Yellow Daze on the way to the Butcher

I finished editing the video footage from the two nights of C.'s YELLOW GIRL reading, from way back in November. Just watched it on our big 20" tv screen (it's big for *us*), and it plays really well, I think. I can finally clear that footage off my hard drive...

Next, I've got to tackle the monster that is my own Butcherhouse Chronicles reading. I haven't seen a frame of the footage I shot for that thing. Guess I've got my summer cut out for me (if I can resist the alluring embrace of suicide).

I'm going to try to put something new up this summer. I think C. thinks I'm slumming trying to do this theater stuff because I've always been about film, but I've always felt the two things satisfy, artistically, in very different ways.

I could sell a screenplay to Paramount (o!, please let me sell a script to Paramount!) and see that script get rewritten by 10 different writers before it goes into production.

In theater, as a writer, I think there is more ownership of the material. It's yours, for good or ill. Sure, the end result can get mucked up as badly as a film can get mucked up, but those words are still yours. That structure is still yours. It is not written by a committee. It is, in more ways, intensely, perhaps unbearably, yours.

Anyway, I'm trying to get this phantom career of mine off the ground. If I wallow the rest of my life in self-pitying obscurity, I'll at least leave the archeologists some curious manuscripts to dig up in 500 years.

(On weekends, I bury my scripts in holes around the city for this purpose.)