The Year of Development Hell (Part 3)...

Continued from previous post...

We were told of one actress, she was then predominantly known for commercials but had been getting smaller roles in television- we had nothing against her. Then we were told which role she was to play… and we were like… What? She made no sense. But we had no decision making power- so fine. We tweaked the script for her “style”.

Then, we get a note saying that she is concerned with the nude scene. Nude scene? There was only one partially nude scene, between the two bi-sexual college girls – but that already had been cut. I can’t even tell you how many times we went back and forth about this nude scene. Our agent was going off the notes of the actor but he never knew what she was talking about.

It turned out that the “nude scene” was a post-sex scene in which her character answers the door in “just a man’s shirt”. The man was bigger than her and the type of shirt meant that the shirt should go well beyond her waist. Once we knew what the concern was, we were able to address the concern with the script.

However, like most of the notes that we were given, our agent took them and passed them on to us without asking any questions or getting a better understanding of what was being asked. This would become a recurring theme.

As more and more actors became interested, we received more and more notes. Many notes contradicting each other. Our agent passed the notes to on to us without any editing. When we questioned any of the notes or asked for clarification we were told to “do our job and write”.

At this time, I need to note a few things about our time with our agent… The night that we met the man that would become our agent, he handed us a script that he had just been given and asked for our comments on it. As time went in our relationship, he continued to come across material and send it to us for our opinion.

We have numerous unpublished manuscripts and self-published books that he considered purchasing the rights to. We helped develop product ideas for quite a few projects. We were even tasked with working with a married couple that owned the rights to an infamous college sports player’s life story. We often felt that the only reason he kept us around (before he optioned our script, anyways) was to do his development work for him. (But that is its own story…)

(and so it continues...)

to be continued, again...

Don.