Writing About Lives

Well my friends, the treatment that Cupcake Brown and I had been working on based on her best-selling book, “A Piece of Cake,” is dead.

She and I befriended each other after I wrote a story for The San Diego Union-Tribune about her journey from drug and alcoholism abuse, prostitution and the Crips, to finishing in a top spot of the University of San Francisco’s Law School in 2001. The way readers connected with that story convinced me that people love reading about one another’s lives more than the mayhem presented in daily newspapers.

A year later she and I collaborated on a book proposal which got her a reputable agent in Los Angeles and a deal with Random House’s Crown Division. She wrote her own book, I just helped with the proposal and experienced the joys and pains of the editing process with her as an early reader. Now that the book has landed on The New York Times Bestseller list and made it all the way up to #1 on the Times of London, we had hoped we could ride the wave of interest into Hollywood.

It took us months to get a first draft of the treatment done. I’m in New York. She’s three time zones away in the Bay Area. After my Columbia professor who was kind enough weigh in with a fairly harsh critique, Cup felt that his comments were so on point that neither of us had the time to get a rewrite ready in time. We were also competing against two proven sceenwriters who have been made acclaimed films. There was no point in having our names attached to a product that couldn’t compete. I respect that given her potential franchise.

The aggravating thing is if we had had more time, maybe another week, we could have implemented his changes. Her life as an author-lawyer and mine in the last leg of my Columbia University graduate school experience, did not allow us to make the deadline her agent and the producers have for the treatments. I am barely learning the ropes of the publishing business. The script business might as well be on Pluto, no longer even another planet.

Thanks to all of my friends who have been extremely supportive – especially a well-placed movie industry insider and a Columbia professor who was relentless in his critique. After hearing the news that she had decided to not submit the treatment, in an email the professor welcomed me to “the crowd with unproduced treatments and scripts.” A 20-page treatment seals our membership.

In the meantime I will be focusing my energy on getting Grace Bumbry’s book proposal done, which will take me to Europe for three weeks and getting my thesis project polished for the committee. In the next few weeks I will be reading three times in New York, leading a panel discussion of writers and coming to the final arc of my course work. No time for pity.

And just maybe if those two treatments that have been submitted by pros bomb – which could totally happen, Cupcake and I could come back roaring and be in business.