Annoying Women

By Peter Englebright

A screenwriter trapped in development hell finds his marriage imperilled by temptation from three women.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Firewood Books
• Release date: Aug 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781516327416

Book preview

Chapter 1

The story I’m about to recount might sound unconvincing to you.  I get that.  So please keep in mind that I’m a very good looking young man.  Believe it or not, that’s not an egotistical, wishful, deluded piece of thinking on my part.  Without modesty or immodesty, it’s a generally accepted fact that most women think I’m attractive.  So if you question the speed in which women show an interest in me, just keep that nugget of information under your hat.  I can make a lot of them happy with my presence.  I can even conjure up a little bit of charm for a few minutes.  So these events are not as farfetched as they might at first seem.

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We removed our jackets and handed them to the coat check girl, then moved along to be greeted by our evening’s host. 

‘Glad you could make it.’

I said, ‘I wouldn’t miss it.  Is Harry here?’

‘Not yet.’

‘I’ll stand back at the door and wait for him.’  Without pausing for a nod that this would be alright I shunted my wife Lindsay to the side.  We stood against the wall and watched as my producer Paul Hastings greeted the guests as they arrived at his mansion.

Lindsay looked resentfully into the body of the house at the ballroom.  From where we were standing she could see groups of people having a good time on the dance floor or chatting and drinking around it.  Slowly her gaze turned to me.  She said, ‘You don’t want to seem too desperate.  It’s best to accidentally bump into him on the dance floor after he’s been here five minutes.  Ambushing him as he walks in the door isn’t going to make you look cool and collected.’

She was right.  I looked pathetic waiting here in the vestibule.  After a subtle tilt of my head to show that I agreed with her I pulled her off the wall and into the room beyond.  Her heels click-clacked behind me before she could match my speed and walk beside me.

With irritation she said, ‘Would you stop manhandling me.  I can take verbal instruction.’

‘I’m sorry.  I’m sorry.’  I repeated myself to make sure my apology came across.  ‘You know I’m nervous.’  For good reason.  A man by the name of Vincent Flowers wrote a splendid novel about men on a quest to scale a mountain.  One man in search of gold.  The other man in search of spiritual answers.  The book was called Spiritual // Greed.  It took the man seven years to write his opus.  He died the following year which allowed his widow to sell the film rights to my producers.  These men of dubious character being Harry Prendergast, Thomas Mandrake and this evening’s host Paul Hastings.

So far I was an unproduced scriptwriter.  An unmade speculative script I wrote attracted a lot of attention for about a month in the film business.  My name, Alan Hetherington, became known in those circles and I sold the script for a lot of money.  Unfortunately the business is accustomed to spending life altering sums of capital on projects that never get made.  So I ended up a well paid writer on something that never saw the light of day.  Two years l spent rewriting a script that people said they loved.  Two years that altered the very fabric of the story and slowly introduced compromises that weakened what was once good about it.

Eventually it collapsed when an actor pulled out.  It was two years wasted, but it was probably for the best that a second rate movie never emerged.  If it was bad enough it could have killed my career dead at birth through no direct fault of my own – I knew they would be working from an inferior script to what I originally wrote.

That original version of the script, before the ‘professionals’ got their hands on it and defanged it with rewrites, got me this job.  Adapting Spiritual // Greed for the big screen seemed like a job with less room for personal attachment since it wasn’t my story they were playing with.

It was a fairly popular book with a big critical reputation.  It had already proved itself in the marketplace as being worth something.  How much executive interference could there be on a book adaptation of this nature?

It turns out there can be a lot of issues getting a script everyone likes.  Likes – as in thinks it’s pretty decent.  Not loves, which is impossible.

The problem is that I’ve got three producers, two lead actors and a director; along with who knows how many studio executives to please.  The personnel I’m trying to appease don’t even stay constant.  The project has worked its way through many actors and several directors.  Also the executives keep changing.  Sometimes one story editor, or a creative executive, or a VP is swapped out for another, or even the whole team is replaced.

The only people to have stuck it out for so far for the two years of development were the three producers and myself.

I’m trying to deliver a script that pleases about twenty people all at the same time.

This is impossible.

These twenty people will never be in agreement with each other.  So the script is an endless war with conflicting notes being given to me every other day.  Notes for alterations that will inevitably please some and displease others. 

This was why I was so desperate to talk to Harry Prendergast this evening.  After two years of bullshit I had a draft that his other two partners liked.  Our current actors and director weren’t grumbling too much, and the studio had liked the direction we had been going in recently, so I didn’t expect much friction from them.  That meant that if Harry gave this draft his blessing then the film might actually happen.  It felt like a real chance to end the frustration and get this monster into production at last.

You would think I wouldn’t be so sensitive to the constant alterations since it wasn’t my story.  How invested could I be?  Yet every new note to modify something that didn’t really need changing was a painful thing.  It just kept getting progressively weaker and weaker with each new rewrite.

I didn’t even know by this point if I still respected myself and my work.  I felt like such a money grabber, doing unnecessary damage to what was once good work.  The fifth draft remained my gold standard.  I wished they’d film that instead of draft...what?  Seventeen or something?  It was so bad I’d lost track of what draft I was onto since not every minor rewrite got a new number.

So I needed to grab Harry and get his reaction or notes on the script right away before this window of opportunity drifted away.  I desperately needed him to be positive about it so this madness could end.

