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This week's Answer:
How
To Not Murder A Producer (or at least get away with it)
An excellent question, Turstin from
San Francisco. The first thing I'd suggest is to not
go within a hundred feet of the Golden Gate Bridge.
If you consider that a tall bridge. And I wouldn't
even suggest visiting short bridges, either.
I mean, think about it: You take a leap; you fall;
you end up in the hospital in a cast, where you're visited
by the producer daily so he can give you his
"notes." Subsequently, you can no longer
take his steady presence any longer and you end up asking
him to bend down to help you adjust your orange juice
straw, wherein you wrap your IV tube around his neck and
send him to Hard To Please Producer Heaven (or the
"other place" where producers are forced to
invest their own money in "hot" movies that fail
the first day they open -- and still have to pay points to
actors who quit before the first day of shooting).
So that won't work.
Picky producers are a challenge, no
doubt. Funny you should mention the word,
"batty." Maybe you could become a vampire
and suck him dry before he does you. Although, you
probably wouldn't want his type of blood. Maybe producers are vampires.
And, if that's true, they could film themselves in
"B" horror films and save on expenses for paying
actors. Come to think of it, you never see
them in the direct sunlight (unless they're playing tennis
to
make a deal, and, in that case, you may be looking at a
clone. I hear clones play a good game. I'm not
so sure the Venus Williams who just made a big comeback
after many years to win in singles at Wimbledon isn't a
clone. She jumped around after winning like
one. No human female tennis players jump like that
after winning.)
And another thing. If the
producer is going to always put in his two cents, the
least he can do is put in a quarter or more. Come
on, producer! Have you heard about inflation!
Geesh!
On a more serious note... (I think
Bb is a serious note. Or is it F#?) It can be most
aggravating as a screenwriter to have somebody continually
scrutinizing and changing his or her screenplay. Specific
feelings can be churned up, strong feelings and thoughts that have
little to do with the concepts of harmony, compromise, cooperation,
willingness, etc., and are more along the lines of scalping, thumb
screws, drive-by-bombing, pushing onto train tracks while a train is
present and in motion, and the like. So how does one handle such
uncomfortable sentiments? What I have found, which has been
inestimably valuable in assisting me in working with
Those
Who Dare To Tell Me What To Do With
MY SCRIPT...
is to do this process:
process
for working with a picky producer
1. Listen to or read the notes
of the producer.
2. Don't react
immediately. Say nothing. Don't be defensive. Stay
aware of your feelings, especially the difficult ones, and
especially the anger. But don't act them out. Just
feel them.
And, now that you've calmed
down and are thinking clearly, bring up a new page and...
3. Start writing down the
producer's train schedule.
DcH
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