Beneath the rock

Alright, I don't have a lot to say, but I feel terrible that I've left the blog go unfed and unwatered for so long, so let me cough up a few syllables to update the world.

Psychopathia just keeps chugging along. The Atlanta Film Festival screening was so successful that the film has been invited to play at the Atlanta Underground Film Festival in late August. Don't worry, information will be provided if and when that date comes through.

All of my spare time has been consumed with reading and writing. Feeding my head and finishing up a new script. Upon advice from counsel, I'm moving away from Victorian debauchery for a while (but only for a while) and concentrating on a more contemporary, down-to-earth type story. The result is Eden, Alabama, a comedy set in the 1960s South -- but not your typical sweet tea, coming-of-age story. Not by a long shot.

It isn't completely official yet, but it appears that the script has been chosen for the 2007 Brave New Works Festival A biennial program of the Playwriting Center of Theater Emory, Brave New Works is a play development lab in which emerging and established writers intensively workshop their plays (and screenplays), which are then presented to the public as staged readings.

It really runs contrary to my nature to discuss something in advance like that -- as I am a firm believer in the destructive power of the jinx -- but I'm trying to break my old habits and learn some new tricks.

Previously I have been one of those filmmakers who keeps the film squirreled away inside my head and gradually revealed to the cast and crew on a need-to-know basis. Brave New Works offers the welcome challenge of having the entire screenplay laid bare to every actor, every collaborator, and opened up for discussion and development. Rather than conceptualizing a film's visual style and then building a narrative within it, I will now reverse the process and focus my primary energies on plot structure, character, dialogue, conflict... to create a script that is bullet-proof and water-tight.

Originally I had planned to introduce a lot of the script's visual stylings into the staged readings (integrating projected video, etc. because the script includes several films-within-the-film). But I quickly realized that if I'm going to do this, I've got to do it without a crutch. So the script will have to sink or swim without the aid of visual embellishments.

Okay, now that you see the enormity of the challenge, you'll understand if I'll disappear for a few more weeks and keep hammering.

Where I've been hiding

Greetings, friends and loyal readers.

I just wanted to post an update so you wouldn't think I had totally vanished from blogdom. I've just been taking advantage of the down-time between Psychopathia's East Coast runs (which concluded in late June) and the West Coast runs (which start in early August) to work on new projects.

Psychopathia has opened a few doors, and I want to stick my foot in them (or at least a script) before they slam shut again. So I've been devoting my scant spare time to working on my two scripts. I'm really happy with how they're shaping up and can't wait to start workshopping them in the Fall. There's a good chance that one of them will be performed in Atlanta in February 2007 as a staged reading. Details will surely be provided if this comes to pass.