Gorracula Stage 6 (Midwest Writer's Conference)

Let's fast forward a bit. My last entry left the story dangling right around spring 2012.

2012 produced nothing more in the realm of writing. I made personal advances, formed relationships and began planning my next moves in life. But for the purposes of this book's story we can pretty much ignore the remainder of 2012.

January 2013 I laid down a writing challenge with a fellow writer, we would pay for our admission to the Midwest Writer's Conference and then have the six months leading up to it to produce 50,000 word drafts with which to attend the conference. Thus I began writing in earnest. I began adapting the screenplay into a prose narrative, I attempted to maintain the tone of offbeat comedy though it was becoming clear that in the more complex form of the novel the characters wanted elaboration. If I was going to maintain my own interest I would have to make the story more about the people and less about the events. This slowed me down considerably as I was still fighting to keep it as the silly farcical thing it had been born as.

I read a lot more novels than I normally did, trying to gain some greater fluency, to get my head into the right space. It worked to a certain degree, though I only managed about 35,000 words by the time of the conference and what I had was a bit choppy.

I entered on the conference with a concept I liked, a solid start on a draft and a tiny pulse of optimism. The conference went well and was interesting, a lot of non-specific "you-can-do-it" encouragement and a decent amount of useful practical information on everything from researching a real world detail to navigating tax time as a freelance writer.

I had paid the extra amount for the privilege of a pitch session with a real working agent. I had my story pitch whittled down to three brief direct sentences which I memorized. I sat down across from the agent, a pleasant and open faced young woman perhaps five years younger than me and I tried to put the picture of the story in her mind clearly and quickly.

The final exam pitch session from back in film school was a very useful reference point and my success in that situation gave a feeling confidence if not complete ease. It translated pretty well. She liked the idea and gave me her card. She asked me to send a sample.

Read PT 7.

Gorracula Stage 5 (Screenplay Completion and the Passage of Time)

So I finished the first draft of Gorracula: A Tale of Science as a screenplay. It ended up a little less zany than I had imagined it when the idea first occurred to me. No Gorilla-fronted rock band, no scenes of him crashing fraternity mixers. But it was still a largely comic horror film. The kind where disbelief is suspended far enough by the middle of the film that when the gorilla sneaks out to see a movie in a trench coat and dark glasses the audience would perhaps only squirm slightly but still maintain enough emotional investment to find the climax compelling.

I sat congratulating myself on finishing it. I went out for a drink with a friend and we toasted an idea begun and completed. It was very nice. But then, as days past and I looked back over it making edits and corrections, I began to feel like a tree fallen in the woods, wondering if I'd made a noise.What's the next step? I wrote a screenplay. Who might care?

I sent it around to outlets and contests advertising for submissions and time passed.

I had another inspiration and began writing a second screenplay more along my own actual cinematic tastes. I imagined it as a mordant surreal social commentary set in a remote 19th century Germanic kingdom. A cross between the wry surrealism of Luis Bunuel and the opulent grotesquerie of Federico Fellini it was about a kingdom under attack and nearly bankrupt that decides to throw a final party for its citizenry before they are invaded. They invite all social classes to the palace and endeavor to use up any and all resources before the enemy can arrive and deprive them of their freedom. But over the course of the night as aristocrats mix with commoners and the military, their pride wounded by the defacto capitulation, become restive, the party begins to self destruct and culminates in a spectacular slapstick blood bath.

I wrote that one too, over the course of the next six moths. And again it was a silent tree fallen in an empty forest. I began to imagine I might one day publish a book of unproduced screenplays and call it "Films not for Production."

Read PT 6.

Gorracula: Stage 4 (Doctor Who Carries Me Through)

List of assests September 2011:
1. Gorracula A Tale of Science 1st full scene.
2. Broad narrative outline and stacks of character notes.
3. Access at local library to four seasons of recent Doctor Who
4. Time

I sat alternating between writing bursts and Doctor Who breaks for the space of a month or so. At first it went slowly. The watch breaks were long and the writing bursts brief. I was not watching it all in order. The library had the seasons split into two-disc packs and very rarely would a full season be checked in at the same time.

So I watched Doctor Who completely out of order. A batch from season one, followed by a few from season three. Then a swing around to four and then back to one. That's how it unfolded for the most of September and it worked as an invigorating diversion that seemed to keep the creative side of my brain energised.

I think the first episodes I saw during that time were the Daleks in Manhattan story arc. I had a rudimentary understanding of the series having seen episodes like Blink and The Lodger and being dropped into stories without complete comprehension is a good way to make the universe of the story seem incredibly vast. You see what's happening and don't know why but look forward to finding the answers. Perhaps as an outgrowth of having to watch things in this way I have come to enjoy the feeling of discovery as all the things you've already seen begin to make more and more sense in the course of watching.

Then finally I got my hands on a complete season. I still had yet to see any of them fully through. I Had most of series one under my belt and then got all of series two in hand having not yet seen any of it.  This may all seem like a digression away from the main narrative of the writing of Gorracula but, at least in its screenplay form, Gorracula is elemtally tied to my experience of watching Doctor Who.

