I had to laugh a few times at the tone of this Variety column from their normally-moderately-clued-in commentator on the interface of the literary world with the world of TV and film, Jonathan Bing. (I’m hoping this isn’t “premium content”.) It invokes the stereotype of wirters as necessarily solitary beings, and does a few other funny things. Just a few snippets:
“For screenwriters who’ve seen their movies trumpeted in junkets and TV campaigns, the quiet, low-budget, tactical nature of publishing marketing may come as a shock.”
(Yeah, well, at least their names get mentioned in the marketing of the books in a way that’s actually noticeable. By contrast: want to find the writer’s name on the movie poster for, say, X-MEN 2? Bring a magnifying glass. Hear the writer’s name on the commercials? See it on the Pepsi cups? I don’t think so.)
“Some novelists find the fat paycheck and the glitz of Hollywood irresistible, even if it means giving up control over the fate of one’s work. Screenwriters, on the other hand, want to pour their talents into a vehicle more meaningful than the typical megaplex hit, even if the pay is, hour for hour, far inferior.”
(For the first part of this: fair enough, so far as it goes. But the wise novelist who’s Crossed Over also remembers Sterling’s Stricture (Revised): “Hollywood is where they stick your tits in the wringer [there’s a slightly more robust version of this metaphor for male writers, which Sterling used in his original dictum] and start turning the crank while handing you thousand-dollar bills. When you realize that you can’t do without those thousand-dollar bills…they’ve gotcha.”)
But rather further down the article, the line that brought the house down: “Writing novels has its own rewards, of course. There are no rewrites, and if the book is under contract, chances are will be published….”
Whoops, sorry, didn’t know I was reading alternate-universe SF! I think probably none of the big-ticket screenwriters-turned-novelists Bing quotes at the beginning of the article were willing to admit to rewriting to editorial direction. But if that’s not the case, one thing’s for sure: they don’t have any of my editors.
…Back to work now. Today is Peter’s turn in the Sterling Script-O-Matic, while I get to luxuriate in the Land of No Rewrites. (Guffaw.)
