Screenplay redraft

Pretty soon I will be moving out of this dogshit council estate full of jobless bums and crackheads. I've secured a better location, but before I do, I need to do a lot of throwing out. Among the stacks of lever-arch files that I've recently thinned out is one containing six copies of a screenplay, originally wrote in 2005. Once Upon a Time in Great Britain was conceived in 2004 and mostly written in 2005, but I sidelined it when I started blogging at the end of 2006. It's a tale of an intelligent but frustrated graduate who is unwittingly inducted into a terror faction, and who starts to see strange correlations between his life as a student and his life as a terrorist. Eventually I took it to a writers group and started to redraft the whole thing, making it sharper and more natural-sounding.

After a full read-through with what was Writers Connect, a now-disbanded writing feedback group, I wanted a short break before doing a 'final' draft. That short break became some years, and this weekend I went back over the drafts.

In the annotations I made a reminder to check out Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker's SF drama series: a group member had noticed some similarities between the show and my screenplay. At the time I couldn't find it on All4, or Youtube, or anywhere else. So having got a Netflix subscription for Christmas, I've now managed to watch Bandersnatch, the postmodern 80's choose-your-own-adventure story about the computer programmer who finds himself being controlled by a 21st-centry entertainment service called Netflix (or more accurately, you, the viewer making the decisions). This was one of Black Mirror's later releases, but yesterday I managed to watch the pilot episode, National Anthem, about the kidnap of a royal princess and a demand by the hostage-taker for the Prime Minister to... well, do something incredibly degrading. I won't spoil it. But it became almost true, to the point that Brooker admitted, for a moment, that he thought the whole news story was a joke on him.

So, with National Anthem watched, I went back to the screenplay and ran through the drafts. The version I used yesterday seemed to have been updated from the notes on the printed drafts I had on me- corrections I'd written had already been made in the file version- but I went through them all, reading the screenplay six times, making a few minor adjustments. Then what did I do? I found the more recent drafts, with other ideas scrawled in the corner of the pages. I remember going to an organiser's house, having a barbecue, and sitting down and reading out the whole screenplay, with group members taking several parts.

So pretty soon I'm going to have to pencil off a day to go through all those, more updated, copies too.

In other news, my video of Liverpool Comic Con apparently went out on Liverpool TV, a regional channel. Ever seen a stormtrooper dressed as a Scotsman? You have now.

At Sacha's / Golden Orbit's Comic Fair this month they dished out a free horror comic, Tales from the Crypt presents The Vault of Horror. Originally published in 1991, the comic has a 1950's retro feel with some very weird, dated tales. No dates or references to human technology are given, so some of these stories could have taken place any time in the latter half of the 20^th century, but some were set way before the 90s. Entertaining, but a largely silly short story collection.