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.

So Drew screened his short film in Irvine. Having glimpsed a rerun of Miami Vice and seen the movie, I think his Bent Steele is a mighty fun time. He pays homage to two eras of Michael Mann with the fluency of an American speaking English (or something like that). Marvel at those black levels, which are not gray but inky black. If only Drew went rogue more often and did more of this oh-shit-the-cops guerrilla filmmaking.

It seems everyone I know is gettin’ down and dirty with their creative selves. Jaemin Yi is, and of course so is Sean with his romance Rory’s First Kiss. Spring has that effect on the physiology of an artist. I guess for everyone else it makes them want to clean or breed or something.

Oh alright. Fine. I’ll put up the plot of my script, a short romantic drama. But not the whole thing. And take it all with a grain of salt. There are more juicy bits to the lives depicted here that I left out; and while this is a skeletal representation of the story, it’s soft, tender bone that’s yet to mature, still incubating in my imagination.

One night in a coffeeshop, a cute but nerdy girl, Kate, waits to meet her online pal, Derek, for a blind date. She waves when she sees a guy who matches his description, but he walks right past her. It gets late. Derek never shows up.

The next morning, Bryan is startled out of bed by a phone call; a girl on the other end playfully screams “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!” She intended to give her boyfriend a wake-up call, but dialed the wrong number. She apologizes and hangs up.

Bryan meets his friend, Derek, over lunch. The two don’t get along, but Derek has a favor to ask: he wants Bryan to meet a girl named Kate. Last night he went to meet her, but thought she was ugly and gave her the cold shoulder. She still wants to meet; but because she already saw him when he ignored her, he wants Bryan to stand in. After, Derek says he can make up a story to break off the relationship. Bryan says he’ll do it for the girl’s sake, but thinks Derek is a jerk.

On his way home, Derek stops at an intersection and eyeballs a pretty girl as she enters her house. When he gets a text from Kate, he turns the car around.

Bryan dresses for the date. His phone rings. The same girl dialed the wrong number again, but instead of hanging up she asks for advice: “What’s the easiest way to break up with a guy?” Bryan becomes morose, remembers his ex, and tells the girl how not to break up with a guy. They get into small talk, find out they’re a few blocks from each other, then hang up. The doorbell rings. It’s Derek. He gives Bryan his phone for the date; Bryan offers his phone in exchange.

Derek stops for coffee. The phone rings. It’s the girl. As if in a hurry, she begs Bryan for help, then gives her address. Derek ignores it, drives home. When he stops at the familiar intersection he realizes it’s the same cross-street as what the girl blurted. He glances at the house the pretty girl went into and sees the address is identical. Curious, he parks the car and approaches the house.

There is a theme undercutting the events, but yeah, this is my plot in TV Guide form. I lopped it off about a third of the way (so there’s still a good seventy percent to go), right before the first catharsis. It’s structured as a farce, where the A B and C stories collide in convoluted ways.

I don’t want to tell a love story so much as I would rather tell a story about love. A “love story” is essentially a genre piece, stripped and stupefied to archaic expectations (the meet cute, the denial, the compromise of lifestyle, the happily ever after OR the bittersweet departure). A “story about love” is open-ended, and in all likelihood, truer to the heart. It compels me to go buck wild in terms of style. There’s more to love and life than can be expressed in middle-class, Mac generation music. Behold, I give you New Order’s “Your Silent Face,” a song about death, and a very odd choice of music for my ideal title sequence.

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The way to sidestep an expected love story is to blindside the audience with other emotions: hate, pity, fear, sadness, and then love. I adore stories that hook us from the beginning, tease us with a slow build, then reward us with an ending in which everything collides spontaneously; not because it wants to impress us, but because the Fates have spoken and destinies must yield (see: In Bruges). It’s not about the “happy” ending, which is always, always easy, but about taking one step further to become the “beautiful” ending.

Rule number one: Everything happens as it must.