...and another one down

Another draft finished. This time, over the weekend Marc Rosenbush and I finished our adaptation of James Morrow's City of Truth. (And by the way, Morrow has a new book out called The Last Witchfinder. I haven't read it yet but Marc has--he finished Sunday, the same day we finished our script--and he reports that it's wonderful, definitely Morrow's best work.)

This was an incredibly tricky piece, and the problems were all built in. I can't say too much about it at this stage, prior to agents and managers and studios seeing it, but anyone who's read the book knows the essential premise: there is a City of Truth where citizens are conditioned to only be able to tell the truth; and there is an underground of liars, to whom the main character turns when his son becomes desperately ill, and the father finds he can't give his son hope without also lying to him. To us, the story was about dogma, and we pushed even further the fundamental sameness between the competing dogma of truth and lies. (I was fascinated to discover, during all this, that during the most recent British elections, there was a new political party called the Veritas Party, which seeks to be "honest, open and straight" and avoid the old parties' "lies and spin." Life imitating art?)

What it meant for us was that, to pick just one example, characters' language became extremely tricky. You cannot have someone in the City of Truth say "Good morning" unless he really truly believes the morning is notably good. Nor can a character say "I'm afraid I can't do that," because of course he wouldn't be afraid therefore he wouldn't say it. We long ago lost track of the number of times we wrote something like that then had to backtrack and correct it.

So now the revision process will begin; but we took so much time mapping everything out in advance that, with any luck at all, revisions will go pretty quickly. We're already putting together a cast list of friends for a reading, and hope to have this ready to go out by the Fall. Similarly, I'm nearly halfway through touch-ups on Beaudry, and--again, with a little bit of luck--that might be ready by Fall as well. It would be very nice indeed to have three scripts, then (including Marathon), ready to roll out the door at once.