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Development Timeline
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The Captain Cannabis character and story have been evolving over a period of years. Okay, perhaps decades is more to the point. Creator Verne Andru spent his childhood in the 1960's during a time of tremendous social change. The Summer of Love came and went, leaving hope for a better future in its train. It was against this backdrop that the seeds for Captain Cannabis were sown.
During 1976 Verne wrote and drew the first Captain Cannabis comic book. Titled "Roll Me Another One Just Like the Other One" it introduced the Hal Lighter character. While it saw a limited production run, it was registered with the Canadian Copyright Office who issued a copyright certificate dated April 20, 1977. April 20th has become synonymous with the counter-culture as April is the fourth month and when combined with twentieth day goes make up 420 - the rally call of the counter culture. Finding the concept great but execution a tad on the naive side, Verne set out to hone his skills by working his way up the comic book and animation fields. It wasn't until the 1990's that he got back to the putting pen to paper for the new and improved Captain Cannabis story that is chronicled here. In 1999 he attended the NATPE conference in New Orleans. Armed with nothing more than a 1-sheet, he found a great reception and discovered he could easily make numerous international sales by developing it beyond the concept stage. Back home he set about the onerous task of developing the 1-sheet into a feature film and comic book series. Anyone who says writing a feature film screenplay is easy is being extremely disingenuous - it is one of the most difficult tasks anyone could ever undertake. But he persevered through multiple drafts. "The Strange Attractor" was the first comprehensive draft [draft 3] that went out for a professional read. It was well received but was way too long, requiring substantial editing. Writing continued through to draft 7 which was registered with the WGA under the title "420." For the comic series it was divided into 13 parts with the first part published as the 420 comic subtitled "I can't wait that long." The book was made available for sale at outlets like Amazon.com. The story was tweaked further and draft 8 was used for storyboarding. With the entire story illustrated, the drawings were matched with a scratch audio bed to create an animatic. This provided a preliminary test to see how the story worked as a film. The animatic provided a great deal of insight into what worked and didn't that was the basis for the evolution of draft 9 of the screenplay. Leaner and meaner, the story has been cut from 160 to 90 pages and rocks from start to finish. Draft 9 also sees the return of Captain Cannabis as the story title, bringing it full circle to where it all started more than three decades earlier. |
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