In the newest pages, 106-110, from my last breathing collaborator Michael Breiburg, Napolitano is driven to Wolf’s Lair, where he and Rachel are to be executed.
Sensing a setup but needing to rescue Rachel, the disgraced mayor slips out of the car early and approaches Sydney’s mansion in the hills on foot. He’s obviously unsure about his cohort Deland’s role in all this -- a concern later validated -- and he wants to buy himself a little time.
Hiding on the mansion grounds while Deland meets with the goons inside, Napolitano spots the opening he needs: a door to the balcony outside the room where Rachel’s being held. (We saw Rachel temporarily escape out that same door earlier, so we can buy that it’s been left open.)
In a way, Napolitano’s treacherous quest to save Rachel parallels the job facing the most recent writers of our soon-to-be-finished screenplay collaboration, “Right of Way.” The odds are stacked against them, but they keep searching for an opening to exploit, a way to stave off a horrible crash-and-burn demise for at least another week.
Take Breiburg for example. The guy’s working 11-hour days on some clearly exploitive reality TV show (my characterization, not his); he comes home barely energetic enough to feed his political jones with the latest convention news; then he makes it to the weekend, only to learn no one else has contributed any new pages to our script, and it’s up to him to keep our group effort going another week.
He must feel like Napolitano, whose perseverance and quick thinking lands him in Rachel’s bedroom, where he finds she’s been handcuffed to the bed with the executioner’s clock ticking. Sure, he finds a way to get her out of there, but now he’s got four armed henchmen (and maybe an ally with questionable loyalties) clamoring after him full-tilt.
Because of the interactive nature of our project, you have one last chance to bail out the good guys (Napolitano and Breiburg), by writing the script’s next pages.
In the past, our deadlines have been Sunday at midnight, but this week, if I don’t get a decent submission by Sunday at noon, I’m going to take the whip to Breiburg one last time.
I’ll be writing the script’s final pages the week after that, so if you want to take part in our heroic quest and maybe win a Script Project t-shirt in the process, the door is closing.
But for now, the opening is still there, waiting for someone to blast through.
