Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Frustration. It hits all of us. The Wave-inatrix sees it more than most because it's either my own frustration or one of the hundreds of writers I work with. Some recent examples:

Writer, friend and Script Whisperer client: This is a gifted and experienced writer. He wrote and rewrote a script, was feeling very high octane about it, got notes from an exec. Not good enough. Can he do more this and less that and eviscerate this and add that? Can he gut the 2nd act and why is this character so brooding? It's not that the notes were not necessarily legitimate, it's the distance between those notes and where my writer thought the script was. He is still in Pissed Off Seclusion as far as I know.

Close friend of mine: has this writer friend, right? The kid was so-so. She'd given him notes from time to time and while I must maintain her anonymity, suffice it to say she's qualified to easily assess his writing skills. Kid is all of 22. Suddenly his mediocre, cliched, predictable horror script gets some attention at a major studio. Kid gets a pitch meeting. Studio buys pitch for a quarter million dollars. Kid has a studio-bought dinner with an A-list, academy award winning screenwriter. He texts my friend from the bathroom, mid-dinner, with lots of exclamation points. A few weeks ago, the kid shows up in the list of top-ten screenwriters to watch. Which is when my friend called me, absolutely apoplectic. We have to have dinner, she said, her voice shaking - we have to have dinner to discuss WTF is going on here!

Script Whisperer client: has written a fanTAStic family adventure. Great work, definitely makeable. I got it to some producers here in LA at appropriate companies who liked it but weren't looking for that particular storyline at this moment in time. They commented very positively on the writing though. His material was read by buyers with millions of dollars in their budgets and was taken quite seriously - as it should have been. But a few months earlier, he had placed the same script in several competitions. As the results begin to roll in, he finds to his disbelief that it hasn't placed in a one. And the Wave-inatrix can personally attest to the general quality level of competition scripts - dismal. So - what's going on here? Why isn't his work being recognized??

The Wave-inatrix: had a script, along with her partner, out at several A-list actors and top-notch production companies last fall. The project bounced from office to office, getting good notes but not quite finding a home. We'd get notes from actors like: She just did a project like this. or She wants to do a comedy right now or She's booked for two years. But she liked it. Great. The material made the rounds at all the big buyers and players and my partner and I were proud of that even though to date, it hasn't come to fruition. Partner and I decided to work on something else and tend both projects at once (it's a numbers game, remember?) We get notes from a producer who wanted to read the earlier script as a sample before reading our new one. The notes were not only not positive, they defied all the notes we'd gotten for a year previous. They defied the notes of the studio we developed our material with. In fact, if these were the only notes we'd ever gotten - we'd probably cry in our coffee and quit right now. Thank god we had some perspective and experience but WHAT is going on that points of view range that widely. And this 22 year old kid.....It makes the vein in one's forehead throb.

Wave-inatrix friend: wrote a taut psychological thriller. Great stuff, the Wave-inatrix vouches for it personally. Friend got script to a great management company. These were her notes: Really liked it, great character and story development but could you move the midpoint to page 25? I really like my first acts to end no later than page 20. First act end by page twenty? So where does that put the end of the second act - page 60? So there's either one helluva long 3rd act or we're talking about an 80 page script here. How much compressing can a story handle? Do audiences have that much ADD? That's as if we show the girl getting attacked in Jaws, then go straight to the heated chase of the shark out on the boat and skip the town meeting, the USS Indiana speech, the snarky conversations with Richard Dreyfuss. If action is piled on action and we lose the smaller moments, where does a script have to go from there? What are we left with? By these definitions, most of the great movies we know and love from the past would not stand a chance today. Whiskey tango foxtrot??

So Wavers - the Wave-inatrix and friends and clients of hers know your pain and frustration very, very well. Sometimes you just want to chuck your laptop under a train and go be a normal person with a normal job. In this business, the goalpost is always moving. Mediocre writers are rewarded with big paydays and great writers labor for years, unnoticed. It's who you know. It's the buzz your material creates that dictates how "good" it is. The same execs who were your detractors will be your biggest fan if someone higher in the food chain gives you and your work kudos. It's mixed up. It doesn't make sense. What can the Wave-inatrix say except that this is Hollywood, and if it were easy, everybody would do it.

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