Yeah, I'm back. Sat here furious at "delivery" company UPS losing an order I placed for Mothers Day ages ago. Felt a rant coming on so I figured I'd come to this thing and keep y'all up to date on doing's with Expose'.
In some respects it could feel like we've sat still for a while. We've had almost a week since the actors were told they've been short-listed for the pilot, so a whole load of scheduling is going on to figure out when to get them to come over. It's all really boring behind the scenes stuff. (Unless you include the creation of a new phrase - "Turd Fairy" - and yes it will be in the script!) What is interesting though, and what I wanted to concentrate on in this post, is having spoken with our Esteemed Director Richard Reay we've agreed some re-writes are needed on Episode One of the show. A re-write? On my awesomely perfect script? How very dare he!!
In all honesty I already knew. You'd be amazed at the amounts of re-writes I had to do for my first book "Getting Sync'd" (available now in all good book shops and for digital download - #PIMPED! Oh come off, you can't blame me for that! Some Jeffer on eBay is trying to shift copies for £35. (Yeah, good look with that by the way!) Get it on Kindle at the mo it's 77p! That's a saving of £34.23. Not just an awesome read but also good maths!) and even now there's things I would change. With Expose' it's different, at least in this incarnation it is. Richard is a clever guy, and gets where the show is coming from. He's not trying to make it something it's not, and that makes the re-writing an honest joy and not giving me the feeling like I'm butchering my beloved mind-child!
It wasn't the case with the previous incarnation "MidKnight Rising". Yes the script had to be expanded to make a full length feature, and with that I was lucky enough to have a good friend Nick Johnstone fill in a lot of the blanks. The script, as you would expect, was sheer bloody awesomeness. BUT we seemed to be fighting an up-hill struggle in terms of translating that script to the screen. The producer and director saw something different to what myself and Nick, and in all honesty the rest of the hired team saw. Where we saw drama/action/fantasy/comedy, they saw "Carry On Superhero". It was painful, agonising to watch these people pull apart the very premise of the film and reassemble it in to something even Frankenstein's monster would look at and say "you are really dicking around with nature now"! They wanted to make it a straight-forward comedy, and that's not what this is at all. Yes it's funny. in parts, but that's more down to how the characters react to the situations they find themselves in. It's also emotional, dramatic, action-packed, scary! Them trying to make it something it wasn't was a surefire sign that I was working with the wrong people, and in hindsight I should have got out there and then. It wasn't their fault, they were going with their vision for the project. It just...wasn't the right vision!
With what we're doing now, it's a lot clearer. I'm able to work with people who get the concept. So when Richard says "re-write" I know it's coming from a good reason. It's not even that big a deal, more just "structural changes". Thing is what I've done in the last few days has merely increased the awesomeness, and I never thought that was possible. What was originally a 60 page script and should ideally be around 45 is now 63. Now that ain't good maths yo! So a severe amount of literary blood will be split (unless we decide to do a "Twilight: Breaking Dawn"...and by that I mean tell the story over two halves, not make a series of God awful films from a book you wouldn't use as toilet paper 'cos you'd wipe more on than you'd take off!) to try and get this right. I know it won't be perfect, not like it is in my head. In my head the show's already been seen by a billion people and I'm shooting the follow-up. In my head everything is as seen on the paper, every angle is right, every actor perfectly cast, every location perfectly lit. In my head. In the real world I know that won't happen. The characters will look different to what I have in mind because there more than likely isn't an actor that looks like the one in my head. There'll be restrictions on locations, time. Money. Did I mention money? No one's getting a penny for this pilot! There's no budget. We're doing this with nothing, so my mind will have to let quite a few things go. And who knows, maybe we'll see something even more awesome than what's on the page.
I mean that's doubtful, cos I wrote the damn thing, but still Maybe...
In the meantime we've got more rehearsals coming up on Monday with our two cast actors, and by the end of this month we'll be auditioning the rest of the cast (and there's a lot of Potentials there).
Keep watching peeps. Things are heating up!
