Escape from Vacationland

I'm back from a week in Maine. I was happy to discover that all three of my readers hung in there and did not abandon me. A personal thanks to Rob, Muriel and Patsy.


The last time I went to Maine I came back with an idea for a movie and I wrote Lobster Cop.


I got the idea while I was fishing in a canoe with my brother and his son. My brother was flyfishing, his rod a blur of movement as 47 feet of fluorescent green line flashed overhead. His son was using a Garcia ultralight setup with 2 pound test. I was using a sweet, hot pink Scooby Doo rig and a hula popper. In my opinion, there's nothing in this world beats a hula popper and a Vincent Black Lightning, 1952. If you are not a real man, a hula popper is a fishing lure that looks like a frog in a hula skirt. Hey, there's one right down there.

I started with a short story called One and a Half Jews in a Canoe that Dave Eggers called lyrical and laugh out loud funny. I told him to use lol next time cause then the kids will think he's cool.

The short story became a screenplay. The first scene I wrote for Lobster Cop was a fishing scene. Our hero, Jake Marino is fishing in a rowboat with our villian, Commodore Dudley Saltonstall III. For Jake, think a skinnier Vince Vaughn with a slight New York accent. For the Commodore, think Ted Knight in Caddyshack.

One hundred and fourteen pages later, I'm four pages over and because of the whole story arc, three act structure, and pushing the plot forward crap, I'm forced to cut the fishing scene -- the original, first-written scene that got the whole thing started in the first place.

No screenplay this time, but I plan on a mess of Maine posts.