In a rare early collaboration, I co-penned a script with friend and former agent, Rick Jaffa. Though the partnership eventually collapsed under the weight of unreasonable expectation, the screenplay we wrote possessed a certain fire. I pressed the print button, the script was spit out, and while Rick and his lovely bride, Amanda, flew off to honeymoon in Tahiti, I confabbed with our mutual reps in order to determine strategy to sell it to the town.
We assigned obvious producers to cover each of the major studios and essentially tossed the script to the wind and hoped it landed in a warm pool where the big fish were biting. As an agent, Rick had sold his share of specs. Speaking of beaches, my plan was to be enjoying the sand and a stack of paperbacks somewhere on Cape Cod before attending a wedding in Rhode Island during the spec sale⦠if there was even to be a sale.
It was a Tuesday when the script was messengered from of the William Morris offices in Beverly Hills. By my calculations, it would most likely be read overnight by the assigned producers and passed on to the studios by Thursday or Friday.
The soon-to-be War Department and myself were readying ourselves for a drive to Los Angeles International when somewhere around eight AM the phone rang. It was Mike Simpson from William Morris.
With that, I tried to put the spec sale out of my mind as I loaded the car and queued up in the Wednesday AM traffic. We were going to be late. Thank God the airline was running late. Now, let me tell you a thing or two about spec sales. And the amounts that usually end up making news are floated by agents and managers looking to advertise their brand. They wanna buy it lock, stock, and everything else. I hung up and rushed for the gate. I ran down the ramp as the doors shut behind me, then worked my way to the back of the aircraft and found Karen with my unoccupied seat right next to her.
