The Grail Is At Hand!

Okay, HOW stoked AM I!!!

I've been bangin my head against a wall for some 14 years now, trying to figure out how to get people to pay me to do what I already do for free -- namely, write movies and make movies.

This past week I finally figured out what I was doing wrong...

I've been trying to figure out how to contact the people who have the money to risk in an indpendant feature film. Which is a dificult thing to do since I don't know WHO those people are!

But then I was reading an article in... What was it? OH! It was on the Highland Myst Productions website. And it was about their business team. And I realized that there are some people in the world who enjoy making deals as much as we enjoy making movies. THESE are the people I need to be seeking out! Because these are the people who know who has the money to invest, and what it is they're most interested in investing in.

That's what these people DO! They spend as much time cultivating contacts and revising business strategy as I spend nourishing my understanding of what makes movies great and revising my understanding of story structure. Ted Elliot and Ted Rossio have said on their website Wordplay that we should become screenwriting EXPERTS.

Well...

There are people who devote their time to becoming experts at getting a movie rolling!

So I desperately email my friend Kelly, begging him to tell me how to find one of these experts. He's in Hollywood, that's where the money is -- or at least, the people who know how to get at money for that particular purpose.

It was a long conversation, and Kelly told me everything I need to know to get started!!!

First step, natch, write a fantastic screenplay.

NO PROBLEM!!!

I'm sorry if that seems arrogant, and please believe that it doesn't come from some misguided belief that I myself am some master screenwriter. This confidence comes from the belief in the AMAZING TEAM, of which I am a grateful part!!!

After some of the initial responses for the short we're gearing up to shoot, I'd say that Brian and Tommy and I are the top of our game!!! I'm really proud of the script, but mostly I'm proud at the ideas that make the script a fun read -- most of which, I'm not at all ashamed to admit, came from Brian and Tommy!!! All I really did was find a way to make them work in a single story, and to make sure folks didn't doze off while reading that story :)

So this has been an EXCITING weekend for Ray Jay!!! It's like like running a long-distance race, seing the finish line ahead, and then lloking back to see that everyone is half a mile behind you and losing steam! All I have to do is keep running and I'll win!

But don't get me wrong, I'm sweating buckets and my legs feel like they're about to give out.

I mean, not really. I was extending the metaphor, but it looks like I may have stretched it out so it doesn't fit anymore.

I mean that there is still work to be done before the big First Deal is struck. Like, we need to write a GREAT movie that can be shot for a really small budget.

But like I said, we're in a groove!!!

2006 isn't following the plan I laid out for it at the beginning of the year, but I like the plan it laid out for me a GREAT DEAL better :D

And I hope things are going twice as good for anyone reading this!!!

Just finished listing the following necessities for the flick:

-Characters
-Sets/Locations
-Props
-SFX

Fun.

But useful!!! It's a necessary step. We need to know what all we need so we can start tracking stuff down, or at least form a gameplan as to HOW we will start tracking stuff down.

Anyone in Texas know of someone who owns or manages a rural cemetery with a grounds-keeper house on the premisis?

Couldn't hurt to ask.

Also, I got a glowing review on the script from my ex-wife!!! So I'm stoked about that!

Don't get me wrong, she's always supportive of us and our filmmaking endeavours, and my writing in general. But she's got good taste in movies and books, so if she disliked it I seriously would have taken a closer look. But instead, she loved it!

So YAY!

Now I'm waiting for our writer friends to get word back to me... And their job will be to cut me NO SLACK. So it's REALLY cool to get some ego-massages beforehand :)

Okay, U2 is on Conan O'Brien tonight, so I'm gonna go watch.

Checking In...

I'm working on a new novel.

I had this idea for a while for a novel based on my SecondLife experiences. I was going to sort of borrow the structure of BIG TROUBLE (the movie, I haven't read dave Barry's novel yet) and make it this sort of no-holds-barred comedy aventure thing.

But recent events have made me more contemplative about what SL is, and so the current novel will probably be more like FORREST GUMP (the novel, not the movie).

Thanks to my eMusic subscrition, I now own the first 4 of Lewis Black's 5 cds!

That's really cool! Although his humor is as smart and as biting as George carlin, he's somehow less scary. One night I made an uber-playlist of Carlin's carreer in albums, and by the 4th album I was kinda hatin' on the world. But Black allows me to laugh at our (mankind's/societies) foibles without wanting to slap people around for being idiots.

