Scene Four: Life is Change

     Just because someone loves your writing, loves your script and presumably loves you doesn't mean that they don't want to change you. It's like a marriage.  You love him for all his fine qualities, and he will be so much better once you touch up those little things about him you can't stand. Like his plot, assuming he's a screenplay. But you can't show signs of wanting to alter him too soon, lest you scare him off.
     We writers want to please. We are really desperate to please if the changes will  make them love us more. Wear my hair up?  Darling, you will never see it hanging down in those awful squiggly curls I thought you adored ever again. Let's see less of my family?  Never fear, Sweetheart.  I always thought my Mother was pesty, too. And my sister?  A complete loser, I agree.  Asks too many questions.
     And then he up and runs off with the screenplay, er that is, the busty bitch from human resources and neither your Mother or your sister gives a fig. Glad to see him go.  And six months later your sister submits a sit-com based on your awful marriage and your fool of a husband, and she she sells it. Life is cruel.
      So face it.  Whatever you write is almost certain to be changed in what may seem like the most illogical, boneheaded ways by people who do not write as well as you, and you will probably nod lamely and say, I never thought of that, because really, you never did think of  turning the heroine's druggie son into a pool boy who is just trying to earn money for film school. Life imitates art, and vice versa.
    I will leave you with a story that sounds apocryphal but which the writer swears is true.  The studio wanted his screenplay about two middle aged married couples holed up in a New England farm house during an snowstorm, confronting their personal failures and the tatters of their marriages. Very Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?The writer was asked Why middle aged people?  Who wants to look at a bunch of saggy people with wrinkles anyway?  Let's make them younger.  Well, the writer replies, they had to have been married for a while for them to have their thirty year old son commit suicide and the elderly parent have Alzeheimers. OK, younger it is, the studio guy replies. I am thinking stewardesses, here. Marriage was kind of the point of the story, the writer protests. And New England, in the winter for God's sake?  What could be more depressing? Let's use Malibu. It's close, cheap to film, everybody loves the beach. The writer: The location is pretty important.  You know, as an analogy for the barreness of their lives.  The light of awareness in the studio exec goes on.  But you know something?  You're right.  It does need sexual tension.  Lesbian stewardesses.