A Radical Idea posted by Martin

Brought to you by: Shower—a contained, temperature controlled indoor rain, promoting clarity of thought, cleanliness of body, and consumption of odiferous creams, jellies, soaps and scrubs. Shower—its repetitive beating on your head will stimulate deep thought. Shower—have one every morning.

I was thinking about these two ideas and how to move forward. First of all, though, I have to say that I totally dug your last post. Dreams are usually a bit boring to read, but you had great tension, suspension, and now I want to know more about the man who will become president. Really engaging and inspiring work, Mr. Shockah.

So—we have two character bios for each story, and I’m no closer to picking one. At first I thought that I would just call for a vote, and force myself to decide, but as I pitted these against each other, I just couldn’t. I want them both to win for very different reasons. And maybe they both can.

Even though it’s taken us four months to get to this point, at some future date we’re going to start writing, and then at some future date months or years away we’ll have a screenplay written that we have blessed as our as-good-as-we-can-make-it version (or, knowing us, as-good-as-we-can-make-it-until-we-undertake-a-massive-rewrite-and-totally-complicate-the-plot), what then? Does this blog just sit fallow?

I can’t predict what will happen here in the future, but assuming everything goes well, what if we had a string of scripts to work on?

Here’s what I propose: we move through all the heats in the in the current round, doing our bios. We discuss as much as we want the pros and cons of each story as if we were going to vote on them, but then we vote on whether or not each idea is really a viable idea for a script. If we both vote no, off it goes, if we vote yes that idea moves forward. If we vote yes on both, then they both move forward, and we move on to the next round. If one votes yes, and the other votes no, the idea is shelved for later. When we are through with all of the heats, we list all the ideas that made it through, and each of us orders, from one to whatever, our favorite ideas.

We take those numbers, and average our scores, which will give us a list or ranked ideas that we both liked and feel can be made into a doable script—and a string of scripts to write, should we actually get that far. Now, here’s the rub—since an idea might end up on top that we both are a little unhappy about, it would be silly to force us to write it. So, we always have the option of voting again until we get the order that we both want.

Also, if any shelved ideas are gnawing at us, the party that voted yes on it can try to expand on the idea to sell the other on his vision of it. Of course, this continues our fine tradition of needlessly complex™ rules, and will eliminate the dread I feel when it comes to not working on some of these ideas.

What do you think? Silly, or maybe something workable?

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