Book Review: I Liked It, Didn't Love It

This, of course, is the kiss of death for all writers: the close but no cigar moment in which a producer, agent, or editor says, "Yeah, it was good, but not good enough." I've heard this line, or variations on it, a number of times, including the "terrific read, but just not right for us" corollary. And much like the mythical death of a thousand cuts, each one stings but won't kill you all by itself (the cumulative effect, of course, may well be another story).

In I Liked It, Didn't Love It, studio and development executives Rona Edwards and Monika Skerbelis introduce readers not so much to the process of writing but rather to what goes on as a studio or production company considers a work. What happens when your precious baby (that'd be your script or novel, by the way) leaves your hands and shows up at the offices of a production company? Who sees it, spills coffee on it, circular files it, and maybe - just maybe - even reads it? What happens in the absurdly unlikely instance that your work is optioned or sold? And what, exactly, does "in development" really mean?

Edwards and Skerbelis provide the details, even offering little diagrams of the development process that for some reason remind me of the line in Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" where the cop has his 8x10 color glossies with the circles and arrows on the back: the diagrams only serve to demonstrate the overall Byzantine nature of the entire Hollywood development process (if Hollywood were a game by Milton-Bradley, every other space would read "Go back to Start"). There is information about the operation of story departments, production companies, agents, managers, and more.

I rather enjoyed their "brief history" of film and screenwriting, which included excerpts from the 1922 issue of Film Play magazine (yes, that's right, more than eighty years ago). What was the first recommendation? "Don't write your manuscript in pencil - have it typewritten. Your predecessors have made the readers take to wearing glasses." Others include "Don't point out the excellence of your script" and "Don't ever get the idea in your head that a motion picture producer is waiting to steal your story." The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Article Author: W.E. Wallo

W.E. Wallo is a book and movie junkie whose writings have appeared in a variety of print and online publications.

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