Earl and I went through 2 passes with the script last night (him sending scripts, me sending suggestions for revision--many of which he incorporated, much to my delight and surprise); anyway, everyone at last agreed on the changes that needed to be made, and they are being made. They film the first scene tomorrow morning. Good Lord!
I'm going to warn you that when the film premieres, you have to do something that was difficult for me to do the first time I read the script -- put as much of my story out of your mind as possible. It's not that Earl has messed with the spine of the piece -- he hasn't, that's very much in tact -- but he has reshaped several elements in order to make it: A) More readily adaptable to a visual medium; B) Less talky than it was in the short story version (and it was crammed with a lot of dialogue that I knew wasn't going to make it, I have no problems with this); and, C) Be able to shoot it within the time frame and budget he's been given. (The scene with the "masks" has been changed to a very different location, one that -- while at first striking me as completely wrong -- revealed itself to be oddly, even darkly appropriate. As Earl told me in his defense of the change: "Just because it's a 'place of power' doesn't men it has to be all bright and happy and shiny.' True enough: one of the 'places of power' in India is located right smack in the middle of one of the country's worst slums.
While I am more than pleased with all of the script, the 2 things I really like about the adaptation are that, 1) It's an adaptation; it's another person's interpretation of the story, someone who looked at the material with fresh eyes, eyes trained for a completely different medium, and knew what was necessary for a good film and what was not; it's not a dramatization -- that's simply when a filmmaker portrays everything that happens in the story precisely as it happened, event by event, word by word. Dull as hell half the time.
2) Earl's adaptation of my dialogue. While 65% of what's spoken are the words I put into the characters' mouths in the story, Earl has pruned it down to the bare bones; nothing is said that doesn't advance the story or characterization. The dialogue reminds me of early David Mamet (think A Life in the Theatre) where the characters spoke almost in short-hand, or perhaps the work Harold Pinter was doing in the 70's; sparse, with not one word wasted. It's really quite impressive, what he's done, because he's going to show as much as possible, instead of having the characters explain it to one another (and therefore the audience).
This weekend Lucy and I will be filming a short "Visual Essay" that Earl will use on the Stranger Things site to introduce both myself and my work. It's going to be about how it feels to see your first story adapted into a film, and how one reacts upon first seeing the script.
There will be much weeping and screaming on my part:evil
Hopefully, people will get a nice chuckle out of the Intro.
I will continue to keep you posted during the filming.
Gary