Day 38: Rewrites & Research
A light day on writing new material, but I did do some rewriting on the latest episode of Everyday Clowns. I was hoping to trim it down a bit but ended up adding a page, bringing it to a total of 17 pages. That's really long for a webisode, and I may have to rethink this down the road. On the plus side though, it establishes a through line for the remainder of the series. Whereas the series up to this point has been a sequence of comic sketches loosely connected with an overall arc, this episode really makes the storyline the priority over the clown routines.
I also did some work in preparing Come Ups for its next couple of readings at Tuesdays@9. This involves formatting the script for a cold reading. Not all the action is necessary, so that can be trimmed up, which makes more room for dialogue. You also want to try and end the reading on a cliffhanger to keep the audience wanting more.
Finally, I did some research on industry script readers to get some coverage on Come Ups, but that is proving a more difficult task than I had hoped for. There are a number of consultants that offer coverage services. Some of them claim they were readers in the past, and some are past writers for both movies and TV. Unfortunately some of those credits date back 30 and 40 years. I'm not sure how up to speed they are on today's industry and what producers are looking for. One consultant promised to flag every speech where a character spoke more than 15 words. 15 words is too many. Nobody will read more than 15 words.
He must hate Aaron Sorkin's scripts. And Quentin Tarantino's. And Tony Kushner's. And Tom Stoppard's. Well, you get the idea. While I agree you should be concise and say no more than is necessary, creating a 15 word cutoff seems rather arbitrary. And with rates ranging up to $700 just for coverage (not script notes), these guys might actually be making more money in retirement than they did as professional TV and Film writers. I think some further research will be required.
