Options

You can probably tell from the slowing rate of blog postage that we’ve entered that time of year again, when Xandra has way too much school work to do and I pretend like that makes me too busy to post as well. No longer!

Some interesting developments in screenwriting land: My writing partner Charly and I have optioned the script of his that we revised. Does this mean that fame and riches will soon be ours? Yes! Just as soon as our producer can find someone in this economy to finance a film shoot, we cast well-known actors, we edit hours upon hours of footage down into a manageable movie, we con one or more film festivals into showing the finished product, a daring distributor decides to purchase the rights, a Hollywood marketing agency gives the film a facelift as “Sophie’s Choice meets Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” and hundreds of thousands of filmgoers sit through the whole thing without demanding their money back from the box office. So, it’s practically a done deal. I already put one of these on order:

Really, all the option means is that Charly and I each got $50 so that a friend of his who is interested in producing the movie can act in good faith to begin talking with other local filmmakers and actors about shooting the film. A lot of talking still to be done before anyone puts serious money on the table. Still, that’s $50 more than my screenwriting has ever made before.

And, as if that wasn’t enough, there is another option in the works. Charly works with a writer named Steve Womack, who wrote a series of detective novels set in Nashville. Charly floated an idea by Steve recently that we might option the novels and develop them into a TV series that might run on PBS, using the connections that Charly made when PBS ran a documentary of his last year. Steve loves the idea. And this project is more likely to draw serious attention because Steve is well known in the area. This is starting to sound like a real job!

So that’s what I’ve been up to while Xandra has been buried in a mountain of heavy law books. But she does want you to know that she still has time to make pancakes… of love.