Big Trees and a Million Little Tims

So the wife and I impulsively decided to head north over the weekend. She booked a room in Fresno, which is about 212 miles up, though we blew through Fresno at about 1 PM and kept going up to Yosemite Park, which is about 90 miles further.

Very cool place, if you've never been. It's a long drive, on a lot of winding roads, but the drive is a lot of the point; there's nothing like immersing yourself in nature to help get your head on straight.

Saturday night we stayed at the Radisson in Fresno (nice rooms, terrible food) and then Sunday morning we headed east, to Sequoia Natural Forest. Home of the big big trees.

Giant redwoods. Too cool for words. Has to be experienced.

Nature rocks.

*****

Like a good boy, I kept up my minimum- hour-a-day screenwriting mission even though we were on the road. Saturday (while me wife was driving up a particularly boring stretch of highway) I went through a chunk of act two of my low budget thriller, which I'm rewriting, splitting one character into two.

The character used to be named Tim. The new characters are Randy and Bull.

The problem is that even though most of the "Tim"s are now "Randy's", I can't do a find-and-replace, because it'll change all the words in which the letters t-i-m appear consecutively. Like "time", or "intimate" or "stimulation" or "Timber!".

Not that anyone ever says "Timber!" in this particular script. But you get the idea.

Stupid Final Draft.

Stupid me, for naming him Tim in the first place. I should have given him some long name that wasn't going to randomly occur elsewhere.

So this morning I sat at the laptop, making all the changes, and getting rid of every last little Tim. And then going back, and looking, and finding Tims that I missed. They're like cockroaches.

It is making me process every single line again, though. Not necessarily a bad thing.

29 straight days of at least an hour of screenwriting, through today.

*******

So 3:10 to Yuma made about $14 million over the weekend. Solid, though I thought it would have done more. I think it'll hold up well though.

Maybe some people thought the title sounded too much like it was going to be about senior citizens on a bus.

Shoot 'Em Up didn't do well, only making about $5 million.

The Brothers Solomon tanked completely, making only about half a million, about $700 per screen. That's an average of 80-90 people per theater for the weekend, which divides out to an average of about 5 or 6 people in each showing. Yuck.