Bootlegger body count, Celtx, and Javier Bardem

Today is Script Day; I spend most of every Tuesday contract-writing on a movie script that my co-writer hopes to sell or produce when we are finished. Later I will post a photoblog from her pawn shop where we have our meetings. When my German pal Joho was in town, he almost shifted around his schedule one day just to accompany me to a Tuesday meeting. "Are you really that interested in our script?" I asked. (He was.) He shrugged a bit and said, "Well, yes, PLUS I want to see the inside of a real American pawn shop!"

The script explores the lives of whiskey bootleggers, hoodlums, and, later, drug dealers in the North Georgia mountains from the 1930s to the 1980s. Every piece of the script has its seed in a story that my co-writer was told as a child growing up there. It begins in 1934 with a young whiskey maker's murder-suicide of his family in protest against being sent to federal prison.

I fell into the project accidentally, but the confidence that my co-writer maintains over the work we have produced is contagious. Several months ago, the only thing I could offer were writing talents and an organizational framework. However, I found an online program called Celtx, which facilitates the writing and planning of several audio-visual media forms -- radio play, film, stage play, comic book. It's free online and comes with a script sharing component and access to an online independent film community.

I may write more technically about Celtx and how it works in another post. Suffice it to say that it has made our process more efficient. Less time formatting the script (one of the things Celtx does) and more time writing the gritty dialog. In our film, we want to capture the structure of The Godfather, the language of Sling Blade, and the tone of No Country for Old Men. Just getting the ultra-creepy-sexiness of Javier Bardem in one scene would be an additional success.

Yes, we are shooting high.