Hooked

I stumbled across a 99 cent Kindle novel called Screenwriter with great reader reviews and couldn't turn it down. I'm glad I didn't. I just started it. Rafael Lima, the writer, is a journalist, playwright, screenwriter and professor at the Univ of Miami, who knows what he's talking about. The early pages about the path of a screenplay through the institution of prodco readers is worth the price of admission.

Hollywood revolves around the script the way black flies revolve around a good size piece of warm feces. But the script is a guess by the screenwriter. A guess as to whether someone will like the main character, a guess as to whether someone will identify with his struggle, a guess as to whether someone will see a film in the script....

But if the reader really likes the script – maybe there’s a scene about noodle soup and the reader has just had a really good bowl of noodle soup that afternoon and the noodle soup experience is still fresh in their minds and so the noodle soup scene resonates and because the noodle soup scene resonates they pass it on to a smaller pile, say only three feet tall of scripts to be read by the producer....

The producer may like the script not because the script has a noodle soup scene but maybe because in the coverage he spots that the main character is Hispanic and female and left handed and the production company is trying to attract a demographics of Hispanic left handed females.

This is a funny albeit dark book, in the Hollywood-as-subject tradition of Nathaniel West, and unless I'm disappointed with the pages to come, will rank high on my list of favorite dark comedies. More after I finish it.

Get it here.