A to B (And All the Way Back Again)

Once upon a time, I wrote a script. In chronological order, this is what happened to it:

1) To start with, read about Terry Illot and the Hammer Films episode here.

2) After that, Marchmont Films got their grubby little hands on it – you can read the full sorry lowdown here.

3) More or less at the same time, this happened (hello Yellow UK!) (I never got those script reports done, incidentally).

4) November 2007, and the script is selected by METLAB for development and eventual pitching to a cabal of investors. After a meeting in January 2008, I launched upon a month’s worth of rewrite and whizzed the new draft over to the truly gorgeous Lucy Vee for comment (Lucy is/was METLAB’s script editor of choice). Notes came back: super! At this stage, I was hoping to get another meeting with both Lucy and John Sweeney (METLAB head cheese) as per the original ‘calling notice’ to discuss potential ways forward. For whatever reason, the meeting never materialised. Wary of putting a lot of work in for no discernible gain, I turned my attention elsewhere (I was mid-way through a tricksy collaboration/treatment; stay tuned for more fun and games on that one at some point). Over the next few months, I waited for a meeting and a plan of action from John Sweeney, but nothing turned up. By now, I was starting to get the feeling that nothing was going to come of this (my sixth sense by now is quite well attuned to episodes of this sort). The project sat on the backburner for several months until I e-mailed John asking him what was going on (and giving him an ultimatum of sorts). I received this in reply. Game over.

5) In February 2008, I got this from an agent at United Agents:

...I absolutely loved it. It is smart and witty and unsettling.

...I’d love to read anything else you might want an agent to sell and I’d love to meet, if you’re still looking for representation.

Er, let’s think about this for a second – yes please!

Then: complete and utter silence for months. I chased up Mr Agent on a couple of occasions - he was always politeness and charm personified, but still nothing doing. Is it worth another chase? Probably not.

(Apropos of nothing at all, United Agents represent Henry Naylor: a couple of friends of mine were on the same Cambridge Footlights revue as Mister Naylor, and had a frankly uncalled for rhyme whenever his name arose in conversation: “Henry Naylor, Henry Naylor; about as funny as Vlad the Impaler.” Honestly, there’s just no need for it (*chortle*)).

6) “Notable Producer X”: I am wary of blogging too much about this at the moment, as I might say something I'll regret (as if that's ever stopped me before).

7) BBC Writersroom: a couple of months ago I got a lovely letter from Writersoom with a couple of pages of notes saying how much they liked the script and inviting me to send my next grand opus in (which I duly did, only for it to come back a month later – they’d already read it, you see. Oops).

Strangely enough, I wrote this in a post on 30th July 2007:

... if you want to know where NOT to send your speculative scripts, then stay tuned – I seem to have an almost supernatural knack for ferreting out production companies for whom procrastination is a profitable pastime...

In a bizarrely circuitous fashion, over a year later I’m back to where I started from - which really does go to show that if you want a successful screenwriting career, keep one eye permanently glued on Unfit for Print. Whatever I do, do the exact opposite: you really can’t go wrong.

Metlab Update, Part 6

Yet more feedback from the script correction house of Ms Vee. This time I got a solitary ‘WTF’ , one ‘DON’T PANIC’, and something called a “pffffffffffffffffffffffflllllllllllllrrrrrrt”, which I can only assume is either an extended raspberry or the sound of something deflating rather slowly. I’ll go for a combination of the two, I think. It looks like I might have to return to an outline, or at the least a rewrite of the first thirty pages just to get things kicked off.

I’m sure that my fellow ‘Labbers have all been eminently sensible and have honed their outlines and treatments to a shiny, gleaming perfection before launching upon a first draft. I roll a slightly different way, and frankly, it’s pretty rubbish. That said, I’m writing a ‘sort of’ treatment/ outline for someone at the moment, and I have to say it’s far more enjoyable than I thought, so in future, I might have to stick with this method – it’s only taken me about a million drafts to realise this, but then I always was a bit slow on the uptake.

Anonymous in Toronto

Another episode from the “spec script sending out and waiting for something to happen” pile (gotta find a better way of expressing that at some point).

