Notes from Dec. 1 07

The Watermelon did not get selected for Sundance. It passed some initial steps, but not the final. The producers are bummed, I think. I am used to rejection and I'd lie if I said it doesn't bother me, but it does just a litte. It was a long shot and they did not submit the best cut -- at least not where the film is at now. There are plenty of other festivals, many, and a great deal of very good movies never got into Sundance -- e.g., Edmond, its first screening was at the Silverlake Film Festival, which is local centric and new.

So now I am waiting to hear from the Sundance Screenwriting Lab and the Sloan regrading Antarctica. I shold know by mid-month.

I have made it to consideration rounds for a Guggenheim Fellowship -- at least, I know they sent out recommendation forms to my agent, Larry McCaffery, LightSong Films and...somewhere else...another long shot but I am mid-career, I beleive, which is what the Guggenheim is for, although a few people have told me that they usually turn you down the first year and give it to you the next time you apply (I think SSI does the same thing).

I have a lot of book ms. and book proposals out there -- my main interest is fidning homes for the Carver biography and Zona Norte.

No new screenplays in my head, or none that I feel an urgent need to write, but I am thinking of going back and rewriting two that I have not been marketing because they have plot problems, Priority Male (rom com) and Fifty Bucks (thriller/crime). Will, the lead in The Watermelon who acted at The Fritz back in 1995, showed Fifty Bucks to a producer he knows at Lakeshore Entertainment -- the guy said he was ready to option it from age one, until he got to page 50 and felt it came apart. We've been trying to set up a meeting for him to give me notes on where he'd like to see the story go, but I have some ideas on how the fix pages 51-110, so may do that.


Priority Male just needs a new Act III. The Act III I have now is kind of like Blazing Saddles, but only Mel Brooks can do mel Brooks.

What else...before the year is up, I will attempt to finish the first draft of the Star Trek critical monograph, finish the last chapter of Judas Payne and turn it into Borgo Press, get the outlines and opening chapters to The Agent (novel) and Now I Know What Happened to Me (auto/ethnography)out there, and manybe have my book of essays ready to go, which is called Promises Made to Heaven...Broken.