Contradiction

I read an article praising Scott Frank as a script doctor and it put an intrusive thought in my head. It is slightly easier to doctor than to write your own. It’s counterintuitive. Because you want to hire a specialist who is on top of his(her) game to help improve your work. Maybe this triggered me because I have been working as a script doctor and a pitch doctor. A script doctor should obtain superficial power to see not just the flaws, but to be an animal tracker - by the look of the snow had fallen over a pawprint to tell how old and hungry the bear is, thus how many troubles it will cause to catch it.

But the same person directs their own text and the result is unpredictable. Because it comes from a very different place than where the knowledge on dramaturgy is stored. It comes from an itchy urge to tell this story or to annunciate this character, from one’s heart, if you will. And emotions and feelings in this case would mess with the heart. It’s only natural.

And to doctor your own script is not the same thing. Because you're too attached to the characters or let’s say, the sunset scene (🤷🏻‍♀️).

And you are arrogant, because you know how awesome as a doctor you are, so you think that you can get away with things. The others need to play all by the playbook of ruthless dramaturgy but you’re special. And so in front of your nice tight script you put a long unchewable prequel episode describing the character's childhood in an orphanage. Long and boring.

The series dropped on the quarantine and it was like Victorian England - no where to go and

nothing better to do than swallow long and vague descriptions. Afterwards, he even actually said it in the interview - “can you imagine, Netflix even let me keep the long first episode that was completely out of pace.”

Just one scene showing how the main character started to play chess would have made a fine flashback somewhere in the fourth episode, end of story.

Shows like that take so much time to make - 2-3 years. They wouldn’t know about the quarantine and what an ideal combination they made. People were tired of being scared by the news and craved for a quiet place. It even caused a famous Chess shortage on Amazon (ironically, it brought money both to Amazon and Netflix).

Maybe it is only natural to teach (and doctoring is just a much more aggressive teaching) the opposite of what you do yourself. You don’t live by the rules that you preach.

Or is it a good example to see that directing is slightly more difficult than just translating whatever is written to the screen.

20th of January

474 words

Writing the full text almost as it is on the phone on Thursday + proofread on computer Saturday.

Omg!

I feel so full of myself these days🤢 Every inner monologue or a pretend interview that I am having in my head I write down. When normally I would just laugh about it and forget. I constantly panic that I won’t have enough material to write about. On a bright side, I started writing a lot more during the week, and I hope to find peace and confidence one day.