Thursday, June 16, 2011

A couple of weeks ago I got the final feedback on a feature I had sweated blood over, in its 5th major rewrite. This time I knew I'd got it right, I had really got a feel for the theme and the characters, it was all there.

I knew it.

Jez was very apologetic in saying there were serious issues. The US coverage company were businesslike in their damning analysis. Philip Shelley was somewhere in between with his negative appraisal.

Though they all agreed it had something solid at the core, the implementation was something else.

It was about this time I started to realise that perhaps I was not quite as good as I thought I was. Humility is a good thing, it just hurts a bit when you're forced to remove the rose-tinted spectacles. Producing two very good scripts early on gave me the wrong impression.

And I have this web series to write.

I was reading Bill Martell's screen tip and was forced to acknowledge that the flood of the first draft (or even the flood of the fifth draft) is not a replacement for the hard work you actually have to put in to make a script really work.




What's on the turntable? "Bridge over Troubled Water" by Simon & Garfunkel

2 comments:

Eleanor said...

It's an ongoing lesson / battle.

Yehudah Jez Freedman said...

if it's any consolation I'm about to blog almost exactly the same thing - entitled Why I'm Not A Genius