I’ve never had kids but today I got a fleeting sense of what it might be like…
2gether played at the MTV conference thingy in Puerto Rico last night and word has come back to us that the place went nuts and they had a standing ovation. Suddenly I felt a tinge of regret…this is the first time they have done anything like this without ME! They exist in a world without their director (dad) unit…they have a life of their own. I feel suddenly stranded, left out, excluded but also intensely proud that all the things that Buss taught them are paying off. Even so I hope the little buggers (lying in the sun by a swimming pool today by all accounts) send us a postcard!
Maggie gave us her reaction to the assembly of the movie today. I was summoned to the MTV bunker and my knees were wobbly as I waited for the elevator. “It couldn’t be more painful than the intrusive teeth cleaning I had this morning,” I told myself. And I was right….phew!
There are many more hurdles to overcome yet but this was an important one. Maggie is the person who first heard the pitch, the first person who sat in her chair and wondered what 2gether would look like. Without her there would be no 2gether at all. And by and large she seems pretty pleased with the results but feels we need to spice up the first act. I don’t disagree. This is the bit where film-making gets really creative…how do we take the scenes we’ve got, truncate them, move them around, flesh them out and intercut them so that the movie is better, faster and funnier?
This may seem like an admission of defeat but it’s nothing of the sort. The footage is good, I’m intensely proud of the performances, it does exactly what it was supposed to do but now we can actually see and feel what was on the written page and we need to mould it so that you, the viewer, will be entertained, intrigued, amused and entranced. You’d be surprised how much of this goes on in film-making. Hey, Woody Allen has shot some of his movies twice!
P.S. They rejected “Flying Hooves Of Steel.” Time for me to remember Buss’s John Travolta Rule…