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Thursday, March 30, 2006
JOHN AUGUST'S WORST WORKING HABIT 

From "10 Things I Hate About Me" posted on the great blog by the screenwriter of Go, Big Fish, and Corpse Bride, among others:

Particularly when I’m re-writing a script, I suffer from what my friend John Gatins refers to as the line-painter dilemma. Here’s the short version:

A guy is hired to paint the yellow line down the middle of a country road. The first day, he paints five miles. His supervisor is impressed. The second day, he only paints two miles. His supervisor thinks, “Well, maybe he had a bad day.” But the third day, the guy only paints half a mile. The supervisor asks the guy what’s wrong — why is he getting so much less done?

“Well,” the guy says, “I have to keep walking back to the paint can.”

The screenwriting equivalent, of course, is that at the start of each day’s work, one’s instinct is to go back to page one and read-slash-revise up to where you left off. Which is a very counter-productive habit.


# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/30/2006 12:22:00 PM
Comments (4)

 
My paintings are never finished. I decide to stop. Deadlines certainly help (I'm smiling).
# posted by Anonymous @ 3/30/2006 4:26 PM  

 
Someone once said to me about producing, "You never finish a film, you abandon it." I've always remembered that... particularly in year seven after the film's completion when some foreign distributor is calling because they've lost the slides or something like that.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/30/2006 10:51 PM  

 
i think stanley kubrick said something similar also, that a "film is never finished, only abandoned. "
# posted by Wyatt Ben Bernstein @ 4/02/2006 10:06 PM  

 
If you're George Lucas, you never abandon it, you just come back and continue to work on it 20 years later.
# posted by Josh Boelter @ 4/03/2006 12:42 PM  


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