No idea what that's about, but there it is.

Looking foreward to seeing THE DA VINCI CODE Saturday with my friends Lisa and Regina! That should be groovy :)

Oh, and we -- Tommy, Brian and I -- are working on lists of things we need to make the movie in the next couple of months (actors, locations, props, etc.). So things are moving forward still with the flick!

VERY cool :)

Tons of SL stuff, none of which I can blog about. Which is a little frustrating, because some of it is fairly profound. But all of it involves other folk's lives and stuff, and therefor is not my story to tell. I could simply talk about the impacts of these events on my perspective, but none of it would make sense without the context. (Like when I first started blogging about SL, before I started putting pics up. Ya know?)

Blah.

Soooo...

Not much to tell ya about. But it just feels like I've been away from here for a while.

PEACE, LOVE & HAPPINESS to anyone reading these words!!!

As Of 1:43 a.m. Central Time...

Hola, Peeps & Peepettes!!!

I finished the third draft of the screenplay for the short flick Tommy & Brian and I plan to shoot this summer!!!

YAY, ME!!!

I'd LOVE to say that I finished it in SeconLife, like I did the first draft, but that would be a lie. Truth is I loaded it up Saturday, but I just wasn't feelin' it.

This behavior is what non-writers might call "Creative" -- as in, "No, no, he's not retarded. He's Creative..." -- and writers refer to as "Undisiplined". Or possibly, "a writer". (Apparently Douglas Adams, among others, just "didn't feel it" quite often when he had a novel due...)

So Monday night, at work -- when Tommy and Brian & I were meeting Tuesday -- I finally pulled it up and finished the second draft. Then after the production meeting I wrote the third draft, and now I've got a WHOLE WEEK OFF FROM WRITING!!!

This excites me to NO end!!!

God bless Tommy for his busy schedule! 'Cause Tommy simply can't meet with us this coming Tuesday.

And now the script is in other hands. Tommy sent the script off to two writer members of our creative Core -- Kelly (director, editor, screenwriter in L.A.) and Chuck (Playwright, Actor, theatre director and Theatre Teacher in Florida) and a third set of eyes, a screenwriter he knows, but that Brian and I haven't met yet.

So we'll be getting valuable feedback soon, to help turn our very good script into, hopefully, a GREAT script!!!

Also, part of the reason I didn't do any writing on Sunday is because I was reading THE DA VINCI CODE before the movie comes out! GREAT BOOK!!! Dan Brown writes a lot like Michael Crichton, in that his stories are taught suspenceful action mixed with thought-provoking, fact-based ideas.

I know, YOU'VE ALL read it already. I'm WAY behind everyone else.

That's cool. I don't have any problem with that. I enjoy stuff when I'm "feelin' it" and not before. I didn't get into Harry Potter until the first flick was announced... and then I had 3 novels to catch up on.

I can live with that.

BUT, how many movies are YOU gonna shoot this summer? Huh?

I didn't THINK so :)

*winks*

Pardon me, chat-lingo is seeping into ALL my written communications, thatk's to my SL habit. I now know what "afk" and "rofl" mean!!! (Btw, "brb" and "lol" were the first chat phrases I learned. Followed quickly by "lmao", "omg" and "wtf"... FYI.)

Dudes!!! If you're looking for a good read, may I suggest Kevin Smith's 9-part essay "Me And My Shadow". It's SO worth the read!!! You'll never see Jason "Jay" Mewes in the same light EVER again!!! (Or Kevin Smith, for that matter...) Dude brougth tears to my eyes more than once, and not all not all of them sad!!! You wouldn't think the "Noitch-noitch-noitch" dude could be a hero, but the portait Smith paints of his "boy"'s struggles is both heart-wrenching and inspiring!!!

Then, jump ahead to the May 9th article, "Johnny Rotten vs. Stan Lee!"!!! I would love to have been in THAT room Tuesday night!

Have I meantioned that Eddie Izzard's SEXIE finally came in the mail?!! A couple of weeks ago, but I recommend it to anyone who likes to laugh!!! It's right up there with DRESS TO KILL as some of Izzard's very best work!!! I had to wait, like, A MONTH to get it because I ordered it from his site so it came all the way from England -- which kinda makes it COOLER, you know, in that fan-boy geek kind of way -- and it was SO worth the wait!!!

What else?

Um...

Nothing I guess. I think you're caught up: I've torn myself away from Sl long enough to write 2 more drafts of the short and read THE DA VINCI CODE and listen to the latest Eddie Izzard.

