Adventures In Table Reading

I recently completed a feature length screenplay titled Second Time Around, an adaptation of my stage play Electric Serenade which was performed at Theater for the New City in East Greenwich Village New York in September 2022. As soon as I returned home to California after its premier I began turning my stage play into a screenplay. At first I was copying and pasting passages from the play into the text of the screenplay, then I started adding more scenes and more characters which pushed the completion date further than I originally imagined. After a year and nine months of rewrites I finally had a completed draft I felt good enough to send out to festivals last June.

I also uploaded a PDF of my screenplay onto my International Screenwriters Association profile. Other media can be added to profiles as well, including a table read video, so I decided to do that. I asked some actors I know around town, put an ad on Craigslist to find more actors, rented the studio at Community TV of Santa Cruz so I could record it with three cameras, and found a crew among the CTV volunteers. Everything was set for Saturday afternoon August 10.

I showed up at the location at noon, an hour before we got access to the TV studio. I brought printed copies of the script, munchies, and I made a big urn of coffee in the break room area. Soon after the problems began. One of the readers who was on his way from San Francisco texted me to say that he received some really bad news and couldn’t make it. Now I’m down to nine committed readers for the 21 speaking roles. 1PM rolls around and now we can enter the studio. I’d planned on using a couple of rectangular folding tables that CTV used for televised board meetings but turns out they got rid of those tables. This further altered my plans so now I had to look around for a suitable substitute. Eventually we found one, then one of the readers decided to leave because he thought we were going to start at 1PM, even though I said in the ad that 1PM to 2PM was going to be the setup then the actual table read would start. Now down to eight readers.

Eight readers for 21 roles was going to require every reader except the two leads to read multiple roles. Fortunately Phil the audio man stepped in when necessary to read for some roles and I ended up reading for a couple of small roles in between the stage directions so I was very busy. I was going to end to sit at one end of the readers but that was too far from the nearest microphone, so Phil suggested I sit behind the readers on a stool. This created the appearance of me sitting on a throne overseeing the readers, but I didn’t let the power go to my head.

We began the table read and the recording, and as it went along I discovered some missing words in the dialogue and other mistakes that had escaped my notice during all the previous rewriting and rereading. Otherwise the reading went well, the readers brought the words to life, and after a break at the midpoint climax we finished by 4:30, a half hour before reservation ended. Big thanks to the readers and the CTV crew!

We got it done, everyone had a good time, and now the next step is to edit the footage and post it to my ISA profile.

August 10 also would’ve been my mother’s 79th birthday. She was my artistic muse, and her love and her memory continue to inspire me. Happy birthday, Mom, in the hereafter. ❤️

©2024 Robert Kirkendall