HOLLYWOOD: a graveyard of options
newsletter: june 2004
Many authors look forward to the day when Hollywood comes to the door asking to buy movie rights to your last novel, or one you’ve written so long ago you’ve already forgotten it. Hollywood, jingle jangle! It purveys dreams, renders books into films, and pays the novelist huge quantities of dollars for the privilege. So you read about some writer selling a book to the Dream Foundry for $1.5m or whatever, and you wonder why it hasn’t happened to any of your books…it surely will, it’s only a matter of time: writers need to be incorrigible optimists.
The truth about the world of Hollywood is different, even banal. Only those writers who have had dealings with Hollywood understand what passes as the everyday reality of the place. Big cash for books is the exception; in the main, it’s all about little cash for Options. This is when a producer or a director or some film-sick lawyer says he wants to turn your book into a movie (and you hear the lush fog-horn of your ship coming in), and before you have time to enjoy the rush of imagined bucks fluttering into your bank-account, you suddenly realize the aforementioned producer/director/lawyer is only interested in an option, which means you’ll receive a princely sum of $2K to maybe $10K, which ties up the property for a period of time, usually a year, while the optioner scrambles around trying to raise cash, find a screenwriter, and interest a box-office Name. None of these things might happen in the twelve-month period bought by the interested party. In fact, quite often that year will pass and you will never hear from the purchaser again; or if you do, it will be to read that he/she has begun filming another project altogether, and your book, which hasn’t been picked up for movie immortality, slips into the purgatory of the lapsed option. There it may wither and die and be utterly forgotten. Having been optioned once, and then fallen from grace, your book is somehow tainted, like a kid who couldn’t make the grade into college. In other words, the Dream Foundry has tested your book and found it lacking…and you never know why.
Sometimes, the option will be extended for another period of twelve months in return for a small sum of money similar to that which was paid for the first twelve months. (You’re not getting rich, notice.) At the end of the second option period, the same thing may happen to your book. Option is about to lapse, you wait by the phone to hear it is being renewed and/or has a Major Star attached. Nobody calls. Your book has flunked again. You’re a flop. Hollywood doesn’t want you. You hear the sound of doors slamming. You’ll never make it into films.
Occasionally, a book option will go into a third, fourth, or fifth year. And small sums of money will dribble in, and maybe every now and then you’ll hear, via an agent, or some casual gossip, that X is interested in writing a script, and Y is interested in being the Star. Hope floats afresh. You know that when the camera rolls on the movie of your book you may make as much as 500,000 dollars, though it is more likely to be a half of that; in very rare cases it might be more. So you listen to the gossip and you start to believe that your movie is about to go into production…no matter that you haven’t seen a script, or that the original scriptwriter whose name flipflopped your heart is working on a seventh remake of Tarzan, you assume just the same that another writer has taken on the script, but nobody’s thought to inform you. Afloat on the narcotic of optimism, you think: the phone will ring, I will hear that the script is finished, that Matt Damon or whoever the crush of the month is, has agreed to play the main role and and and….That call never comes. The option lapses again. The project is moribund. You’ve already moved on and can barely remember the title of the book that was optioned and dropped. Maybe next time, you think.
But what has really happened is that you’ve just caught a bad habit: you’ve been through Optionitis, and now you want the real thing, the goddam movie, and so - perhaps unconsciously - you may start to tinker with the next book to make it more movie-friendly. If you’re smart, you don’t. The two forms, book and movie, are so different; and besides nobody in Hollywood has a clue what makes one book filmable and another not. Why should you?
And here I am, counting the options. There are perhaps five, if I include the one that has lasted thirty-five years. There are three books with finished scripts awaiting a producer’s movie. There is one book awaiting a scriptwriter. My options. One of them will be a movie one day. I heard that Ed Harris was interested in one, and that we already have a bright young director on board. Mind you, nobody has actually signed a contract, and there’s no date for the film to go into production, but it will, it really will, I can feel it…
contents©2006 Campbell Armstrong
web design + hosting:
