In my continuing thoughts on the book and it's characters, I gave some more thought to the "Cowgirl" character I mentioned a few posts back, and I might have an idea. Actually, it's a collision of ideas. During my seven year tenure in the Libbyverse, I created a few characters to fill out the world, and I became five of them myself (all five on Delphi, four of them on AIM). While I'm absolutely comfortable in Libby's shoes, and can slide into that character with ease, my best performances were probably in my portrayal of her younger sister Jillian, otherwise known as The Jill. To get into her character I had to adopt an entirely different mindset and a different way of speaking, which included using some abstract sentence structure at times. Of the four of them, she's definitely the most fun to do.
And I was thinking, it would be further fun if I had a character in the book somewhere who spoke the way I write for Jillian. Then that thought bumped into the Cowgirl idea and smushed together. So now this Cowgirl person pretty much = The Jill, albeit toned down a bit. For visual sake, we're talking about this girl:
Before you ask, I have no idea who this girl really is. I found this picture back in 2000 when the Jillian character was created after scrounging around some questionable and disreputable websites. If I were doing this now, I'd just plunder someone's Myspace page, but that option didn't exist then.
I still don't have a clear thought on who or what Cowgirl is, except she's probably going to be used in the Diner somewhere or other, and will only be a minor, peripheral character, as the center of her own universe with a lot of people in orbit around her. She'll be around just enough for me to work in some of my favorite Jillisms, such as "It ain't no thing" or "That's pretty fucken badass, son" or "Yeah! Pulverize that shit!". But so far this is just a random idea without much of an anchor.
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I may have found a new hero, having just watched the vicious and brilliant Thank You For Smoking, in the form of Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhardt), who is a lobbyist and spin doctor for Big Tobacco, and is one hell of an arguer. Wow, I loved that movie, and it totally wasn't what I was expecting. I'll tell you something, though, when it was done I had a big craving for a cigarette. So I went outside and had two.
Thank you for smoking.
You're welcome.
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It occurs to me that this new baby is going to be something special. Not only will it be the product of two super-genius scientists, but based on the projected due date it's going to be a Virgo. And we all know what that means, don't we? Those two are in for some very interesting times.
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While proofing the packets of Season Two late last night I found a couple of things. There were two spots on the same page where I accidentally dropped the quotation marks, so I had to draw them in with my pen. And I found a minor mistake, too. It's miniscule, and doesn't affect anything important, but it bugs the piss out of me. When you get to a paragraph discussing Ben's ex-girlfriends, that's where it is. During this rewrite I changed "Karen" to "Katrina", but in one single paragraph I have one Katrina and two Karens. So when you see Karen, think Katrina, because that's what it's supposed to be. I'm going in to fix that blunder tomorrow and re-save it to the disk, but this edition of Season Two is just going to have to live with that mistake.
It was a little deflating to discover those boo-boos now rather than BEFORE I printed those chapters out. Sometime in the near future I'm going to give the entire thirteen chapters a quick read-through with an eye towards fixing any other similar gaffes that may have made it through. Dammit.
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Sometimes while woolgathering I think about what the movie version of the book might be like. I wouldn't even know how to write the screenplay for it. I'm not a screenwriter (currently), and the idea of trying to tackle what's going to be a lengthy piece of work and smushing it into movie size is somewhat daunting, and that's not even taking into account trying to figure out how to work Chapter 2 into the mix. I'll leave that for someone else after I sell the rights to the book to some studio and make a good chunk of money.
Well, I can dream, can't I?
I can't cast it either. The film would require a fairly young cast, and I'm not totally up on what young actors are out there right now. The hardest part would be figuring out the three leads. Kelly would probably be somewhat easy to cast, as he's pretty much an average 19 year old, but I can't do it. It's hard enough writing myself into a book as it is without giving thought to who would play me in a movie version. My ego isn't designed to cover that sort of thing.
I don't think Alyssa would be too tough either. We just need someone who can play a femme fatale with all kinds of hidden agendas ... without playing her too over the top. There's actually a lot of subtlety in the character, and the wrong actress would turn her into a cartoon character.
Emma is the hard one. The film would have to have *just* the right actress for her part or the entire enterprise would fall apart. I'm thinking of something like Kate Hudson's amazing performance as Penny Lane in Almost Famous. Penny Lane and Emma are pretty far apart, yes, but check out the extended bootleg version of the movie (which is so good it breaks my star rating scale) and pay special attention to 1) the birthday party scene, and especially the aftermath, 2) the scene where Penny shows up at the restaraunt, and 3) the resulting scene in her hotel room ... and then tell me someone like her wouldn't be great for Emma.
Based on Evan Rachel Wood's equally awesome performance in Thirteen, I think Miss Wood would have made a terrific younger version of Emma for the Chapter 2 scenes. Come to think of it, she might be the right age now to play the regular Emma. Hmmm.
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Speaking of movies I love, I was thinking about Elizabethtown earlier today, and specifically the character of Claire. I wasn't sure about it last summer, but the more I think about it, Jennifer really was a Claire type in terms of the intervention she staged in my life. Let's think about it. Last year, just before I met Jen I was at an all-time low -- so low that even the latter half of 1998 would have trouble competing -- and then along came Jen. The state that Jen found me in at LSI is very comparable to the state that Claire found Drew in on that plane. And from almost the first moment Jen started taking in interest in finding out why I was that way. And in Claire like fashion, she stepped in and rearranged all the pieces to put me on a better path.
I know this blog wasn't active during the earliest interactions with Jen, but there were some really topsy-turvy times with that girl in the early going. One line from the movie -- "You're always trying to break up with me, and we're not even together." -- is a pretty good summary of what was going on then. And that would have been Jen saying that to me, by the way, not the other way around. It got more complicated later, of course. During the two months that preceded the grand re-opening of Stray Bullets, though, I was resistant to her, and it took her a while to break through my formidable defenses. But she was persistant, and peculiar, just like Claire, and she got through.
I still can't find that phone number.
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That's all for tonight, folks.
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