Serve You Glory On A Silver Platter

I am nervous about tomorrow.

Well, technically, I am nervous about today. I'm waking up in a paltry four hours, donning a very convincing tablecloth, and portraying Dregr Jarrat again for the first time in two years.

I wish it was the performance alone that I worried about. But it's really the incredible time-crunch we're under to finish what we began, where we began it.

Three-and-a-half years ago, at the soundstage at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, we filmed the Dregr scenes for "Star Wars: Hunt for the Holocron." It was our first shoot. We we so excited we did 12 takes of the first shot, a medium-shot that started with me in the background, walking to the foreground, and cutting Luke into two pieces with my lightsaber. Tomorrow, as we build the set and rehearse the lines, we are preparing to film completely new Dregr scenes to replaces those old ones, new scenes written with all the knowledge about the movie and myself gathered since. And even still, they pose an incredible challenge. They are nexus points, exposition scenes with ties to all the other characters, and as such are very delicate. Add to that the fact that we have only 6 hours with the actress playing opposite of me, and you have a very intense, high-stakes situation.

Jeffrey is here, and I am delighted. He flew up from Houston after work, and he flies back early in the evening on Sunday. We watched the rough-cut, the rough assembly of scenes from the movie, and it was an amazingly revealing experience. I learned a couple of things. They may seem simple, or obvious, but they are genuine surprises to me:

1) The movie will mostly make sense. Nothing insanely random happens.
2) The movie is much, much smaller than I thought it was. It really is just the story of a couple of characters and what happens to them over the course of two days.
3) We actually do need to hear, from Dregr, why he wants the holocron, and why E'Din fights him for it.
4) Despite a couple rough patches, including but not limited to pacing and writing, there are some genuinely exciting moments that feel like Star Wars.

After watching the rough-cut I turned to Jeffrey and asked, "Is it worth finishing?"

He looked at me for a moment and then, choosing his words carefully, said, "Yes. Absolutely. That's not the question at all."

And I felt a little better. He had never watched the whole thing end-to-end, and for him, it was a sign of hope, a sign that maybe there was a movie at the end of all this, a movie worth making and worth watching. It seems a little silly to me now, all this hullabaloo over a little Star Wars tale, like I've picked up a painting I did as a child and traced its lines with my fingers, remembering old strokes and the earnestness with which I made them. Sure, the movie won't be perfect. It might not even be good. But it will be complete, and I will have steered it through, and people will enjoy watching it.

If I can do that, make one person's life better for an hour, then I will have accomplished something truly Good.

Here's hoping.

M