First Drafts Are Disgusting

So here I am in New York doing a sort of reverse Barton Fink. As some of you readers know, I showed up here and about seven months ago had a reading of a play of mine at The Public Theatre with Meryl Streep and her kids. It was a fine time and the play is heading toward a real NY production…(Stop asking me when and where—as soon as it is set, you’ll know! And it isn’t with Meryl Streep.) Okay, you’re all caught up. But on the side, these movie people, yes, NY has some movie people, well these movie people who have made a bunch of movies, one of them is a movie that you’ve all seen—okay, why be coy. It’s called ELF and it starred Will Ferrell. So, they asked me to come in to pitch some movie ideas. Being someone with lots of ideas and being someone who is highly organized and has all those ideas in folders, I went in with my list of 26 movies, pitched 8 of them and they liked the one best that I liked best (which was, of course, also the one most thought out)—and so they said, “We’ll take it!” Which means, I am writing it. And if all goes well, they will sell it to one of their big ol’ Hollywood studios, make it, it does as well as ELF, I buy a big apartment in NYC and return to LA and buy a dog. Maybe a trip to Costa Rica. Or Greece.

Okay, that’s the easy stuff, the stuff you tell your mother, the stuff I usually don’t blog about much because it’s sort of like an accountant blogging about the day’s P & L’s and Balance Sheets. (Writer’s lives are so boring. I mean, even if you speed it up on tape---it just looks like a hunchback at a keyboard who keeps getting up to nuke his herbal tea.)

Okay---so then there’s the treatment. Which was actually completely fun to write. Lots of ideas. I have lots of ideas…so building a big sheet with big empty blocks and filling them in is easy for me. When people ask me, incredulously, sort of thinking-they-can-do-it-too-and-kind-of-want-to-if-only-they-knew-how “How do you come up with those ideas? What do you do when you sit to write?” My honest answer should be, “You just have to be one of those people who is loaded with ideas, if you are not, then don’t write. If you must, then pick one topic you are interested in, do a lot of research about it, take notes and write a nonfiction book. Make it about the natural history of warts, Malaysia or a really great cult leader.”

Okay—so the treatment is easy. Notes, notes, notes from the company. Wonderful guys. I love them. Best people I’ve run into ever when it comes to movies-TV-etc. Truly. Okay, so I have this great treatment, fine tooth combed. Needed one little plot tweak, we fixed that.

And then---then---then---“Now go and write it.”

Friends, I am almost done with the first draft. And it is a big, fat, sloppy, overwritten, pig pile! But I love it and I am glad that I barreled on and didn’t stop to fix the first 70 pages before I went on to write the next 70. I know, I know—140 page screen play? Okay, not quite that long. But almost. I’ll cut it. I swear!

But it’s been fun. I only cried four or ten different times---and that was only because I was wretchedly lonely. Watching a grown man cry is hilarious. I run to the mirror to see it when it happens. I look like an old Italian woman at her son’s funeral. My face crinkles up—and my eyes, fleshy pig-slits that they are now, fill up with tears but they don’t even run down my face---they just fill up my loose eye ball area with water and I just get really wet from the nose up. I don’t look like a movie star when I cry. I look like a very old, tired monster, surrounded by pink tile, I repeat, fleshy, and just sort of wet.

So then, I decided to solve my writing problem. I realized, “Hey, lunatic…get out of the apartment, see people.”

So, I have been making more plans and that is helping enormously. I am completely normal, or close to it, when I am outside with humanity. In fact, one might say I am decent company. I talk a lot, but I listen (I think) more than I talk. And I rather not control the subject matter (I think).

First drafts are monsters. I’d like to say you birth them out your ass—but that would be too pleasurable compared to what it really feels like—maybe a burning pepper through the sinuses or glassy vinegar pushed through the pores of your inner thighs.

You are not graceful during a first draft. You get really greasy. You certainly don’t get your hair cut. You do a lot of Google map searches and your friends (who thank goodness are generous with your personality tics) receive long emails about almost nothing--in detail.

And, of course, these long blog entries---to cleanse the palate.

Good luck with your first draft, if you are writing one. If you are editing—baby, you’re on vacation.

This blog entry, and others like it, is from www.opentrench.blogspot.com