The adaptation

I haven't been doing a lot for networking, but I have joined one site, and I think that is how I got a message asking for me to review a comedy pilot and offering to review something of mine. That sounded good until I looked at the pilot, and it was too awful to talk about. I could not say anything nice, so it seemed better to have no conversation. This will relate.

Periodically I will write about previously written screenplays and refer to others that don't count.

For example, "Sisters of Justice" is a television pilot. It was written to fill one hour, leaving room for commercials, so it's shorter than feature length, but because there are also character bios, summaries of episodes that would happen in the first season, and notes on arcs that could occur in future seasons, there is a lot more to it too. Also, with doing all my submissions at Amazon Studios, they don't take drama pilots (comedies and children's shows can be submitted), so there's not really anything to do with it now. I don't count it as a screenplay.

It can get much messier. I worked with a partner on adapting an novel into a screenplay. As the partner kept veering further from the book she also brought in another person. They decided that it didn't even need to be set in the Depression anymore. There are some marketing advantages to not making something a period piece, but I felt in this case the time period was relevant.

I hated what they were doing with it, but it was an exhausting period in my life anyway, and having someone else to work with for her meant the long phone calls to me ended, which I needed. That whole experience drained the writing joy out of me, leading to a dry spell that lasted from October 2010 to March 2012. I didn't write anything creative again until a music video launched me into 400 pages of post-Apocalyptic fan fiction.

I don't count the fan fiction as a completed screenplay. Length-wise it's more like three and a half movies, I envision it as a comic book anyway, and it is using other people's characters.

I don't count the adaption because it was with two other people, one of whom I never met or spoke to, I hated the finished product, and again, it started with someone else's material. I always felt bad about what that became. We started the project feeling pretty good about it. I liked the book.

I wrote to the author a while back telling her that I often though of it. I had thought maybe the way to go was to read the book again and come up with three treatments, focusing on different themes and events. After reading it again, I felt like there was really only one theme that would work.

I just couldn't see starting over again without knowing that there was someone interested in the screenplay. We started the adaptation because a filmmaker she knew had told her he thought it would make a good movie, so there seemed to be some promise there but it never panned out.

She wrote back that she was re-writing the book and changing the setting to make it fit in with where she was living now. People buy souvenir books there, especially if you show the landscape on the cover, and there are people who promote the area. Also, she decided that one of the characters needed more backstory.

I just finished the new version today. I feel like I need to get back to her. I don't want to tell her I don't like it. It wasn't just the setting change. The original was set in Arizona and New Mexico, and parts of it have been moved to Utah. Some parts have not moved at all.

Characters have changed a lot. I can see that they were softened to be made more likable, but they are still flawed and now it doesn't feel real. It felt very real before. Without that, they are actually less likable.

I know she re-wrote it with input from her writing group. One of the members is the previous collaborator. That didn't seem like a good sign.

There are other things that grate. Some descriptions have been added that drag things out. Some actions have been cut that were interesting. Some of the old-fashioned slang has been taken out, which should help comprehension, but it subtracted flavor. If I were going to cut slang, I would have taken out the terms that have racist origins, but they're still there. While the location change wasn't major, maybe changing things to make a more marketable book opened the door to everything else.

It really felt important to write to her, so it feels like something should come of it. I don't know what I would do with it now.