Done Part Two

I finished the screenplay adaptation of FRANKENSTEIN'S MONSTER.

It was harder than I thought it would be, and took a bit longer, and the first draft is this big, unwieldy animal. But it's done - always the first step - and now I have a draft I can hack at until it's semi-readable.

Writing an adaptation is its own sub-skill of screenwriting. I've only done one before... back in film school, I wrote an adaptation of THE MASTER AND MARGARITA as an exercise. I found it was mostly about cutting and cutting and cutting, stripping the words down to the core A-story, then building back up from there so the A-story is told well in a cinematic fashion.

I got cocky 'cause FRANK is an adaptation of a novel I wrote. But a novel is a novel, and a script is a script... the job is still the same. You get a lot of luxuries in terms of keeping characters and subplots if the underlying property is massive. For instance, every little character and bit of business from the Harry Potter series makes its way on screen. And if the book's too long, they just make two movies to fit it all. If you're not J.K. Rowling, however, some shit's gotta go out the window.

Meanwhile, I'm working on the fourth draft of the treatment for DEAD RIGHT THERE, which'll be the next script. Every incarnation of the treatment takes us one step closer, until it finally becomes the story we'd like to see play out on the screen. But I always find new stuff when I go to script - either new little problems I missed in the treatment stage, or just little "wouldn't this be kinda cool?" moments. You don't shut off your brain when you're writing, no matter what it is.

I ordinarily write a lot, but 2008's been a fuckin' year, man... I wrote DEMON and THE CASTLE -- both scripts -- then FRANKENSTEIN'S MONSTER the novel, just finished FRANK the script, and I'm hoping to have a first draft of DRT done by the first.

What can I say? I'm hungry as fuck. And I'm gonna keep writing and producing until some of this shit gets on the screens.