Tuesday, November 28, 2006

The Essay Portion Will Be Graded

With written proposals for four series and one MOW submitted to various networks as they requested, and while I await research on three more MOWs, I’ve been freed up at work after a long haul of writing to review a ton of spec pitches that have come in over the last few months.

As you can probably tell from my last post.

And then yesterday at lunch I listened to an interview with Michael Arndt, writer of Little Miss Sunshine. (Not that money’s the only thing, but interestingly, it was made for about $8 million, sold to Fox Searchlight at Sundance for $10.5 million and has taken in over $76 million. Plus, I really liked it.)

Anyway, Arndt said that Hollywood is “overflowing with B- scripts.” He said he didn’t think there were that many bad scripts floating around in Hollywood, just a lot of unfinished ones. Good point.

(Although… I know there are a lot of bad scripts out there. I’ve read some of them. [I just hope mine aren’t among them –- though secretly I fear they are…] As for the TV show pitches I get sent, a few are good, some are unfinished, but man, a lot of them are just plain bad. Like, smelly bad. Like, please leave it outside or it’ll stink up the kitchen bad.)

If a script makes it to an agent, studio, manager, someone out in Hollywood with enough clout to spread it around, even if it’s stuck in turnaround for years, there has to be some merit to it. But merit alone gets you a B-. To go further you need at least a B+. Of course, even if you have a solid A, it can float for years because of weird business decisions that have noting to do with the quality of your script.

It just keeps getting more and more unfair, huh?

Writing is hard. Everyone who writes says this. But I’m not sure everyone who writes does this. Which is to say, actually work hard. It’s really freaking difficult to take an objective look at your script, weed out the notes from your trusted readers that have merit, and then go in and fix the problems. Most writers, I think, don’t get to that last part.

I’ve written dozens of hours of primetime cable television, some that have won awards. I have one movie under my belt, done the hard way. What this has taught me is that it takes a lot of hard work. Really. Like, seriously. HARD WORK. Long hours trying and failing and trying again. Then failing again and trying once more. Thrice more. Then convincing yourself you’re a hack, and then talking yourself into trying again.

It’s not enough to say you’re struggling over a script, but in truth all you’re doing is reading it over and over, and in the end, you change 1% of it because you can’t figure out what else to do.

I’ve been handed scripts by writers who say they’ve been toiling over it forEVER, and then I read it and it's still full of typos and inconsistent slug lines. Let alone wildly obvious logic flaws. Or a totally uninspired story.

Of course, it’s still very hard for me to do this revision thing. There’s something about a written document that you’ve spent months creating that feels concrete and unchangeable. But dammit man, you have to keep plugging away. And admit that you’re flawed. And be willing to kill your babies. (See earlier post re: this terrible infanticide…)

Which is why the Harlem rewrite, though it’s been frustrating and intimidating, has been good for me. I’m forcing myself to keep a fresh mind, throw away things that won’t work no matter how much I love them or how badly I want them to work.

Because even though I have all those writing credits, I’m still very much a beginner and I have a lot to learn.

Maybe not as much as the lady who keeps calling me at work because she had the idea for almost every hit show out there before they came out… but I have a lot to learn. The good thing is, I’m willing to muscle my way past the B- mark.

Or try anyway.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Brilliant!

And by the way - you're never a B- in my book.

I'd give you a solid B anyday.