The read-through for the first draft was a real eye-opener. You really don't realise just how lumpy the dialogue is until it's read by strangers - the long sections drag on and on, and people start twitching their eyes about the room, looking for ways to politely escape. Every attempt at humour sounds flat and empty, of course, and by the time it gets to filming you have to trust to your initial judgement that the joke was ever funny. (At this point you will discover that your initial judgement on many other areas was such that you have to immediately rewrite or suffer unending embarassment - which is why I suspect that script writers should never be allowed on-set.) But we're getting a little ahead of ourselves here...

Yes, so I did the read-through of the first draft. A couple of things leaped out. Yes, it was loose and flabby, but the plot was also un-necessarily convoluted.

Why have the flashback at all? Why were there so many characters? Not to mention, the motivations of the characters was occasionally suspect. If Player A is the one so interested in the rules, why is it Player B who has the whole "Theory of Game" thing? What are these people actually playing the game for in the first place? Why on earth is Player C actually persisting with the game?

All this stuff came out in the read-through. After everyone had gone off home, I cleaned away the bottles of soft-drink, replayed the read-through, wincing all the way through, and started rewriting immediately. There's nothing like the threat of imminent embarassment (such as would occur had we filmed with anything like the first draft) to motivate me.

So, I purged the flashback bit. I sorted out the characters to be a bit closer to my initial ideas for them. I added a few personality traits to the characters, who were beginning to firm up, in my mind at least. I reread my initial notes, and tried to add some of the subplots and themes that I'd initially planned. I went through the Once Upon A Time cards again, found better cards for some of the inner-story. I deleted most of the jokes, but not, unfortunately, all of them. And a month or so later, I had a brand new draft.

I showed the second draft around to a few people, and immediately started rewriting again. I'm not going to show you the second draft. It wasn't as significant an improvement over the first draft as I'd hoped, and this was pointed out to me fairly quickly.

The third draft was better. This was to form the basis for the remaining drafts - there were six in all, before I started adding the shooting details, turning it into a shooting script. Unfortunately, I can't find these drafts. They're somewhere around. What I do have is the final shooting script, of course.

Have a read of it, and then we'll go onto the preproduction details.

The sixth draft, and shooting script.