While attempting to keep a regular journal of my trip to Hollywood and its aftermath, it would be two days before I made a new entry to my diary. It was to say that the legal papers had arrived plus Les the Lawyer called to follow up. I learned the Warners’ lawyer is located near where I work in Manhattan (“Maybe when they cut the check I can just run over and pick it up. Ha-ha.”). Les is covering all the bases on this script sale; payments for daytime serial rights (wha?), credit-based bonuses, extra 1st-class tickets for travel if needed. On 7/20, I finished and printed out a full draft of “Pee Wee’s Christmas Caper” (Yeah, we never did settle on a title).
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Continuing in my diary...My next journal entry is 6 days later, to mark the point where I was getting the first waves of notes on my new script pages. Going into the weekend, Kevin called, telling me he finished the pages and I did “OK.” But he felt I left out some things; Pee Wee’s decision to take the case seems rushed. Trench coat gags weren’t elaborate enough (think Harpo Marx). Pee Wee winds up taking a backseat to the elf character, Tweedle, in the end of the first 45 pages. We need to see Pee Wee playing detective; that was the hook, Pee Wee as a private eye. Looking at my journal (as we've been doing here), I was home working on a draft of “Pee Wee’s Christmas Adventure” but other things were going on and I was starting to make notes of that. Face it, my life is not that interesting and I had to start doing something to justify my diary. I had returned from my 3-day LA jaunt (details of which can be found here) but the writing muse was apparently still on the West Coast. I was not tackling the new draft of my script as quickly as I ought. Granted, I had only been home a couple of days, but this was MY BIG BREAK and I needed to put on my big boy writer pants. So I made a big decision. I was going to buy the new AtariWriter program! As I was saying here, I had been keeping a journal of my big break in Hollywood. My diary keeping--er, journal keeping--is not very consistent. It was 3 days until my next entry (6/25/90) after I arrived home. I attempted to summarize the previous days: As noted earlier in part 1 and earlier in part 2, the Warner meeting ran for 90 minutes and was chock full of new ideas. At the end of the day, back in my room, I ran out of reasons to procrastinate and started working on the notes I had taken from my meeting for “an updated Pee Wee outline” (the first mention in my journal of Pee Wee). Turns out it was a good thing I did finally get around to that. One of the things I packed was my portable manual typewriter and supplies. While packing for the trip, I truly wondered if bringing all that was too much. Turns out it wasn’t. I had to wade through all the notes, use them to retool the story and type up a new treatment for the meeting they scheduled for the next day. And if you ever saw my handwriting you’d know why bringing a typewriter was a good thing. Part 1 Upon waking in Hollywood, I began my journal detailing the trip west. Mostly the food available on my 1st class flight (also my last 1st class flight) and how things look from the sky. Plans were made for my first day in Hollywood. Turns out, not much... I’ve been keeping a diary, er, journal since June 1990. Nothing fancy, just a marble composition notebook, the kind that I used to buy for school (the inspiration for my character’s journal in Novel Concept or vice versa). I was about to embark on my first (pronounced “only”) trip to Hollywood. I thought I would need to record the events and my thoughts, the better to help future biographers when they did their stories about “noted screenwriter Dan Fiorella.” Since the likelihood of that is rapidly diminishing, I got the urge to pull out the old books and look them over. I haven’t read them in years. I want to go through them and see if I can track a path, see the arc of my development. Or, perhaps, realize where I went wrong (Or at least, not right enough). Will I bare my soul? Unlikely. With I note things that happen to me and my reactions at the time and now? Yeah, that seems doable. |
Dan FiorellaFreelance writer, still hacking away. Archives
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