Five Years Ago This Month

Because it proved interesting when I did it last month, I figured I'd look back into my records, and see how many scripts/books that I read in October 2000 actually made it into movies.

(And again, keep in mind that because I'm mostly reading stuff that comes from agents and producers, the percentages are going to be much, much higher than if I was reading slushpile stuff).

That month, I read 13 books and 56 scripts, and a solid 5 were made into movies. One was "Tortilla Soup", which was a remake of Ang Lee's "Eat Drink Man Woman". Another was "Rent", which is coming out soon.

The other three were horror movies, so I guess it is true; October isn't only a good month for releasing them, but for sending them around as well. None were specs; all were based on previous properties (two video games, one long-running movie series). The first two were "Resident Evil" (which wasn't a bad read, as I remember, though I never saw the film) and the last "Halloween" movie, the one with the Internet broadcast, which I thought needed a lot of work at the script stage, which it didn't get.

The third was "House of the Dead", which I have absolutely no memory of reading. So I dug up my coverage, to see if I actually read this violent b-movie that I had no interest in seeing, afraid that I might actually have liked it (not that I'm averse to liking violent b-movies, if they work well).

Yeah, I read. No, I didn't like it. (It was ultimately released by a different company than the one I read it for).

Otherwise, nothing really jumps out at all for the things that didn't get made, though one was the book about Pete Rose and A. Bartlett Giametti, which might have fed a cable TV movie somewhere. Another was a movie about writer H.P. Lovecraft, which was a pretty good script (at least according to my coverage; my brain doesn't come close to holding memories of everything I read). It was a writing sample, so the script had probably been optioned somewhere, though the movie never came out, as far as I know. I've read a couple of good Edgar Allan Poe scripts in the past, and someday someone is going to make a good Poe movie.

Another was about playwright Moliere, which didn't really work; though I have read scripts about a lot of writers/musicians/classical composers, some of these people were simply guys whose lives just weren't all that interesting, while too many of the other biopics just familiarly fall into the generic genius/alcoholic (or drug addict)/womanizer/died young template, which seems to make for bland, paint-by-numbers stories more often than fascinating ones.

Otherwise, a random check of some of the other titles just reveals a lot of mediocrity; ideas that weren't all that solid, that weren't executed all that well either, but are still being sent around in hopes that someone will spark to them.

So if you think that there's a thick layer of unproduced great scripts going out every month, it's not really happening.