The Reading

Monday night went quite smoothly. Everyone arrived, one late (love ya), but only due to non-existent parking. I guess I wasn't prepared to read as much as I did, but duh, I had to read all of the action, and a couple of characters as well. I was tired by the end of the evening. The other half and I had spent all day cleaning and prepping. I was so out of it by Tuesday morning; just exhausted. Strangely enough, not much of my dialogue leapt out at me as "bad" as the actors read. Considering this was the definition of a cold read, I was quite impressed with the work that everyone did. Of particular note, was the guy (I'll leave out names, cuz I don't want people to sue me) playing one of my leads. He was a last minute replacement, but came in and took over the part. I found alot of problems in my action as the read went on; many redundant statements, so those are clearly in need of a fix. But honestly, I didn't find tons of problems with the dialogue. I have yet to complete my review of the recordings we made, so time will tell. It was pretty rewarding to hear my words out loud, and to get some good reaction to some of the characters and situations. In the end, I heard a sarcastic (but well meaning) comment of, "that was a nice light piece", or something in that vein. Exactly what I wanted to hear. One actor's read of a character, opened up a new possibility for that character. It's only a supporting role, but I liked the read, so the character got a bit of that outlook input into their words.

I've already begun my rewrite; based on info I took away from the read and from the comments of friends that have already read it. I'm on page 15 in the script; as far as revising it. This is going to be time consuming, but I have to remind myself that it's all there. It just needs to be gutted and cleaned.