Monday February 15, 2010

Happy Jack Bauer Day!

I wake up around 8:00 this morning, as I have to be to Tim's by 10:00 so he can do the breaks on my car. I shower, dry off, look up directions to his house, pack up my computer (in case it takes a long time and I need something to do), and am out the door. I swing by a car wash first, as my car is just absolutely fuckin' filthy and I will be embarrassed having someone work on such a nasty looking car. I get it cleaned, make a pit-stop at Dunkin', and head over to Tim's. I get there at exactly 10:00 sharp, one of the few times I'm actually on time for something.

The breaks take literally 45 minutes. My cousin, Carrie, heads out to the garage right as Tim's putting the tires back on. Apparently she fell asleep and just cruised out here to hang out for a bit while he finished, not anticipating it would be this quick. I bullshit with her for a bit and then get in my car to take a trip out and test the new breaks. I get a few blocks from Tim's house and hear absolutely NO metal scraping noises. I am ecstatic, so I shoot a call over to Tim to thank him one last time for saving my ass with this break job, which only ended up costing me about $75 for the parts and I threw Tim $40 for his time. I check my phone and it's only 11:00 AM. I see this as a perfect opportunity to work on the screenplay a bit, so I head over to my old stomping ground at the Caribou Coffee in Darien. Everyone is happy to have me visit, so I bullshit with my old co-workers, grab a quick smoke with one of them, and head back in to do some much needed work, if I wanna secure a possibility of fathering children someday.

The writing goes much better than I anticipated. I wind up working on the script for almost four hours straight and am now about 130 pages in and all I have left is the ending, which should be about another 20-30 pages. This also means I'm going to have to do some major editing to the first draft. They say the average script is about 1 minute per page. So that would be putting my film around the two and a half hour mark, which is not good. This story does not need more than an hour forty to sum up, otherwise I will lose my audience. You have to have a pretty fucking epic story to tell to be able to successfully use up 150 minutes worth of someone's time. And the movies that don't need to be that long that are that long, end up being torn apart by people for having too much filler and not getting to the point. Either way, it's just the first draft, so I'm not too concerned with length at this point. I just want to get every possible idea down and work out the rest whe I read over it. I pack up my shit around 4:00 and head back to the condo.

I get home and cook up some dinner and update the diary. I shoot a call over to Hart and V to make sure they are still coming by to watch the new episode of 24. They confirm that they are. I then hit up a little Wii time and play some tunes on The Beatles: Rock Band. Soon enough, V and Hart show up and we spend the next hour or so switching off playing songs until it's time for Jack Bauer. We wait to watch it until about 8:45, as I've got it recording on the DVR so we can skip commercials. Commercials can ruin an episode of 24, as everything goes so quickly and it sucks when you have to slow it down for 8 minutes in between every good scene.

We watch the episode, which has been by far the best one yet, and spend the next few hours just channel surfing. Everyone cruises around 11:30, and I decide to call it an early night. I do the routine and crash while watching X2.