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The Screenwriter in Cyberspace
By Charles Deemer

Mr. Deemer is an award-winning playwright, a screenwriter, an editor and writer. He teaches screenwriting at Portland State University, is the author of the book Screenwright: the Craft of Screenwriting, and is the webmaster of The Screenwriters & Playwrights Home Page. For more information on Mr. Deemer and his work, please click here. This column is a guide to using the Internet to a writer's advantage in matters of craft and marketing.

Listen to Charles Deemer's RealAudio Screenwriting Tips

Column #22: More about options -- or, The Option from Hell

In my last column I wrote about the changing option scene. This was an overview, a general look at how the marketplace has changed in ways to the financial detriment of beginning writers.

Here I want to get more personal and give you the case history of an option -- my own. Since this option is still active, I am not going to mention any names. But I think the play-by-play of what follows will be useful to a beginning writer. Call this story "The Option from Hell."

From agent to producer

I have an agent, so the first thing I do when I finish a script is send it to her. Now just because she is my agent and just because she represents me does not mean that she's going to market everything I send her. She only takes out scripts she can fully get behind, stuff she really likes. So sending a new script to my agent is no guarantee of anything.

I sent her a script we'll call Between Heaven and Hell. It was a story about a scam, a caper movie: a quiet, shy English professor, a William Blake scholar, receives for his fiftieth birthday a night with a young call girl. He becomes obsessed with her. Buying time with her, he gets set up to take the fall for a scam she is involved in -- but he learns enough about street life to turn the tables and ends up double-crossing her in the end. He blossoms into a kind of rogue by story's end.

My agent liked the story and began shopping it. She liked the fact that it had a fifty year-old protagonist because there are many good actors that age, or older, who have a hard time getting good parts. So the script was ready by, and turned down by, the prodcos of Sean Connery and Dustin Hoffman. But we were getting some good comments on the script. (It's another story, and an irrelevant one, that I couldn't see either of these actors playing the professor.)

After about two months, we got an offer from an independent producer to option the script. No great upfront money was involved. My agent recommended that I accept the offer. The producer had a good track record and was excited about the script. Bingo.

Surprise, surprise

I live in Oregon, and the producer was willing to do our work over the phone. We set a time for our first phone meeting to discuss the script. I was excited.

And then we talked.

The producer had nothing good to say about the script. That's okay, since we were in a long-distance phone meeting and what I needed to know right away were the script changes he wanted. But I was not prepared for his first request.

He wanted the protagonist to be in his twenties. Thirties at most.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. The entire basis of the story was the age of the retiring English professor, how an older, secluded man comes out of his shell to become a kind of free-wheeling ladies man. I didn't get it.

The producer just didn't like the protagonist. He liked the scam -- but he didn't like the older professor.

So there it was. Now a writer in this position is really powerless. I could refuse to do this, of course, but then I would have nothing more to do with developing the script. In this game, the producer is boss.

I decided to give the change a try. My agent was horrified at the request as well. She understood what the story was about.

Rewrites from hell

The next several drafts -- three or four of them -- had a much younger protagonist. Interestingly enough, the first rewrite shocked the producer. "I didn't expect you to make so many changes," he told me.

Really! Well, I belong to the school of screenwriting that says everything in a script must be there for a purpose, must contribute to the whole and make sense. You can't just change the age of the protagonist from 50 to 25 and expect everything to stay the same. Nothing stayed the same except the nature of the scam itself. But relationships, behavior, action, all this had to be revised to fit the new younger protagonist.

But nothing really worked. The scam itself wasn't working without a sucker -- the older, shy professor -- to make it work.

God bless the agent -- and the producer's wife

I kept griping to my agent, and finally she called the producer. They must have had quite a talk. After that call, the producer's wife read the script -- and she thought the protagonist had to be fifty!

So the producer told me to make the hero an older guy again -- but not so shy and passive, not so uncool.

A few more drafts. The producer wanted to see more humor in the script. It was too dark. Film noir is out, he said, although this didn't seem to be true to me, judging by movies being released.

To make a long story short, the film slowly changed genre from a dark caper movie to an edgy romantic comedy. The old professor and the call girl ended up together in later drafts, and this was working. He falls for the woman who tries to blackmail him. He blackmails her back to show how much they have in common. They become quite a pair.

Finally I sent the producer a draft he liked -- it must have been number ten or twelve. As I write, he is pitching this to actors, trying to put together a package.

The process of writing

More importantly -- not in the marketplace especially but as a lesson to beginning writers, and to myself -- the script we ended up with is stronger than the script we started with. This convoluted and often unpleasant experience, this "option from hell," resulted in a better screenplay! The major changes -- adding some humor, putting the pair together at the end -- made for a stronger story. The first idea was the producer's, the second mine. The collaboration, however uncomfortable early on, improved the script.

And this is what the process of writing is all about. Making the script better.

Screenwriting is frustrating when your producer wants you to make a change that destroys the story. In this case, the producer was man enough to reverse that decision. This doesn't always happen.

As it turns out, producers option scripts for strange reasons. To me, my story was about the protagonist. To the producer, it was about the scam and the young woman. He even told me at one point that we should change the script into a "Pretty Woman for the millennium," whatever that means. But the spine of the story, which is the journey of the older professor, did not interest the producer in the beginning! This essential part of the story had to grow on him. And here, indeed, some compromises were made, and I changed the professor into a less shy and retiring man than the one in the original script.

As you enter the marketplace, as you prepare for the experience of working with your first producer, you have to be ready for changes as extreme as these. In the old marketplace, at least writers were getting paid well for going through this special kind of hell. That no longer is true, unfortunately.

Perhaps the worst part of this experience is that I'm now pretty sick of this story. But if the producer does his job and cuts a deal with a studio, then I get a good paycheck, yes, but then I also have to do the rewrite dance all over again, now trying to satisfy a director and actors.

The demands on a screenwriter to jump through hoops never ends. Maybe that's why I find myself writing a lot of fiction again.

--Charles Deemer



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