The Desktop Stole My Movie Script
After a flash of insight one night while working my at my second job for the day, an overnight shift at a convience store, I managed to mash two of my older scripts into one movie with some various other ideas thrown in. I worked on writing pages of notes and when I got home reworked the script into something I could be proud of. Then the computer stole my movie script.
The monitor stopped working. And if there is one thing that hinders your ability to use a computer its staring at a blank screen and getting pissed because you were in the process of backing up the file when it went down.
No problem, I bought a new monitor, a flat screen that took up far less room on my desk leaving plenty of room for scribbled notes and hard boiled eggs.
But it wasn't the monitor. So I borrow a computer from a friend, minus the hard drive, pull mine out and install it on his machine. Simple right, all I need is that one file. My script. So I can rewrite and tweak it until its perfect. After all I want to begin shooting at the end of November and all of this happened sometime in October.
Only Microsoft Windows decides to throw a wrench in the works by saying I need a new authentification code. Call India it says. So I do. Automated operator can't help me; I get a guy who says words in English but I'm not sure if he understands them. My authentification code is wrong, please read the whole thing he says. I did, I'm looking at it and I'm telling you the whole thing. Please hold he says as he hangs up.
I call back, after 5 minutes trying to bypass the automated operator I finally get a female operator that speaks a little better. I give her the code, almost immediately she asks if I have moved the hard drive from an Emachine computer to a Gateway computer, why yes I have. She says I need to reinstall the hard drive on the Emachine and call back with the code it gives me. But it's not sending a signal to the monitor I say, how will I get the code to get my one file off of the computer if I cant see the screen? She can't help me.
So now I'm getting desperate. Over a month since the rewrite and scrap pieces of paper with notes and dialogue are floating around everywhere, in jean pockets and in my back pack, stuffed in books that I've already finished reading. I need to get that script.
So I pull a slave/master switch. I put my friends original hard drive in as the master and switch the pins on my hard drive to be the slave. It actually worked, though it doesn't seem to want to recognize any of my programs and I had a hard time remembering where I actually saved the script. By the time I find the folder I realize that I saved it as a Works Word Processing file. A format I can't seem to open on any other machine, even ones with Microsoft Works installed.
It's funny but even when I try to write notes at work to add quality to the script the pens stop writing.
Someone said that maybe the movie was cursed. There's the monitor thing, the mouse pad problem on the laptop that holds up everything for 20 minutes at a time, the pen thing, the file format problems, the lack of internet access which seemed to be solved then reared it's ugly head as yet another problem and the loss of the female lead due to drug problems.
And when I started to think of all the little things that kept popping up while closing my drawer out for the night I realized that I had done $666 in sales.
The monitor stopped working. And if there is one thing that hinders your ability to use a computer its staring at a blank screen and getting pissed because you were in the process of backing up the file when it went down.
No problem, I bought a new monitor, a flat screen that took up far less room on my desk leaving plenty of room for scribbled notes and hard boiled eggs.
But it wasn't the monitor. So I borrow a computer from a friend, minus the hard drive, pull mine out and install it on his machine. Simple right, all I need is that one file. My script. So I can rewrite and tweak it until its perfect. After all I want to begin shooting at the end of November and all of this happened sometime in October.
Only Microsoft Windows decides to throw a wrench in the works by saying I need a new authentification code. Call India it says. So I do. Automated operator can't help me; I get a guy who says words in English but I'm not sure if he understands them. My authentification code is wrong, please read the whole thing he says. I did, I'm looking at it and I'm telling you the whole thing. Please hold he says as he hangs up.
I call back, after 5 minutes trying to bypass the automated operator I finally get a female operator that speaks a little better. I give her the code, almost immediately she asks if I have moved the hard drive from an Emachine computer to a Gateway computer, why yes I have. She says I need to reinstall the hard drive on the Emachine and call back with the code it gives me. But it's not sending a signal to the monitor I say, how will I get the code to get my one file off of the computer if I cant see the screen? She can't help me.
So now I'm getting desperate. Over a month since the rewrite and scrap pieces of paper with notes and dialogue are floating around everywhere, in jean pockets and in my back pack, stuffed in books that I've already finished reading. I need to get that script.
So I pull a slave/master switch. I put my friends original hard drive in as the master and switch the pins on my hard drive to be the slave. It actually worked, though it doesn't seem to want to recognize any of my programs and I had a hard time remembering where I actually saved the script. By the time I find the folder I realize that I saved it as a Works Word Processing file. A format I can't seem to open on any other machine, even ones with Microsoft Works installed.
It's funny but even when I try to write notes at work to add quality to the script the pens stop writing.
Someone said that maybe the movie was cursed. There's the monitor thing, the mouse pad problem on the laptop that holds up everything for 20 minutes at a time, the pen thing, the file format problems, the lack of internet access which seemed to be solved then reared it's ugly head as yet another problem and the loss of the female lead due to drug problems.
And when I started to think of all the little things that kept popping up while closing my drawer out for the night I realized that I had done $666 in sales.
posted by Chris at 12:45 AM
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