April 21, 1996

I tried to storyboard one of the most sexually explicit scenes in the script today, in which the girl asks the boy to give her oral sex, and offers helpful suggestions on how to do it the way she likes it. The storyboard didn't come together, and I gradually realized that the scene was a miscalculation at this point in the film, where the focus is on pulling the troubled marriage together, not on exploring the couple's sexual interaction. I revised the scene, and the revisions gave me no pleasure, because I basically threw away all the scene's novel elements and brought it closer to a Hollywood treatment of sex, with the action discreetly off-camera and no awkwardness. To every thing there is a season, I suppose. Click here to look at script excerpts and decide for yourself whether I wimped out.

We found the camcorder we were looking for (thanks, Terry and Sue!), so we're just about ready for the first auditions tomorrow.

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