For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a new screenplay called Twelve Steps, a very dark romantic comedy about a young guy who realizes he’s an asshole. The story is structured according to the twelve steps of addiction recovery, though they aren’t acknowledged explicitly by any of the characters; instead, each segment is simply preceded by a black interstitial card with white text, as in “Step 1: Admitting you have a problem.” Many of the steps deal with a ‘higher power’, and in the context of the story, love is the force that eventually redeems the protagonist. Sadly, however, the poor sap gets his heart crushed along the way, and though he ends up a better person, it isn’t clear that he’s better off nice but miserable than he was when obnoxious but happy.

Yesterday evening, however, sitting down to work through some scenes, I instead ended up spilling out the outline of an entirely different, and certainly more commercial story – something that goes against my natural nothing-but-indie inclinations. The new story’s a heist film – a clich