It has been fully eleven months (yes, 11 !) since my last blog entry. I apologize for it taking me so long, especially after vowing to post more often after my last multi-month hiatus. Let me explain what has kept me so occupied — and in some cases pre-occupied — in the interim.
As most of you know, I alternate back and forth between writing novels and writing screenplays for feature films. This is relatively easy to do when you’re just plugging along, your career doing well artistically, but maybe there’s not a whole lot going on professionally. As a writer, you just make sure you spend time in front of your laptop doing the grunt work required to create new content. The grunt work is required because you can’t simply create new content. No, your content has to be new, fresh, and exciting, with something to say, and you must say it at a professional level.
Anything less is a waste of your time.
In years past, I had been a client of a different literary manager, who essentially was not doing much to advance my screenwriting career. In retrospect, I have come to believe he was my manager so he could have access to every unproduced script I’ve written without having to pay an option fee on each one of them. But at the time, I did not think that way. Anyway, he and I were trying to set up a film finance deal to shoot a small found-footage creature feature at about the $500K level. I had approached the rep for a known horror actor to see if perhaps said actor might be interested in doing a few weeks’ work on our project. They read my script and LOVED it. The actor’s rep wanted to help produce it, but at a higher budget level. I was elated! Not only was it vindication of work (I was worthy!), but a larger budget meant more money for everyone all around. Win/win, right?
Wrong. My manager was resistant to this; I could not figure out why. And when queried directly, he never did give me an answer that made any kind of logical sense. This lead to friction between us. We eventually had a blowout argument, and my (now former) manager kicked me to the curb at Christmas almost two years ago.
Not to worry, though. I should thank him. His firing me wound up being the best thing he ever did for my writing career. The other rep, also a manager, offered to represent me and my screenplays. I said yes, and we haven’t looked back since. And now the budget on the project has crept up to somewhere between $5 – $10 MILLION. Which will mean a much bigger payday for yours truly if we ever get the thing financed. And since, at this budget level, the film will be sanctioned under the WGA (Writers Guild of America), I will have an opportunity to join the union.
Please indulge me a brief word about unions in show business. Here’s the bottom line. Regardless of your political or social views, regardless of how you view unions, Hollywood film and television is a union industry. It really is that simple. If you want to work and keep working at that level of filmmaking, you better join the union at the earliest opportunity. If you view unions positively, it’s a non-issue. If you don’t, suck it up and deal with it. Join your union. It’s a fact of life you cannot avoid once you make the jump from backyard, DIY films to working within the established industry.
And here’s where the business of screenwriting comes into play. As each actor came onboard, they each wanted changes made to their respective characters. So I rewrote the scripts. A new directing duo came onboard. More changes. And more changes. And more…
You get the idea.
All totaled, I have rewritten that original script no less than 35 times. And I say that because 35 is where I stopped keeping count. But in addition to the script, I learned there were other documents I had to prepare. Creating a logline and a synopsis for the script was a no-brainer. In fact, I already had that done. All I had to do was tweak a word here and there, turn a phrase here, delete a clause there, and I was home-free. But I had to write something akin to a business plan, something edgy, artsy, beautiful, and cool to wow prospective Executive Producers and financiers. And since it has some elements similar to a business plan, that’s what I called it in the early days. My manager corrected me, it was (at the time) referred to as a “Pitch Plate”, or a “Visual Deck”. As of this writing, the proper term around Hollywood is the colloquial phrase, “Look Book”.
So I had to get a Look Book put together. This is something I had never done before, and I could find VERY few examples. So I had to do it on the fly, and learn by doing. Trial and error is a painful, effective way to learn anything. Even with memory problems like I have (thanks to cancer, chemo, radiation, and ongoing medications), once you’ve done one, you will never forget how. In the lengthy, frustrating, stressful months-long process, I have written, rewritten, done and redone the Look Book not less than 50 times.
This is in addition to working on my next novel, BLOOD RED MOON, and attempting to write the pilot and the first season of an hour-long TV drama series I am still trying to finish. Sometimes I might go days or weeks without hearing from my manager, and I’m the kind of guy who generally subscribes in the old adage, “No news is good news”. I’m basically a fairly optimistic, “glass half-full” kind of guy. So I would spend those days and weeks working on new material rather than sitting by the phone, obsessing over when the project was getting financed and how much money I might get paid. But then I would get various emails or phone calls, saying something needed to be tweaked again, a photo needed to be changed, altered, resized, desaturated, etc. And of course, I would immediately stop whatever project I was working on, push it to the back burner, and focus on the problem in front of me. This has been happening off and on for the past year and a half.
Mind you, I am not complaining about any of this. This is the art I have chosen to pursue. This is world I have chosen to inhabit. This is the business I have chosen to occupy, and this is all just a part of the business.
I make no excuses for why I haven’t posted more, I simply want to explain the reasons why. What is true for writers is also true for other artists who make a living through their art: writing the story or screenplay is only the beginning. And your job is not finished when you send the script off to your agent or manager to read.
It’s just the tip of the iceberg, folks. And your job has only just begun.
THIS HORRORWRITER'S LIFE 