Over the course of watching series two, in the accustomed "Write-watch-write-watch-write" pattern, I banged out two-thirds of the screenplay in about two and a half weeks. I felt like I was writing at a run, ideas formed and materialized on the page alarmingly fast and the time I spent at writing without getting fatigued greatly increased. The energy of creativity and the depth of chemistry and emotion I experienced from that span of episodes was completely inspiring.

This story would mean a lot more if anything had ever come of that screenplay, you know the sort of reminiscence that plays well on the DVD extras, but the fact remains that Doctor Who Series 2, the Rose and 10th doctor arc, powered me like an outboard motor through the process of writing.

I haven't watched it since, waiting for the memory of it to grow dim enough to maybe work like that again.

Read PT 5.

Gorracula Stage 3 (fail to get work but manage to find time)

So I graduated film school with a degree in my hand (metaphorically, they actually mail it to you a month or so later) and an idea in my back pocket. Wanting time to write I headed back home which turned out to be financial/professional suicide but it did have the intended result of affording me time to put Gorracula down on paper.

For the purposes of our final project, (mentioned in the previous post) I'd had to produce a twenty-five page sample of the script. The scene was strong and made me feel powerful (you can't see it but I'm flexing to illustrate as I type this). There's something about writing a thing that makes you laugh...something that has an element of the strange and the sexy, even if no one else ever sees it, you've done that much and it's invigorating. Of course it becomes risky because if you give it someone to read and they don't react in the way you expect you kind of become a pale and writerly version of The Hulk and want to start smashing furniture. There is a maturing process involved in becoming a writer. And a lot of it has to do with not destroying furniture.

So, fastforwarding about three months from film school graduation: following a failed job hunt, failed apartment hunt, two months spent on a couple friends' couch writing morose self-reflexive poetry and a long defeated car ride home, from Orlando to Indiana, I sat in my old room in front of a computer screen. I had the first scene and a stack of notes for the screenplay version of Gorracula a Tale of Science.

And then, like any self-respecting procrastination prone writer, I swiveled my desk chair around to face the TV and flipped on a Doctor Who DVD.

Read Pt 4.

Gorracula Stage 2 (Growing the Seed)

After the long night of shooting for my friends' short film, wherein Gorracula had first sprouted as a good/bad idea worth a few laughs, I made the two mile trek back to my apartment still pounding out the details of Gorracula in my head. It was dominating every thought and it never once bothered me that it might be a stupid idea. Of course it was stupid. That's what made it fun to think about.

That walk was a straight shot along street-lit sidewalks up Semoran Boulevard in the Winter Park area of Orlando. It was too late for the buses to run and I probably would not have taken them anyway. Putting your legs in motion is way better for thinking than dozing in a bus seat or even sitting at home.

By the time I got back to my apartment I had decided it was meant to be a screenplay. In my head Simon Pegg was to play the lead as the scientist, Nick Frost would be either made up or CGI-ed Gollum style to play the Gorilla, and Patricia Clarkson would be my ideal as the cool and alluring English professor/romantic interest. As I fell asleep, and then again over the next few days, I felt like I was watching the movie version over and over in my head. It was pretty hilarious.

In the last month of film school we had to do a group project wherein we built a movie proposal out of a complete concept. I arrived at the first group meeting happy to offer my, by now, three-months-gestating pet project.

During this process it received feedback, group sourced logistical thought, and the logo it currently sports. We went into to our "final exam" pitch meeting and despite a few critiques of short comings in our planning, casting, budgeting etc. we got the "green light" (i.e. we passed the exam). It was a first validation for the idea and entrenched it even further in my mind.

I cannot overstate just how much Gorracula has changed since then. I'll try and elucidate each major stage and decision as this blog unfolds but at that moment (late May 2011) if you'd asked me, Gorracula: A Tale of Science was to be a horror comedy in the style of Shaun of the Dead.

I still sometimes sit back and run the movie version in my head. It's pretty great.

Read PT 3.

Gorracula: Origins

The story begins in film school on a cluttered and busy student film set in Orlando, Fl. that's where the idea was born. It was late spring 2011 and I was an extra on a friend's project.
It was really really late.

They didn't need me for the scene, set at a Halloween party with people in sweaty costumes beneath the production lighting. I went and sat next to Matt, the sound mixer. He pointed at one of the other extras who was dressed as a gorilla, propped against a wall looking passed out.

"This would be a way better movie if the gorilla just went nuts and killed everybody!" He said, joking about the desire for chaos that often accompanies hours and hours of open ended waiting.

"What, like a kill-rilla?" I said, frankly impressed at my own sleep deprived wit.

He laughed and said, "What if it was a vampire?"

"A Gorracula!" I replied increasingly proud of my linguistic prowess.

From there we spun a tale of a gorilla in a college laboratory who learns to speak and becomes a local celebrity. But unbeknownst to anyone he has also been bitten by a radioactive bat in an adjacent lab and at night becomes a blood sucking horror. There was speculation that he might start a rock band called Gorracula and the Killrillas and host sock hops that he then ravages in the throws of bloodlust.

As the story has evolved however it has become a bit more sensible. There's no rock band at least.

Read PT 2.