KungPowThinking

Imagine that you’re a film maker. You have spent years at your craft, and you’re pretty damn good. Early days shooting home movies with your friends in high school, a couple popular shorts done in college, and a few well-paying gigs have morphed into a 10 year career and a solid rep for making magic.

It’s fair to say that you’ve paid your dues in the “biz” and now you’re looking to get involved in your first studio feature. Not that you haven’t had tempting offers in the past, you have. They’ve just never seemed quite right, like the beds were either too soft or too hard.

So you’re looking for a screenwriter. Someone with a great story that is just begging to be told. You have tons of meetings over coffee, and read hundreds of treatments. Sometimes the stories are amazing, but you know they won’t sell. Other times the stories are remakes of the same ol shit, but you know it’s exactly the type of thing a studio will pick up. You look for a long time. The process sucks and is wearing you out. You’re just about to give in when you hear a humor that there’s a great story on the market written by someone whose work you’ve appreciated for years. You know this is your shot. You feel in your bones. Call it fate.

So you meet.

The initial meetings go well. They’re mostly meet and greets and general “get to know you’s” but overall there’s real potential. It’s the fourth meeting when you finally ask the writer to let you check out the story. You’re nervous as hell and expecting pure magic.

He cracks open his laptop, starts up some software, digs for a file, and hands it over to you with a “now check this out!”

You take a look, and all you see are 8 sloppy hand drawn sketches and some illegible annotations. WTF!?!

He’s looking at you with great expectation in his eyes, and he asks the inevitable – Can you make my story come to life?

Remember this is supposed to be your shot at the big show. What do you say?