Oh yeah, and I’m extremely jealous of “medium rare” stakes comment, above. Nothing else even comes close.

“Well done!”

M.

Okay, that was pretty bad.

I just heard a good quote of Gene Simmons’ along that line. “It’s not called ’show’ — it’s called ’show business’. If you don’t learn the business part of it, you won’t be in it very long.”

This reminds me – I was really surprised when I watched the movie, Being Mick Jagger. In one scene, Mick shows up at Elton John’s lawn party. What was the conversation about? THE BUSINESS OF MUSIC. Sure, the cameras were running, but I got the feeling from watching the scene of the two of them that people who are successful – artists who are successful – are successful because they are thinking just as much about the business of their art as the art, itself. Same thing with the Beatles. When asked about their success, Paul said nothing about their talent or passion – it was all business related. Paraphrasing here – Paul: We just wanted to do a little better than the last thing. We started out wanting to write a song. They we wanted to make a record. Then we wanted to play outside Liverpool. Finally, we wouldn’t come to America until we got a number one, because…etc.

So don’t worry so much about how original your idea is (obviously it helps) but focus on your execution. True, writing a screenplay about a guy who dresses up like a bat and beats up bad guys while speaking with a raspy voice is a bit counter intuitive. That script ain’t going to sell. BUT if you really knocked off the reader’s socks with solid story structure and killer dialogue — you might just have proven you can write and be offered work on the new Cheetah Man project.

To that end, writing a story that you feel passion for improves your chances of sticking with a script through all the inevitable rewrites and polishes. You could be left with a unsellable script, but a legit writing sample.

This is, frankly, a mistake I feel I’ve made as an aspiring writer. I haven’t focused on one story that I really, really want to tell. Thus I don’t have one amazing script that I can show agents as proof that ’see, I can write a movie’ – -even if there’s a dozen similar projects like it out there.

But we learn from our mistakes and my latest script I’m starting on is going to pop those eyeballs.