As the writers strike drags on, there's at least one small corner of the industry that hasn't been grinding to a halt over the last months: literary departments at the major talent agencies, which are getting inundated with book proposals and story ideas for novels from out-of-work screenwriters.
"Some of our writers who have ideas but never had the time are turning to their book projects," said Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, an executive vice president of the William Morris Agency's literary department.
Lydia Wills at Paradigm agreed that "back-burner projects" are now getting more attention, noting a surge in "book pitches and novel writing" among her agency's Hollywood clientele.
But although the strike has given screenwriters who've long had novels percolating in their heads the impetus to finally get the darn things written, there's also a cruel reality: Because book fees are small change compared with the big payoff of a Hollywood script, it's a treacherous hedge, a gamble on something that might not even cover one month's rent, let alone a house note.
Most are undeterred. Screenwriter Mark Haskell Smith ("Playing God," "The Inheritance") is using the downtime as an excuse to get his fourth novel finished. There may not be a big check waiting for him, but he's content that the tome will at least find its way to bookstores. He turned to fiction, after all, because he didn't want to see another good spec script languish.
"I had an idea for a movie," he said. "I thought rather than hear an executive tell me that the writing was good but the story was too dark, I would just write a book instead. I didn't want another rejected script."
Besides, Smith said, it's not like there are any guarantees for screenwriters, strike or no strike. "The job market for screenwriters has shrunk dramatically over the last few years," he said. "I've been hot, then not, then hot again."
A fan of the novelists Donald Westlake and Ross Thomas, Smith writes in the "comic noir" genre. "Moist," the story of an employee in a pathology lab who falls in love with a woman on the tattoo of a severed arm, was published by Grove Press in 2001, and he's had two subsequent novels, also published by Grove.
"The Writers Guild is gonna kill me for saying this, but a script is nothing more than a blueprint for a film," he said. "It's a road map and can't stand on its own; it needs others to make it a movie. Books are more holistic. They're less about plot and more about character, emotions, nuance. It's refreshing to just write about people for a change."
