2 Busy 2 Blog

You may be wondering where Friday’s Hitchcock entry on TO CATCH A THIEF went, ot where this coming Friday’s entry on REAR WINDOW vanished to... or maybe even next Friday’s Hitchcock entry... though I’m hoping to get my life back to normal by then. Over the past week I’ve written what would translate (by word count) into 100 novel pages. If I did that every week, I’d have a 400 page novel every month. Now I know what it feels like to be Stephen King.

But I haven’t been working on a novel, I’ve been working on the Top Secret Studio Remake Project. We have a stack of meetings lined up, and need the *perfect* treatment, so that’s what I’ve been writing and rewriting and rewriting and doing something 180 degrees from the original one time and then 360 degrees from the original the next. This is a speed and accuracy deal - the thing has to be written *fast* and it also had to be written well, or we may not get the deal... or the best deal (the original film was a hit, opened at #1, so I don’t see it not being remade). But, since there’s not cast signed or director signed... well, it’s the original property and my work.

And I can be replaced in a heartbeat. Somewhere, David Koepp is waiting for a phone call. Actually, he’s fit this material really well.... I’d better do a great job.

So I’ve been under a little pressure lately. You know, the kind where you think your head might explode? And I’ve been typing like crazy - and had a day when the laptop went wacky and I almost bought a new one but instead found a solution to the problem the next day - and there were days when I couldn’t figure out how part of the film could work, and had to wrestle with the story until I figured it out. The thing about a treatment is that it’s pretty much a condensed version of the script - you have to figure it all out in order to write it. All of the problems in the script have to be solved. And when they decide to take a different approach to the story - you have to figure out the entire script all over again. Fewer pages, but close to the same amount of brain work as writing the entire script.

So, while I’ve been doing this stuff, I’ve been neglecting the blog, and haven’t written any new script tips for the website and haven’t done a damned thing on Second Son (spec) or anything else. There was a day when I forgot to eat. When all of this settles down and I’m working on the script (or David Koepp is) the Hitchcock Fridays will resume - probably even before that, since once we get that perfect treatment it’s just a bunch of meetings where I have to pitch a story that will make a studio exec spend tens of millions of dollars. No pressure there.

Now, I may sneak in a blog entry like this one if my brain isn’t fried at the end of the day. Probably won’t be long, though. Oddly, I want to go back to work on Second Son - my brain keeps coming up with scenes on that one while I’m writing this one. The scenes are always greener on the other side of the fence...

- Bill