millsworks

Hey there!

I haven’t posted a lot here lately because I’ve been allegedly busy writing the script for the Ruffus The Dog version of “A Christmas Carol”. It was a bitch to finish partly because I’m lazy slob and also because I ignored the advice contained in my own notes and found myself in the trap of trying to remain true to Dicken’s original text.

What was I thinking?

In the original Ruffus episodes we tackled a lot of different kinds of stories, including Dr. Jeykll & Mr. Hyde, Around The World In 80 Days and The Three Musketeers as well as more common fairy tales like The Emperor’s New Clothes, Tom Thumb and The Three Bears. Rarely, if ever, did we ever use any of the original text from those stories. Sometimes we would crib a line or two from a famous movie version – more often we’d stick in some cheesy vaudville gags – but we always managed to find a way to adhere to the spirit of the stories without letting ourselves get distanced from the unique world we had created for Ruffus The Dog.

I watched every film version of “A Christmas Carol” I could find and while I wanted to emulate the Alistair Sim version, entitled “Scrooge”, because it’s my absolute favourite – I knew I couldn’t just go ahead and copy it for both artistic and legal reasons. The words of Charles Dickens in that slender volume of a holiday ghost story are SO tight and nuanced – as opposed to his usually penny-a-word serialized novel ramblings – that it became even more difficult for me to cut the tale down to the bone and still leave enough room for our deliberately stupid puppet gags. At one point I had a draft that was 113 pages – that’s a fucking feature film!

Knowing we can’t do a feature for $8,500 + a pantload of goodwill meant I had to stop wasting valuable time, drag my head out of my sorry arse and get down to business. Hack. Slash. Cut. Revise. Rearrange. Be more inclusive of other faiths. Leave room for the Pig and the Monkey and the Sheep – and find the best places to use JP Houston’s wonderful songs.

Last night – after a day of intense last-minute effort (combined with an interlude for putting zombie makeup on my son) – I finally had a working draft that we can use as the basis for our production.

I credit Richard Williams for his half-hour animated version (which also starred Sims as the voice of Scrooge) for leading the way. While I didn’t copy his structure entirely – partly because it was a tad too abbreviated – it certainly showed me what could be safely excised and still leave the heart of the story intact — with room to spare for pigs, sheep and monkeys.

So it is written – so let it be done.

It ain’t Shakespeare. It ain’t Dickens. It’s Ruffus The Dog – and that’s what we wanted.

Now – on with the task of raising the rest of the cash and getting the team organized to meet our proposed shoot dates for the last week of November. Wait a minute – today is November 1st?

fuck

P. S. You can help contribute (if you haven’t already) by visiting our IndieGoGo web pages where we are crowd-sourcing our funding for this episode of Ruffus. Word-of-mouth is as valuable as cash – please tell everyone you know. Thanks!