My Knowledge of Reading
Yeah, so I got the reader job.
I sent Amelia the coverage samples, hoping the ones I’d chosen weren’t too long or too short. And yet, despite my desire for brevity, I couldn’t resist sending the epic. It’s long, but it’s the best example I have of rolling up my sleeves and digging deeper, which I’ve been asked to do on several occasions. It has a plot so convoluted, it requires both a long synopsis and a long analysis, so you can get into the nitty-gritty and explore just why it doesn’t work — even the writing problems are convoluted.
Besides that, everyone seems to have different coverage policies. The last two places I read for wanted longer analyses than synopses, yet I’ve also done work for companies that seem to want longer synopses with a brief, “three biggest problems”-type analysis. I guess this is fair, because I’ve read plenty of scripts where if they fixed the biggest problems, everything else would fall into place. So in the three samples I sent, I tried to get the wide range: biggest problems, digging deeper, and one that’s kind of in the middle. I didn’t know if Amelia wanted three so she could choose what she, having worked at Murdstone & Grinby for a year, thought they’d prefer. If she showed them all three, I wanted to show what little range one can show in analytical writing.
I have no clue how the bosses felt about them. Instead of telling me, she sent me the shooting draft of an upcoming remake of a once-iconic (if not what you might call good) movie to give them a coverage sample. I figured they’d do something like this, but I wasn’t sure. Because they don’t just want competence — who knows how many months I slaved writing the samples I sent? — they want speed. So they send the script, I tear right into it, synopsize it, and analyze it. I try to do this in under two hours, but almost always it ends up being around two and a half. Synopses are deceptively tricky — if I didn’t have to write one, I could definitely cover any 100-page script in less than two hours.
Time is not always of the essence, but when you’re effectively “auditioning” for the job, you want to show you can do it if they need you to. Probably the funniest part about the experience is that I didn’t get Amelia’s e-mail with the script until about 90 minutes after she sent it, and they still raved about the incredible turnaround time.
But raving is one thing. Paying is another. Amelia e-mailed the next day, saying, “They loved your coverage! You’re hired! But here’s the thing…” There’s always a thing, isn’t there?
See, when she e-mailed, she told me they were hiring readers because they needed readers. But they don’t need readers — they want a reader, but the load won’t be heavy until later in the year. Basically, this will be a nice supplemental income, but it’s not exactly solving my financial woes. I received an official e-mail from Jim, the person who is now technically my boss, telling me that if they get anything in the interim, they’d send it over to me, but who knows what that means?
I had really hoped I could get a decent volume — something like three scripts a day — and just turn that into a full-time thing. Instead, I’ll be lucky if I get one a week. Things will be different in August, but it’s not August.
In the meantime, I’d been scheming to parlay this work into something akin to what my pseudo-Net-nerd hero, Darwin Mayflower, used to do — write longer, movie-review-style analyses and convince some crazy film website to pay me for the trouble. I don’t know if I’m allowed to do that or not, but if I’m careful enough, the shroud of anonymity afforded by the Internet might help me pull a fast one, making double the money for half the work.
But alas, if I’m not getting scripts, I can’t do shit about shit.
Posted by Stan on June 27, 2008 3:20 PM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Career-Based Rambling | Digg It
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