Oooo! I Am The Ghost of Crappy Writing Yet to Be! Oooooo!

Weird thing. Woke up one day last week, maybe Thursday, with one perfectly clear thought in my head: Everybody knows, looking at the "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" poster, that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie don't die. Not even close.

A brief side note: I never need to see MAMS ever again. Which is weird, because it should be my idea of a perfect movie. But it lacks...something. Hmmm, I wonder what.

Then I thought of something Joss Whedon likes to say, that he'd rather a viewer were upset about the death of character, than if they just went "huh" and kept watching.

I might have put it together then, but the truth is, Mr. Whedon is extremely good at killing off characters in a way that rips your still-beating-heart out of your chest, throws it on the ground and then kicks it into oncoming traffic. If you've seen "Serenity," you know what I'm talking about, but similar stuff goes down on every Whedon joynt.

(Side note: What does it look like when Spike Lee and Joss Whedon team up? Just something to think about.)

Next day, I guess Friday, I had a dream that my dad ran Lucasfilm. But he wasn't George Lucas, he was my dad. And Lucasfilm appeared to be inside the Warner Bros office tower where I used to intern for "Smallville."

Anyway, my dad, good guy that he is, had greenlit one of my scripts. We stood in the back of a test screening, watching scene after scene of all the stuff I love in movies -- girls kicking butt, unexpected love interests, last minute saves. But it wasn't any fun to watch. Because it was safe. I hadn't put anyone in jeopardy, once in the entire film.

(See if you can think which Lucasfilm productions might suffer from the same problem. I'll give you a hint. They're about a group of characters, about whom we know which ones live and which ones die. Just saying.)

So I woke up, more than a little horrified by the thought that my dad had put his career on the line to make a film without any recognizable danger or stakes. And right then, I felt a profound rush of gratitude that I was only on page 10 of my rewrite project and would, thankfully, have time to repair matters.

I am also grateful that my subconscious, sensing that the first lesson didn't quite take, went ahead and sent a second telegram, just to make sure.