This is the second in a series of essays here about how professional or aspiring professional writers can and must cope with two various kinds of rejection — rejection of your work by the buyers and rejection by various folks in the audience. Part 1 can be read here.
One important point in dealing with the latter is that you need to have realistic expectations. I don't know how often this has happened: A writer friend has called me for comfort and reassurance when his new book (or show or whatever) got a withering review. I ask him about the overall reception and learn that he's gotten twelve notices — eleven in the good-to-rave category, one that likened his work to the flinging of feces. He's so destroyed by #12 that he's forgotten #1-11.
The problem there is that he's set himself up for defoliation. It's like buying one lottery ticket and then being crushed when it turns out you didn't win. Unanimous approval happens about as often as me or you winning the $45,000,000 grand prize.
Mickey Mantle didn't step up to the plate expecting his every swing to clear the left field fence so he was not crushed when he struck out. His lifetime batting average was around .300 and that's just fine. Imagine a player feeling like an abject failure because he didn't do a lot better than that.
Someone once observed that the difference between an American playwright and a British playwright was as follows: In England, a great playwright is someone who now and then writes a great play. In America, a great playwright is someone whose last play was great. The latter approach can make for a lot of grief and anguish and it can even make a writer afraid to take chances and to not play it safe.
Even if you play it as safe as humanly possible as a writer, you will have failures. They are unavoidable — some may not even be your fault — and I've had friends do incredible damage to themselves by not accepting that as a reality. What you should hope is to have successes of sufficient quantity and magnitude that you can stay in the game. As long as you can stay in the game, you have a chance to hit a home run next time at bat.
Also, remember that it is (usually) not you they don't like but the product. As readers of this blog know, I hate cole slaw. If you are a fine chef and you make me cole slaw, I'm not going to like it. If you write certain kinds of stories, I'm not going to like them either.
I think writers get crushed a lot by rejections that are in the same category as trying to make me love your cole slaw. It's like entering a contest you can't win. I ain't gonna shine on Dancing with the Stars or in the Short Track Speed Skating event at the next Winter Olympics. Entering something like that is just begging for failure and rejection.
There are writing assignments that are like that because of your limitations but there are also those where you simply can't succeed, no matter what you do. I shall favor you with but two examples, both cases of motion picture producers I've encountered in my career. I'll call them Frick and Frack.
Mr. Frick, I met in the late seventies. He had co-produced one movie for Paramount and now had an office on the lot from which, I was told, he hoped to develop screenplays for production. A mutual friend steered me to him and we hit it off well. He was a nice guy and he laughed in all the right places — always a good sign. He gave me some broad parameters of the kinds of ideas he was looking for and invited me to go off and come up with some, then come back and pitch them to him.
It seemed like a great opportunity. The guy was indeed a producer. He had an office at Paramount. He liked me. How could that not be worth my time to pursue?
SPOILER ALERT: The guy had no ability to get a movie made or even to pay for any writing. I'll tell you why in a moment.
Cluelessly thinking all I had to do was come back to him with the right idea, I spent a week or two of pondering. Once I thought I had three good ones, I went back and clicked into performance mode. One by one, my ideas were shot down. The first one was all wrong for these reasons. The second would never work for those reasons. The third was just plain a bad idea.
I didn't think any of them were terrible but he thought they all were…so that was it for those three ideas. But he still liked me and he encouraged me and he said, "Well, maybe now you have a better idea of what I'm looking for." That seemed possible so I went home, came up with three more and returned to his office, resulting in three more strike-outs. In fact, he seemed to like these three less than the first three…and he hadn't liked the first three at all.
He urged me to try, try again and he did it so nicely and sincerely that I almost did. What stopped me is that, via that most powerful of show business forces — dumb luck — I happened to meet another writer who'd been playing the same game with Mr. Frick. The writer had given up after four pitch sessions, asked around and learned what he thought was the reason for all the turndowns…
Mr. Frick was not a producer. Though he had that office on the Paramount lot, the studio had zero interest in him producing anything for them and he knew it.
He had not really even been a producer on that one film with his name on it. A friend then in power had set him up with the job, he'd botched it and another producer had to be brought in. They shared co-producer credit but the other guy had done all the work. Mr. Frick had then reverted to his previous job, which was as a consultant on matters of foreign distribution. That's why he had that office at Paramount and though it was in the building with real producers, he was no longer one of them. I might as well have been pitching to one of the janitors.
Frick had not accepted his fate so he continued to try and be a kind of "pretend" producer, taking meetings like mine when he wasn't doing his consulting work. The writer who tipped me off had a theory: "He thinks that if he hangs in there for a while, taking meetings and acting like an in-house producer who produces movies, eventually there will be some new Paramount execs who will think he is one."
That put him in this position: If he'd said to me, "Hey, that's a great idea," he would then have had to do something with it. He'd have to have Paramount draw up a contract and pay me money…and Paramount wasn't about to do that for anything he told them he wanted to do. His enthusiasm for an idea carried zero weight with the current guys in charge. So he had to hate all ideas pitched to him while he bided his time and hoped somehow that would change.
My friend's theory made way too much sense to me so I gave up on Mr. Frick. He passed away about twelve years later and if the Internet Movie Database is to believed — and sometimes, it is — he never produced anything else again in his career.
I'd thought my ideas were being rejected because they were rotten. They may have been — I pitched a few of them elsewhere and didn't get any takers — but that wasn't why he turned them down. The whole thing was akin to one of those unwinnable carnival games where you take home the Big Prize if you can knock down all three milk bottles by throwing a baseball at them — and one of the milk bottles is weighted-down so even a hurricane couldn't topple it.
I have come to believe this happens a lot with writers: They're playing a game that cannot be won. Either they're trying to sell the right thing to the wrong guy or the wrong thing to the right guy…or, once in a while, even the wrong thing to the wrong guy. And then they think they bombed because someone thought their scripts or pitches stunk.
In the next one of these, I'll tell you about Mr. Frack — who did produce movies, many of them. And I'll tell why you'd have had just as much chance of selling him your screenplay as you would have of selling it to Mr. Frick.
