The project is underway

I thought I would start this off with a post describing the script we're working from. The screenplay is based on an AWFUL stage play that I wrote many years ago. The play, in turn, was based on the real-life road-trip that my wife, Tab, and I took to California with my little brother, Brian, and our good friend, Wendy. At the end of that trip, Tab and I stayed to live in California for the summer (that's where our first daughter was born), Brian and Wendy returned to Missouri. They drowned in a boating accident five days after they returned.

That little summary leaves out a lot of what happened--some fantastic memories of hiking and driving and enjoying adventures along that long, long road. It also leaves out the fact that they began an affair and that we quarreled bitterly about it. Our relationship when they set out to return to Missouri was, at best, strained.

The play, like much of my poetry at the time, was an attempt for me to process that mourning, remorse for some of our actions, my guilt over my role in their deaths. Strangely enough, the screenplay, which my friend Chad Cogdill (Producer and Director of Photography for the film) has pestered me to write for a decade, changes most of the circumstantial facts of the trip (most obviously, it reroutes the trip to Kentucky rather that westward to CA). But it manages to be more honest, more true, more effective, than the fact-based play. I wrote most of it late last Fall as my sabbatical was finishing up. Since then, Andrew Kramp (our wonderful director and a fantastic collaborator), Cogdill, and I have worked on it steadily. We've made some compromises--especially in settings--that are driven by budget concerns or technical issues (who knew that filming in a moving car was so challenging?). But they're both very committed to telling the story as I envisioned it...more precisely, we've collaborated to create a script that represents our shared vision. In other words, I'm still immensely proud of it and I hope it looks as good on film as it does in my head.

- Scott Coykendall, screenwriter