Here is a list that I dedicate to all writers whose works have been unfairly condemned. I suppose that includes most of us.

Rejection of  The Time Machine: “It is not interesting enough for the general reader and not thorough enough for the scientific reader.”

Rejection of Altlas Shrugged: “Unsaleable and unpublishable.”

Rejection of Moby Dick: “We regret to say that our united opinion is entirely against the book as we do not think it would be at all suitable for the juvenile market. It is very long, rather old-fashioned…”

Rejection of Animal Farm: “It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA”.

Rejection of Lady Windermere’s Fan: “Oh, my dear, sir.”

Rejection of Carrie: “We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.”

Rejection of Catch 22: “…. it is really not funny on any intellectual level…”

Rejection of Lolita: “I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.”

Rejection of Lord of the Flies: “an absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull.”

Feel free to add your own to the list.

Illegitimi non carborundum.

OK peeps, I haven’t blogged for what seems like a very long time so I thought I’d make a note of where I’m at and what projects I’m working on at the moment.

There’s a brand new website on the horizon, which will focus on projects rather than script consultancy. Like this site, I will display some unproduced work and will blog about screenwriting, but I would also like others to contribute their thoughts and scripts, and hopefully their videos as well.  Moviehijacker.com will continue, but solely as a script consultancy site.

As for projects, well Saskatchewan is coming along nicely. As ever, the concept has changed quite radically in the development process.  I didn’t want to say too much at first but as it has changed so much it won’t make any difference now. It might be of interest to some of you… To me, writing spec scripts is always exciting as you never know where your story will go.

So this is where it started: I’m an unashamedly massive Leonard Cohen fan and have always loved Leonard’s recountings of the incident that inspired his song, The Sisters of Mercy.  He changes the story every time he tells it, which kind of adds to the mystery of it all of course. The lovely thing is that over the years he has almost always dedicated the song to Lorraine and Barbara when he’s sung it live.

The story goes something like this: It’s November 28, 1966 (I’m such an anorak that I’ve narrowed it down to the exact date, based on a number of factors such as the moon phase. OK it could be a few days out, but I think this date is fairly accurate, and would place it on the very same night that Capote held his masked ball in New York). Leonard Cohen, a Canadian poet and novelist in his early 30s trying his luck at being a singer-songwriter, arrives in Edmonton as part of a tour of some of Canada’s university towns. He is caught in a snowstorm and goes to shelter in a cinema doorway where two young ladies, both clad in deliciously short skirts, are also sheltering. They have nowhere to stay so he invites them to his shabby little hotel room.  He thinks his luck is in - that his helpless depression will be lifted for a while by this night of raw passion. But nothing like that happens. The girls - Lorraine and Barbara - lift his spirits and touch him in a deeper way. They fall asleep on the bed and Leonard gets his guitar and sits by the window. He looks out and sees the glow of the full moon reflecting off the snow and off the frozen North Saskatchewan River.  It’s like daylight. So he starts writing a song for the ladies, and by the time they wake up, he’s finished it - the first and only time in what would become fifty years of songwriting that Leonard writes a song without any revision. And he sings it to them.

All we know about the ladies is their names, and that they were tracked down once for a show called You Probably Think This Song is About You, but refused to be interviewed and asked to be left alone. Some say they were hookers. Some say backpackers. I wanted to get to know them, since they were special enough to leave such an imprint on Leonard without as much as undressing for him! So I created their backstories. I really got to know them. They were runaway girls who hitched a ride with a guy who would be the protagonist of the story. I had the whole thing figured. It would be Thelma and Louise meets Into the Wild, set in the mid-sixties. I fell in love with it.

But then the plot became difficult to map out in any sort of detail. I wanted the guy to be the protagonist, and yeah there would be more than one love triangle involved, but it just became redundant story-wise. Having a protagonist flanked by two sidekicks with their own opinions and their own desires just became too messy to organize into a meaningful screenplay. And towards the end the girls would meet Leonard (but I would possibly give him another identity) and that scene I just described would happen. But I couldn’t draw any story meaning from that - I couldn’t see how it could work as part of the climax. My problem was that, not for the first time, I had put the cart before the horse, and it had led to a big almighty mess. What can I say? I just love that story. But I had to do what Faulkner told us to do, and kill my darlings. Well - not kill, exactly. I loved Lollie and Barb and Frankie too much for that, so I laid them aside for a while. I hope I can return to them some time. 

So the project is looking very different now. It’s still set around that time, but I’ve concentrated on developing Frankie, changed his name to Newman and made him a lefty draft-dodger whose father is a hawkish former WWII colonel. Newman hits the road and ends up giving a ride to a shifty old chancer, and the movie is about their relationship on the road, in the context of the Vietnam War. I’m calling it an anti-buddy drama. I can’t think of any other anti-buddy dramas so I hope it will have a freshness to it. I want to stick to some road movie conventions and subvert others. I think that, in a road movie, two is the magic number. Bonnie and Clyde, Thelma and Louise, Gun Crazy, Kings of the Road, etc. etc. etc.

So what can I say about the develoment process of this script? Well, it’s been incredibly circuitous so far, and I’ve still got a fair way to go.  But I don’t think any of it has been wasteful. Getting from A to B this way has introduced me to lots of other letters that otherwise I wouldn’t have got to know!

My Saskatchewan baby is growing up fast, and turning into something I can’t control. Namely a low-concept North American period piece that’s lost its ”based on a true story” lure.  Who on earth is going to want to distribute this thing now? It could possibly work as a festival film - not an “art film”, just a movie done in the style of those Hollywood films of the late 60s/early 70s. The ones where the studios let the makers get on with it: Easy Rider, Bonnie & Clyde, Alice’s Restaurant…

In crude shorthand, it’s currently Into the Wild meets Thelma and Louise.  What I think I’ll do is just write it exactly as I would like to see it on the screen and be done with it. If I get interest from a producer, then fine - I’ll take it from there. Pursue it, sell it, whatever. If nobody takes it, then at least it’ll be mine and I’ll use it as a sample script for reference. They’re funny things, unproduced screenplays - pristine and perfectly useless.  

I’ve decided to stick with the characters and the period, but am considering ditching the whole songwriting thing. The reality is:  the concept would never get past the suits. OK that’s if it reaches them in the first place Either way, better to stick to one simple premise and be done with it. So I’m writing a North American 1960s road movie about a draft-dodging maniac and a pair of freespirited, miniskirt-wearing ladies. They do tell you to write what you know, don’t they? Never mind. I like a challenge.

Did a whole load of research around the time and place of the event. Came across some interesting stuff, not least the fact that the people who will become central characters in my film have gone on record previously as saying they’ve washed their hands of the whole event that the story leads up to. That makes my job both harder and easier in that I can’t rely on any historic events/relationships as crutches. I basically have to make up 95% of the story and obviously present it as fiction.

Good Friday. Just had an idea whilst washing up. Who says washing up is a waste of time? J It’s for a film that leads to a well-documented event in songwriting – an event that has fascinated me since first reading one of several accounts of it. Quite a few versions are recounted by the songwriter himself, who seems happy to embellish or change the details with every telling.

I listened to the song 4 times, then Anna begged me not to play it again. I’m determined to pursue this and I’ll probably drive us both mad in the process. The denouement is all there – I just have to put my own slant on it and build the story around it. There’s a few potential pitfalls but I’ll just have to find ways around them.

What it means is that the other project, which was already on the backburner, will have to be put off for the foreseeable future…