Your Greatest Enemy - Part 2

So there I am, a 22 year-old aspiring screenplay writer who just won the lottery—a good query letter and better screenplay mixed with a lot of luck landed me contractual representation. It was a 1 in 1,000 shot. Needless to say, Ralph Monroe, of the Monroe Pritchard Monroe agency no longer represents me. In fact, he won’t even return my e-mails or letters anymore. What happened?

To this day, it makes me cringe, but I am ashamed to say that it is primarily my fault that the business relationship crumbled.

The first part of the relationship went exceedingly well. Ralph suggested some minor changes to my second script, PHINEAS GOODMAN. The changes were made, and we were off and running. Ralph got six producers to read the script. They all politely passed, citing that the writing was good, but that the work wasn’t quite what they were looking for.

For film, it was more appropriate for cable.
For cable, it was more appropriate for television.
And, for television, it was more appropriate for film.

This, of course, was intentional on my part. The consideration was that the piece could be easily adapted to multiple platforms. Unfortunately, it caused the exact opposite problem, making it “just outside” of what each platform wanted. So, we moved on.

My next script was a horror/action piece called PRISM. In PRISM, two detectives are investigating a string of serial murders where the victims’ only connection was an affinity for gothic culture (you know, dark clothes, black-dyed hair, black lipstick, crappy poetry, etc.,). The murderer is a college professor, suffering from severe delusions. He believes himself to be a vampire slayer, and the “goth kids” who fall victim to his violence are, in his mind, vampires. The beauty of the script is that the audience doesn’t know whether or not the killer is crazy until the end—it’s a vampire movie that could actually happen.

Here is where the relationship fell apart.

Ralph wanted change after change done to this script. I wrote the Protagonist/Killer as an Asian man, hoping to have Jet Li cast in the role. Unfortunately, the big name Asian actors weren’t taking villainous roles, so Ralph suggested that I rewrite him so that he is not insane. And after that, it was a matter or re-writing the entire script.

Each change took me only a few hours, but I didn’t get to it until weeks after we spoke. This also happened to be a very rough period in my life—but that is no excuse for the absolute time that I wasted in finishing this project. Eventually, we just didn’t speak again.

My fault. I was always afraid to call him, believing that I sounded too stupid, and that I could communicate my thoughts better through e-mail. I got irritated that my script got so radically changed. I got frustrated that every change I made just wasn’t enough. But the absolute worst thing…I was just lazy.

There were other things that I wanted to be doing, so I did those instead of write. And, I paid the price for my laziness.

Perhaps one day, I’ll be lucky enough to strike gold again. If that happens, I can guarantee that I won’t screw things up a second time. Communication is the key. It’s not smart to “bug” your agent, but never let the line of communication close forever.