Tonight, I had the pleasure to sit and listen to a rather up-and-coming screenwriter, although by my estimation she’s been in the game for almost ten years now, Nicole Pearlman talk about what writing means to her. She, most recently, wrote the Guardians of the Galaxy screenplay along with James Gunn, who also directed the movie.
She was incredibly articulate, and the Ho and I agreed, one of the most interesting people that we’d seen speak so far. It was part of this on-going event that the WGA Foundation does called “Genre Smash,” hence the title of tonight’s blog. The Foundation does all kinds of things, as you likely know if you read this blog with any sort of intermittent regularity (whatever that means), that I’ve attended over the course of the last year or so. I freaking love it. REAL writers talking about REAL projects and the REAL stuff that goes into making these magical things on our screens come to life.
I have learned SO MUCH over the past year about how things actually work in hollywood when it comes to being a writer (or, just a filmmaker in general, really). Tonight, Nicole was talking about how Guardians had been made, and how she’d handed her script that she’d worked on for the better part of two years over to James, who was going to direct. I can’t remember if the question was about whether or not that was hard, but regardless, I found it very…affirming that her answer was that she had no problem handing work off to someone she knew was going to help elevate it to a whole other level. I feel exactly the same way, I realized. How could you not want to put your baby into the hands of geniuses who can take it places you had never dreamed of. Sure, sometimes that doesn’t happen, but collaboration is literally the only constant in the process of movie or television making. You NEED the help of all these others in order to make it happen. And, right now, that act of surrendering totally makes sense to me. You can only do so much yourself.
Got my writing done today. Not quite 6 pages, it was 5, but still. Very happy. And, they’re good pages too. I’m getting into the meat of the story, and it’s really starting to hum along. I think that’s a good sign, since it always seems to be easiest to write beginnings and endings. The middles are usually problematic. Not on this one, or really every usually for me. See, I *love* the middle stuff. That’s where the journey actually HAPPENS, right? All the cool stuff you see along the way, and predicaments and adventures that you fall into getting where you want to go. I love that shit. The pitching camp in the middle of the forest stuff. The epic battles with the dragons are cool, don’t get me wrong, but it’s always been the quieter moments with our heroes sitting and roasting marshmallows that have struck me as the most vivid images.
Editing went well. I honestly finished about three minutes or so shy today of the total amount of work I should have done, but that was purely a function of going over the hill to NerdMelt for the Nicole Pearlman event, and not because I’d been unfocused or anything like that. I’ll try to make it up tomorrow, or Thursday…though both days are quite likely to have distractions of their own. I know I have another trip all the way down to OC ahead of me at some point…
Anyway, that’s all for tonight. It was a good day. I’ll see you guys tomorrow 😉