So today we relax a little…but not too much, as this afternoon we’ll hear back from our production partners, and they’ll have notes on The Ring.
There are always notes. “Notes” in this sense are the changes or suggestions (though when they come from your director, they frequently have the force of commands) that the team would like to have incorporated into your next draft. If you’re very lucky, they’ll make sense. Fortunately, we’re lucky in our production team.
But there have been some notes from people outside our team on this project which caused us to sniff a little. One, from what appear to be the Correctness Police at Channel Four in the UK, regarded one character who dies after, well, let’s call it a run-in with a magical weapon. They were concerned that this behavior might be “imitable”. Yeah, and the would-be imitator is going to get a magical spear-cum-cruise-missile where, exactly? …Some of the C4 notes reminded me forcibly of some of the idiocies we used to suffer at Hanna-Barbera at the hands of the network BS&P (broadcast standards and practices) people who would come in weekly and pass judgment on our scripts. (I particularly remember the BS&P lady who told us we weren’t allowed to tie characters up, but when my story editor Tom [in the depths of irony] suggested that maybe we could chain them up instead, that was fine with her. Go figure.)
Oh well. There are a few other things to do while waiting for the four o’clock phone call. The sink is full of dishes, for one thing. Better get on with it: they won’t just go away by themselves…
