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.