The project isn’t dead and I’m not dead either.

But I am slow and procrastination-prone. Curses. Apologies if I’m letting my very few readers down. Then again, I don’t have a “professional” deadline breathing down my neck, so I can be as slow as I want to… as long as I actually do it.

For the past few weeks, the weather has been extremely hot and humid. It was turning my brain into mush and my mush into something incomprehensible. The incomprehensible was then turned into Things Man Was Not Meant To Know and that was turned into space jelly. Let’s just say these weren’t nice working conditions.

The weather has improved dramatically some time ago, but now the start of my next university semester is inching closer and closer… plus, I had to freaking recover first.

I got to a certain part in chapter 2 and then I just had to stop, but now I’m going to continue. I’ve also worked out a few things about the overall structure of this first draft of a screenplay:

– still aiming at the size of two movies

– expect biggest time-saving cuts in Rivendell and in the city right before Smaug

– expect the first movie to end right before Beorn

The Hobbit. “An Unexpected Party”

CURRENT SCRIPT LENGTH: 18 pages

Chapter 1 is 99% done. I still need to figure out when and how to make a believable transition from day to night after the dwarves arrive to Bilbo’s house and I have to decide whether to use “Front Gate”, “great Gate” or just “the gate” in Thorin’s exposition, but everything else seems to have worked out fairly well.

What made it in?

Pretty much everything. The events in this chapter aren’t world-shattering in scale, but each and every one of them is important in some way to Bilbo’s character. It’s not immediately obvious, but I’ll explain my reasons later on.

What was shortened?

1. The opening narration contains information that’s either irrelevant to the story or redundant in a visual medium. I cut it down in half by mentioning only the things I’d care about as a director. It’s still quite lengthy, but I think it could work in a movie, given a pleasant enough voice to listen to.

2. The “Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold” song got shortened from 10 verses to 6. That’s still long, but it’s a decent start and I actually enjoy reading my abridged version more. Less fluff, more stuff.

3. Thorin’s incredibly long expository monologue had some information that was related only to his family tree and not to his story. I put an end to that. A few of Gandalf’s later phrases were joined together, cutting out the only mention of Azog, who never appears in the book and is not truly relevant to the main story.

What got cut?

Nothing of any importance. As I said before, Azog is never mentioned.

What are the reasons behind my decisions?

In this case, I don’t have to explain my cuts because there aren’t any. On the contrary, I have to explain why I’m leaving in almost everything and why does it have to take so long.

First, the opening narration. It lets us know about hobbits and their comfortable holes, but, more importantly, it lets us know that hobbits are not very adventurous, making Bilbo’s character development more impressive. We also find out about Belladonna Took, which sets up a nice bit of dialogue later. That’s what I need and that’s what I kept.

The first dialogue between Bilbo and Gandalf doesn’t take much time, is smartly written, introduces both characters very well and sets up all the shenanigans that are to follow. It’s quite obvious why this part is important. The “Belladonna Took” part of the opening narration pays off here in a few rather nice lines.

OK, at first glance, the dwarves enter Bilbo’s house at seemingly random times and you could easily “compress” that, perhaps even joining it with that first dialogue. The 1977 cartoon does exactly that and saves a lot of time. However, such an approach ignores one very important factor: this whole situation could not have been an accident. There are no internal reasons for the prolonged sequence we see in the book. That means there has to be an external reason… what could it be? I may be wrong, but I think it was all one big trick planned by Gandalf from the start. Later on, he plans out a similar sequence in order to put Beorn in a nicer mood and make him more interested in what they have to say. I think Gandalf intentionally made Bilbo feel annoyed and bewildered in order to shake him out of his hobbit-like complacency. This makes the dwarf entrance a bit more than just a funny scene. It might be possible to shorten something here, but doing so without messing up the nature of Gandalf’s strategy would be quite tricky.

Finally, the song, the map, the explanations and such are all important to get Blibo excited and us interested. It also allows us to understand what’s going on, which is always nice. I don’t think I have to explain much about this.

