The Plan...

Last night, I had a little heart to heart with Team Winburn about Kim and Val's path to introduction. I turned it in last week, this piece of work that I believe to be beyond solid. Actually, I'm using restraint on adjectives here so I don't sound delusional, which I am...but I can sling words, so my delusion is at least partially justified at this point.

So, now that we're done, he did this great thing where he switched to business, all business, realistic business. There were reasons he wasn't doing cartwheels. There were reasons I wasn't expecting him to do cartwheels. See, this one's tricky...

In the world of sending out a spec, going out with someone's first is a tricky thing too. It's an introduction to the world, a play to get into the game. And sometimes, you only get one shot at it, so you have to be careful what you deal out and when. The biggest problem with Kimberly and Valentine is their universal accessibility. What does that mean? Well, I'll tell you...

It means that if you fall in love with them. IF they're not too salty. AND you're on board with their sweet but extremist, tongue twisting tendencies, introducing a poet antagonist on page 13 who chops off hands and snorts cocaine cut by the blood of his victims...then I may lose you.

It means that if you're on board for the first 31 pages, right up until their famed Cheyenne robbery and marriage and then I stop, flash back to their first star crossed night and you can only dig a linear narrative, then I may lose you.

It means that if you're on board when these sugar dipped youths are forced into killing, it may be a touch too much when Kimberly dangles a gun to her head with this whole, you die, I die kinda thing...I may lose you there.

And truth is, there are a hundred parts like that, and monologues...lots of monologues. And buckets of style. This script would set a studio checklist on fire for reasons why it would never work. I know that. Maybe I just like to think or believe that the great movies, the great scripts will always do that.

And he convinced me, maybe because he's just not sure, maybe because going super wide was never going to be a real possibility for this one, but this is one that we're gonna need to hustle. It's too refined. And I don't have a problem with that. At the end of the day, as brilliant as I believe this story and script to be, I'm very realistic about it. And I absolutely believe that there is someone in this town that is going to flip for it. We just have to dig for them.

So right now, the town is on lockdown. Everyone is leaving until January 5th or somewhere in the ballpark of. I recently gave it out to my small fan base, fanned it across town through alleys and into companies and producers and directors. And now I'll wait forever.

But what my guy can do, and what he's going to do that I've never really had access to, is getting coverage. Unbiased, thoroughly objective coverage through agencies and studios. This means your script goes into a stack of scripts. Everyone goes in the stack. From Diablo Cody to David Benioff. And you're judged on skill, on viability, execution. And then you get a report, written by someone who reads for a living, by someone who sees everything, and you see where you stand. Obviously, coverage isn't everything, but I'm sure it's quite rare for a script to get stank coverage and stand any chance at succeeding. We're both so deeply connected to this story and these characters, it's time to see where it stands.

He had this great closing line that I like to keep in mind. He said that at the end of the day, what we have here is a good script, absolutely...and it was a world created out of thin air, and so few people can do that. For now, my job is done. And whether we sell it now or in 5 years, when I have some absurd quote, that's something, certainly something.

Onward now. I need to write something for Ricky Gervais...