Sorry the blog has been irregular: the last two of five trips in as many weeks are coming up, then I am around for a while. But interesting things keep happening, the latest of which is repeated every few months as a negotiation takes place or a producer tries to vary elements of a contract after the contract has been signed.
I don’t mean tearing it up, just pushing into an area of semantic ambiguity. This happens when there is no clear definition of the difference between a rewrite and a polish. One is bigger than the other. But rarely is there wording that clearly differentiates one from the other.
What happens when the writer shows say the first Act to the producer and director and they provide notes while the writer is still writing the first draft? In this case it made sense for some of the rewrite to be done before the Second Act. So the writer did it.
When the final pages of the first draft was delivered they were well received and the response included the words (more of less) that perhaps there could be some tidying up prior to the rewrite.
This raised an interesting scenario. If a writer writes such a good first draft that very little work is needed for the ‘rewrite’, so little that it is a matter of a day or two, ie much more like a polish? Should writers perhaps deliberately leave in aspects of the script so that the rewrite is substantial and necessary?
In the end the producer behaved perfectly and even though the notes for the rewrite have still to be delivered, they asked for the rewrite invoice to be sent since some of the rewrite had already been done.