Thursday night, I was sitting in my apartment, drinking a beer and saving Las Vegas from terrorists in Rainbow Six Vegas 2 when my phone rang. Gretchen, the producer who optioned my post-Apocalyptic spec, was on the line. She was wondering if I had a few minutes to chat about the latest draft, which I sent her way on Sunday night. At this point in the game, there is almost nothing that I wouldn't drop or reschedule when she wants to chat about the script.
Much to my delight, Gretchen really liked the new draft. While I certainly didn't want to give her a sub-par draft, I had been concerned about certain elements of the new draft. I wasn't positive that everything had been integrated efficiently, and I was worried that her interpretation of the events might be clouded - as a failure on my part. Though certain things did need to be threaded through more successfully, she was incredibly pleased overall. You can imagine that was a great weight off my back.
We spoke for about fifteen minutes, discussing some of the larger notes and also speculating about potential conflicts (read: similarities) with movies soon to hit screens. On the one hand, if something's a hit - how many vampire things flooded the market after Twilight? - it's good to be able to provide the studios that missed out on round one their own answer to the demand. But on the other hand, being too similar equals unoriginal and, in some extreme cases, out right copying. (I didn't base this spec on anything or mimic and existing movies, but with the market being sort of post-Apocalyptic heavy now, we wanted to make sure we knew what we were up against.)
Gretchen ended the call with the promise of typed notes to come, which I got on Saturday. We have a conference call with our manager on the project on Wednesday, by which point I'll have started implementing the smaller tweaks and will have had time to sleep on the larger ones. We're still on track to try to bring the script to the market after Labor Day. Until then, though, I'm forcing myself to be as re-write and perfection minded as possible. There's no sense in getting caught up with what-if scenarios, especially when the work is far from done.
