My Huge Loss in Hollywood

Newsletter 2024-04-14

I have an embarrassing story that I’ve put off telling for months. Considering that I proudly told the world about the butt wound that nearly killed me, this new tale represents a level of shame never before seen on the internet. Yet, if I don’t tell it, it was all for nothing. My greatest mistakes make for the best content. Here’s how I lost nearly two thousand dollars to Hollywood.

As you might have heard, I write books. I have seven out right now with an eighth due to hit store shelves in June. None of them have made me rich, as you might have deduced from the fact that I drive my kids around in a minivan rather than a stretch Hummer pulled by a team of Clydesdales. The ultimate mark of wealth is to never be in a hurry to get anywhere. I’ve written enough books to realize there’s not much money in books. Not for me, anyway. My prior sales numbers have helped publishers quantify my capacity for failure, and my shrinking advances reflect that. Seven times in a row, I moved enough copies to get to the next book deal, though not much more than that. Honestly, it could be worse. Publisher’s aren’t getting rich off me, but they aren’t going broke, either. In baseball terms, I hit singles rather than home runs. You need guys like me on your team if you want to win games, but I’m never going to bring the crowd to its feet with a grand slam in the playoffs. For a long time, I was happy to be in the game at all. That was before I got the fateful email.

My wife Lola and I were sitting at our dining room table with our friends Peter and Delilah playing games last summer when it happened. An executive producer I’d never heard of emailed me about optioning the film and TV rights to The Chosen Twelve, the sci-fi novel I was supposed to be writing a sequel for at that very moment. I stared at the words, stunned and confused. It couldn’t be real. Twenty minutes of Googling later, I realized the offer was legit. The producer had made a movie starring an actress even I’d heard of. She had since gone on to become the next big thing. He wanted to pay me ten thousand dollars for a chance to bring my book to the screen. I was ecstatic.

I was also realistic. Almost nothing that gets optioned ever makes it across the finish line to become a movie. But being optioned at all meant getting paid, which was my own personal finish line. It would give me a publishing accomplishment worth celebrating for the first time in forever. I’d been hitting singles for a very, very long time. I wanted to swing for the fences for once. I sometimes joke with my kids about Netflix money. It’s the writer version of winning the lottery. If Hollywood takes a liking to your book, it can suddenly become a bestseller and maybe even a major franchise. It’s extremely rare, but it does happen. Pretty much every movie ever made is based on a book. There’s a woman who started out on Twitter around the same time I did and ran in some of the same online circles. I went viral before she did, and she subtweeted something passive aggressive about it. There was no need for her to be jealous. A few years later, she wrote a novel that got picked up by a huge book club and is now a bestseller with a movie on the way. She’s real-life famous, not the meaningless internet kind like me. Even my wife reads her work. Not surprisingly, when I asked her to blurb one of my books, she never got back to me. The key to making it big is forgetting all the little people. Nothing feels better than punching down.

I put the producer in touch with my literary agent, and the two agreed to general terms. Then my agent told me I needed to find an entertainment lawyer to work out the fine print. Those costs were on me. It would be foolhardy for me to sign anything without legal representation. On the infinitely small chance this project actually turned into something, agreeing to a bad deal could cause me to lose out on a fortune. Unfortunately, entertainment lawyers aren’t cheap. My agent put me in touch with a buddy of his at a big firm who agreed to do me a favor. His normal rate was $1,500 an hour, but he could cut that down to nine hundred if I agreed to work with a junior associate or possibly the janitor in the lobby. I kept looking. I connected with another lawyer who said she charged six hundred per hour, which seemed like a steal by comparison. Still, I was nervous. At that rate, it wouldn’t take many hours to burn up the full ten thousand dollars I was being offered. I also had the option of paying nothing out of pocket but giving the lawyer a percent of the total value of the contract on the back end, however much it ended up being. If this franchise became the next Star Wars, that could mean paying millions in perpetuity because I was too cheap to fork over a few thousand up front. The lawyer recommended that I pay her at the start rather than going with the percentage plan, and I did what she said. After all, I was literally paying her for her advice. Everything went sideways from there.

At first, the delays were on our end. The producer sent us the initial contract, and my lawyer said she’d read over it and get the revisions back to him at the end of the weekend. That turned into three weeks. Something happened with the flooring in her office, and everyone knows you can’t do good legal work if the hardwood is messed up. Then she thought she sent the contract to the producer, but she never actually hit the send button. I should have followed up, but every time I messaged her, it cost me sixty dollars, so I stayed silent and assumed things were getting done. That was another multi-week delay. A few days after she finally sent the email for real, the writers went on strike. The actors followed a few months later. The producer didn’t want to sign anything when no one was working. My lawyer insisted that other deals were getting done and that there was no reason to let this hold us up. The term limit for any rights would automatically be extended by the length of the strikes. The producer didn’t care. He went from being extremely eager to being hard to reach. His inbox must have been full.

