Quint at AICN wrote about a couple of new flicks recently, one of which I had a weird experience with a number of months ago. For a while I was spending time in a screenwriting newsgroup (until I realized it was nothing but a personal chat room for one huge jerk, a bunch of wannbes that could have been contenders, etc) where a new guy showed up one day looking for help with the basics. A short time later he showed up celebrating the purchase of a spec script called The Bucket List in a way that intimated it was his sale.

Nobody questioned this right off the bat, but things eventually came crashing down around the troll and he later morphed himself into an agent. Anyway, it was a surreal and retarded thing and I just thought I'd share it with you because, sure enough, a day or two after this guy started celebrating someone else's script sale, the transaction showed up in the trades.

Some in the group foamed all over the script while I thought it had some problems and could have used a number of successive drafts. Those of us who held that belief were attacked in deeply unprofessional and fanboy'ish ways that need not be dredged from the depths where such things belong.

I mention all of this because that script wasn't terribly good in the form it was sold and I don't have real high prospects for it, regardless of who was attached at the time. That script, to wrap this up, was produced, has trailers out, and I suppose Quint has seen it.

So head over to AICN and see what he thinks of it -- I'm not holding my breath.

Update:
While this story was waiting to publish, I came across a review for The Bucket List from the Hollywood Reporter that begins with this:

If anyone could turn a tragicomedy about terminal cancer into a holiday moviegoing proposition, you'd think the team of Rob Reiner, Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman might have had the right stuff. Alas, their labored efforts fail to lift "The Bucket List" out of its flatlining state.

Ouch.

<< Previous entry

Next entry >>