The length of this first chapter (once Trelby allowed me to format it as a proper screenplay) was a real shock for me. I never realized how much time even “simple” scenes can take. Stuff that feels short in book form can take way too long after being visualized. That’s a lesson I’ll have to keep in mind.

It’s very late right now and I need some sleep, but I promise I’ll export and upload a PDF tomorrow. It’s just chapter 1, though, and most of it is the same as it was in the book, right down to dialogue, so you don’t have much of a reason to download it yet unless you’re really curious to see the shortened parts, like the opening narration.

EDIT: And here it is, chapter 01. Not as a PDF, though, but as an HTML file. Apparently, Trelby can export as HTML, too. I think it’s a very convenient option.

The script so far: https://dl.dropbox.com/s/qlok5se191iejm3/hobbit_01.html

Let the fun begin

And by “fun”, I mean “embarrassment”. And by “embarrassment”, I mean “attempts at screenwriting”.

Look, I don’t see myself as a screenwriter. I really don’t. I think I could make for a good indie director with a “be your own DP and editor” approach, but screenwriting? I don’t think I’m all that talented in this area…

… but while I’m waiting for an opportunity to get a cheap camera, tripod and microphone (yes, I’m poor enough for that to be a problem) I would love to do something and screenwriting has never exactly harmed anyone. Even as a potential director, I think some scriptwriting will help me understand story and pacing much better. Plus, whenever I’ll find myself in a dire shortage of scripts, I’d love to be able to write at least a decent script myself in a pinch.

Because I’m an eternal procrastinator with a heavy case of ADHD to boot, I’m going to publicize my progress to make myself feel ashamed whenever I slow down too much. I have no idea if this is going to be successful, but we shall see.

My first series of posts will blog my experiences as I’m writing my script for a non-existent two-film adaptation of The Hobbit. It is merely a writing exercise, so it’s an unauthorized adaptation, but I don’t think anybody’s going to bother shutting me down. Being a nobody has one minor advantage – as long as you’re not making any profit and not hurting the profit of others, nobody cares about you violating copyrights.

Why an adaptation? Because I’d most likely get stuck if I were to attempt an original story and the few (if any) blog readers that I have would be disappointed. Also, I simply don’t feel up to the task of writing a fully developed original story… yet.

Why The Hobbit? Well, it’s one of my favorite books, it’s reasonably short and has a fairly linear narrative that’s easy to keep track of. Like any other book, it will, of course, have its own unique adaptation challenges, but I think I’ve chosen one of the easier books to practice adaptations on. Plus, I haven’t seen any of the Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films yet, which means that, as soon as I’m finished with my version of the script, I get to compare. That’s a very nice bonus for me.

Why a “two-film” adaptation? Because if I tried to fit everything in the span of one film, I’d likely have to cut out some of the things I want to keep intact. If you want to see a “one-film” version, watch the 1977 cartoon. Not only do they cut out Beorn, they never even mention the Arkenstone, so the subplot about Thorin’s greed remains very underdeveloped. It’s true that the runtime was only 77 minutes, but they also rushed the pacing in a way that I’m not comfortable with. Everything is so compressed in time that we get to see the trolls less than 12 minutes after we start watching. For a cartoon of that size, the script was very well done, but they turned a long journey into a rush from point A to point B and I’m not sure how I feel about this. I’m really not planning on taking influences from the cartoon.

The book has 19 chapters and I’m 99% done with the first one. I’ll be posting my “first draft progress” chapter by chapter, unless I move some elements so thoroughly that the chapter division no longer applies at some point.

I’m using a free program called Trelby to format my script. It’s really easy to use and to understand. My only problem with it so far is lack of proper formatting for dual dialogue and song lyrics, but I’ll manage. I left it at default settings and it works just fine. A4 paper size, Courier 12 (or whatever font screenwriters have to use), very intuitive interface and it’s free. Can’t beat the price.

Anyway, so… yeah. The Hobbit.

Enough blabbering. Let the fail begin.