The Dead Zone
It’s Sunday, July 25th at about 5 in the morning. I curiously awake and eager to get to it. Something changed. Last night, around 7:00 pm.
I’m working through UNTITLED SPACE THRILLER, somewhere near page 80. At this point, you have to have a really good idea of where the ending is because, on the outside, I’ve only got 40 pages to pull it all together. So it’s crunch time.
Suddenly it occurs to me that I’ve had this feeling so many times in the past. THE DEAD ZONE.
The time when doubt creeps in. I wonder…
… Does the story have legs?
… Do I care about the characters?
… Is it cinematic? Can it be MORE cinematic?
And about a thousand other questions that go through my head and I realize that… I’m stalling out. That self-doubt is holding me back.
But what is more important THIS TIME is that I recognize I’ve entered THE DEAD ZONE and I’ve escaped it time and time again… and I’ll escape it this time, as well.
Last night as I was roughing in a scene, it suddenly occurred to me how derivative it was. Almost a beat for beat copy of a scene from EVENT HORIZON (one of my favorite flicks)…
… and I sort of disgusted myself with how… cheap it was. Like I was cheating myself and cheating whoever might read it.
The problem with the story was that it was trying to be too many things, instead of one really good thing. Sure, it worked, but just because it works doesn’t mean it’s good.
Before we started, Alex had commented that “it seems like [the 3rd act] is a different movie from the first 2 acts.” And he was right. But I thought (at the time) it would work because I had a good sense of the pace in my head. On page, though, it wasn’t working.
And so I descended into THE DEAD ZONE.
Once I saw the dreck I had written (the EVENT HORIZON-esque scene) combined with the page count, I realized that 1) I was in THE DEAD ZONE; and 2) The way out (this time) was to make the 3rd act congruous with the first two. KA-BLAM! Done. Out of THE DEAD ZONE!
Of course, out of one, into another. But still…
M A R K