These last two weeks have covered areas in the movie that I hadn’t fleshed out in my mind. Instead, they were just flashes of images that I strung together, and it somehow all made sense. I thought the pages were going to be a real slog to get through, but — surprisingly — they weren’t. I think as I wrote last week, I could have kept writing, but other time commitments called me away from the script.
So, there are some big changes that you should be aware of.
- Billy (Maggie’s kid) is now Tommy. This is because…
- Prospector #1 is named Bill and Prospector #2 is named Bud. They had too many lines of dialog for me to keep them as generically named characters.
- I extended the exchange in the jail between Long and Everett. We now get a flashback sequence of Long’s life in China. It felt a little odd to throw in a flashback at first, but since we have two more major coming, it can be a theme within the movie.
My only concern at this point is that I’m tying together a bunch of loose storylines as we approach the middle of the movie, and I’m worried that audiences will get confused by all the characters and start wondering what kind of movie they’re watching. I know that I tend to lose focus as a viewer when my mind is expecting one thing and I keep getting something else. I’m crossing my fingers that this comes together in a coherent way.
Now, Let’s Write This Movie!
Epitaph 37-45