.

Fuck me, what a week.

As I said in my last entry, I've spent all week in Writer/Actor collaboration. I still maintain that it was an interesting, and relatively rewarding experience-- But, man, was it ever a bitch. It was a lot of long hours, a lot of crashing egos, nights of zero sleep, tears, blood, sweat, and plenty of coffee breaks.

The product of which was "Rose Walls" -- A twenty minute, one-act comedy about friendship, unrequited love, and drinking piss. Oh man, was there a lot of dirty talk.

That was Michael Robinson, my instructor's, main note. Make it raunchier. Go for the shock, make it absolutely sexually explicit as possible. There's a line in there about golden showers? Punch it up, and talk about a specific time she peed in some guy's mouth... oh, and add in that he came in his pants afterward. Keep going, farther, farther, push the boundaries. Dirtier. Damn it, get this as fucking nasty as possible. (Keep in mind, however, this man has a role in Uwe Boll's upcoming 'Postal' -- which instantly makes me lose respect for him as a human being.)

So, by Thursday, I had a script together. It made me laugh, but then again, I'm a huge fan of low-brow humor. That morning, the three actors performed it in front of the rest of the class for the first time.

...'Oh my god,' I'm thinking. 'This is so fucking dirty.'

The class seemed to agree. The entire twenty-two minutes was complete, dead, absolute silence. Not even a fucking pity laugh. By the end, they were fucking horrified.

I've marked it down as one of the worst moments of my entire life.

So, of course, this called for an emergency rewrite. I spent the rest of the day trying to tone the whole thing down, removing all of the dirty talk, and replacing it with more suggestion. Of course, what happens when you take the shock value out of a script that RELIES on cheap shock laughs? An even shittier script than you had before. 

...Because Friday morning's run through was even worse than Thursdays. People didn't even pay attention, just giving up on it a few minutes in. After it was over, the actress literally went off on me in front of everyone-- claiming that script was just too gross, and that she didn't want to do it anymore.

I spent that afternoon pretty much destroyed. My writing has taken some pretty big beat-downs in the past-- But, this was a mother fucking extermination. Robinson defended me a bit, claiming that seventy percent of the problem was in the performances-- Which made me feel a little better, I guess. But it's still kind of hard to recover from an earth shattering knock out like that one.

So, ideas began bouncing. We had a three o'clock deadline, which meant that we had no time to try and do another rewrite-- So, improving the performances was about all we were able to do.

By three o'clock, when it was performed again, the actors had their energy up a bit more-- and the run went MUCH smoother, with VERY minimal changes to the fifth draft. It wasn't the best out of the ones that were run, but, we still managed a couple of laughs here and there.

I can deal with that.

It gets performed in front of an audience in a few weeks. I'm nervous, but, I'm hoping that the whole 'laughter is contagious' thing will take effect.

I'm just glad my awkward clitoris rant got significantly trimmed. That's one ODD chunk of dialogue.