So, where am I at? I think I’m muddled mentally where I have too much story in my head, and it’s irritating to know that I began loose threads that will never be tied off. So, while I endeavored to hit 100 pages for our next episode, I couldn’t resist going back through the script and whittling down parts that I wrote.
I wanted to have Ray face off with a racist film nemesis (Beardy), but since Ray is at risk as a character already, it doesn’t make sense to build an entire subplot around him. So, that saved a quarter of a page already.
I also revisited the discussion about the heist pre-outbreak and decided to cut all of the conversation about Boone and the dynamite. No one is going to remember any of that when they need to later in the film, so I’m just going to have Boone get introduced late, which will signal to the audience that they don’t have to invest much into his character (and he dies quickly after that anyway). As for the dynamite, I’m thinking that it gets discovered on Bao’s corpse just before the outbreak, and Stan snatches the dynamite up for evidence…? We’ll see.
Also, I had toyed with Bao having a speaking role, but I’ve reverted to him being a mute. Instead of dogs attacking him as a child, he gets brained by an angry neighbor he steals food from. That will set up the protective nature Long has for his brother.
I wasn’t able to go through the entire script, so there’s probably some details that don’t line up, but I’ll fix that next week. For this week’s episode, we’ll probably discuss pages 81-91. I reworked the argument in the hotel room and re-tooled the flashback sequence. The good news is that I’ve gotten us out of the flashback and back into the story proper!
Now Let’s Write This Movie!
Epitaph 1-91