A Dream of Snow
I made it to the second or third round of Project Greenlight last year (the top 250, I think it was) and was very curious to watch this go-round of the show on HBO. A buddy taped the entirety of the season and we blew through the second half of it last night. Which prompted the dream I had early this morning. It went a little something like this:
I won and the trick this year was that I had to write a script on spec. They (the producers) had a window of opportunity to shoot up north and they wanted to do a quasi-documentary about a native woman who sailed across the Arctic ocean in a boat made of snow. I had to write the script. There is a loop of footage still running in my head of the boat sailing through a channel between two massive icebergs. The water is getting warmer the further south she sails and the snow is rapidly dropping off the boat. I can see the boat crossing the frame again and again, pieces of it falling away.
There is a great train wreck sequence behind the scenes that follows. The director doesn't seem to understand that this boat can't be shaped like a modern cutter rig and I'm having this screaming match with him about the complete incoherency of having a native woman build and sail a style of boat that is more in keeping with wealthy socialites sailing out of San Diego than the indigenous culture of Greenland. The loop of film runs in the background, the snow falling away from the rigid outline of the cutter rig.
There are the standard establishing shots that stream through my head: a helicopter-based camera that flies across the ice, sizing up the camp and the production; the talking head interviews where the crew talks about what a bitch it is to "hurry up and shoot" in the ice. And then there is a sequence of me wearing a fuzzy duck suit. I'm standing out on the edge of a glacier with a wooden bat, whacking snowballs off the edge of the cliff.
It's a good shot. There is a perfectly shaped pyramid of snowballs next to me. The spray of ice as I whack the snowball off the cliff catches the sun and the ice scintilates as it falls. The orange and yellow of the duck suit jumps out against the blue and white of the sky and glacier. I'm sure it is insulated. It's not just fuzzy on the outside for show.