Last week I talked about my original intention to write screenplays and television scripts. Eventually, they led me into writing my first novel.
I may not be telling you anything that comes as a complete surprise but publishing novels in Canada is not a...uhm...how shall I put it?....terribly lucrative way to earn a living. Of course, what it lacks in income it more than makes up for in glamorous lifestyle, what with the onslaught of invitations to upscale cocktail parties.
But for sheer glamour coupled with the moola, movies and television are the places to be. Also, the drinks at the cocktail parties are probably higher end.
Looking at our scribing brethren to the south, for example, one could expect to make around $70,000 for the story and script for a two-hour television movie.
Sure, it’s not all about the money, but having a movie version of one’s story out there gets your story in front of a whole lot more people, which, of course, has the effect of having more people wanting to read your work. It’s the circle of life for written work.
Shortly after the release of Deadly Lessons, it was suggested to me that the book would make a good movie. Given that the genesis of the story was from an attempt at pitching an episodic television script (I keep planning a posting on the Deadly Lessons origins- I’ll get to it), I agreed, at least, the story was transferrable from paper to celluloid. In my head, both Deadly Lessons and Last Dance seemed more suitable for television movie than feature film. My surely-too-many years of watching too much television probably cause me to write the books with chapter endings more or less where commercial breaks ought to be. It should be a snap.
There were a couple of examples of mow’s that were suggestive to me of the style of film I could envision my books becoming. I know my admiration for Robert B. Parker has come up in previous posts. The Spenser novels were made into both into a television series with Robert Urich in the title role. It was the series that introduced me to Parker’s work in the first place.
More in line with what I think my books could become was Small Vices and Thin Air, mow versions of two of Parker’s novels starring Joe Mantegna, and the mow versions of Parker’s Jesse Stone series starring Tom Selleck, who also wrote the teleplay for a number of the movies.
Closer to home, local author Don Hauka wrote a series with intrepid crime reporter Mister Jinnah, that was made into Canadian television movies. Thus, I looked for production companies having made that type of movie and contacted them.
They expressed interest and accepted the first book to consider. One of their first questions was “will this be a series?” Recognizing the correct answer was obviously ‘yes,’ as I had when first asked by a publisher the same question, I replied in the affirmative. Clearly, production companies want to know that if they successfully produced a tele-film that turned out to be successful, there are more stories coming with the same characters.
In fact, the production company I approached initially passed on Deadly Lessons but was quite interested in what was then simply an outline for Last Dance.
First rejection in hand, I then did nothing further. Writers are often by their nature, lazy. At least this one is. Now that Last Dance has been out a year and been positively reviewed I really ought to get in touch with them again. With W3.doc well under way (well…under way) and the story ideas for two more in the wings, certainly a series of television movies is not beyond the scope of possibility.
And the whodunit nature of the novels, I think, lends itself more to the episodic nature of television movies than the grander scope of a feature film. Of course, if someone wants to make a feature film of one or more of my books, who am I to argue?
The challenge with which I’m faced now is do I approach production companies (yes, I should probably consider more than one) with a completed teleplay in hand or do I pitch the novels as potential movies with the hope they have a screenwriter in mind who can do the magic to ready the books for movies? I’m torn: on the one hand, I still enjoy the prospect of screenwriting; on the other, I’m not sure how well I’d handle converting the novels I wrote into the much trimmer screen version.
I’m open to suggestions: if you know a screenwriter who might want to take a crack at adaptation or a production company just looking for their next project, do tell.
Next week: how do we love the victim?