My Screenplay May Have Found a Home

As some of you know, last winter, I wrote a screenplay, The Airport Bar, on the fly on the advice of a few people that kept saying, “You need to have a screenplay in your portfolio!”. So I did. I sat down and I wrote one.

I had 4 months of hiatus from work and was just finishing a new version of my spec pilot for my series that I developed entitled, The First Year, and then I wrote a screenplay. This took me one month. I gave myself only a month for many reasons; I had to finish an episode of Saving Grace that I started earlier that year, I had to finish my pilot episode that was in rewrites, and I was taking storyboard tests for 3 shows on FOX in hopes to get a day job which took a week each, and then I was going to be back on a short animated project. I only had a month of time to spare.

~Wanting to work in television is also a huge factor in my fast writing process. In TV, you don’t get a year to write an episode or even two episodes, you get a few days to first draft it and then if you are lucky a week or two to change it. Yes there are staff members, and you have people helping you, but you have to be able to go from concept to script very quickly. This is what I want to do so I have to practice in the way that I would work. To be clear, since Feb 2009 when I wrote and completed The Airport Bar, I have gone back and it has had two re writes and I am sure many more to come.~

I had no idea what I was going to write about, I didn’t want to adapt one of my novels, so I took something familiar to me and wrote an indie drama. I say indie drama because it fits in that place. This film would never be a blockbuster, but more of a smaller film. The idea behind me doing this was also to show that I can write. I entered a few contests, the more respectable ones and I even was able to apply for more writing jobs.

Through a series of emails with someone from an ad I saw on Craigslist, the first 20 pages of my script landed in the hands of one of my idols in TV writing, and all around amazing guy. He liked it but didn’t hire me for his project. That was that. A few weeks went by and my then agent called me to say that a production company was interested.

I met with them, chatted, nothing. Then a director was interested and if you are out in the world trying to sell your script, you will see that this is more normal than not normal. You don’t just write one and sell it~it should be so easy.

Now months later that original company is interested again. They made an offer, my agent (from back then, I am still sort of working with him until I find a new one-another story for another day) countered. I was like “what? I am not working, I can’t even afford the parking fee to come see you! I need to sell it” but he knows what he is doing, so I wait!

My tiny little film may have a home! I hope, but I am also realistic about the process.
I just always wonder if it will be one of my novels, my screenplay or a TV show that puts me on the map. They say, “you are only one screenplay away from making it.”

Yes, There Are Stupid Questions!

“You say you read a lot of spec scripts, is that so you can get ideas?”
True story, that was a true question asked at the notes on craft seminar last night at the WGA. Really? Yes really? The worst part is that was not the dumbest question asked.

I love going to panels and hearing from the show runners and even sometimes the cast because you get a real feel of how the show works, and the same is for screenwriters. I love to hear all their stories about the business, and how it works and doesn’t work for you.

I love hearing about so in so’s screenplay went through 6 writers and umpteen rewrites before it became the version we saw on the screen.

But there is always that point in the night when I cringe and just want to go out running, but not without first apologizing to whomever is up there speaking.

Why? Why? Why do these people ask the most ridiculous questions? And why are they always 3, 4, or 5 part questions? Usually whatever these people ask has been covered in the original lecture.

It is the part that makes me want to leave.

That said, last night’s panel was amazing. Diane English, (My Sister Sam, Murphy Brown, The Women), Tom Rickman, (Coal Miner’s Daughter, Truman, Tuesdays With Morrie), and Bruce Joel Rubin, (Ghost, The Time Traveler’s Wife), rounded out this very experienced and successful panel of writers.

Daniel Petrie, Jr., (Beverly Hills Cop, The BIg Easy, Toy Soldiers), was once again the moderator, and did a fantastic job, just like last week for the notes on concept.

I find it is always great to go to these panels because even though we as writers know these things, usually, at least for me, every time I come away with knowledge that hadn’t sunk in yet or something. I always come home and then change my script in some way. It is just the dumbfuck questions that drive me crazy.