was first published in the late Seventies. Story, on the other hand, is quite a bit newer, and has a more artistic, less formulaic approach. Both contain good information on screenwriting, I can say that much.

But if you’re looking for an enjoyable read with good prose and eloquence, stay away from Screenplay. It’s a pretty horrible text, full of overstretched metaphors (that are repeated almost verbatim several times), bombastic proclamations, not to mention misspellings and other problems. Story, on the other hand, is very well written, and McKee obviously has a passion for the craft. He’s also much more inclusive in his approach, which might appease those who have misgivings about “learning to write” in general.