Who Are You People?

You hear cautionary tales about it all the time, but the true horror doesn't strike until it happens to you.

CHDD: Catastrophic Hard Drive Death.

I spent the past five weeks traveling -- visiting family and driving all over the northeast. I planned to do some work while we were on the road. After all, the home office is a nice comfort, but not necessary. I work on a laptop. My office goes where I go.

Two weeks into the trip, I settled down in an unused bedroom of my in-laws' house to start polishing up my latest spec. Half an hour later, I noticed an occassional, faint buzz emanating from the left palmrest of my Apple Powerbook.

That's where the hard drive lives.

As one of the few moving parts in a computer, hard drives make noise. But I've been using this laptop for a couple of years, and this was a new noise.

And it started to get worse. Louder. More frequent.

I made a panicked phone call to my Techie Friend, who had me run a couple of disk utilities that should tell whether or not the hard drive is starting to fail. The tests showed nothing. The hard drive appeared to be in good health.

But then something really disturbing happened. I went to save a file and, while the program was writing to the disk, the buzzing noise kicked in and the system froze. I got that spinning, technicolor pinwheel of death (you Mac users know what I'm talking about).

I was about to force quit when, all the sudden, the buzzing noise stopped and the system unfroze. The file had even been saved. But, disk utilities be damned, something was definitely not right.

As Somerset warned Mills, "This isn't gonna have a happy ending."

I transferred my working files to my wife's iBook and, the next day, my Powerbook shit the bed. Wouldn't even boot up. It was dead. Kaput. It was no more.

This was an ex-hard drive.

I shipped it back to Apple, and they replaced the hard drive. What that means, of course, is that everything on the old drive was gone. Just a ghost of ones and zeroes, lost to the digital ether.

The good news: I had a backup. I always backup. I'm practically religious about it. I'm gay for backing up.

The bad news: the backup was at home in Los Angeles, so I lost a couple weeks of laptop use. Which was annoying, but tolerable.

The great news: my backup procedure has always been to simply copy my personal files, not the programs themselves. In otherwords, I just drop my home folder onto an external drive. It's a simple and quick system. The drawback is, in the event of CHDD, you have to reinstall every program and reset every preference. However, in one of the few strokes of good fortune to grace my pathetic life, I had recently changed my backup procedure. A couple months ago, I bought a new external drive -- a 500GB Maxtor One-Touch Firewire drive.

My old external was also a Maxtor One-Touch, but I'd never used the one-touch feature. With the new drive, I decided to give it a shot.

Here's how it works:

Before you use the drive, you partition it, creating a separate partition that is at least as big as your internal hard drive. Then you setup the Maxtor software, creating a backup script., which allows you to perform a complete backup of your hard drive by simply pushing the lone button on the front of the external drive.

It takes a while to run the backup. But, when you're done, what you've got is an exact duplicate of the contents of your internal drive. You can even boot up from the external drive (which is exactly how you restore the backup to your new internal drive).

I had run my very first one-touch backup just a week before we left for our trip. So, instead of reinstalling several dozen programs and futzing with preferences and settings, all I had to do was boot up from the external drive and, using the Maxtor software, restore from the backup.

The results are, essentially, magic. It's like the hard drive never died.

I'm going to make this full backup procedure part of my regular routine.

My work -- the fruits of my labor -- exists in an ethereal form on my hard drive. In years past, I made sure to have paper printouts of every version of every script I wrote. That practice filled up a four-drawer filing cabinet. But nowadays, I tend to deliver drafts to my employers as a PDF file. The last script I wrote, I never printed out a single copy. I don't need to anymore.

That's nice and convenient, but it means I have to take extra measures to make sure I don't lose this stuff. I take this seriously. My work has value. I always felt that way, of course, even before I was getting paid for it. But now that I am getting paid, my work has value to people other than myself.

I simply can't imagine the horror of having to call a studio executive and tell her that the script they paid me to write, the one I spent the past six months working on, vanished in a flurry of grinding noises inside my laptop. That would be a catastrophic failure -- on the part of both the hard drive and my wee little brain.

Posted by Michael Gilvary at 7:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don't have much in the way of screenwriting advice. It's like telling someone how to make love. It's more useful (and more fun) to figure it out on your own. But I do have one tip that I feel qualified to give:

Never throw anything away.

Keep every idea you come up with, every scene you jot down, every line of dialogue. And, for heaven's sake, don't ever throw away an entire script or story. This is not a repudiation of the "kill your darlings" maxim. I'm not talking about cherishing every crap thing you scribble down while dropping acid. I'm just saying, tuck it away somewhere. Just in case. Because you never know.

Shortly after I moved to LA, I was doing some housekeeping and came across an old floppy disk. I didn't recognize the file that was on it, and I wasn't able to open it, since it was written using an antiquated word processing program I no longer had. So, I pitched it into the trash can.

But it didn't stay there long. Curiosity had gotten the better of me. I dug it out and, through trial and error, was able to convert the file to plain text.

Turns out, it was a rough draft of a screenplay I'd written six years earlier. It was maybe the third or fourth feature length script I'd attempted, but I had such a low opinion of it at the time that I abandoned it.

I started to read it right there on the screen, in plain text, all of the formatting stripped away, with action running into dialogue -- and I couldn't tear myself away.

I had put the story so completely out of my mind that it was like reading someone else's work. In fact, as I became increasingly invested in the story and the characters, I realized that I didn't know how it ended -- or even if I'd ever written an ending.

Fortunately, I did. And that ending brought me to tears.

The story was about a precocious and vexing 16-year-old girl who is sent by her beleagured mother to spend the summer with her grandparents in a sleepy beach town. She's so irritated at this punishment that she declares to all interested parties that she intends to commit suicide before the summer is out. And as she goes on to wreak havoc in their lives, her grandparents can't decide whether to fear that her threat is serious or pray that it is. Not exactly high-concept, I know. But it's a nifty story, alternately hilarious and moving.

The script was rough and needed some polishing, but the spine was in place, and the characters were vivid. To a screenwriter always in search of a new idea, this was better than finding a sack of money in the gutter. I'd essentially come into possession of a free script.

I cleaned it up and showed it to my agent, and he agreed with my assessment: this was a keeper.

The script rapidly eclipsed my more recent work to become my calling card piece. The small scale and macabre nature of the story made it a tough film to get off the ground, but a number of proven producers and name directors tried. It became the first screenplay to earn me money, in the form of an option to an independent producer who went on to hire me to write a couple assignments for him. At one point, an icon of the tweener set was even attached to star.

And, as of this writing, the script is setup with a production company and a director who are proceeding with plans to produce it on a low budget next summer. If things go as planned, it will be my first screenplay to go into production.

And for a few moments, seven years ago, the only existing copy was sitting in the trash can.

I don't throw anything out anymore. In this age of affordable hard drives and CD burners, you simply have no excuse for it. In fact, when I start on a revision of anything -- no matter how minor the changes -- I save it to a new file first so I won't destroy any previous version. I might end up with forty or fifty different versions of a screenplay, most of which I will never look at again. Who cares? It costs nothing. And every now again you might just realize you overlooked a gem.

Posted by Michael Gilvary at 3:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)