The Wannabe But Not Very Good Writer Offspring of a Famous Person

Now there's a person: The Wannabe But Not Very Good Writer Offspring of a Famous Person. I had to repeat it just for personal effect. Now I feel so twisted and resentful with his image in my head I have to be careful I don't go over the top on this one. It goes like this: I get a telephone call from someone saying he's seen my latest book and wants maybe to turn it into a film. I put him off because his voice is just a bit too smooth for my liking. He rings again, leaves a message. Rings again and I'm silly enough to pick up the receiver without vetting the call. It's him, for anonymity let's call him 'John'. We agree to meet. Couple of minor foreplay lunches later he moves in for the kill, introduces me to his wife, and we start to discuss possibilities. The book's a bit gritty, y'know, not exactly mass-market stuff. Can we tone it down a bit? No, I say. The book's its own animal and is going to stay that way. Hmmmm. Okay, he says, you need a co-writer if we're going to do something maybe a bit similar, because you're not famous enough, not a name. Weird logic, but hey, he's the producer after all. So along comes - let's call him Small Person Awesome Mouth or Spam for short. Spam. Little guy with a well-known mum and dad. And loadsa connexions. Well, at first we get along okay. I write the first draft and give him insight into the harsh subject matter, he pretties it up with his particular brand of middle-class gooiness, and soon we have something unrealistic and unsaleable: south-east London characters and plot interlaced with his dialogue and social mores. Annoying thing is, is that pre-Spam, we interviewed a couple of Scouser screenwriters who would have been ideal, but Spam bluffed and weedled his way into it. Worse, he's now trying to undermine my position by altering the plot and changing the characters so that he can cope with it. Because He Can't Do Working Class. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists or Mean Streets or The Royle Family or even Eastenders just don't exist in his world. Everything has to be a curiously emasculated version of Brideshead Revisited. The crunch comes when the three of us meet one evening for a beer and John points out that as the latest offering's all Spam, there's really no need for me to bother myself with it any more. John's motto is that he always gets films made. Well, he didn't make this one. Spam came to see me a few days later, bad-mouthing John and the world in general. I made my excuses etc...
Lessons: Get an agent you can trust. Just don't deal with anyone without him/her.

And an addenda to this one - Years later 'John' contacts me because Spam's doing a remake of a classic which he wants to do Sixties-style and he needs a bit of info on detail, cos I'm the expert on Sixties stuff you see, and he's been trying to get hold of me. So anyway, I do the honorable thing and check the period detail for Spam (no credits agreed, but I'm still a bit of a sucker you see, and vulnerable to sweet talk). The positive side of this is that I reconnect with John, get to know him better, and discover that he's actually an excellent bloke, and highly talented. So I wish him all the best with his new film, which is brilliant by the way.

Happy ending to something that actually screwed me up for a while.