Writing Retreat Days 1, 2, 3

4:41 Sunday

You ever write for 13 hours and get that writing euphoria? Feeling like your brain is stuffed with endorphins? No? I'm pretty lucky to have done it many many times. Friday - 6 hours. Saturday - 13. Today 6 so far. We just been incredibly creative the entire time. Euphorically creative. Inventing, challenging, problem solving, moving on, creating, expanding, laughing, acting out...repeat for 13 hours. I feel I've expanded my brain.

In the writing retreat in august we wrote a synopsis of "Alderman" - 12 pages. Very much a skeleton. All motivations and events layed our in very broad terms. Over the last few weeks we've been taking those broad terms and explaining them to each other and questioning and arguing whether each event fits into the overall event and how, in addition to adding new ideas and kicking out some concepts that don't fit. It padded the synopsis aout to 40 pages. And when we got here we went through it all again, adding muscles to the organs coming up with more ideas within the slowly hardening overall concept, making sure it's safe to hand off to someone else in the group. Now we're at 73 pages and it's time for the flesh. The dialogue. But we have just been massively creative, we ought to be we've trained like that Bears over the last two years to be good at this. The be able to trust our instincts and flesh a new idea out at the drop of a hat.

We just finished the most recent push-through, we knocked out the last beat, after the election, throwing in a Return of the Jedi reference on top of a Revenge of The Nerds reference and took it home. We all sat in a second silence and then Sandy said said "holy shit, we just wrote a screenplay."

I owe the readers a shot by shot of what takes place at the writing retreat, but after writing for 13 hours in a day, you really don't feel like writing more. No TV watching has ever been justified than last nights and the previous nights. No football game felt better than the one that broke up last nights writing session and definitely the Bears today.

Jim Zulevic has overshadowed the writing retreat, and not in a bad way. But it is superodd and puts my life way in perspective. How lucky am I to spend an entire weekend writing a script that draws on eight years of sketches I wrote with a group I formed out of Second City, which I'd wanted to go to my whole life, while mourning a relationship I formed with someone prominent from that institution that I forged by being a part of it. Heady stuff.

We attended Jim's wake on Thursday, and attended the reception for the funeral at The Second City. Sandy said sadness over a death never feels quite so real as when you're in a group of people who are usually laughing all the time.

In some ways this screenplay is dedicated to Jim Zulevic, we were very inspired by driving through his South Side and meeting all his friends who were real South Siders. Ed Bus is that kind of guy, a Grabowski. This script got a hefty infusion of Grabowski starting with the opening scene which takes place at Mike Ditka Elementary "where every kid's a winner goddammit". The bit of the weekend started early when Justin suggested we blow of the writing retreat and go get lapdances at V.I.P., backing it up by saying "Jim would've wanted it that way." Now every self-indulgent thing we do is backed up with "Jim would've wanted it that way." Funny.

The first night here, after the Second City reception, we talked Jim a lot, I keep forgetting all the crazy stories. Saturday afternoon we listened to Ed Fuhrman & Company's tribute to Jim on WCKG. We also ran into former Schadenfreuder John Bolger at the services at Second City. John used to play Joey Bus, so that was kind of a good intro to the weekend too.

Funny observation from last night:
Joey Bus always has a plan for Ed and it goes "Okay, so we create a tv show and it goes awesome and then we throw a party at VIP, and you've got a VIP table and I've got a VIP table..." Not really a plan. Justin pointed out that that's us. "Let's put on a show and it goes awesome then we throw a party with strippers." That's Schadenfreude, just doing a show to justify a Pudding Wresting Party.