Screenplay Retrospective
Writing is a strange thing. It is never finished, it is eventually just abandoned by the writer. I was recently looking through all of my screenplays, "finished" and otherwise, and for some reason I began to focus in on the scripts of the projects that actually crossed that elusive finish line into a completed movie. What made them interesting to me was not only the difference from script to finished product, not just the footprint of the long process of filmmaking, but the ugliness of it all.
Chronologically, you can see the format change as I learned, as I tried so hard to get this screenwriting thing right. Starting with huge blocks of action and progressing to short bursts of direction, you can see the attempts at growth in real time. But these format changes are tangental. The real point of interest is the fact that if I were to pick some of these up today I have thousands of ideas of how to adapt, how to change, how to improve.
These supposedly finished scripts still have options, they are still nebulous.
I guess, then, that art is less of a finished product and more of a timestamp of an individual at the point of creation. If you read these you can see me at different points, some embarrassing points, some low points, and some confident points.
With all of that said, I really don't know why I'm doing this. Call it a look behind the curtain of screenwriting, call it nostalgia, call it a retrospective bit of self whimsy, but here it is. Enjoy.
Chronologically, you can see the format change as I learned, as I tried so hard to get this screenwriting thing right. Starting with huge blocks of action and progressing to short bursts of direction, you can see the attempts at growth in real time. But these format changes are tangental. The real point of interest is the fact that if I were to pick some of these up today I have thousands of ideas of how to adapt, how to change, how to improve.
These supposedly finished scripts still have options, they are still nebulous.
I guess, then, that art is less of a finished product and more of a timestamp of an individual at the point of creation. If you read these you can see me at different points, some embarrassing points, some low points, and some confident points.
With all of that said, I really don't know why I'm doing this. Call it a look behind the curtain of screenwriting, call it nostalgia, call it a retrospective bit of self whimsy, but here it is. Enjoy.
This is how I think about everything I've ever written as well...I know my first film in college was SO much better as a script than the finished product. Thanks for sharing this stuff!
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