Sometimes your greatest ideas get changed in production

Inspiration comes in flashes, or so they say. So too, I believe, does its fellow--insight. Here's an example that yet again left me gasping in my own ignorence:

About a year ago, my son, who works at Fox Studios, was looking for a script. Hey, I said, I've got one for you. Long story short, I took a clean and simple short story I'd written and adapted it into a nifty little dramatic short.

Well, the script had a talking desert tortoise as one of two main characters, and I felt he was a laconic, drool sort of desert creature, so I wrote all his lines thus and so, slow and full of ironic humor. Well, we got out on the Mojave and cold reality struck: I found that desert tortoises are marvels of physical economy. When it comes to eating, no need for six or seven chomps on a piece of lettuce when one will do. The point is that, clever writer/director that I am, I needed many, many lettuce chomps so I could insert my absurd drawling dialogue into the tortoise's reticent beak. And worse...ever look a tortoise in the eye on an extreme close up? Nothing the least bit laconic about that face. Grim. Relentless. Maybe even fatalistic would apply. (if you don't believe me take a look for yourself: www.extinctionthefilm.com )

What to do? The only thing I could--I changed the character 180 degrees from drawling and drool into curt, grumpy and brusk. Hey, drastic and a big mess for a while, but it seems to work. And in the process I caught a dose of humility, not a bad thing, all told.