With a Single Bound I Was Free

My most recent film script, an adaptation of Shane Richie's heartrending biography 'From Rags to Richie'- no I'm kidding, obviously it's about SUPERHEROES, has jumped though a number of hoops (some of them flaming) and ticked various boxes (not flaming) and has been picked up by the Film Council as being Potentially Just Stupid Enough To Work.

I need to do a proper outline though, so show how a second draft will build upon the complexities and depths evident in the first, and thus secure me some development money with which to buy pens and notebooks and hookers not hookers. I am also seconded a script editor, via a means I can only assume is like that thing in school where David Mammet Mamet and Tom Stoppard are picked first for games, and my script is left with the fat kid who smells of crisps* and Akiva Goldsman**. What a weird school.

I have a meeting with my script editor, so that we may discuss how the second draft can build upon the complexities and depths evident in the first. One concern is the ending, which sort of fizzles away a bit, in that after the hero has travelled across the entire country into order to get to the villain's base to turn off a machine which could potentially blow up the world, it ends when he gets there and sort of.... turns it off. The End. Thus far, it's not exactly Citizen Kane.

INT. SOHO COFFEE SHOP - DAY

SCRIPT EDITOR: So, any thoughts about developing the ending?
ME: Yes, I thought the villain's lair could suddenly turn into a giant robot, which the hero could fight, which would make a better ending, and would pad it out a bit into the bargain.

Slight pause.

SCRIPT EDITOR: I was thinking more about some way in which the hero could, you know, sort of develop. Emotionally.

I punch her in the face, smash through the window and run, screaming, onto the london streets.

Later however, I wonder if she might have a point, and ring the Film Council to see if my actions were irreversible. Fortunately, it turns out that script editors are grown in vats, in a large warehouse on the edge of Chiswick, and there's loads left. Hurrah!


* He later goes on to invent streaming video, so don't feel bad for him.
** Hoik Spit



UPDATE: of course, if anyone from the Film Council happened to have glanced at this blog during the half hour it took me to realise the protagonist's name in Citizen Kane isn't actually spelled with a 'C', the whole point might be AMAZINGLY MOOT anyway.