I've slept some, too.

Yep. That's about it :)

Writing at Walden Pond

Remember me mentioning that Tommy and Brian and I are working on a new short? Well I finished the script for it thts past Saturday!!!

Ask me where!

WALDEN POND!!!

Some SL friends created Walden Pond -- immortalized by Henry David Thoreau in his 1854 novel WALDEN -- on their land, as a personal escape for them and an attraction for others in SecondLife. I looked up pics of the place, past and present, and they NAILED! It looks JUST as it did for the 2 years and 2 months Thoreau lived there!!!

The pictures below won't do their creation justice, though. 'Cause this entry's about ME :)

So I know I need to write. And I know there's not much going on for me in-world at the moment. But I'm not feeling the desire to write in my Writer's Pad (my Home in SL).

Despite the RIDICULOUSLY HIGH Pretntious Factor [I've read Thoreau and I, sir, am NO THOREAU], I decide I'm gonna go write in Thoreau's cabin, and see how much work I get done.


Okay, so a screenplay -- even a short one -- has 4 essential components which, for our purposes here, I will arbitrarily call The Open, The Meat, The Climax and The Resolution. If the script is 7 pages long, then The Open might be 1 page, The Meat might be 3 pages, the Climax might be 2 pages and the Resolution might be 1 page. (If the script runs longer, the only component that expands significantly is The Meat. The rest stay comparitively tiny; and I think the Crap Draft of our movie runs approcimately 17 pages, making The Meat closer to 10 pages long.)

I got The Open late, late, late Friday night just before I left work.

So I sat down at Thoreau's table and got started.

The land has its own soundeffects, so as the sun set the chirping of birds faded away and I got to hear the hooting of owls out the window as I typed :)

It was WAY COOL!!!


Now looking at the layout of the cabin, there's a table, a desk and a bed. The table was most likely intended strictly for eating. Maybe reading. But Thoreau was a writer... I'm guessing he did some writing there, too :) (He probably did some writing under a tree just outside, and probably by on a rock by the pond. I mean, 2 years and 2 month? He probably did some writing on just about every square inch of that land, right?)


So I wrote at the very same table that THOREAU probably wrote at!!!

...if he had a computer with a cable modem and an XP operating system....

And there probably wasn't an alien sleeping on the bed next to him as he wrote.

These pics are me revisiting the places i wrote at. At the time I wasn't in picture-taking mode. And Brian's computer takes MUCH better snapshots than mine, so I asked him to come with me and be the photographer for these.

Which means that sometimes I'd turn around and find him in wierd palces.

So anyway...

I wrote The Meat of the script here. And after that 10 pages or so, I felt like I was probably done for the day. So I got up to stretch my legs and IM some friends and see what they were up to, and just generally feel good about myself for having done some good work, and having done it IN THOREAU'S CABIN ON WALDEN POND!!!


I strolled over to the campsite there and sat infront of the fire.

...and discovered I WASN'T spent for the day! I wrote a paragraph that had popped into my head, a piece of dialogue that seemed to come naturally after that...

And before I knew it, I had completed The Climax of the script!!!


So I ran around with my SL friend April and checked out some of the ASTOUDING things she's created in-world, and then I get an IM from my friend Tam. She's dancing at a club (HUGE surprise) and can I come dance, too?

I've done A LOT of good work today (12 or so pages in a day for just about ANY screenwriter is GOOD WORK) so I go celebrate! There are topless women dancing around me, the music is blasting, everyone's chatting to each other, and to me...

And I decide I want to work out this ONE SCENE...


So I turn my music off and whip out the Notecard I've been writing the screenplay on...

And half an hour later I'VE FINISHED THE CRAP DRAFT OF THE SCRIPT!!!

This is PARTY TIME, INDEED!!! Before I was celebrating because I had come VERY CLOSE to finishing the script! NOW I'm celebrating IT COMPLETION!!!

In the pic above is Tempest Jewel, she manages Baby Dollz, the club I wrote the Resolution in. She was there Saturday night, and when Brian and I went back to the club to get a picture, she was there THEN, too!!! All alone, playing music and dancing to it.

And Tommy left about 20 minutes ago. He and Brian and I talked about the script, about what changes we want to see in this next draft.

So I've got more work to do this week/weekend.

AND SECONDLIFE SEEMS TO BE THE PERFECT PLACE TO DO IT!!!