Nothing’s ever simple. Wow, that was deep. I should write a book or something. It will be called, “Adam’s Book of Cliched Folk Sayings.” As I write and write...and write the script for Sudden Death! (I don’t mean to sound excited, that’s just the title... I’m currently on draft 13), one of the major things I continue to try and work on is to simplify. Not dumb it down, not at all... it’s just the the most effective stories are the ones that aren’t too convoluted and don’t try to do too much. They just do what they do extremely well. That’s what I want to go for. The early drafts of this thing, while I think they were funny, were extremely complicated and intricate and I was trying to fit so many ideas and philosophies into it, because honestly, that early on, I didn’t and most writers don’t, know exactly what the story is or what it’s about yet. So we try to fit in everything. We probably believe that we look really smart doing this, “Look at how many ideas I have! Aren’t you impressed that I know all about Hannah Arendt and her ideas about “groupthink?!” No. No one is, and all I’ve done is make things really confusing for the reader, and to water down what should be a great story.

It’s amazing, you would think that having more ideas and complications would make the script stronger, but it really just waters it down. So, I’ve simplified. And the script has just gotten (in my opinion) stronger and stronger with each draft. Yet, it’s still not there. It’s really, really close, don’t get me wrong, but there’s at least one more thing I can do to improve the script... and that’s to work on the ending. Ah, the ending... that’s a story you’ll get some other time. Let’s just say I think people (and me!) will be a lot happier with the ending that will show up in the film versus the one that has been consistent from draft 1 through 12. If I kept it like it was... you all would have wanted to flay me alive when you saw it. Talk about ripping the carpet out from under the audience (but, I’m starting to realize, in a bad way). That’s a story for next time, though.