Of the various 48 HFPs I'd been involved with in a scriptwriting capacity I I find this one the hardest to watch. I'm conflicted, because I'm actually proud of what I managed to write overnight (with a but of help by my writing partner and another member of the crew). It was a very unusual piece of writing for me (at the time) in that it was just a series of conversations about where these people were going figuratively and literally), and how the woman's car—which never gets her to her destination—represents how she's been on the wrong road with her life. It's far from perfect, sure, and it was a good stretch but the execution fails the story on some level, and I'm partly to blame for that.
Because I so burned myself out on "How the Bunny Got the Bear" months earlier I made a deal with Scott for this film where I would sleep in the morning of the shoot, since I'd be up most of the night writing, and then come onto location later with the prop book that I would create. It was a good idea in terms of making me functional, but it was a bad idea practically speaking.
The pace of a 48 HFP shoot leaves little to no time for reviewing a script. The crew has to just blast through the shoot and get all the scenes done. As such, without the author there it's easy for the crew to miss some of the aspects of a script written so quickly and so unpolished. In this case it hurt the film a lot because a lot of things in the script are metaphorical and representational, with lines not necessarily meaning what they said, but addressing the character attitudes and the theme. When under-pressure actors change a line, or drop a word, the meaning can be affected. Or the crew makes a shot choice that isn't what the script calls for. For instance, the script called for the last scene to take place at a crossroad or fork in a road, representing the choices Jane had before her at that moment, but it was shot along a straight roadside, so the meaning was lost.
The big one was a change in the climactic action that I somehow didn't grok was happening. It was vitally important that the character of Jane hook up the jumper cables wrong, nearly get zapped, and realizes that she has to reverse the connections. But due to a mistake in the script and my being too tired to notice the director had the hitchhiker do the incorrect hookup. That tiny change of action somewhat guts the ending, because it's Jane who's the screwup, and has to realize she's got to turn it around. Simply putting the cables in the wrong hands undermines the point and robs her decision of motivation.
In any case, it illustrates how easy it is to screw up an important detail when you're moving at breakneck speed.
