|
A Cinderella StoryBy Cynthia Whitcomb Willamette Writers December 2003 We finally have a breakout Hollywood Cinderella story in our Willamette Writers family!I have been living in Portland, involved in WW for ten years now, teaching screenwriting, working toward breaking our screenwriters into the world of Hollywood and we've finally had a breakthrough. We have had a healthy share of writers get agents and managers and options from Hollywood over the last few years, but now one of us has finally hit the magic movie jackpot. Marc Acito came to our conference this August fully prepared. Like most overnight successes, he had worked hard for several years preparing to hit the bigtime. He writes a newspaper humor Column which he syndicated himself, making a small, local Column into one with a national readership. He worked more than two years writing and polishing his first novel. He also took my spring screenwriting class and wrote and polished a romantic comedy screenplay. And took my pitching class a week before the conference to practice his pitch until he had it down. He was ready to launch rockets toward both coasts. He signed up for as many pitch sessions as he could, standing in line at the conference to add more as slots became available. In fact he pitched more times that weekend than anyone else. And nearly everyone he pitched to asked him to send something. Within weeks he had a book agent in New York and a manager in Hollywood. On Tuesday September 30, the N. Y. book agent asked to represent him and sent out copies of his manuscript on Thursday October 2. Within hours, an editor called expressing interest, having already read the first 2 chapters. And by the following Tuesday, Oct. 7, Marc had a book deal for $50,000. For a first novel. It will be published next fall in hardcover from Doubleday. This alone is a Cinderella story. But the momentum was just beginning to build. Marc's manager in Hollywood, coordinating with his book agent, sent out copies of the novel in manuscript to a select group of movie studios and producers and two weeks after the book sale, on Oct. 21, they had optioned the book to Columbia Pictures and producer Laura Ziskin (Spiderman I & II) for $100,000, against a sale price several times higher. Okay. You can scream and cheer now. This is the champagne moment. The book is called, "How I Paid For College:A Tale of Sex, Theft, Friendship and Musical Theatre". It's the story of a 1980's New Jersey kid, a high school senior who gets accepted to Juilliard, the famed NYC music school. The only catch is his dad refuses to pay for it. So the kid and his buddies spend the summer coming up with ingenious ways to get the dough, some of them not so legal, all of them hilarious. For the whole story, let's back up a few years. Marc, now in his thirties, spent several years supporting himself as an opera singer. In his spare time, he wrote. He was in Ireland, for his European operatic debut, when he realized one night, when he had to stop writing to go to the theatre, that he loved creating is own art more than interpreting someone else's. For him Opera had become his day job. And he made a leap of faith. He quit singing opera and vowed not to go back to that world until he had launched his writing career. He came back to Portland and went into a regular business to support himself while writing seriously. This whole process took about five years. Here's where it gets mystical. The day the agent in New York called with the offer for the book deal, Marc got a call from Portland Opera. Now, while he is from here, he has never sung for Portland Opera. But at the last minute, they needed a Chinese Emperor for Turandot. Would he like to be Emperor of China? Well...why not? So Marc played the Emperor of China. If any of you saw it, that old man with the long white beard in yards and yards of royal robes, rolled in on the colossal throne? That was Marc. Turandot closed on November 15, and the next day Marc flew to L. A. because he has become suddenly very hot there. It seems like half the big producers and executives in town want to meet with him. How's he going to handle success? The same way he achieved success. By being as well prepared as it's possible to be. Polished spec scripts in hand. Fresh and funny stories for movies up his sleeve. Rehearsed and ready to pitch. Researching the people he's pitching to on the internet so he knows what they've done, what their strong suits are and what they love. The story of the script sale hit Variety October 23: "'Acito has such a fresh voice,' Ziskin said. ‘It could be the kind of movie that Risky Business or Ferris Bueller's Day Off were. '" Variety adds: "Both Acito and Palahniuk (Chuck of Fight Club fame), who are friends, are natives of Portland, Ore. ... ‘There must be something in the drinking water up there,' Ziskin said." The word is out. They are starting to get it about us. One of our own is blasting off into space and we are standing at the launching pad screaming cheers, leaping in the air, showering each other with champagne. Cynthia Whitcomb is president of Willamette Writers, and has had 29 of her screenplays produced. She is author of The Writers' Guide to Writing Your Screenplay and The Writers' Guide to Selling Your Screenplay. She teaches screenwriting classes at Portland State University.and through Willamette Writers. |