Stories

My sleep schedule is messed up, to put it mildly.  At any rate, I fell asleep early, then woke up some time during the 1 o'clock hour and decided I needed to re-read the screenplay, and also, try to format it to fit on fewer pages, so that I could print it and make notes on it.  That took until after 4 am, and I fell back asleep and then woke up from a dream ("Thelma and Louise" was somehow entwined in the dream) and sat straight up and said, "Oh, God, it's almost 8."  I was supposed to be somewhere at 8:30.  I did make it.  More of the interview project I'm working on, and I had to be on camera today, so I felt like I wanted to wash my hair.  It went well.  At least one person I wanted to keep interviewing, on tangential subjects, but didn't have the time.

This project is more targeted than the one I still want: I want to hear about people's lives, oral histories while they are still alive.  All of which stems from going to a lot of memorial services and realizing how little we really know the people in our lives.  How we only know them at the stage of life where we interact, but they have this whole other history that made them who they are.  Part of it is that I feel we are all so quick to judge one another, especially people we've never met, as if we have some authority, and we know so little about anyone.  But knowing someone takes effort.  Putting a label on someone, or a whole group of someones, is easier, because then we have a box where we "understand" and can move onto the next thing.  I get it, we're busy, have other things to do.  But we're also complicated, we want someone to be all bad or all good, but none of us are that.  Anyway, I''m not asking those questions (much) right now, I'm supposed to be following a script (for editing purposes), but some people want to go off script, and some people I want to go off-script with.  And it all might be cut, but at least I got to have the conversation with them once.  (I'm conducting the interviews, for most of it.)

As far as the screenplay goes, I am liking the story more.  And since I had the option to choose, I chose Thelma because she's the one I'd be least likely to be cast as, so it's more of a challenge.  I think we all have the seeds of the characters within us, it's a matter of accessing it.  And what I have of her in me, is repressed, so...it'll be a challenge.  I like the characters, it's just the whole "women have to be saints, or sinners" thing, that they had to die to win.  I do get why that happens in the story.  For Thelma, once she was "free" going back to her old life wasn't an option.  It was more of the larger options for women that bothered me.

I've also heard that the original ending didn't have them die, but at some point in the process it was decided that that was the ending that was called for.  And escape doesn't make sense, not in the context of the rest of the story.

Anyway, got a lot of work to do.  And I need to read another play, and deal with groceries/cooking.  And god, is it gorgeous out today.  (I can take ol' Bill to the park, but I'm waiting for laundry.)