you just fell to sleep

Despite the title of today’s entry, I will not be listing off the many faults of Rita Hanson, who says that line just before the end of the film. Instead, I use that line because it was the last correction I just made in a 3 hour plus process of fixing the transcript I have of the movie. See, I got the transcript online and use it occasionally to find lines to use as titles, but far too often there are mistakes.

Prior to today, I’d reformatted the transcript that existed—if you click on that link above, you’ll see how it’s organized (I get the feeling the “transcript” was actually just pulled off the subtitle file, hence it being broken up as it is)—and corrected some lines. But, tonight I set out to fix the whole thing.

(Now, I can print a copy and mark each line I’ve used for titles and mark off new ones as I go so I can be sure not to repeat myself.)

At first, I thought it wouldn’t take too much longer than simply watching the movie. But, 20 minutes into the process I was only a handful of minutes into the film because the transcripter or subtitler apparently didn’t like the verb tense. “I’m gonna have to” became “I will have to” and stuff like that. Not a big deal except that for my purposes I want the lines to be accurate… even though at this point I’ve mostly got the movie memorized, it’s nice to have backup.

So, this blog entry will not be very long for the very simple reason that I have been working with this movie for more than three hours now, it’s after 1 AM and, well, in the immortal words of Rita, I need to fall to sleep.

Not, fall asleep.

Not, go to sleep.

No, that would be normal. And, Rita the Robot is not normal.

It was tempting to put the entire transcript here for this entry, but at nearly 10,000 words, it would be a bit unwieldy and no one would read it… Still, while there might be some copyright issue with putting the whole thing online, I will consider doing it (wink wink).

I still might format it a little more like a screenplay or at least put labels on who’s saying which lines before I print it. But, for now, I’ve got my transcript.

Today’s reason to repeat a day forever: to take my transcript and turn it into a one man stage production, one night only (obviously), just me playing all the parts, Phil, Rita, Larry, Buster, Doris, Debbie, Fred, Bill, Gus, Ralph, Nancy, Laraine, Florence, Buster’s wife, Felix, Felix’s wife, Herman, the nurse, the barman, all three old ladies, and Punxsutawney Phil himself with some original dialogue in Groundhogese.