Déjà vu. It suddenly feels like I’ve written this entry before. Whoa! As I peck this from the keypad of my iPhone, somebody sings “I wonder if I will ever see you again” on the radio in McDonald’s here in Norco. For almost three seconds I see the world for the very first time. What a fantastic feeling.

Have you heard the theory of the Accordion Universe? If we believe the universe began with a Big Bang and will end when it collapses on itself, then the theory supposes that another Big Bang will take its place. From there the universe begins again, identical to the previous. Even time is identical. If your mother died of cancer in that universe, the same will occur in this one. If you kissed a girl on June 19th, 1995 in that universe, you can look forward to kissing her again some trillions of years later. You just won’t know it.

Déjà vu is leftover psychic residue, seeping through the cracks.

Which reminds me of Haruki Murakami’s popular short story, called “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning.” I read it one afternoon in a bookstore. You can read it here if you like, or this:

A man sees a beautiful girl walking down the sidewalk. He tries to think of a reason to speak to her but he can’t. So he goes home. He thinks of something profound he should have said to her. The two of them were once lovers, he supposes. They knew each other to be soul mates. In order to test this, they decide to separate; if they meet again, then it must be true love. They go their separate ways. And then, each is stricken with raging influenza. On the verge of death, they both recover, but have lost their memory. Time passes. Now they have crossed paths with each other, they way they had hoped, but this time as strangers, unaware of the true love they had set out to prove.

“That is what I should have said to her,” the man says, and from there the story ends.

A Thousand Words by Ted Chung is a Murakami story without the surrealism. Which is to say it is a Chung story. The protagonist is a man with whom I share my immediate sympathies; who makes a choice that leads to the discovery of potential happiness. The story never rings false and is told with such efficiency of economy that it practically tells itself.

I want that efficiency for my script, which will be two-and-a-half times longer than Mr. Chung’s. I have seen “A Thousand Words” four times and have mentally dissected it. It’s my motivation; but it is not my inspiration. That belongs to this masterwork, Red. Is it a serious film? That’s a matter of intelligence, I suppose, the way football is a matter of strength: I have no doubts I consider it too rough while a stronger man may find it passively enjoyable.

What fascinates me about “Red” is the same with the Accordion Universe: it needn’t supply an answer. Like “A Thousand Words” didn’t need a conclusive ending to be romantic. Like how Murakami’s story, one of his most well known, is powerful due to an ending that in fact questions the romance. What I am getting at, what I am trying to say, is this:

I am scripting the ending, and I pray it does not suck.

Nothing seems worth it. Your friend(s) are disconnected in their own pursuits and daily errands are routine. “Family” is a euphemism for eating out or eating in. Your entrepreneurial plans no longer feel unique or even your’s. Above all else, waking and showering and eating breakfast is a chore. It is not that suicide is so bad, but suicide does not answer anything, does not arrive at a solution; it terminates the possibility to comprehend an answer.

Yet by running this silent gauntlet of, lets face it, incurable dissatisfaction, you realize you still want to tell a story; because the people in your imagination have no other way of seeing the light of day, and you pull it together for them–not for amusement, not out of boredom, not for the praise of strangers: but writing for the sake of unleashing characters upon a world you hate, and tipping the balance in your favor, evening the odds a bit. To cultivate an understanding of your unsavory being through miraculous creation, by contributing to the world a part of yourself.

And the guy next to me, he said, “Why not just raise a family?”

So it’s my usual hour of discontent: four o’clock in the morning. Last night I slept for three hours, woke up at eight-thirty, went driving around the city for the entire day (without air conditioning—it’s busted), and I just got home three hours ago. I spent that precious time revising the first seven pages of my romance, titled, “Anonymous: A Love Story.” If I don’t bail out of writing the rest, the script should add up to a hefty seventeen or twenty pages.

I am in a bit of doubt as to the quality of the story. I came up with the outline in a half hour; good timing, but I suspect it was hasty. Francis Coppola did say that young writers are their own worst enemy: they judge their own writing self-consciously and abandon their work before completing them, a big no-no. Better to finish what you have and simply rewrite the darned thing. As McKee said, “Stories are not written. They are rewritten.” Amen. And so on those merits I think I will persevere.

Alright, out with the details. It’s why you’re [hopefully] still reading, right? I’m not gonna deal in specifics, but I’ll say it takes place inside a car on a third date. The girl recites a poem that sets up the theme of the story. Her date is intellectually challenged and wants desperately to impress her with knowledge of literature he does not possess. Thus in his attempt to woo her he…ends up introducing the ‘B’ story into the mix. This ‘B’ story acts as a catalyst to the date until the boy and the girl arrive at an epiphany, which is defined as “the sudden realization or comprehension of the essence or meaning of something.” In this case, the meaning was embedded all along in the girl’s otherwise nonchalant dialog as well as in the poem.

