Hot Cross Buns

The phone rang this morning and I said, "Who in God's name would call at this hour of morning?" It turned out to be 10am. It's the latest I've slept in weeks.

I have to concentrate on the one most salient fact, however: I finished. I had copies made, dropped them off at USC in order to enter the contests, and then came home and collapsed.

As Carolann said when she stopped by the office to drop off her script: "I don't even know what's on these pages."

I find that I am having a real problem keeping down the Naysayer in my head. (I'd call that voice the Critic, but then I'd have a continual vision of a small cartoon version of Jon Lovitz in my head. Which actually might help, come to think of it.) I keep hearing the litany, "It's stupid, it's crap, it's the worst thing ever written. You're not even sure there's a story there. You didn't even include the scene that explains the title, you dimwit hack."

I didn't want to say anything to anyone -- I know that I have a tendency, shall we say, to seem a bit negative, or as Darin puts it, "Yes, Diane, we know there's a cloud, now let's concentrate on the silver lining." -- but I cornered Linda out in the hallway, because she's written a couple of scripts, and I asked her if she felt that way when she was done: spent, stupid, and like she'd just produced the world's biggest load of crap. She said, yes, yes, yes...and she always hates the script when she does. Totally hates it.

Well, that's all good to know, I thought. It did make me feel relieved.

The name of the script, by the way, is Before the Devil Knows and it's the story of a woman who discovers that her mother was married and had a family before she emigrated to the US...and that family seems to have died under horrible circumstances. No, I shan't be posting it.

On a bad note, I discovered that Bernice, of all people, had won one of the scholarships USC offers. A comedy scholarship. Now I haven't read any of her work, but I have seen her productions in Directing class, and they were all bad. Other students who have read her stuff agree that it's bad, and even worse than that, not funny.

And there are several people who are laugh-out-loud funny, so I am doubly pissed off that she won. I didn't enter the contest; I'm not upset I didn't win. I'm upset that deserving people didn't.

Argh.

On an up side, I did contact Kathryn, whom I used to work with at Spring Creek. She's now working for a theatre producer, which is what she's really wanted to do. She's going to read my script, since she can give me professional quality feedback, having done it for several years for Spring Creek.