An agent wants to read BA to see about representing me. Sort of came out of nowhere...though I guess I might have contacted them, once upon a time and they just took a while to get back to me. Anyway, it nudged me into reworking the ending with an idea I once had for it. I don't expect much from this, but you never know.
It's funny, but the ending of BA is totally different from what I thought it would be when the story first came to me. Initially, I was going to set it in St. Louis and do a play on the legend of Tristan and Isolde. Not Wagner's version but the earlier stories that influenced the idea of Lancelot and Guinevere in the Arthurian stories...albeit with a tragic end. Tristan would die and Gabrielle would let herself be destroyed by walking into the sunrise.
Hmm...maybe more Wagner-esque than I'm willing to admit.
But the story never would sit right. I tried New Orleans but that was too Anne Rice-ish. I considered LA's Latino Jazz scene, with Tristan being a cool cat with a horn...but that wasn't it, either. Neither was Miami and the Caribbean rhythm. Then Katrina slammed into New Orleans, and the vultures came out to pick on the bones of the dying city...and I found my way in.
The script's done well in competitions -- winning or placing well in nearly a dozen. But it's not a vampires are cool story, nor is it Buffy... redux. It's got some serious sex in it, and is borderline non-PC thanks to Dmitriy, Gabrielle's vampire companion, being gay and vicious. I've got another gay character in it to mitigate that, but it's still pretty harsh.
What's harsher is Gabrielle and her plan to seduce Tristan into becoming like her, even though it means giving up everything he loves. Including his music. Their encounters are as erotic as you can get without it being porno. I used Almodovar's Matador as my guideline, there.
I worked my ass off to get this script going. Blew several thousand dollars of my 401K money. Went to Austin's Film Festival and networked and did seminars and workshops...hell, I paid to have a budget worked up and business plan developed to show how it could make a good bit of cash. Did storyboards for a couple scenes. I was even pimping Jonathan Togo and Christina Ricci as possible leads, to give people the visuals (emphasis on possible, since I hadn't made contact with either one of them). But it didn't fit any ready-made niches, and so it didn't fly. I guess. That, or I really seriously suck at selling anything.
I may make it into a book...I dunno. I'll see what happens with this agent. But it's low on the priority list, right now. I want to finish OT and The Alice 65 and Bugzters and Underground Guy before I focus on that.
Still, thinking about it makes me sad...because I know it would've been a good, sexy film.
It's funny, but the ending of BA is totally different from what I thought it would be when the story first came to me. Initially, I was going to set it in St. Louis and do a play on the legend of Tristan and Isolde. Not Wagner's version but the earlier stories that influenced the idea of Lancelot and Guinevere in the Arthurian stories...albeit with a tragic end. Tristan would die and Gabrielle would let herself be destroyed by walking into the sunrise.
Hmm...maybe more Wagner-esque than I'm willing to admit.
But the story never would sit right. I tried New Orleans but that was too Anne Rice-ish. I considered LA's Latino Jazz scene, with Tristan being a cool cat with a horn...but that wasn't it, either. Neither was Miami and the Caribbean rhythm. Then Katrina slammed into New Orleans, and the vultures came out to pick on the bones of the dying city...and I found my way in.
The script's done well in competitions -- winning or placing well in nearly a dozen. But it's not a vampires are cool story, nor is it Buffy... redux. It's got some serious sex in it, and is borderline non-PC thanks to Dmitriy, Gabrielle's vampire companion, being gay and vicious. I've got another gay character in it to mitigate that, but it's still pretty harsh.
I may make it into a book...I dunno. I'll see what happens with this agent. But it's low on the priority list, right now. I want to finish OT and The Alice 65 and Bugzters and Underground Guy before I focus on that.
Still, thinking about it makes me sad...because I know it would've been a good, sexy film.
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