Screenwriting Update: I Just Watched A Rough Cut Of My Movie!!!

Most of you know that I’m a screenwriter.  I sold my screenplay, The Retirement Party, to a little studio that went on to make the movie.  The flick has yet to be released and the studio hasn’t returned my calls for well over a year.

Then a couple of weeks ago, completely out of the blue, I received an email from one of the producers asking me to call him.  We played a very frustrating game of phone tag for the better part of a week, until we finally got a chance to talk.  It was an odd scene…I’m out on a quiet cul de sac in Maine, in sub-zero temperatures, talking by cell phone about a movie with a producer, who is on the set of another movie out in Los Angeles.

I can’t get into the details of that conversation because I need to leave that to the lawyers, so there’s still no news on whether the movie will ever be released.  However, this morning, a rough cut of the flick showed up in my inbox.

If none of you have ever seen a rough cut of a movie, let me explain.  There’s no music added yet, some of the effects haven’t been completed, and the sound might be horrible or, in some cases, missing entirely.

Nevertheless, it is a version of the movie from start to finish, and this would be my first chance to see more than just a two minute trailer.  For those of you new to this tale, The Retirement Party is a romantic comedy I wrote about one of my break ups.  The guy in the script is me, and the woman who broke my heart is based on the woman who crushed me in real life.  As you can imagine, watching the movie was a very surreal and personal experience for me.

The producers really got me pretty good early in the film.  Justin (see how I cleverly changed the protagonist’s name from Austin to Justin?) works at a psychiatric hospital just as I did when the real life events in the story occurred.  So, I almost fell off my couch when the establishing shot of the hospital came up on the screen and the sign read “The Austin Hodgens Psychiatric Center”!  Nice inside joke.

I must say, I was rather impressed with the outcome.  They were very loyal to my script aside from two minor changes that annoyed me.  One was that they changed the nickname of the girl who broke Justin’s heart from Pooky (which was what I really called the heart breaker) to Lily.  The other was that a crucial scene at the end of Act Two, which takes place in a grocery store in the script, was set in a laundry room in the film.  This was a scene without sound, so I have no idea if they tinkered with the dialogue as well.  While I normally wouldn’t care much about the setting of a scene, this one was important because Sam’s bizarre shopping habits reveal crucial information about her character.

I’ll come clean and admit that I cried during the one scene that always makes me cry when I read it in the script (how corny is it that the screenwriter cries upon reading his own words???).  The chemistry between Justin (Desmond Phillips) and his best friend Sam (Chelsea Cardwell) was amazing.  Rob Constantine and Ted Huckabee, who portray characters based on two of my best friends from college, made me feel like I was back at NYU hanging out with my boys.  Kelly Natividade, the only actor playing someone who was a complete figment of my imagination, was incredibly charming as Kate, the reporter who travels to Maine to discover if Justin is truly serious about retiring from dating.

UPDATE!  I had to pause in writing this post for an hour because I got a call from Matthias Saunders, the director of The Retirement Party.  He’d seen my status update on Facebook about watching the rough cut, and wanted to talk about it.  He had left the production after filming completed because of a dispute with the production company, so he has never seen a finished version of the film.  We had a very interesting conversation, which I can’t really detail at this point, but he made it clear that he would be willing to discuss returning to the project to oversee the editing.

I did, however, put Matthias on the spot about the laundry room scene and the Pooky change.  (When have you ever watched a movie and then immediately been able to demand that the director explain himself for the issues you had with the film???)  He said they couldn’t find a grocery store that would allow them to film there on the production’s tiny budget, so the laundry room was used instead.

As for the change from Pooky to Lily, he said that in rehearsals, Desmond had a lot of trouble saying the name and it didn’t sound natural coming out of his mouth.  So, Matthias made the executive decision to change it to Lily.

Since I am in a very happy place right now, I will disclose that Matthias and I are working together on another project based on one of my original scripts.  His update on that production was extremely positive, so keep your fingers crossed that I’ll have another screenplay in front of the cameras before the end of the year.

Well, that about wraps up this post.  It was a very busy and positive night in my screenwriting career.  The life of a screenwriter is terribly frustrating and often filled with rejection and feelings of hopelessness.  Tonight was one of those nights that reminded me why I have never given up on my dream.

Dream on, Modern Philosophers!  Don’t ever let anyone discourage you from going after what’s important to you…