What Came First?

I've written scripts and stories based on a title. Nothing more. I have a script, my first, failed feature film, "Caught In The Rain." I had the title before I had the script. In fact, the title existed almost 8 years before the script idea was ever conceived. It started out as a poem. I use to write a lot of poetry. I was very tortured in my late teens. I had a bunch of notebooks just crammed with one liners and all sorts of nonsensical crap. I took the Jim Morrison approach to my early work one night, while still living with my parents. I attempted to burn all my work in a garbage can, dousing it with some lighter fluid. I was purging my creativity. I didn't make it very far. My mother had her sights set on preserving my work.

Before and after the poetry bit, I wrote short stories. My high school buddies and I made up a fictional CIA team of mercenaries called, "The Death Squad." There were four of them. My character was the linchpin of the group. They all used aliases, but later faked their deaths and returned to the real world, under their real names, to run their team off the reservation. They used money they'd collect during their black ops to fund their intricately devised hideouts and fancy weaponry. They all had specialties and very distinct personalities. Each one of us created our own characters and later, I did most of the writing. But we all did one chapter in this incredibly long epic where we went after the mob bosses in our respective cities and then introduced our character's replacements, who would turn out to be their sons. It was wild. When my friends and I split off, after high school, the storyline broke into two timelines. In one, I was killed by two of the other members of the team and in the other, we split off, amicably and led our own lives. I wrote the latter. A very disgruntled buddy of mine wrote the timeline where I got killed. He killed me. Our friendship was very fractured.

I wrote as much and as often as I could. I carried notebooks for most of my life. My dad bought me a computer early in my teens, an Apple, and I really started to go at it. I started my first novel when I was 17. I never finished it. But there were other false starts. Lots of them.

I didn't always keep a journal, but I threatened to start one frequently. There are fractured bits of time, saved on floppy discs and type written pages all over the place. One could make a fairly accurate progression of my work and my personality with them.

Eventually, when I realized that I wanted to be involved with film, I decided to take the novel and just write a screenplay. It would be easier. I started looking up script formatting and checking out books on filmmaking from the library. Once I got the basic gist of it, I began to dream up ideas for scripts. "Caught In The Rain" came about just before "Boondock Saints" was released, but I didn't move on it then. I waited until I had a video camera and even bought a Steadicam rig to shoot it. I made it about a quarter of the way before the rig broke, my cast bailed and I lost inspiration. I've managed to piece together a scene not too recently during a shoot at the house of my production assistant's cousin. It was the end of the script where the bad guy gets owned. I have to say, for my lack of planning and the bad blocking, it wasn't half bad. I shot the scene myself, had three actors, one with a real gun and managed to get myself in the scene via a VHS tape. It turned out great. I was really hyped that night. I still have the video of the first reading of the script we had at the bar I worked at.

I've done a few things since then. I've written a bunch of stuff and pieces of things I'll include in scripts to come. I still think about writing a novel. I think I've got one good one in me. I've got dozens of scripts that are just ready to be written.

One thing at a time.

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