Photo by Vincentas Liskauskas on Unsplash

Through all this, I kept my contact with him to a minimum. I didn’t want to say something stupid to scare him away before the deal was signed. I desperately wanted to hear what his plans were. Did he want to make a movie or a TV series? Would it be with human actors or CGI? Could we replace the entire cast with Muppets? I shut up for my own good. The months dragged on. The strikes ended. The producer stopped responding to emails from anyone on my side. The joke was on me, the guy who was supposed to be writing the jokes. I spent thousands on legal fees for a deal he wanted and initiated, then he simply disappeared. He ghosted me like I was a drunken Tinder hookup he regretted. My books never look as good when you’re sober.

I’m not blameless here, which is the most embarrassing part. I should have advocated for myself every step of the way. I needed to be in everybody’s inboxes on all sides to make sure emails were sent and received by all parties, regardless of the annoyance I caused or extra legal fees I incurred. I also should have talked to the producer by phone to learn his ideas and build a connection with him. I’ll never know what his plans were for getting the book to the screen. That would have been an interesting story to tell after everything fell apart, making this a much better newsletter. Maybe that Muppet thing was on the table after all. He might have been less likely to blow me off if he viewed me as an actual person rather than a faceless rube in Indiana. Or maybe talking with me would have led him to ditch me sooner. An earlier failure could have saved me weeks of extra lawyer costs. Either way, I should have been more proactive from the start. The producer wasn’t doing me some precious favor. This was a business deal, and I had skin in the game. I should have acted like it. Changing my behavior wouldn’t have caused the movie to be made—clearly the producer’s interest was too tepid for that—but I think it could have led to the deal being signed, transforming a two thousand dollar loss into an eight thousand dollar profit. Instead, I got to tell my wife about all the money I basically lit on fire. That was fun.

Beyond that, I shouldn’t have brooded on the deal when things fell apart. After I lost the money, my sulking only hurt me. Everyone who wasn’t in my house couldn’t have cared less. My lawyer got paid, and the producer went back to gallivanting around French film festivals surrounded by the finest wines and cheeses. He definitely overdosed on a good Gruyère and forgot I existed. It was hard for me to get over, though, because my book earnings are so meager to begin with. It was like breaking into someone’s house to steal their food stamps. I know the amounts involved were small—by Hollywood standards, anyway—but come on. Those legal fees wiped out all the advance money I was paid in 2023. During that year, I effectively wrote The Gods of Spenser Island for free. Then again, the failed deal also helped me finish the book. I hit the deadline for the initial draft because I was motivated by the possibility of a movie, and I plowed through the final edits when I was furious about the deal falling through. All five of my stages of grief are revenge. Remember that when you try to figure out which one of the monsters in the book is actually me. Spoiler alert: It’s all of them.

At the height of my anger, I thought I would name and shame everyone involved. In what’s perhaps the only wise thing I’ve ever done, I realized that was a dumb idea. I don’t want to dig through my emails and invoices to establish exact timelines and prices so this can hold up in court if someone sues. I’d rather leave out names and double down on my own version, half-remembered and obscured by rage. It’s best to put this whole thing behind me. But if that’s the case, why write about it at all?

First to serve as a warning to my fellow small-time authors. If somebody emails you about movie rights, it’s not risk-free money from the sky. Whether you choose to move forward or not, you’re taking a chance. Be aware of that going in. The second reason is to thank my paid Substack subscribers. My only positive writing income last year came from you. Without that generous backing, I would have given up writing for good. I wrote for free for years on my way up, but back then I was driven by delusions of grandeur about my own potential. I’ve since come back down to reality, or something adjacent to it. Writing a book isn’t something I can do on a whim. It takes time away from family, friends, and all the other things that make life worth living. I’m nearly forty. If I’m going to do something that takes as much time as a job, it has to pay at least like a part-time one. Substack got me there. That’s why I write those extra newsletters on Thursdays with that annoying paywall. That thin dividing line is holding up my entire writing career. Therein lies my thought process behind sharing my greatest professional setback. If I can parlay that into a few more paid subscriptions, maybe I could slowly offset the loss over time. I view every embarrassment as an opportunity. I just figured out why I’m so bad at business.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James