I just got a response from a top independent movie producer on my new screenplay which has made me melancholic,.I just got a response from a top independent movie producer on my new screenplay which has made me melancholic, not only for myself but for the sad state of modern cinema. This producer constructs exceptional films on budgets that would barely cover Pedro Pascale’s makeup, while evoking better performances…
I just got a response from a top independent movie producer on my new screenplay which has made me melancholic, not only for myself but for the sad state of modern cinema. This producer constructs exceptional films on budgets that would barely cover Pedro Pascale’s makeup, while evoking better performances from Mel Gibson, Kurt Russell, Vince Vaughn, and, currently, Rob Lowe. My script is Operation Cowboy: The Assassination of John Wayne, based on the true story of a 1950 Soviet plot to murder John Wayne because of his success flushing out Hollywood communists — in showbiz jargon, it’s Day of the Jackal meets Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. And what depressed me is not that the producer disliked it, but rather that he loved it yet can’t move forward with it.
Good and bad news. I really enjoyed this script. It is so wonderful. I would love to see one of the classy old school guys direct this and really bring this to the screen in a way that feels like we were there with JW and the other characters. I honestly have zero notes, just fabulous. Now the challenging part … I do not have nearly the resources or leeway to get to make something like this. Maybe if I was 5 years into building a new American movie studio and things were healthy, but the sheer cost of the production would be far outside my current zone and wheelhouse. Don’t laugh, but I think you need to bring this to John Wayne’s family and ask them to raise the $20m budget. Maybe the REAGAN producers would be the right fit?
“Ay, there’s the rub,” as people who have read my musings here over the past seven years know by now. The fiction I write in books and scripts is inconceivable to modern Hollywoke — traditionalist humanist fare where men, majority straight white men, rise to heroic height, and girl power comprises femininity, beauty, sensuality, maternal instinct, and compassion, minus the ability to beat up men twice their weight or show them up as morons.
