A picture worth a thousand words

Starting a project as monumental as The Lumber Baron takes a lot. For one, it takes a great deal of writing. Our screenwriter Karen Hurd labored months over the screenplay that finally made it into the actors' hands. This motion picture: it's definitely worth the thousand words poured into it.

The casual film-goer may not realize how many iterations a screenplay has before hitting the set. In the case of The Lumber Baron, the screenplay received ten different rewrites. And we're not just talking about a mini switch of lines for one character. These are deep shifts that allowed the story to blossom.

What all changed? Well, some amazing stuff. Like, Mary Catherine took on more action, moving her from a nice sister hanging in the background to a woman who has a serious hand in her family's fortune. Daniel Jr., our hero, became more real and sharpened as his character was developed. The villains and vain neighbors were transformed into three-dimensional beings. We see the "bad guys" are really people like us who made a few terrible decisions. They're real, not cardboard cut-outs. And the treasure everyone is talking about--that was shifted and enhanced. What originally was the answer to the if-there's-a-treasure-what-is-it riddle is better than ever.

So the months of writing, and re-writing, and re-writing were worth it. The thousand (or more) words that have been changed are making this motion picture breathtaking.

​Come along. Let's see this picture.