The Revamp — Week 5: When the Plan Went to Hell

I started this week with one of those schedules that makes you feel competent just looking at it.

Workouts mapped out. Runs mapped out. Meditation and breathwork in the mornings. Reading at night. Work hours protected. Calls scheduled around them. Food, groceries, grooming, clothes to list, scripts to revise, people to follow up with, apartment cleaning, Austin prep. Charlie had his walks. The dog had more structure than some corporations.

There was a place for everything.

Then the week started.

And almost immediately the thing became less about whether I could follow a meticulous schedule and more about what happened when I couldn't.

That has usually been where I lose. Not because something goes wrong. Something always goes wrong. It's because I have a bad habit of treating disruption like permission. Miss the workout, the day is compromised. Miss two workouts, apparently I no longer exercise. Stay up too late because something happened with work, then the morning routine goes, then meditation goes, then reading goes, and pretty soon I'm standing in the wreckage of a Wednesday acting like Monday happened during another presidential administration.

This week didn't work like that.

I got into the gym. I ran. I meditated. I did the breathwork. Not according to the beautiful little fantasy schedule I had built before the week began, and not every single time I had intended to, but enough that those things began functioning differently in my head. They stopped being obligations that required perfect circumstances and became places where I could put some control when everything else was moving.

That may be the most useful thing I've learned from the Revamp so far.

The week got fucking busy.

BIRDTOWN, which for a long time existed mostly as a screenplay and whatever hopes I attached to it, suddenly had a small economy growing around it. Producers. Film offices. Lawyers. Budget people. Incentive people. Local economic-development people. Chambers of commerce. People who make movies in Missouri. People who know what happens when somebody actually tries to make one.

I had calls. Then calls produced other calls.

I spoke with Chimaeric and sent them the screenplay. I talked with people who have actually produced movies in Missouri. I talked with David Draper about money, attachments, getting to the first yes and what might make the project easier for somebody else to say yes to. I talked with entertainment counsel about what it means to stop treating a movie as something I wrote and start treating it as a business that needs ownership, agreements, chain of title and an entity around it.

Suddenly I was talking about an LLC.

Suddenly I was talking about transferring the screenplay into that LLC.

Suddenly there were numbers attached to all the things I had previously referred to collectively as "the business stuff."

One legal proposal came in around $7,500. A professional budget and schedule quote came in at $3,800. Other costs started lining up behind them. Copyrights. Fiscal sponsorship. Accounting. Incentive administration. Whatever else I still don't know enough to know I don't know.

This is how the idea of raising $20,000–$25,000 in development money became less theoretical.

I'm not raising twenty-five grand because I would like twenty-five grand. I'm trying to build the infrastructure that lets me answer questions I am already being asked.

What's the budget?

How much is financed?

What's the production structure?

Who's attached?

When do you shoot?

For a while, the honest answer to almost all of those was some version of, "I'm working on it."

Now I am actually working on it.

Film Independent confirmed that fiscal sponsorship can be used for development. Entertainment Partners started explaining how Missouri qualified spend, payroll and incentives need to be reflected in the budget. I started talking with Perryville about whether it could be a real production base rather than a place I circle on a tax-credit map. The Cape Girardeau Chamber agreed to talk about local business relationships. The St. Louis Film Office got involved. A professional line producer/budgeter agreed to talk through what a usable Missouri budget would look like.

None of that means the movie is financed.

Nobody should confuse activity with an announcement.

There isn't a start date. There isn't a cast. There isn't a million-dollar check sitting on a desk. What there is now is a growing number of people who know the movie exists and are willing to tell me what would have to happen next.

That is a very different place from where I was a month ago.

It is also how a carefully planned week turns into something that looks like it was scheduled by a man being chased through an airport.

The surprising part was what happened to the rest of the Revamp while all of this was going on.

It didn't disappear.

Not completely. Not this time.

There were mornings when I got up and did the meditation and breathwork because I knew I couldn't control what email would come in later, whether somebody would like a script, whether a lawyer's proposal would be affordable, whether a call would produce anything useful. But I could sit there for ten minutes and breathe.

There were workouts that became useful for the same reason. I didn't need them to prove anything. I needed an hour where the instructions were extremely simple. Pick the thing up. Put it down. Do it again. Move to the next thing.

Running was similar. There is something very reassuring about an activity whose central premise is just: keep moving forward until you're done.

That is different from how I've treated this stuff before.

Usually exercise and meditation are among the first things sacrificed when I decide something "important" is happening. Career work gets promoted to emergency status. Everything involving my actual body gets treated like an elective.

This week, the chaos made those things feel more necessary.

I couldn't make every conversation end the way I wanted. I couldn't make somebody finance a movie. I couldn't make somebody answer an email. I couldn't make the entire mechanism of independent filmmaking stop being an elaborate system where everybody would feel much better if somebody else had already taken the risk.

But I could work out.

I could run.

I could breathe.

I could take care of Charlie.

I could shower, shave, brush my teeth, take care of my skin, put the apartment back together, eat like somebody who plans to remain alive.

Those aren't the consolation prizes.

That is probably the point.

The writing changed this week too. I'm trying to do less of it, which is a strange sentence for somebody who has spent most of his life wishing he had more time to write. What I need right now isn't another screenplay. I have enough screenplays. Some of them are good. Some of them are close. Some of them apparently went on an aggressive page-count diet while I wasn't paying attention.

So the work now is revision.

Read. Notes. Redraft. Read again.

Make every scene earn its place. Make the characters sound like different human beings. Stop cutting merely because shorter feels cleaner. If a feature is drifting toward eighty pages, figure out what's missing instead of congratulating myself on efficiency.

BIRDTOWN climbed back into proper feature territory while getting better, which is exactly what I needed to see could happen.

The literary-agent outreach for the book didn't happen. I'm fine with that. I had twenty-five agents shortlisted and could have sent something simply because the schedule said I was supposed to. Instead, I decided the package should be finished first.

That's not procrastination unless I let "finished first" become a six-month hiding place.

Next week means package, then send.

There are still things that need work. Reading didn't get the attention I wanted. Some administrative cleanup didn't happen. There are pieces of the physical plan I didn't hit exactly as written. There are conversations still waiting to be scheduled. Austin is getting close enough that it has stopped being a date on a calendar and started becoming something I actually need clothes, materials and a plan for.

But I'm less interested in scoring this week against the schedule than I would have been five weeks ago.

The schedule assumed life would cooperate.

Life declined.

What I did instead was keep reaching for the parts of it that were mine.

That may sound obvious. Apparently it wasn't obvious to me.

I've spent an enormous amount of my life believing control meant arranging circumstances correctly. Make the plan. Avoid the disruption. Finish one thing before the next thing begins. Get everybody where they are supposed to be. Eliminate uncertainty.

That's not control. That's hoping nobody touches the table.

Control is what happens after they do.

This week the table got kicked a few times.

I still trained.

I still ran.

I still sat down and breathed.

I still moved the movie forward.

I still handled the calls.

I still came out of the week feeling more like the person I'm trying to become than the person who started this thing on September 8.

Not because I finally learned how to make a perfect week.

Because I didn't need one.