With Kurt's notes - which Chris Smith just went through and agreed he and I are on the same page - I am moving ahead to draft 11. No major changes, just a bit of fleshing out the characters with some revised action and dialogue. Possibly going to re-incorporate some stuff dropped from previous versions and tighten up artifacts from those previous versions.

Also, I've been breaking down the script to get a bead on what we'd be looking at budget-wise. It's an odd beast. It could easily be made for $100,000, but would feel like a no budget film. I think at about $1 million it would be substantially awesome, on par with a film that costs five times as much, simply because of clever filmmaking tricks. That extra money would feed into the actors, obviously, but also one of the most overlooked elements in low budget films: production design.

Still, at this point, even $1,000 is beyond our means. So, I'll keep working on the business plan.

Kurt Rauf gave feedback on the latest draft of Detox. Kurt was the DP on "The Bet" and many other films, including My Name Is Bruce with his buddy Bruce Campbell. Kurt's leaving to go to Michigan next week to catch the tour of MNIB. But he managed to get through the latest draft and make notes.

It'd be pretty much impossible to go into any kind of detail regarding the notes and have it make sense without having first read the script. So I won't - at least not yet. What I will say is Kurt said we went from a mediocre script (draft 4) to a pretty damn good one. He agreed it was a drama that has horrific elements and thriller trappings, but it's not a horror film, nor a thriller. He had absolutely no problems with the story/plot; his comments were mainly on dialogue (we were a bit wordy), artifacts of plot devices removed from previous drafts and some suggestions to punch up the characters a bit.

Still waiting for other responses, but so far, not too drastic of changes.

Oh, and today is the notification date for The Movie Deal. They haven't posted the winners yet, but, based on previous experience, I'd say we'd have known by now if we won.

On Friday, I came across a post from the Director of Development of a production company asking for scripts to be pitched. I sent him an email asking if they were buying the script outright or if they were willing to allow me to develop it for them as the director. They said they were open to all options. So, I figured it wouldn't to give it a shot.

The problem was I had never pitched a script before. And everything I could find about techniques on pitching spent a lot of time covering how to look, how to present yourself and how to interact with the person to whom your pitching. Obviously I wasn't actually meeting them, so all that advice wasn't doing me any good.

I looked through the company's site, saw the kinds of films they had been making. Then looked those films up on IMDb. They had requested low-budget horror/sci-fi/fantasy scripts. What they had done were very low budget horror films. And not something that was straddling genres the way Detox does. There was no doubt these were horror films.

I had already decided they were going to pass on the script, so I didn't feel any kind of pressure writing something up and sending it to them. I decided to approach it more as a proposal in a business plan than an actual script pitch. I didn't want to go through the entire thing, scene-by-scene, and waste their time, when I was pretty sure this wasn't their cup of tea. Instead, I wrote out an introduction, a logline, the theme, a synopsis and then a list of selling points, such as the character of Miss Northrup being an ideal cameo option for a well-known star. The selling points also explained why we would be a good choice to create the film ourselves.

I sent it off last night. This morning I got their response.

Thanks for the very detailed pitch (really like your style of pitching), but we're going to pass on reading the script. Feel free to pitch me any other completed scripts you have.

Like I said, I didn't expect them to go with it, so it's not a letdown. And the comment about liking the style of pitching could be B.S., but it might not.

The whole thing, though, has really reinforced the need to write a straight-up horror script. No questions horror. Not a psychological thriller. Not an enigmatic drama. A horror film. I've got one in mind. All it takes is to get it on the page. Maybe that is what will eventually allow Detox to get made.