Monday, September 25, 2006

Free Time? What Free Time?

It's there. Dismal is in the offices of the Sundance selectors. Whoever they are. So our future in Utah is no longer in our control.

Today (my anniversary by the way), Ray, Jeff and I meet to plan out the remaining work on Dismal to get ready for the next festivals we'll submit to. SXSW and Tribeca both have early December deadlines, so we hope to be finished with the fine cut by Thanksgiving.

This means a more editing to tighten up a few places, fix some problems, make the moments we haven't made yet, plus giving the various fellows the time to do the full score composition, full sound mix, full color correction, etc.

And we'll cut a good trailer, print up some one sheets and prepare a press kit for when we'll need them.

But what I think this means for me is that while there's still much work ahead, it's mainly managerial stuff, which should free up a little more time to get back to that thing we do.

Writing.

It's been a while.

I mean, I've done a lot of writing for the regular job -- which has been fun and has worked out well, since we're on the verge of signing two pilots and some MOWs -- but no scripts.

My plan is first to bang out some outlines for the next two movies for 1944, then dive back into the Harlem movie. Then, as I'm working on the Harlem rewrite I can let the 1944 outlines percolate, and when I go back to fixing the 1944 outlines I can let the Harlem rewrite percolate.

Seems like that's the way it works for me. Good to have one thing to work on immediately, to distract my mind from the other thing -- which is when the good ideas come for the other thing. And vice versa.

I think most writers I know work this way.

And outsiders think we're just being lazy and unfocused.

Sheesh.

Now let's all waste some time Googling my current favorite phrase, from Greg's Web of Lies and Deceit: rusty Chinese tongue muscles.

No comments: