I finished it. Yes, finally. After all the ways I found not to even start it.
This process began back in 2005 when I was schlepping around London flogging other peoples’ screenplays. I blustered into Icon distribution in Wardour Street and spoke to the acquisitions dept. All I had was a synopsis but that was a minor detail they did not need to know yet.
I dared not dream they’d actually be interested in my little story but they were and I promptly wrote a draft. It took me too long. So long in fact that the aquisitions dept. changed personnel. I was screwed now for sure. My contact was on some other post now and her replacement was male. Yikes. I’m useless at being charming to men.
I wasn’t industry-savvy back then and I’m not much closer to being so now, had never read a book on screenwriting, but I had writted a screenplay before, (hahaha) thus I had all quals I needed. How fucking difficult can it be anyhow? I used to be a screenplay reader too. There’s plenty of bozos (yeah, I’m a bozo) that have written screenplays. Some of them turned them into franchises and they still operate off just the one brain cell. Why not jump in and grab them big ol’ bulls’ horns? No one else is gonna do it for ya!
How very wrong I was. There is a world of difference between being a screenplay reader to becoming a screenwriter. This may be obvious to most people. But not to old ‘think-it-up-and-do-it’ me.
My research took me around the film business, up and down to London and a quick tour of Pinewood studios as an extra to bring me back down to earth and to serious writing at the end of last year. I say serious…I had a sit down look at what I had written so far and, although the story is based on fact, I realized the gig was up. I’d been kidding myself all along and I was the last to find out, dammit.
But all was not lost. This temporary trough was only due to an unfamiliarity with the film business from a writer’s perspective so I looked into it again, the abyss.
I read all the books, did a next to useless short course, met up with ‘people-in-the-know’ who turned out to be not so in-the-know, visited studio executives in their offices and one in a car park, pestered other key industry people, harassed the fuck out of anyone remotely linked to film production, distribution and finance I could get my hands on. I’m good at that sort of thing. I soon stopped because this sort of news travels and fast.
Uniformly the patient response in the guise of encouragement came back. “Ray, you have to sit on your ass and write the bloody thing before we can go anywhere. Sitting here talking to me is gonna get you nowhere, even though you’re a great pitcher. Your mouth is your 2nd most redeeming feature and if you can somehow commit the magic that spews forth from it to the page then you’re onto a winner for sure. ” In other words “fuck off.”
I cleared my schedule. (That’s a good one.) I didn’t do anything else but write, research, drink gallons of coffee and wreck computer chairs. The wheels always fell off eventually.
I researched, again and again and finally sat down on yet another new chair to write. And write I did. Then rewrote and rewrote. Became disillusioned at the news that the spec script market is fucked, then became disillusioned at how Brit gangster flicks are made today and what awfulness they’re morphing into, a kind of Carry-On-Gangster, always with actors drawn from the same well, all overdoing the ‘Yoof-yobo-cum-DJ makes-good-after-jail-time-tripe’. I ignored this news. Something else I’ve a talent for. Ask my ex-wife.
I started again because it seems I still didn’t know wtf I was doing in the first place. But I did find out. It was a hard lesson. They’re the most effective and I got to keep all my limbs.
Did all that and a day short of two months later I completed the first draft of my original screenplay. Hallelujah!
I’ll let you know what happens next. Right now it’s time for a snooze.
And they said it would flop.
