My Screenplay Update

You may remember the movie I was writing. And writing. And writing. Well, I finally finished, and Team Handleman began sending it around town.

When I came to Los Angeles, I heard stories of napkins with doodles on them being sold for a million bucks. But times have changed, my friends. Pretty much at the exact moment I stepped foot here, the money dried up. It was the equivalent of going to Germany in 1945 to get in the Nazi business. The enthusiasm had died down a bit.

So even though I didn't just scribble on a cocktail napkin, and actually used a newfangled computer and printed out neatly typed pages, my script didn't immediately make it rain. But it did get me a million...meetings. So that's what I've been doing the last couple weeks.

It's been pretty great. It took me 2 fricking years to write this thing, so it's nice to sit down with people who say they enjoyed reading it. It almost makes it all worthwhile. Almost. Well, not really.

But the people I've been meeting with have been awesome and they are smart and know their shit, and it's nice to hear some positive feedback. They all ask good, tough questions, and we talk about the script and the characters and the story like it's an actual thing. It can almost make you feel silly if you stop and think about it - some dude (or dudette) in a real office is asking me about some made up bullshit I wrote down while sitting around in my underwear eating triscuits. Nothing makes sense!

I've spent the last many years in TV, so I'm pretty new to the feature business. And in going to these meetings, I've learned a very important lesson that I didn't expect, and that I thought I'd share with you. It's the most important thing in the feature business right now and seemingly the only thing that matters. It's only two letters long, it's...

IP

Those are the magical letters that I keep hearing over and over again. In the end, my script doesn't mean much, but IP means everything. So what the hell is IP?

IP is intellectual property.

People like my script, or at least they say they do. But they can't sell it. And they can't sell it for one reason: it wasn't a book first. A book is IP. An article in Wired magazine is IP. A comic strip is IP.

Apparently, IP makes studios feel protected. "See?! Some other asshole liked it enough to bound it into a book, it must be safe to invest in!" "Look! They put a cover on it and sold it at Barnes and Noble, that means smarter people than us trust it!" "Wired magazine wouldn't go to the trouble of writing 500 words about it if it wouldn't make a billion dollar franchise!"

Spec screenplays are an unknown, risky gambit. But a movie project based on preexisting material makes everyone feel all warm and toasty inside. Ya figure if it's an adaptation the guarantee fairy might come by and leave a quarter. But how do you know the Guarantee Fairy isn't a crazy glue sniffer, er, a shitty story that won't make a good movie. The next thing you know there's money missing from your dresser and your daughter's knocked up. I seen it a hundred times.

Sorry, lapsed into Tommy Boy for a sec.

Anyway, these folks that I'm meeting with want me, or them, to find a book or an article or a something that already exists, and adapt it. Then they want us to go into a studio and sell it. And in that meeting we can go, "Hey, we're not just some idiots making stuff up, you know, like wacky, glue sniffing writers, this thing's a book! It's proven!". Even though it's not and no one reads anything or cares.

It's strange. It's almost like after Harry Potter and Twilight everyone got confused and thought that book = box office gold. But there are like 4 famous books, and then everything else. But I guess it's easier to point to something that already exists than do the hard work of reading a 100 page screenplay that no one else has seen before, and believing in it.

But the script I wrote isn't completely worthless. Not at all. It got me in the door. Now they think I can write something. If some "IP" comes around, they might give me a shot. So there's that.

I just wish I would've known this ahead of time. I could've gotten a gig writing shit for Wired Magazine and cut out the middle man.

More updates as they happen...