Lights, Camera...

...and, WE'RE ROLLING!

Okay, "rolling" is a deceptive term, as the word implies a quick motion. I am learning (albeit, quickly), that there is nothing fast about making a movie. But as long as I feel like I am making a teeny tiny bit of progress each day, I can live with that.

So, how long has this been in the works, you ask? Believe it or not, it started three years ago. One morning, I woke up and I imagined a story from beginning to end, a complicated romantic story with a few twists and turns and plenty of amusing characters, all set within the beautiful, boisterous borders of Baltimore, Maryland.

Though I have enjoyed writing for my entire life, my attention span had never been long enough or strong enough to withstand writing anything more than 20 pages or so before I would be distracted by another project. So, I decided, I had best write this new story down as quickly as possible, before I lose it. The first draft of the script was completed in 30 days, in December of 2004.

It was good. I was happy with it. I honestly felt it was better than a lot of the formulaic romantic comedies out there with big names attached to them ("Runaway Bride," I'm looking at you...). But, something wasn't ringing true. It was too tidy, the ending was too perfect. Life is messy! And messy is funny. Messy is good, embrace the mess! But I couldn't put my finger on it. I didn't know where to go with it.

I knew it would come to me in its own sweet time, so it gathered dust for almost a year while I waited for my, "Eureka!" moment. It finally came, almost exactly a year later.

The night of my annual Holiday Gala of 2005, (the best party in Baltimore, as anyone who has attended will attest to,) one of the first guests to arrive was my dear friend Thom Hickling. Thom was in the band, so he came early to set up the equipment. As he was hanging up his coat on the rack, he said something that struck me like a bolt of lightning. I knew just where to take the script now! I was so excited I could hardly wait to start writing. But, it was the holidays, and we all know how that goes, and three days after Christmas I was leaving town to spend three weeks in Europe. But that was all right, it would give my subconscious time to percolate this new information.

Tragically, two days after Christmas, the day before I was leaving for Europe, I received a phone call from Thom's best friend, Tucker. Thom had been killed in a car accident in Zambia, Africa, where he had been visiting his daughter for the holidays (http://www.thomhickling.com/). I was devastated.

What Thom never knew was that I had written him into the script, as himself. I hadn't told anyone about the script at that point. But I had never imagined anyone playing Thom except Thom. If you had ever met him, you know what I mean. I abandoned the script, and all thoughts of rewriting it. There didn't seem to be any point. I couldn't think about Thom without crying, which does not make for good comedy writing.

Life, fate, whatever you want to call it, has its own plan, though, and for me at least, it always seems to fall into place the way it should. The summer following Thom's death, July of 2006 to be exact, I met a great person by chance. I had never met him before, but there was something about him. He was kind and funny, and it seemed impossible for him to speak without smiling. When he talked to you, you felt like you were the only person in the room, and whatever it was that you were saying seemed very important to him. There was something familiar about the twinkle in his eye.

After getting to know him a little better over two or three weeks, I realized what made me so comfortable with him. Above and beyond his own charms, this man reminded me very much of my friend Thom.

I was reenergized. It is difficult for me to write a character without attaching someone I know in real life to that character. When Thom died, I couldn't write about him anymore. It was too hard to imagine what he might say in a situation when all I could focus on was how sad I was that I would never hear him say anything again. But now I had someone that I could imagine as Thom, and I could write again. It still needed time to percolate, but I was on my way.

I made a complete overhaul of the script, which now bears little resemblance to the original draft. And then I wrote it again. And then I tweaked it. And then I tweaked it again. And I am still tweaking. And I am learning that I won't be done tweaking until the whole thing is, "in the can". "In the can," is a good thing. I am really looking forward to, "in the can."