Four Cousins

Hooray! I got something accomplished! I just spent the past hour doing notes for the first half of the script. It was more productive than I thought... I got rid of a lot of lines and re-wrote some of the dialogue to make it edgier and a bit funnier. It's so freaking hard to be 'funny' per se, and I feel like so much of it is left up to the actors and the chemistry. This isn't a script that is supposed to be laugh-out-loud hilarious necessarily. I wouldn't mind if this didn't fit squarely into the romcom genre, because there are so many negative implicatons that come with that; mainly, lack of depth. I'd like to think there's some depth to this... Regardless, I actually got somewhere today. I just feel like there is some sort of freshness lacking from the first half. It could be because I've seen this over and over again, but maybe that's a good thing, because I'll constantly be one-upping the previous 'fresh' change I made. On the other hand, in all of this changing about, I could lose a good idea.

I came up with a line the other day that rings true to lots of other Indian/Asian minority people, I'm sure. Landon, who plays the female protagonist's snobby Stanford grad fiance, says to Armaan, "Hey, a really good friend of mine is Indian... maybe you know him?" It's funny, because this gets said a lot, but at the same time there is total merit to it. Most Indians are connected somehow. Maybe that's an element I can work into this on some subconscious level.

The other hurdle is the creation of the four cousins. Professor Abrams had this idea... basically, Armaan's company is starting to fail, and if he marries the ditzy, snobby Mona, he can save the company financially. There is, however, one other hope, which is the Singhania account. Initially, the Singhania account was just an account that could have brought a lot of money, but then Abrams suggested that there be three or four cousins that are getting married off together. I love that idea... it reminds me of Pride and Prejudice, of which I'm not a big fan, but I love the style. I think it would be a really old-fashioned touch to have these four sisters who need to be married off, each objecting to marriage for their own reasons. As soon as he meets them, Armaan will figure out that getting them married off against their will is a bad idea. That's where I wanted Alex to come in; something about her losing the account for him, or talking sense into him... or she really pushes him into not going through with it, when she doesn't realize that if he does that, she's effectively pushing him closer to Mona. The other aspect is the relationship between these two guys; should they hate each other until the very end? There is certainly nothing interesting about two characters who are pleasant around each other. What works is either one end of the spectrum, the mutual dislike in 'When Harry Met Sally', or the reverse, which is all-out passionate love, like in 'The Notebook.' The latter doesn't fit this story at all. So I think the hating angle would be interesting.

So far there are a few instances where one of them will try to patch things up, but it blows up in their faces. How do you create a feeling of two people needing to be together so badly? It's hard! I think it just happens organically... you can't consciously set out to make it happen. I guess the best I can do is lay the seeds... the moments, the dialogue, the actions... and that actual pulling feeling that makes the audience root for the leads will have to happen on screen. Anyway, that's all second half stuff... I'm going to figure out if there is some way for me to post the second draft that I'm revising right now.

That's all for now..