“Nobody knows anything”: Part Infinity
I’m sure you’ve heard the saying attributed to screenwriter William Goldman in reference to the movie business: “Nobody knows anything.” Yet another example of this emerged last week.
On June 24, TheWrap ran this article:
Hollywood’s Zombie Overload: Why Flesh-Eater Pitches Are a Tough Sale
Excerpts:
With zombie projects replicating almost as fast as zombies themselves, film studios say no more flesh-eaters need apply.
That doesn’t mean they’re done with zombie projects — given the $66 million weekend take for Brad Pitt’s “World War Z,” they plan many more. But Hollywood now has so many features about the living dead that any new zombie pitches are a hard sell, insiders tell TheWrap.
“I was just at an event two weeks ago where I was on a panel,” said Magnet Management’s Mitch Solomon, who sold Larry Brenner’s vampires-and-zombies screenplay “Bethlehem” to Universal. “The first thing I said was, ‘No more zombie scripts.’”
He said that “it would be extraordinarily difficult without some underlying property to do a zombie project” for film or TV.
On June 28, Deadline reported this:
QED Acquires Zombie Pitch “19”
Excerpts:
EXCLUSIVE: QED International‘s Bill Block has made a pre-emptive acquisition of 19, a pitch that will be written by Jim Agnew & Sean Keller. The intention is to turn this into a trilogy. It involves zombies, but takes that genre in a new direction, in that everybody over the age of 19 turns into a walking corpse. That leaves a civilized world to be run by kids. The film will be produced by Film 360 and Wonderland Sound and Vision. The producers also are looking to reverse engineer the 19 idea into a series of books.
Yep, “extraordinarily difficult” enough to translate into a “pre-emptive acquisition” precisely four days after the original assertion in print. Plus there was no “underlying property” supporting the deal, instead the plan is to turn the pitch into a “series of books.”
No knock on anyone prognosticating a down market for zombie projects or making any sort of prediction about Hollywood, it’s just that this sort of harsh truth happens all the time in Hollywood. People say that can’t work, then it comes out and does. People say this absolutely will work, then it comes out and doesn’t.
From a screenwriting perspective, note how Agnew and Keller did a spin on ‘similar but different’: A zombie movie, only with the twist (i.e., everyone over 19 is infected). That the conceit creates a group of protagonists who fit the target demo (teens and young adults) perfectly can not be coincidental and is surely an example of the writers putting on a producer’s hat while brainstorming ideas.
On a more general note, I am reminded of an exchange the great Johnny Carson had on “The Tonight Show.” Carson, who was famously married four times, was talking with a guest, an actor as I recall, who provided some advice to Johnny, one of the keys to a successful relationship: “Refrain from using two words: ‘Always’ and ‘Never’. Like, ‘You ALWAYS leave the toilet seat up.’ Or ‘You NEVER take out the trash.’” His point was the use of those two words only serve to inflame the situation. Moreover it’s simply not true, people are not that consistent in ANYTHING to fall into an ‘Always’ or ‘Never’ category.
Same thing with Hollywood. Refrain from using the words ‘Always’ and ‘Never’ about any predictive comment because as soon as you do, chances are something is going to come along to crush your assertion to pieces.
Much safer — and more accurate — to stick with: “Nobody knows anything.”
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