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Writing From the Real
World:
Dear Future Agent
-Victor D.
Infante
We interrupt our regularly scheduled
gentle-insights into the delicate art of writing to discuss, briefly, a subject
much more vulgar. No, not the upcoming November election, but rather, the crass
and distasteful business side of writing. To the point, the
Agent.
I really didn’t want to go here, because I
realized that somewhere along the way I’d probably have to admit that I do
indeed not have an agent, which seems tantamount to admitting that I’m a failure
as a screenwriter. Which isn’t really true. Lots of screenwriters don’t have
agents. They’re called waiters. But I digress.
In
the recent issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, there’s an hysterical story
by Paul Di Fillipo called, “My Lifeand Welcome to Fifteen Percent of it,”
depicting a world where the Agent not only receives a 15% commission for selling
the manuscript, screenplay, whateverthey also have to pick up 15% of the
writer’s household chores. The agent brings the writer lunch, cleans his pool,
walks his dog, and furtively hopes that the writer has a script to be sold, or a
past due bill to be collected, just so he can get away from all the menial
stuff.
I laughed my ass off, until I remembered
that I don’t have an agent, and that 15% of nothing is nothing. So, in the
interests of, well, something, I would like to present a list of promises to my
future agent:
- I promise to do my share of
the lifting on moving the script.
- I promise that I will not
call day in and day out, seeing if there’s any movement on the script. Indeed, I
will call as rarely as possible, because phone calls cost money that could be
well spent on asparagus or pornography or something.
- I promise I will make any
reasonable edits you ask of me, unless they involve heat-warming animated
characters of dubious racial sensitivity.
- I promise you will not have
to buy me lunch often, because I live far away and only come to L.A. when
necessary or hijacked by Muppets.
- I promise I will stop
loitering around outside Kirsten Dunst’s house in a vain attempt to convince her
to read my screenplay and let me say she’s “attached” to the project.
Okay, I
promise to stop sending her flowers and asking her to Kaplan’s for some Matzo
Ball soup. I understand that this makes it difficult for you to pitch my script.
Oh, and I promise to ditch the Spider-Man costume, too. The hanging upside down
was making me dizzy anyway.
- I promise to stop including
zombies in my scripts, because everybody makes me take them out, even though
they’re really cool and I wholeheartedly believe that vampires will quickly
become passe, and that zombies will be the next big thing, mark my
words!
- I promise I will never make a
crack again in public about the episode of Dark Angel with Max in
heat.
- I promise David Fury that I
will post the sentence “Go Fish was the bestest episode of Buffy ever!” in every
single Buffy newsgroup I know of, just to prove to him that no matter what he
thinks, I don’t hate it.
- I promise all this and more.
I will be loyal. I will be hard-working. I can DO comedy! I can DO tragedy!
Would you like fries with that?
(Victor D. Infante is a regular
contributor to OC Weekly and the Worcester InCity Times, and the author of the
recent screenplay, Nihilist Chic. You can visit him on the web of http://www.quantumredhead.com/victor.)
(c) Victor D. Infante,
2002
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