Outline Coming Soon...

I'm here in Avalon for another weekend in the sun...but its time to get down to business as well.  No sipping fruity alcoholic beverages for me with a little straw umbrella to snag my nose on. If I drink, it will only be beer or whiskey...maybe gin if the mood calls for it.

I need to finish this outline and get this first draft done.  This downward funk of being half-done with something for so long needs to come to a screeching halt.  The outline is the first step, the first little tap on the gas.  Hopefully I'll just start to cruise along once I can bang this script out.

I also had an especially long night last week, and I began to scribble  some unintelligible notes were scratched down like a manic  and dishonest pen on a lie detector machine. Ken Burns Baseball was completely intriguing. The talking heads and photo slideshow of the story of Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle was the subject. Joe D, a shadow of the great player he once was, still overcoming serious career injuries in his final career and The Mick, the young rookie and protege of Casey Stengel, the man to replace the Yankee Clipper.  In the 1951 World Series, Casey Stengel confides in Mickey Mantle to run down every ball in the outfield because the "Old Man" (DiMaggio) couldn't leg it anymore.  On a fly ball from Willie Mays to right-center, Joe calls down Mickey Mantle on a fly ball between the two of them, Mickey stumbles and his foot gets caught in a drain pipe in the field and his knee practically explodes.  Joe makes a great catch, while Mick suffers an injury that many believe held him back from being the next Ty Cobb.  This was of course the first of several of Mick's injuries, but I'd still love to do a story comparing the two men.  DiMaggio, quiet, stern and bursting with pride.  Later in his career playing with extreme injury.  Mick, a womanizer, a showman, playing through his entire career with infamous injuries.

First things first...

Tales From the Script

Just saw a good little documentary called Tales From the Script.  It has all these well known, and not so known screenwriters talking about their experience writing, trying to write, and how to deal with Hollywood in general.

It's got me in a good funk...I want to write I'm ready to go. That movie was as much or even more honest than the writing lessons I had in school.  It doesn't matter if what I write is crap right now, I'm just gonna keep on chugging.  It's what I like to do, it's what I would ideally want to do the rest of my life.  It's not a full-time gig for me right now, but Lord willing it will be one day soon.  I know to expect failure, and that nothing I write will be perfect.  I just gotta keep on working to make it good.  

On the plate:
Finishing outline for first draft of Lake Success.  Got some work done on that today, and hopefully I'll have the outline done by next week and can finally finish the first draft shortly after.

Wanna start plotting out a story about the Philadelphia Flower Show...got some ideas, but nothing's really clicked yet.  This one might be a play.

Also I have some cool ideas for a re-make of Cagney's Public Enemy.  Michael Mann already kinda fucked me on the title for it but I'd just love to write it for the hell of it.

The Babysitters

                   Have you noticed how babysitters are portrayed in movies?  Mom and Dad go out for the evening to work out their marital problems at the therapist and they enlist the help of a local teenage girl.  She plops down on the couch, turns on the tube while the kids run their hearts out.   When they finally tucker out and go to bed, her boyfriend, the second string quarterback, will come over before the folks are home.  Of course in these kinds of movies, the babysitter is taught a little lesson in sexual tact by some masked killer running around with a huge bowie knife.  This Hollywood version of the babysitter is of course, bloated and fake and totally out of the minds of a fetishistic writer.  My babysitting experience as a kid comes nowhere near anything I’ve seen in a movie.

                   After a summer of having our neighbors’ daughters watch us during their Senior year of High school, my parents would need another babysitting option as they were planning to go away for school.

                  When my brother and I were kids, our babysitters tried to turn us into Born-Again Christians.

                  After a day spent playing catch at the Terrone house driveway, we would go inside for dinner and a movie.  Dinners were always delicious, made of spicy fra diavlo sauce and other Italian delights at the comforts of a separate kids table. (I’m still bitter about having to sit at the kid’s table.  I’m twenty-two and I have to spend dinner talking about Sonic the Hedgehog and breaking up fights between my little cousins.)