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.