Thursday 30 August 2007 @ 9:36 am

... Didn't go to bed 'til five in the morning, because I was working on "Red State" - the horror flick we're gonna do after "Zack and Miri Make a Porno".

Woke up around 11. Talked to Jen a bit, then went back to work on the script.

Finished "Red State" around 1-ish. Totally different than anything I've written before. Very fucked up. Shortest script I've ever written, too, as well as the least dialogue-driven (not to say there's not a lot of dialogue in it still; just not nearly as much as I'm used to writing). It's a weird, relentlessly bleak and extremely unsettling affair, that "Red State" script. If you didn't know I wrote it, and you read it, and I told you afterwards that I'd written it, you'd be like "Bullshit."

After letting said story stew in my head for nearly a year, the actual writing of "Red State" didn't take very long at all. Granted, I'd done about twenty pages of an outline that I worked off of, but from the moment I started the actual screenplay (from "INT AIRPORT - DAY") to the moment I finished what I'd consider the first draft ("The End"), it was a five day affair.

When I'd gotten to page 87, I sent it to Scott, Malcolm and Bryan to read. All came back thumbs up. Mosier had excellent notes and suggestions, as per usual, so I went back, stripped stuff out, wrote new stuff, and wound up with 84 pages. 11 pages later, I was done. Like I said: shortest script (in terms of page count) I've ever written.

Mos was out when I finished writing, so the first person I sent the end pages to was Malcolm. Malcolm IM's me back, quite simply, "I dare you." That made me chuckle.