What A Difference 10 Days Make
And I'm not kidding. Started, stopped and started
the "official" polish about three times since last post. Finally delivered it
yesterday afternoon. It's an actual Pink Production Revision. They start
shooting a week from Monday. No idea what they'll think of
it.
In other news -- hoping to get the
original I'm "Guaranteed" going sooner than later, but Jeff (Beach, the
producer) has gone to Bulgaria. Maybe I can get something set up with TJ, my
buddy who also happens to be the executive on the project and the guy who made
the deal with me for the guaranteed movie in the first
place.
Need to get all this going
because...
My feature agents have
decided that they don't want to take my latest 'real' spec, THE MINOTAUR, out to
buyers. My last spec was a difficult subject and subsequently didn't sell. My
next spec NEEDS to sell to keep any shot at a real career alive. If I go out
with something that doesn't get it done, it will be all but impossible to get
executives and buyers to read whatever I do next. I'll be known as "That writer
whose stuff never sells." Kiss of death. As much work as I've put into
Minotaur over the past six months, I would rather shelve it than risk career
suicide. It is, after all, only the second complete screenplay I've written by
myself (at least in years, and only one of the previous endeavors ever saw the
light of day). I think I'm going to just "write it off" and move on to
something else. MINOTAUR may come back around as even my agents agreed it's a
really good serial killer movie. Right now, the fact that it's a serial killer
movie is the problem. They want me doing spy thrillers and such.
As I was posting this, I got a call
from TJ (the exec on the B-Movie). He wants me to tweak a few things at the
end. I come from a big-budget studio movie background and my instinct is to
always save the biggest punch, the cleverest trick for last. They don't have
the money to stage what I've written for the very ending and there is some
political issue with the Sci-Fi Channel people regarding the destruction of a
mosque (we blow one up with a precision guided bomb in the movie). So, I have
to go back in after a pending call with the director, Tripp, to re-tool the
ending, make changes throughout that correspond to the ending and also change
the mosque to, well, I guess now they want a bath house (the whole thing is
shooting in Bulgaria. I don't know what they really have access to in terms of
sets and locations. I just work
here.)
It looks like the rest of my
"day off" is going to be spent figuring out a new clever way to kill the monster
using a new method and still try to come up with new studio spec ideas for my
agents who insist that I need to get them to sign off on the concept before I
write anything. I tend to write whatever lands in my head because good ideas
are hard to come by. This no longer flies with them. I don't have the luxury,
financial or otherwise, to let my ego do the talking here. Back to the drawing
board.
Posted: Sat
- June 12, 2004 at 11:51 AM