The Story So Far Pt.2

At this point James and I had to wait awhile to find out if our submission would be chosen. For some reason this was particularly hard on James. He even began to doubt the level of our genius. I'm a cocky little punk so I never wavered. But, to cheer him I had a great idea: regardless of whether or not our little brain child was chosen, we'd make and film our own version of it. This cheered James up for the simple reason that it gave him another creative outlet to focus on. Slowly he became more and more excited about the possibility. Then, on December 29th we got the e-mail telling us we'd been chosen. I was chosen twice due to my secondary and tertiary submissions but that's a gloat for another time and place. We were invited to the first rehearsal of the one act, but I was unable to attend. I called James afterward and he was very excited about the direction that Mrs. Howe was taking it.

I knew nothing throughout the entire process. I'd been out of Master's for four years and only knew who one of the cast members was. I was not nervous in the least despite this however. I was incredibly excited. I had written and performed things in the past but I'd never written something and handed it off to be used by someone else before.

Opening night arrived. We'd been talking about this thing for over a month so we had a number of people almost as ready to see it as we were. Now our only nerves were that we'd built too much of a hype and people would be disappointed. It was not to be. The little one act was incredibly popular, even with those who didn't know about it.

James and I basked in the adulation for a little while but our creativity would not remain dormant. I asked him about his vision for filming this thing. We began discussing options for when and who we'd want to help us, then I just casually made the comment that we would no longer be working with a time limit and we could probably add some stuff to make the plot and characters more developed. I've known James long enough to know that I had said something intriguing because I saw a mental click in his face. I had meant a mere extra five to ten minutes, but he was now thinking much much bigger. "What if we made this thing full length?" I responded, "That's risky, difficult, and crazy. I like it."

I went home but under strange circumstances, this time my brain was not buzzing. I was racking my brain but I could not figure out how to seriously extend this very basic story. Two days went by and I had nothing. Then, late at night, it dawned on me; that story was fine. It didn't need any changes. No, what this needed was more stories. Claire the understudy was not the only character in this show. We had Helena the diva, Toni the director, Addison the co-star, Parker the stage manager, and Sam the wisened actress. The original actors played these small parts so well that finding out more about them was intriguing. I told James this plan the next day only to be told, "Yeah, that's what I meant." Grumble.

Two weeks later, on a Friday, in a snowstorm, at about 1 PM, I arrived at James house, ready to work. We locked ourselves in his room, pulled out the post its and set to work. Six hours later, we emerged. The original plot outline was written out on eleven post its and had six characters. We had extended that to twenty-eight post its and sixteen characters.

This time James knew how I worked and handed it off to me. I began writing like a fiend. Eight days later, I had taken a mere eleven page script and turned it into an eight-two page monster as well as added fourteen characters to the already added ten. All that was left was rewrites and then casting.

-T.J. Mercer