Back in September 2006, I sent a speculative email to a guy (let’s call him Jim) at Company X (I’m obstructed from saying any more due to confidentiality). Wanna read a couple of scripts, mate? Go on, go on, go on (RIP Father Ted).

The next day (5th September), Jim replies. Trousers, that was quick! OK, he said, send me a couple of hard copies.

On 11th September, Jim replies – he’s read them both. Good gravy, this guy is quicker than Superman on Ex-Lax! He states that he wants to send both scripts to his executive producer, who was en route to Toronto. Can I send him PDFs of both scripts and a short biography?

Send scripts in pdf format – no problem. As for a short biography – oh, Christ, I hate things like this. I was always taught that it was vulgar to talk about oneself, so compiling a CV is a complete nightmare for me. I know, I know, the whole point about this type of thing is that you should puff yourself up and bang your chest and get very excited about your ‘passion’ for scriptwriting and all suchlike related endeavours (then take a deep breath and relax). So I tell Jim what I do for a living in the hope that it will intimidate him enough so he doesn’t need to ask for another biography.

14th September, and things are moving apace:

Thanks for these… I’ve forwarded them to Toronto.

Wow. Toronto. I wonder what they’re doing over there?

A long silence follows. To Jim’s credit, I hassle him a few times and he always gets back promptly.

The scripts are in Canada.... you will have to forgive the time, but it’s ‘the process’.

Okay. ‘The Process’. In Toronto. Sounds mysterious, as if my poor scripts are being subjected to some weird Cronenbergian mind probe (either that, or Jim’s quoting the title of some Hollywood high concept piece o’ crap at me).

This arrives on 2nd January 2007 (Happy New Year by the way):

I don’t think your scripts are up to scratch... they’ll need a lot of work to get to a point where we can actively get sales potential involved. They lack structure which is not insurmountable, but they will need you to do some independent research. If you can provide us with script reports (independent reports), then we can, from a sales perspective look at them further.

Crikey! ‘Not up to scratch’, ‘no structure’. Everything’s gone pear shaped in the space of two lines (what happened in Toronto to my poor defenceless scripts?). OK, I can handle this. I e-mail Jim back and say sure, independent script reports are not a problem (I can imagine an unruly queue of script consultants forming round the block as I type), but surely you’d have some idea of how marketable you feel these scripts are, and whether or not they are likely to attract funding?

I get a reply the same day (I told you he works fast – you slackers over at Marchmont, take note):

…I cannot try to raise private equity funding from any of my collective of investors until a global sales deal is in place on a project. If and when that sales deal is in place, then I can bring the project to my personal financiers / private bankers. But to get it to this stage, any script consultancy report will help greatly, since if they are reputable, then they will have sales potential in mind.

Let me know if you’d be interested in getting some reports (for both if possible) and we can take it from there.

Jim then goes on to detail a huge list of requirements that he would need from me in order to ‘take things further’ – none of them are insurmountable, but all require a good degree of work, script reports notwithstanding.

Righty ho! I email Jim back to tell him that if he’s interested, all this might take a while. OK, he says, no hurry. A couple of re-writes later and I’m considering sending both scripts out for ‘professional’ coverage and then back to Jim to see if the initial interest is still there.

However, do script consultants really do this?

…any script consultancy report will help greatly, since if they are reputable, then they will have sales potential in mind…

Coverage I’ve received before refuses to comment on the ‘subjective’ concept of marketability (in that case I propose that structure is subjective as well J). Some of the ScriptShark coverage I’ve seen does briefly touch on marketability, but this entirely revolves around a script’s suitability within the current market – i.e., if you’ve written a time travel drama about the French revolution, chances are that ScriptShark will put the boot in (“A script featuring Marie Antoinette and her cyborg sidekick is unlikely to find funding in the current climate”). Then again, who knows? It’s all a lottery, right? (and bearing in mind some of the godawful British films that have been produced with lottery money, that’s absolutely true). That said, I’ve never gone as far as getting someone like the Script Factory to provide any of my scripts with feedback, which is probably something I should do, and pretty pronto.

At the very least, Jim sounds like a good man to know if you need someone to get the drinks in (he has his own coterie of personal financiers, no less).