Biting the Bullet

A while back I blogged about making sure you have friends in this business. Then, of course, I promptly spent four weeks buried under a pile of crap trying to get my act together alone. Big mistake. And, as it turns out, completely unnecessary.

Yesterday, I went to coffee with a producer I haven't spoken to since the birth of his second baby (funny how friends drop away when the kids come, isn't it?). Anyway, we were talking about our projects, and he mentioned a way for me to save my almost-jettisoned book project! Ha!

Now I feel all better. If anything comes of it I'll let you all know immediately. But it is a nice way to go into the weekend. The key in a book adaptation, from a seller's standpoint (read: producer) is to find the talent element that makes it an irresistible purchase for a studio exec. This means a director or piece of talent (read: actor) who you know the studio wants to be in business with -- sometimes this means a writer they care about, more often than not it really means a star. The low-budget/old-fashioned way (i.e. the way I was doing it) is to come up with a "take" or approach to the material, either write the treatment or hire a writer to rough it out and then shop it. This is why books are usually not the best source material from a producer's standpoint because the amount of time you have to invest before you actually have something to produce is pretty long. We talked about different ways the project could come together and he mentioned a few folks I didn't have on my radar at all.

It's nice to have friends.