Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Another Brick on the Load

Got an email from my collaborator Reaves yesterday, and we agreed to flintphone today -- this is our term for an iChat videocon, and so-called because we use the Our Man Flint presidential phone ring-tone. If you saw the movie, you probably remember it. Same one I use on my cell phone: Buddah-bah-Buddah-bah-Buddah-BAH-Buddah-bah-Buddah-bah ...

Um. Anyway, Reaves had an idea for a movie, and -- amazingly -- I thought it was clever ...

I was tickled enough with the notion that it kicked in the I-really-don't-have-time-to-be-doing-this-but-it-sounds-like-fun response that sometimes happens when I'm in the middle of a book, and I thought, what-the-hell; life is too short, and it won't take that long to hammer out a treatment and a draft, it's only a screenplay, not a novel, so ...

We are going to take a shot at it. Spec, of course, but hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I can't tell you what it is yet -- we haven't fleshed it out, and until we get a draft done and to an agent, we don't want to queer the deal -- though I can say that it is close enough to some of what I've written that my fans would probably go see it, if somehow it got made, and into a theater near them. A matinee, at least.

Is that vague enough?

Anyway, that's what I'm working on for the next little while ...

7 comments:

Scott said...

Write faster. ;-)

Steve Perry said...

And melt my hands? Naw, my fifteen-pages-a-day days are mostly over, certainly as a regular routine.
I'vee gotten more efficient -- keyboard in my lap, back supported, frequent hand rest and all, but RSI is always lurking just outside the campfire's light ...

Daniel Keys Moran said...

Good luck with it. Selling things around here is a crapshoot, but it's good odds compared with getting it made.

Steve Perry said...

Yep, welcome to LaLaLand. I know guys who have had well-paid careers in which they wrote a bunch of movies, none of which ever made it to the silver screen. If you are willing to settle for the money only, it's possible to do; if you are attached to seeing something you wrote actually get done at all -- not to mention "done well" -- it's a mug's game ...

Anonymous said...

It's not "the Man who Never Missed" is it?

Steve Perry said...

Anon --

Nah, that was my idea; this one was Reaves's notion and unrelated to the Matadors. We've come up with some character names and a rough plot, ball is in his court. When he gets back to me, we'll probably do a treatment, and when we are both equally unhappy with that, proceed to script ...

Anonymous said...

I know but we can always dream