Hit the Big Time LA screening...

So a lot of my friends and colleagues are in LA at the moment for AFM and though I'm not sure I'd be of any use to them at all I do wish I was there, mainly because of this:

The background for anyone irregular followers is that as the finishing touches were being put to Ten Dead Men I was approached by JC Mac who plays Parker in the film about writing a spin-off featuring his character and his partner Garrett, played by Jason Lee Hyde. I agreed and sometime before Christmas 2007 I wrote a short film script - around 15 pages long. This was then taken out of my hands for a while and went through several rewrites before it came back to me (hence I share the writing credit).

The short started shooting in January 2008 while I started work on the feature, which I agreed to do on the basis that I would get sole writing credit (a drama documented here and here back when I used to refer to everyone I worked with by name). Back then it seemed like I'd been really lucky with independent films - Ten Dead Men had started shooting almost immediately after I finished writing the script and now I had a short that had already started filming in LA, Utah and Vegas. I went along to one of the UK shoots on the weekend in February 2008 that they wrapped shooting. I thought that would be it - another short in the can.

It is now November 2009 and the now 29 minute long short has finally been completed. That's around a year and a half in post-production. I don't know the full story, but I do know it's passed through the hands of a number of editors and has run into numerous problems in terms of the UK and US footage being shot in different formats - in other words technical problems that I have no idea about.

While all this was going I was writing the feature script, finishing the first draft in April 2008. I did another couple of drafts that year and a fourth earlier this year (I think it was this year anyway). This week I finished the fifth draft. Overall I'm really happy with it - it's my only all-out comedy script and is therefore a pretty valuable writing sample, and despite having rewritten it five times parts of it still make me laugh when I read through it. There's probably a rule somewhere about cutting the bits that make you, the writer, laugh but I have it on good authority that it made a few other people chuckle too so I think I'm safe.

Whether anything will happen with the feature from here I can't say - I don't even know how the short film turned out yet. But I am looking forward to seeing it and hope the LA screening goes well. If anyone reading this is based in LA and would like to go along feel free send me an e-mail and I'll give you the details. You can watch a brief promo for the short here.