Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Dream Log: Fearing A Shark, Writing A Screenplay

I dreamed that I and some other people were in a hot-air balloon over the ocean. Looking down at the ocean felt like looking up. It felt as if gravity were pushing us up into the basket of the balloon. Looking down/up at the ocean, I saw a huge shark just below/above the surface. I only saw its back, but I thought it might be a great white. I was concerned that someone might fall down/up into the shark's path.

And then I was away from balloons and the ocean and with some prominent American demimonde types. Prominent, and yet unspecified. R Crumb might've been in there somewhere. They hired me to write a remark of Fritz the Cat. But that made no sense for several reasons: Ralph Bakshi, the actual creator of Fritz the Cat, was nowhere around; the unspecified, almost-identified makers of this remake were a different bunch than anyone Ralph has ever run with; I've never seen Fritz the Cat and it wasn't shown to me in preparation for my job here; the original is an animated film and I was writing the screenplay for a live-action movie; and a cat was not among the protagonists in the screenplay I was writing. Just as in another dream I had recently in which I was in the supporting cast of a play starring Danny R McBride, I felt totally unqualified and unprepared, but no-one seemed to question my suitability for the job, so I decided to just hang in there and keep winging it, in large part because I needed the money.

Toward the end of the dream I was negotiating with the producers to add a 2nd screenwriter, without reducing my fee of $10,000. This 2nd writer was going to help me with details, to which I referred as matters of "structural integrity." I was trying to make the case to the producers that the 2nd screenwriter would be money well spent, and I assured them that I had nothing against sharing an equal screen credit with the 2nd writer.

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