Three Day Weekends

December 20th, 2009Blog0 comments

Oh man, when I was a kid there was nothing better than coming home from school and knowing that you had a three day weekend ahead of you. I’d have an extra day to drink chocolatey Quik and watch Transformers and play Rescue Raiders and Infocom games on my Apple ][e. It was FREEDOM in all caps. They say that youth is wasted on the young, but back then I still felt that time was precious. And having a three day weekend to do whatever — to just play — was the best.

I still feel that sorta exhilaration today when I’ve got a big fat break ahead of me with nothing to do but write. Holy crap, that’s the best. I can sit for hours with my notebook and work stuff out, plug things into the computer, punch in pages, spend the whole day plowing through whatever I’m reading for research or enjoyment.

And that’s the best part of my Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa holiday — lots of days of freedom to get things done.

Like this guy, I now have a stack of scripts to read for work and a stack of scripts to read for friends/acquaintances. Fortunately I’m still at an early phase in my career so I still have time to read plenty of both. And I love to read, so it’s like getting a steady stream of candy for free.

What I love — LOVE LOVE LOVE — is to pick up a friend’s script and read it to find out that it’s really good. I really, really like reading good stuff. Good stuff teaches me things, it shows me what’s possible, it stretches my imagination. It lets me spend time in worlds that I would never even have imagined. I spend a lot of time and money seeking out good books to read. There are often a lot of false starts and disappointments, and it’s hard to find the stuff out there that really knocks your socks off.

The other thing I love about reading a friend’s good script is that I can then call them up and say, “Hey friend, I read your script and I really liked it! What are you doing with it? Do you have any questions for me? What else have you got???” The very last question is the most important, because if I have read one good thing from a person, chances are that they have more good stuff to show me. I’m hooked.

Unfortunately this tends to be a rare situation — I mostly read peoples’ work, assemble a list of notes and ship them back to the writer. Most things need work, and it’s up to the scriptwriter to process them and make changes as he/she sees fit. And I’m always down to read second, third, fourth drafts, but the question remains: Will these scripts get better? I don’t know. It’s not really up to me.

But as a reader, it’s discovering the really good scripts that really makes me happy.

So what are the scripts that really do it for me?

It’s simple: