THE ONES THAT GOT AWAY

Dear Friends,

Lots of press this week on Zach Braff’s kickstarter (If you want to support a film by an actors from a GREAT NBC show, definitely also take a look at 30 Rock’s Keith Powell’s here! http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/my-name-is-david ) Zach made an interesting point, he was so close to getting some films off the ground and they’d fall apart in the last minute. I didn’t give to Zach’s film (I did give to Keith’s) but what Zach said got me thinking, so many great projects we get to look at in this business…and yet some suddenly fall apart, sometimes at the very last minute! I started thinking about a few of mine:

L33T: Loved loved love this one, was going to be directed by the good sir Sean Ashanti…a wonderful uplifting story about a college guy confined to a wheelchair and why he’s no different from anyone else. Great little piece, this one came undone the morning of filming in New York! Too bad really, I would love to see this one get made someday.

I’m A Fool: Ahh this one, originally I was adapting this old serial (which starred James Dean and Natalie Wood and was narrated by Ronald Reagan) into a modern day piece, the story was James Dean was a farmhand, charmed Natalie Wood by pretending to be something he wasn’t, and she fell for it and him…this one was originally designed for JJ Garvine after “13th Grade” but sort of crashed and burned when everyone got set up with other things and projects in the Post-13 era.

World Class Fad: This one! The most recent! All film days set up, and we sort of fell apart because of my own other writing project, one of the producers on this was Mauro Giuffrida…and I handed my script for a film called “Suhani” to him, and “Suhani” not only got the greenlight faster, it got made, and I saw a rough cut last week and it was beautiful! Let’s hope WCF is in hibernation and not completely dead. I think it could really be a wonderful film.

Pleased To Meet Me: attention aspiring screenwriters! What you’re about to read is what NOT to do. This was a full length feature, the first real one I actually marketed. This one had some life, this one REALLY kicked up some dust in Los Angeles and in New York and had some producers looking at it. Here’s where it how it all went downhill. Every producer, every actor, every interested party had feedback. And me, right on the heels of a film that didn’t do so well (but should have), a TV show where I didn’t have a whole lot to do, this was my first foray into developing my own material, so I was enthusiastic and eager to keep everyone happy. So I took the feedback, ALL OF THE FEEDBACK, every single suggestion, every little idea, in an effort to get this piece made. Little by little, PLEASED got bloated….it got HUGE (not popularity wise, size wise), it got diluted, it became…something it wasn’t. My over-eagerness at being SO close to getting this film made, I tried to be everything to everyone. A lesson, not only in writing, but in life, don’t do that, doing this watered everything down, diluted what the script was, took the teeth out of it, ended up having 7 endings, just became a bloated mess where the spirit of the piece wasn’t there anymore. It died on the vine. It’s ok to get feedback and some of it may make sense, but don’t do what a “younger version” of Tim did here, remember, feedback is feedback, it’s not gospel.

Life Won’t Wait: A tv show! Folks trying to resurrect door to door sales in this new modern crazy world. Had a major network interested, that was a REALLY good time, complete with a few parties and some congratulatory calls on it. Then our wonderful network contact who loved this show, changed jobs and took this from one network, to another network which hated it. Then other shows with similar formatting started sprouting up, so a pretty solid script ended up getting outdated pretty quickly….went into turnaround (studio talk nice way for DEATH OF YOUR PROJECT) and soon died right after (in “studio” talk and “real” talk). That was a good one. I do remember one line where a character said “All I eat for lunch is candy in milk” which was based on a real thing I heard an actual doctor say one time. Don’t anyone take nutrition advice from that doctor.

So many more, some fell apart or just ended up not working out and this happens a lot to everyone all over this business. Darran Aronfosky who directed the wonderful WRESTLER, his original film “THE FOUNTAIN” fell apart and lost Brad Pitt from the cast and had to regroup with a smaller budget, Steven Soderbergh’s vision of MONEYBALL fell apart a week before filming was supposed to get started, we’re even seeing a lot of that happening right now with Natalie Portman’s film “Jane Got A Gun” seems , lost a director, has lost some key castmembers including Bradley Cooper which was announced this morning that he was leaving the cast. I know the feeling, and wish the “JANE” film all the best as it attempts to regroup and get back on track.

Anyway, I think the key here, with any project, high profile, low profile, is when these things fall apart, don’t take it personally, just like in life, sometimes a very nice sweater will fall apart if even a little thread comes loose. The key is to not let something falling apart make you bitter, make you resentful, it just opens your eyes up to the GOOD things that get made, the fun projects coming up. I still have LIFE WON’T WAIT in my file cabinet, I sometimes think about re writing PLEASED TO MEET ME from scratch. Never give up, always be looking forward, and keep your heads up. I bet I’m forgetting SO many other projects I should be telling stories about! Just learn from them, worst case, take the best lines from the ones you still have the rights to, add them to the new things you’re working on or thinking about! Because sometimes….you just never know.

Take care and be good,
Tim