Something happened to me last week in my other life as a fiction writer that made me flashback to my Hollywood days. I was a Story Analyst there in the 90s. That’s a fancy title for a Reader for a production company. It was the ideal way for us writers to have access to otherwise unapproachable industry players. We were the first and lowest line of separation between the public (strictly via a literary agent) and our employer. We didn’t have the power to get a project made, just enough to choke it off and maybe crush the screenwriter’s dream forever.
I wrote the script for the growing, yet unfortunately still limited, number of independent anti-woke producers now giving audiences what they want.
Our job was to write a report — known as Coverage in the screen trade — on the viability of a book or script as a film or series. We understood this meant commercial potential more than artistic merit, although the two frequently intersected back then. Coverage consisted of four sections, including a Logline encapsulating the story, a Synopsis detailing the plot, and Comments expressing our expert analysis of the project.
But producers often didn’t read past the first section of the coverage, the grid at the top, where we put our jobs on the line. This part gave the title, format — Feature, MOW (TV Movie of the Week), or Series Pilot — and genre of a project, then the reader’s all-important judgment with one of three words: Pass, Consider, Recommend.
A Pass meant the property was essentially dead at our company, our employer trusting us enough to make the call. The only danger was if the material got produced elsewhere and turned out to be Forrest Gump, we would “never work in this town again!” The safer bet was Consider, which kicked the work up to a higher executive to champion or discard. Of course, if the exec hated it, we’d take some heat for wasting his or her time. Our riskiest rating was Recommend, signaling a hot property that needed to be read by a producer right away. I learned the risk the hard way.
My first reading job was for Yorktown Productions, the company of legendary filmmaker Norman Jewison. I was thrilled to be working under the director of some classic pictures, including two of my all-time favorites, In the Heat of the Night and The Thomas Crown Affair. Jewison’s last big hit had been Moonstruck in 1987, and five years, I knew, was an eternity in Hollywood. So, I set out to find my boss the perfect script.
I thought I discovered it — a touching tale about a disturbed Vietnam veteran trying to make his way back to family and normalcy. I wrote up the glowing coverage with a big Recommend. I was pumped up when the Director of Development called me into her office the next day. “Norman’s biggest bomb of the last decade,” she said, “starred Bruce Willis — smoking hot off Die Hard — as a disturbed Vietnam vet trying to make his way back to family and normalcy (In Country). A reader here should’ve known that.” She didn’t need to add the soon-to-be iconic phrase, “You’re fired.”
These memories returned to me when I read the coverage of my latest screenplay, an adaptation of my new novel, The Washington Trail — actually the hour pilot for a six-episode series version. How it earned the coverage is an interesting story by itself, since I’ve chronicled my differences with Hollywoke and its disdain for me. But even if I wasn’t a pariah, I knew no studio type would touch the story of a white male D.C. private eye thwarting a deadly government conspiracy to keep the former Republican president from regaining the White House. They’d be rooting for the conspirators.
Independent Anti-Woke Producer and My Script
I wrote the script for the growing, yet unfortunately still limited, number of independent anti-woke producers now giving audiences what they want, not what they think they should want. One of them asked to read it — the producer of a major hit last year that Hollywood would never make, nor even nominate for an Academy Award, though his film earned more money than most of this year’s nominees. Last Friday, I got his production company’s coverage.
The Logline alone made me want to stream the show: “Army Ranger turned private detective Mark Slade takes on the toughest cases in Washington D.C. using his instincts and military skills to solve various crimes. But when his latest case uncovers a huge conspiracy, he realizes he’s up against something far bigger than what he has faced before.”
The initial Comments only piqued my interest: “The Washington Trail is a combination of action, mystery, and political drama. It’s fast-paced and full of suspense … keeping the audience’s attention from the very beginning. The script does a great job of balancing important action moments with intelligent detective work, and the writing is engaging … ”
I was getting ready to buy a tux for the series premiere party when I read the negative criticism: “However, the story takes a long time to get going … Greg and Paul’s characters could use a bit more depth to make their motivations clearer and heighten the suspense as well as build more emotional depth.”
It was then that I glanced at the top grid for the first time, and the single word after Rating all in caps: CONSIDER. Oh well, I thought to myself, at least the project made it to the higher level. An old showbiz line came to me, applicable to my screen career, past and future. To be continued.
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