two hours on a 3 page scene

GAH! The torture! The torture. I was working with my writing partner today — as I have pretty much most days since 1998. Anyhow, sometimes he gets all OCD about stuff in our scripts. I’m not a detail oriented person so when it gets down to this kind of microscopic word scrubbing I get a little testy. I’m testy on a good day. After hour 2 of our Alexa call (yes, we don’t use zoom, we use Alexa devices not connected to our computers because we like it that way!) Anyhow, after hour 2 of our call this afternoon I kind of snapped, “I did not expect to spend two hours on a three page scene.” He then went off on how Corrine (from the last show he worked on) would spend hours and hours — Yes, I know. And when I pressed him on it she works normal office hours and only half of that is on writing her show. If she truly averaged 1.5 pages per hour on rewrite she’d be in trouble meeting deadline. Anyhow, the problem boiled down to him rejecting every single option we came up with to end the episode. There’s a last line of each scene called a “button” and it’s kind of the final emotional or comedic beat before you move on to the next scene. The button that ended the episode wasn’t up to his standards. I’m not picky. I don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. Even when it comes to something as la-Di-dah as writing. Good enough is great! Por ejemplo: the movie “Some Like It Hot” ends with the main character confessing to a would-be suitor that he’s in fact a man, dressed as a woman. The suitor smirks and says, “well, nobody’s perfect.” I.A. Diamond and Billy Wilder hated that line and figured they’d come up with something better. They never did and that line wound up being the perfect ending to their film. I’m no I.A. Diamond, not by a long shot, but if you don’t accept good enough you’ll never move on.