Land a New Gig Before This One Is Done

I was still in the throes of development hell on my first gig when my William Morris agent called about an open assignment.

“But I’m stuck in rewrites,” I told her.

She answered with the best advice I can remember getting (more on that later), then proceeded with the details. She told me it was with a small independent called AKA Productions. They had a script titled “Library Cop.” They liked the idea but hated the script. They wanted a rewrite. If I came up with the right scenario, they’d hire me.

“What’s the idea?” I asked over the phone.

“A young man wants desperately to be a cop but can’t pass the test, so he becomes a library cop.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

It was the worst movie idea I had ever heard. But they were paying real dollars. Thirty thousand real dollars, as a matter of fact. “Library Cop”--God, what a great idea for a movie! I spent a few days working up a scenario and came up with the following (too long) log line: Squeaky-clean guy from the Midwest moves to L.A., fails the police academy exam, ends up in the downtown library where he falls for a kinky older librarian and uncovers an elaborate Cold War spy ring, which is using the library to pass along secret documents.

Do you see now how money corrupts? Here’s something that makes it easier to recognize when you cross the line: You come up with a crappy comedy idea, and the first thing you say is, “Imagine Adam Sandler playing a guy who always wanted to be a cop but. . .” See?

So I went to pitch this thing to a female VP and her French development guy.

“You’re so tall.” He turned to his boss. “Isn’t he tall?”

“He’s very tall,” she answered.

I sat down and started pitching the story. They were with me for the first five minutes. They especially liked the kinky older librarian angle, although the French guy said, “But of course, she must be young too.”

“You mean a young older librarian?” I asked.

“Exactly,” he said.

Still, I plowed on, laying out, beat by beat, this overly elaborate spy plot, how certain books when turned upside down would signify . . . blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda, who really cares? Certainly not these two, who started whispering about where they were going for lunch until finally, a good 30 minutes later, I was done.

“OK, we like it,” she said. “When can you start?”

“Tomorrow,” I said. And I walked out thinking, oh man, did I just ace that or what? Little did I know that they were both about to be fired, and this would be their last project, and that “Library Cop” had as much chance of getting made as “Howard the Duck.” Wait a minute, that did get made. (So did “Waterworld” and “Gigli” and “The Adventures of Pluto Nash.”) For all I know, they probably called the William Morris Agency and said, “Send us your tallest writer.”

The job ended as absurdly as it began. By the time I had a draft to turn in, both the VP and the French guy weren’t even showing up at the office. We had our final meeting at her house above the Sunset Strip. The French guy was in the dumps. The VP was even worse. Besides getting fired, her husband had left her and she was recovering from surgery.

She looked at me with pained eyes as I handed her the script. “In the last six weeks, I lost my job, my husband and my uterus,” she said.

“Is there anything I can do?” I asked.

“Just go away,” she said.

So I did, and it took me almost a year to score another gig. I sure wish I’d heeded my agent’s wise counsel: “Always line up your next job before you finish your current one.”