Seventy-six pages. Fade out, end credits.

Started typing late August 28, finished early September 26. Not bad.

Since the last update, I found myself in a writing groove, typing every night until the sun came up. A chat with Ryan last week led to an idea for a “third act” scenario (ugh, I hoped to avoid thinking in those terms and aimed for a more anarchic style to the plot, but it worked itself into a three-act structure anyway); the rest poured out from there. Dialogue got goofier and bolder, and several characters were given Oscar-clip monologues.

Somewhere around page forty-five, I stopped worrying about the length of the script. I knew I’d make it past page sixty with scenes to spare, eventually hitting my seventy-five page goal with ease. Yeah, it’s still a little short for a feature these days, but let’s face it, the joke of the movie would wear thin beyond eighty minutes or so.

I also stopped worrying about indie limitations. More characters were added, more locations I didn’t know if we’d be able to get. I was writing it like we could film it, no matter how ridiculous. I started to get optimistic, which is a sensation altogether new to me.

Now comes the brutal part: picking over it scene by scene, line by line, tossing out large chunks, rewriting new ones, a much-needed punch-up to tighten the comedy, a tightening of the story, a polish to ensure the whole thing has a unified voice, and the unavoidable pullback of budget shortcomings. Either that, or I’ll just go through and fix the typos. Whichever.