Yep. It’s a dialog piece. I want to be as much Edith Wharton as possible. She understood that the spoken word can be more than base expository: it can peel back the soul of the story in playful ways the viewer will not comprehend until the time arrives. Richard Linklater understood this in Before Sunrise. I’m not that big of an egotistical ass to compare myself to those two artists. I just wanna take a crack at it, for practice sake. And because Mr. Coppola is telling me not to give up, even though I want to.

Unlike my other project, this script has been tangibly composed in Final Draft, so rest assured that the B.S. meter is low on the threshold. I dislike hyping anything I do, apart from practical means, like this personal blog, which is more a conversation than look-at-me! marketing (right?). On the internet it is too easy to become an attention whore, and I wish to look where I tread. I should have the script printed and sent to Sean by Sunday or Monday, where I can gauge his opinion. And hey, maybe we can shoot soon enough.

Drew will be moving back to Wisconsin, and he’ll be there for at least two years. That sucks. But at the same time it’ll be good for Wisconsin. That Drew can do for Milwaukee what Michael Mann did for L.A. and Miami. Color me intrigued: I’d love to see a gritty, urban tone poem to America’s Dairyland.

After I waved goodbye and [secretly] blew kisses as he drove out of the parking lot (and towards a new horizon in Life’s chapter), I lingered with Sean. We loitered at the place where Wong Fu shot a segment of their music video. Totally rad. We discussed fragments of Rory’s First Kiss and the business of actor reels. Then I confessed to Sean how bored I had gotten with life. So he brought up the idea of shooting something other than our respective projects, something shorter with less meat on its bones, just to refresh ourselves.

When I handed Sean my copy of Scott Pilgrim, we bade farewell and I set off for the hour-long drive home. I stopped at a coffeeshop, scribbled a story idea, then took off, only to stop at Panera Bread for their tasty (and gloriously salty) French Onion Soup, where I scribbled more notes. By the time I was mopping the bowl with a crust of bread, I had arrived at the story’s conclusion.

It will be dialog driven. I want to use Sean and Lainey again because it’s easier that way. But as Sean pointed out, they might suck. Anyway, I think they’re decent actors when given light material. The skit will be a brief romance. I’ll have to sleep on it before I write it, and with any luck I won’t hate it when I wake up. For now, so you have something to click on, here’s an ambient instrumental that I wish to use for the prologue. Lainey’s character recites a poem amidst a montage of the city, all at night:

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I don’t even know if I’ll use it because I don’t know if we’ll even shoot the darned thing (which, if we did, could be in two weeks or less). But here’s to hoping it’ll work out.

I got to thinking: one of us could be famous one day. When you’re a famous artist people pay for your junk. Or they’ll go out of their way to at least see your junk; kind of like what I did with Christopher Nolan’s early short film: I looked it up on YouTube. In the end I didn’t like it much, but I didn’t regret seeing it either. It’s the comfort of knowing he was once a Plain Jane filmmaker, like me, trying to get noticed. So I got to thinking…

…I should totally remaster what I can, because they really need the overhaul. The screencap is from the newly tailored ending of Drew’s “The Trick of the Treat,” which I was in charge of editing along with my own “The Thing at the End of the Hall.” That’s two ten-minute long shorts I had to cut and polish within two days, because at the time we wanted to have them out for Halloween. I never gave them a final cut. The ones you might have seen on YouTube are the “Absolute Utter Crap” cuts. Avoid them. The ones on Vimeo you can call the Alpha cuts.

Do the new cuts make a difference? Is Ridley Scott’s cut of “Blade Runner” superior to the studio’s? I’m not saying our skits are as awesome as that masterpiece, but I am saying these final cuts make a dent. I finally color-corrected every shot in Drew’s segment and tweaked the exposure and saturation throughout. Here’s a before and after of what I did in post. The natural lighting was piss poor and perhaps we shot a little too quick; although we did use a reflector. I was the one holding it, crouched on the floor off-camera like a good little monkey.

What made this segment such a pain to edit was the audio: I mixed tracks from opposing sources while trying to mask the ambient noise (there was a church congregation at the time of shooting). That took a good handful of hours to clean up in my effort to make the three conversations appear seamless. I then revised all the sound effects and added more (keys jingling, door opening and closing, the ruffle of the candy bowl). It took me less time to cut the video than it took to mix the audio.

I’m proud of it. Visually, “The Trick of the Treat” now contains more depth of contrast and a flesh-toned color palette. Aurally, the skit is more seamless to listen to. It’s also a minute-and-a-half shorter, at 7:40, versus the nine minute cut on Vimeo and the perversely longer one on YouTube.

Hopefully Drew will upload it onto his Vimeo account and replace the older, inferior cut. I’ll post “The Thing at the End of the Hall” whenever I get a Plus account. This is not to assert the notion that we made never-before-seen masterpieces. Heck no. What I am saying, and what I am excited to show anyone willing, is that these skits are not as bad as what they were. And, God help you, if you liked them before, you’ll like them even more.