the first draft of mummy
The first draft is never the first draft.
Any writer worth their salt hones, cuts and rewrites a script endlessly before handing in the official 'first draft'. Thousands of dead ends, cut jokes and bad lines, micro 'first drafts' that are never seen by anyone.
I make a habit, whenever I cut anything, of pasting it at the bottom of the script. This is partly out of practicality: I may return to these fragments and salvage the odd line or phrase, I may re-instate a scene totally. But most of the time, it's dead weight. Totally aborted scenes, or versions of scenes that didn't quite work. Dialogue that didn't earn it's place, or was downright awful.
When the script is finished, I paste all the thrown away pieces into a new document and save it. I label it 'cuts'.
The cuts file for the first draft of Mummy On The Orient Express was eighty seven pages long.
The script itself is only sixty three.
I tell you this partly out of a weird sort of self-flagellating pride and partly to point out that I am more than happy to dig endlessly to get to the gold. That's the job.
Not that the first draft of Mummy is gold. Far from it.
It's more like a parallel world, a dark timeline where the events you know and love took a very different turn.
Most things are much worse; the dialogue is more wooden, the plot meanders down pointless complicated alleys, the characters sometimes behave like theme park actors playing the real characters.
And boy, is it overly complicated. I was worried that the mummy needed more than the gimmick of only being seen by the victim, not realising that this was more than enough. I burdened him with an overly complex – well, you'll see. And you'll also see my desperate attempts to try to explain it all through the mouths of my poor, poor characters.
There are hints of where we'll end up in the final episode. Glimmers of hope in the gloom.
Which begs the question – why release this at all, if it's so bloody awful?
Well if you're anything like me, you like the occasional peek behind the curtain. It can be useful to see how the sausage is made and a clunky first draft is the ultimate version of this.
In doing so, I'm also aware that I'm placing myself in quite a vulnerable position. You're seeing the beauty queen with no-make up four hours before the party. The dreamy hunk without his spanx, lifts and wig (and yes, I am viewing myself as the beauty queen and dreamy hunk in those analogies, but as I'm also giving myself spanx, lifts and a wig, it doesn't feel much like bragging.)
I also think this could act as a beacon of hope to all those fledgling writers out there struggling with unwieldy first drafts.
Keep digging. You'll hit gold eventually.
But now, without further ado:
Welcome to the Orient Express!
VISIT the seven wonders of the universe.
DISCOVER the secret race of the mummy.
REGRET reading a first draft of a episode you love
and ruining it FOREVER....
(And for those of you who prefer your scripts a little closer to what you saw on screen, the shooting script can be found here.)