One Bucket of Phlegm Later...

Feeling much better this week than last, thanks to the makers of Levaquin, the antibiotic that wrung me like a car wash rag until I was so dried out my calves started to cramp. Still some residual congestion, but since it came late to the party, I'm not surprised it's still hanging out down there nursing its beer, looking through my CDs (hell, man, put on the Van Morrison and I'll even b.s. with you for a bottle or two before I kick you out).

I saw two of the blogs I link to The Artful Writer and Man Bytes Hollywood are mentioned in Script magazine's article on screenwriting blogs. As an unapologetic cheapskate, I only read part of the article while standing in a Borders near my work, so I'm not sure what the thrust of the article is, but it's good to see a nice guy like David getting some cred out there in the world. Craig's probably a nice guy too, my Staten Island bias notwithstanding, but he's swimming in cred right now as long as people keep going to see spoof movies (and they will, I think). And don't look at me like I'm some freakshow for reading screenwriting mags in the bookstore and leaving them on the rack, I see you doing it too, and at 7 bucks a pop at the newsstand, it's no wonder.

Ken Levine performed nothing less than a public service for writers last week by running scenes from Steve Gordon's first draft of Arthur on his blog By Ken Levine. My favorite of the three is this one, and although I can see why it was cut (some of the dialogue might be considered on-the-nose), I can visualize it so easily and there's no mistaking the tone and pacing he intended, it's right there on the page. Thank you, Steve Gordon, and thank you Ken for running the scenes.

With a full year having passed since I began the Push, I was thinking back on my progress and found myself thinking again about this encounter, my Irish guilt not allowing me to let it go. It was a brief conversation, about twenty minutes, and it was more of a 'getting-to-know-you' thing than a real interview, yet while I knew then and know now that her project about a young girl of Eastern European descent and her family isn't the first job an agent would try to line up for a writer who tends to toil in high-concept genre work (I seem to remember her calling it My Big Fat Armenian Prom), I still felt a connection toward the end of the conversation. I also remember that it would have paid in the very low four-figures. Like as low as you can go and still be considered four figures. I e-mailed over two scripts, both R-rated thrillers, against my better judgment but at the producer's insistence. Hell, even that felt good that someone wanted to read my stuff, but I thought it would turn her off. She said she wanted to see how I handle a full story and characters over the course of a feature, so off they went, and so did she, never to be heard from again. Our mutual contact, an old friend of mine who's a Real-Life Working Screenwriter™, had a film going with her that seems to have stalled, so perhaps she's dropped the whole racket and moved to Nome for all I know, but I can't escape the feeling that I screwed that one up.