Jake – The Movie .com

I don't keep a diary, but I have a document on my laptop that was last modified in September 2007, which is when I must have given up on my first attempt at writing JAKE. It's not a very impressive document - about a page and a half, giving varying details on the first 11 scenes. I must have revised it a couple times, because I have a "Scene 3.5" nestled in there. 

My writing process is not particularly systematic. It involves a lot of vague notes, long walks, and slowly plotting out things in my head until I can see the first third of the movie and the end. Once I have that, I'm normally ready to start writing. Historically, I've literally started writing the script at that point, just starting at page 1 without an outline and working my way forward, watching the movie in my head, almost literally transcribing it. Inevitably, I find that there's scenes that I'm missing, and so they work in, and then the characters or elements I've introduced there start changing the story in an organic way as I go. I'll write til I'm not sure what's supposed to happen next, walk away, then get back to it. Sometimes in a matter of an hour, sometimes days or weeks. 

As I recall, this time I thought I'd try something different, and map the story out scene by scene before writing the script. I say "different" as if it's novel, even though outlining is something every writer is supposed to do before they write. But it was novel. 

One of the interesting discoveries I made doing this is that you can see a lot more of the story in one gulp than you can see when you're writing a script. A quick look at the page and you don't see 45 seconds, you see 5 to 10 minutes. And the more I looked at the page, the less I liked it. 

The problem was this: how do you make a character that is undesirable enough that somebody would want to recast that character with a different actor, without making that character so unlikeable that you don't want to spend time with him?

Now, I'm definitely not somebody who thinks that every movie has to have a conventionally likable protagonist. But there has to be some reason that you want to spend 90-150 minutes in a dark room with them. And I knew I didn't want to spend even five minutes with "Jacob McWorthington", as he was named then. 

And so I put JAKE aside for a few months, not sure what to do with this confusing mess of an idea I'd created.