Um…Sorry…Back To The Depressing News…

Here’s some screenplay advice from a screenwriter friend of a friend of a friend (I think he wrote Citizen Kane, Sunset Boulevard and Chinatown) who read my post on the subject:

As for your post about screenplays… I don’t really have anything to add, really. Bear in mind that just as many copywriters would like to be writing screenplays, so I write screenplays and would like to write novels. Some people are never fucking happy. And for ages I wanted to be a copywriter.

Anyway. What I would say, for what it’s worth, particularly in response to the comments of John W, is this: first, registering a script with the WGA is probably not really worth it. Ideas don’t tend to be stolen in that way, and even if a script is registered there can be rival projects, such as the other Robin Hood movie that came out at the same time as Prince of Thieves.

Second, about this notion that if you have an idea you should be given a shot to write it with no track record. Yes, and I should have seven classic performance cars parked outside and the bathroom from Scarface. But I don’t. And I’m afraid nobody gives a fuck about your idea unless you can prove you’ve got the goods to execute it. There was a time, probably back in the 80s when both ad-land AND movies were more fun, when yes, you could waltz in with some high concept pitch (it’s Die Hard in a mobile library!) and some bloated exec, chiselled off his tits on A-grade Bolivian and getting blown under his desk by some sweet platinum twat, would write you a cheque. That time is gone. It’s virtually impossible for even established film-makers to get things off the ground at the moment unless they involve vampires or zombies or some franchisable comicbook. People are fearful of buying off a pitch even from writers they already know, and even if you have a completed script to tout, the spec market is barren.

Basically I’m trying to offer some consolation. Film is just as wretched as advertising at the moment. The grass might look greener from over there, but I’m standing in it, and from over here it looks like a camp of fucking gypsies have emptied their caravan toilets all over the place and moved on.

And just in case you weren’t quite ready to top yourself, here’s Garrison Keillor on the demise of the fun of publishing:

I ran into my daughter’s favorite author, Mary Pope Osborne, in New York the other night, whose Magic Tree House books I’ve read to the child at night, and a moment later, Scott Turow, who writes legal thrillers that keep people awake all night, and David Remnick, the biographer of Obama. Bang bang bang, one heavyweight after another. Erica Jong, Jeffrey Toobin, Judy Blume. It was a rooftop party in Tribeca that I got invited to via a well-connected pal, wall-to-wall authors and agents and editors and elegant young women in little black dresses, standing, white wine in hand, looking out across the Hudson at the lights of Hoboken and Jersey City, eating shrimp and scallops and spanikopita on toothpicks, all talking at once the way New Yorkers do.

I grew up on the windswept plains with my nose in a book, so I am awestruck in the presence of book people, even though I have written a couple books myself. These are anti-elitist times, when mobs are calling for the downfall of pointy-head intellectuals who dare tell decent people what to think, but I admire the elite. I’m not one of them — I’m a deadline writer, my car has 150,000 miles on it — but I’m sorry about their downfall. And this book party in Tribeca feels like a Historic Moment, like a 1982 convention of typewriter salesmen or the hunting party of Kaiser Wilhelm II with his coterie of plumed barons in the fall of 1913 before the Great War sent their world spinning off the precipice.

Call me a pessimist, call me Ishmael, but I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea. We live in a literate time, and our children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numerals (U R 2 1derful), blogging like crazy, reading for hours off their little screens, surfing around from Henry James to Jesse James to the epistle of James to pajamas to Obama to Alabama to Alanon to non-sequiturs, sequins, penguins, penal institutions, and it’s all free, and you read freely, you’re not committed to anything the way you are when you shell out $30 for a book, you’re like a hummingbird in an endless meadow of flowers.

And if you want to write, you just write and publish yourself. No need to ask permission, just open a Web site. And if you want to write a book, you just write it, send it to Lulu.com or BookSurge at Amazon or PubIt or ExLibris and you’ve got yourself an e-book. No problem. And that is the future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $1.75.

Back in the day, we became writers through the laying on of hands. Some teacher who we worshipped touched our shoulder, and this benediction saw us through a hundred defeats. And then an editor smiled on us and wrote us a check and our babies got shoes. But in the New Era, writers will be self-anointed. No passing of the torch. Just sit down and write the book. And the New York Times, the great brand name of publishing, will vanish (POOF) whose imprimatur you covet for your book (“brilliantly lyrical, edgy, suffused with light” — NY Times). And editors will vanish.

The upside of self-publishing is that you can write whatever you wish, utter freedom, and that also is the downside. You can write whatever you wish and everyone in the world can exercise their right to read the first three sentences and delete the rest.

Self-publishing will destroy the aura of martyrdom that writers have enjoyed for centuries. Tortured geniuses, rejected by publishers, etc., etc. If you publish yourself, this doesn’t work anymore, alas.

Children, I am an author who used to type a book manuscript on a manual typewriter. Yes, I did. And mailed it to a New York publisher in a big manila envelope with actual postage stamps on it. And kept a carbon copy for myself. I waited for a month or so and then got an acceptance letter in the mail. It was typed on paper. They offered to pay me a large sum of money. I read it over and over and ran up and down the rows of corn whooping. It was beautiful, the Old Era. I’m sorry you missed it.

Tribune Media Services/New York Times

Happy Thursday everyone!