Journal entries with ILY in the titles are about the short screen musical
I LOVE YOU, I'M SORRY, AND I'LL NEVER DO IT AGAIN,
currently in pre-production.

While it is true that Mark Alan Miller is a genius, it is less true that I was able to make my revised story work. It made more sense, but the cost was a lot of exposition and too much story convolution for an 8-minute short film.

Here is a new revision, which accomplishes two things. First, it addresses some of the little issues with the previous draft. The most important of these was that the amount of money implied by Clarisse's final dialogue ("Your daughter needed shoes...") wasn't consistent with the level of punishment being doled out by the Thugs.

You'll also notice I've called out the vignettes as "VIGNETTE." This is because one of my choreographer interviews made it clear to me that when I said "the vignettes," it wasn't clear what I was talking about.

Mark's observation that the ending could be taken as homophobic is dead on--but I'm going to address it in the direction, not the script. It just took too much workaround, and for both aesthetic and budgetary reasons, I need to get in, get out, and be done.

But the biggest change is the addition of the character of AGNES. As it reads now, you might wonder why I'm spending so much time with her. The answer is that I decided to make all the dialogue sung, and the AGNES and CLARISSE sections will be done as opera improvs. (The side-by-side dialogue between AGNES and CLARISSE, which is meant to imply overlapping voices, is spaced a little confusingly because Final Draft's PDF output engine doesn't handle it well. Sorry about that.)

What's an opera improv? Glad you asked. It's an improv, only operatic. I first encountered it when we went to see a group in NY called PLAY IT BY EAR. One of their schticks was improvised singing (with accompaniment) of short poems written on the spot by the audience. They picked one of Kathleen's, the night we went, and this was my first introduction (though I wouldn't know it until a year later) to the lovely and talented Mr. Larry Picard.

Who knew opera singers could improvise? Since then I've incorporated opera improv into my work as much as I could--which isn't all that much, but it worked great in CREDO, as well as in the soundtrack of CUPID AND PSYCHE (which you can't hear yet), and I love the idea that all the dialogue in I LOVE YOU, I'M SORRY will be sung--except for the musical number itself, which is patter.

Fran Toliver has consented to play AGNES. Kathleen will be CLARISSE. Larry Picard and Blake Arnold are the THUGS. All but Blake are experienced opera improvisers, and Blake's funny enough to pull it off as a non-singer.

This week I'm contacting references for the choreography and DP positions. I expect to have something to tell you within the next few days.

And I still don't have an EDDIE. I'd like to have a recognizable face in that role, whether from stage or screen. Anybody know anybody?

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