It must be said: writing for the movies is a bullshit job.  If only I had the talent to write prose.  Then I could be the master of my own destiny.  I wouldn’t need all these people and their money and connections to create things.  I could just do it.  Sadly I had no knack for prose.  I was terrible at describing things and going into people’s heads to explain their thinking and psychology.

In a script you can cheat because the writing is meant to be simple and nuts and bolts.  You are only expected to write about the surface.  You are actively discouraged from exploring what is going on under that surface since a movie camera can’t film it.  It’s perfectly okay if you don’t know or understand the deeper stuff.  Scriptwriting can be very superficial.  In a novel though, as the writer, you can’t hide your lack of knowledge.  The reader expects you to know everything.

In a film you can have an actor look out a window while they have a sad expression on their face.  It will come across as deep and thought provoking.  In truth all we did was have someone look out a window.  Now if that was a novel you would have to actually go inside their head and describe what they are thinking.

This is where I can’t hack it.  I don’t know what that person could be thinking.

You can film a person staring for a minute in silence and it will feel significant.  That’s a page or two of real writing if done in prose.  What do you say for those pages?  I have no idea.  The truth is I’m not a real writer.  I’m a fraud.  I’ve got enough talent to write a screenplay, a blueprint for future work to build upon, but not enough to go beyond that.  I can’t write literature that can stand on its own two feet. 

Prose is too hard and laborious.  Too much work.  Scriptwriting is like playing the bass.  It’s simple enough with not too many options or things you can do, while prose writing is like playing the guitar.  It’s much more complex with more options and possibilities. 

So sadly I’m stuck as a professional writer working under the heels of many people.  The idiots outnumber the smarter individuals.  All of them have opinions and more power than me.  Their dumb ideas have to be listened to.  A lot of the really stupid notes can be argued away effectively, but you can’t win every battle.  So the script gets written by committee, and only the most middle of the road and safest, most generic material can survive.  All the weird bits, the quirks that made it interesting in the first place, get sanded down until the final screenplay is, at best, blandly unremarkable.  At worst it’s just stupid, incoherent dog shit.

With my name on it as the writer.

You have to take the praise and blame for other people’s ideas and bad dialogue if you get an onscreen credit.  It’s not like the credits will reflect that such and such a moment was improvised by the actors.

It’s really not a good job.  The only upsides are that it’s an enviable industry creating interesting products; and that you get paid well for the abuse.

From the bar I collected our drinks and I handed a glass of Champaign to Lindsay.  I said to her, ‘When he gets here make sure to stand by my side and puff out your chest.  If he’s looking at something he likes then he might be in a better mood.  I really need this torture to end.’

‘So I’m what?  Your trophy wife?’  She sounded angry but I knew she was joking.

I put on a serious voice to answer her.  ‘I respect you as my intellectual equal.  Maybe even as my better.  But right now I don’t need your brain.  I need your breasts.’

She looked kind of dismayed at me.  ‘You say these things in jest, but they hurt you know.  I’m a person.  I can say intelligent, interesting things.  I could deflect his notes and turn him around to your way of thinking.’

‘That would be great.  I need all the help I can get.  I think I’ll be a burnout if I need to do another page one rewrite.’

‘You look like you’re about to hit someone.’

‘I’m not angry.  I’m not going to lash out.  It wouldn’t do me any good if I did.  I’m okay.’

‘Seriously, maybe it’s better if I handle it on my own.’

‘No.  I need to force his compliance.  He needs to sign off on it.’

She put her hand on my wrist.  ‘I think you’re going to lose it if he wants more work done.  It might be a good idea if you disappear while I talk to him.  I can at least negotiate some of the changes away before you meet.  I’ll find you later and tell you how it went.’

I nodded my head although I really didn’t agree with her.  I was hyped up with some measure of anger caused by the frustration of the silly development process, but I wasn’t in any danger of losing my rag.  ‘I just want this over with so I can get my money and stop sanding down my words.  I’m glad Vincent Flowers isn’t around to see what we’ve done to his book.’  Seven long years he tinkered with it.  At least that’s what he claimed in interviews after it was finally published.  Plus thirty-five more years thinking and dreaming about it before he finally picked up a pen.  A man’s lifework we were desecrating.  His spiritual epic was being refashioned into a conventional action movie.  Instead of two men collaborating and having philosophical discussions as they climb, I was now writing about two men bickering.  Physically fighting, delaying and playing dirty tricks on each other.  In among all the conflict there wasn’t much room for intelligent dialogue.

Anything philosophical in nature was the first thing to be removed by the script notes.  I would later replace those bits with simplified words a few drafts later.  They could see what I was trying to do and so it would get chopped out once again.  Thomas Mandrake, the third producer, had these words of wisdom: ‘Our audience doesn’t understand this intellectual shit.  They’ll be bored.  They just want to see action and beautiful vistas.’

It does make you wonder why they would go to the expense of buying the rights to a respected, intelligent book of literary merit if they had no interest in what it had to say.  They weren’t even planning to keep the title fully intact.  The two strokes had been removed – another example of anything quirky or unusual being washed away.  Most of the story, the characters and the ‘message’ were all on the bonfire.  All that money spent, and essentially all they’re taking from it was the idea of two men climbing a mountain.  Why pay for the rights to this particular book if that’s all they’re using from it?

In one draft it wasn’t even two men.  One of them was changed into a woman as they heard a rumour that a pop star loved the book.  She said in an interview that it changed her life or something.  It was a long shot that