A few months back I mentioned I finished a feature-length screenplay. This is not really news per se: I’m sure yours is coming along nicely. But if ya ask me it’s what you do with the finished manuscript that’s important.

Last fall John (the co-writer of the thing) and I took a free half-hour of advice from Robert Hawk, a New York indie heavyweight. He suggested a staged reading. Sounded like a good idea, so when we had draft thirteen locked, we got the ball rolling.

It’s been an interesting experience, and we haven’t even put the thing on yet.

It started with auditions: Sixty-five applicants, mostly women (the majority of roles in the screenplay are for actresses) narrowed down to eight: One exceptional actress to read the protagonist, four fine actresses to read the 30-odd other female roles, two excellent actors for the male parts, and a leather-lunged voice-over specialist to read the “left-hand:” The scene headers and descriptions, about 16,000 words.

After the very first table reading with the full cast, John and I made a crucial discovery: A film script may jump off the page when it is being read silently, but when it’s being read out loud by a narrator and actors those little left-hand descriptions that seem so important to a scene’s definition mostly killed the actor’s momentum. So a big job two weekends ago was to produce a special “Staged Reading” version of the script with lots of left-hand blah-blah cut out to allow unbroken stretches of dialog.

This is all new to us. I can’t tell you who is least experienced with the world of live theater, me or John. Well, I got some Children’s theater work in during High School, and I took a course in direction in college, but neither of us as far as I know has ever taken an acting class.

The most interesting aspect is how the thing has mushroomed in terms of the importance of the event. It was originally intended to workshop the script– just the actors, John and I, running the whole script to find out what works and what doesn’t. As things have turned out, events have somewhat overtaken us: The buzz the story generated (as I mentioned a while ago, it kills every time we pitch it) has got some people interesting in attending the reading. L.A. people.

It’s set to go off in less than two weeks. Stay tuned.

–Skot C.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 7:11 pm and is filed under Acting, Hosts, Motion Pictures, Stage, Theatre. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.