Twilight Eyes (71 page)

This time I was lured into the tar by a producer who seemed to be neither a crook nor a maniac, and the fact that he had nine distinct personalities—seven more than the average producer and four fewer than the average director—seemed to be something with which I could easily deal. Indeed, I liked all of his personalities except for Viola, a reincarnation who claimed to have been a mistress of Napoleon’s and a poisoner of clergymen in nineteenth century France.

As we developed a pitch to take to the various networks, we had only two serious disagreements, the first being that he wanted Rya Raines not to be an entrepreneur in the carnival, as she was in the novel, but instead to be a stripper in one of the girly shows. He had a young actress in mind for the part, one who, as he put it, “has knockers that would cast a shadow to Japan if she was standing on the Malibu beach at sunrise.” If our female lead, in fact, proved to be that prodigiously endowed, most of our budget per episode would have been spent on elaborate lighting setups to ensure that the other cast members were not perpetually in a mammary eclipse. I wondered if she could get close enough to a dinner table to reach her food, and if her arms looked as out of proportion to her bosom as the arms of a T. rex were out of proportion to its head. I had a few nightmares about this, and I count myself lucky never to have met the poor woman.

After only a few weeks of debate, I won the point, Rya remained an entrepreneur, and then the producer moved on to the argument that Slim, in addition to having the unusual sixth sense that he does, should be a Kung Fu master. Fortunately, I had exhausted him in the entrepreneur-or-stripper debate, and he gave up on Kung Fu Slim after less than a week of discussion—and after I shot him in the foot. All right, I didn’t shoot him in the foot, but I considered doing so.

After taking a number of meetings at the networks and major cable channels, we had two interested buyers. The book had been set in 1963, the year that John Kennedy was assassinated, but the producer and I agreed that because of the added production costs of a period piece, we should move the story to the present. Both networks had that condition, but they both also wanted to ditch the carnival background because it was “dated.”

In a follow-up meeting, one network executive—let’s call him Clueless, though that was not his name—wanted the series to be set in a circus. This confused my producer, who said, “A carnival
is
a circus.”

“No,” said Clueless, “a carnival doesn’t have clowns.”

“No, no,” said the producer, “carnivals are crawling with clowns, they just don’t have elephants.”

“I don’t care about elephants,” Clueless said. “There’s no role in this series for an elephant.”

“Rya Raines could be a trapeze artist,” said the producer. “They wear those tight little costumes.”

I spoke up to confirm that carnivals do not have clowns or elephants or trapeze artists.

“But clowns are essential to the mood of this,” Clueless said. “I really want clowns.”

My producer said, “I want clowns, too.”

In all the rambling, ever-spiraling, frequently insane discussions that I’d had with my producer, the subject of clowns had never arisen. I felt bozo blindsided.

I didn’t want clowns. In fact, I suggested I’d accept an elephant before I’d add clowns. They assured me that clowns are really scary, and one of them—I no longer recall which—wanted me to understand that clowns are scarier than elephants.

Let’s just say that over the course of the meeting, I came to the conclusion that I would cut off my left leg before I would develop the series with that network.

I still have both legs.

At the other network, an executive—let’s call him Hopeless, although that wasn’t his name—didn’t want the carnival, but he did not want the circus, either. He thought that Slim should be a homicide detective who sees the goblins among us. Hopeless also felt that Slim, in addition to his sixth sense, should be able to transform himself into a “good goblin” who could beat the crap out of the bad creatures. In this scenario, Rya would be a “sexy Internal Affairs investigator or a sexy reporter” who loves Slim but is always half a step away from discovering that he is a shapeshifter. In addition, Slim should have a thirteen-year-old sister, whom he has had to look after ever since goblins killed their parents, and the sister “should have a teenage-girl garage band that brings a rocker sensibility into the war against the goblins.”

I shot him in
both
feet and declined to develop such a series. Okay, you know me by now: I’m always claiming to have shot people in the feet, but it’s never true. The rest of it is true, however, and
Twilight Eyes
never became a TV series. I am, however, working on a script for a series about a sexy Internal Affairs investigator who has a pet elephant.