How to get into the movie business, part 2

I've been hoping the Surrogates movie will do well for the sake of my pals at Top Shelf Productions. I see it came in second in the box office tally for the weekend, taking fifteen million, beaten by the animated Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. Top Shelf acquired a great deal of experience in shifting books with a movie tie-in after From Hell back in 2001. In fact it was shortly after then that I gave up my self-publishing operation, feeling that I wasn't paying enough attention to complicated market fluctuations and that Chris Staros was handling those issues much better than I could. Our bookstore distributor had just gone bust owing us collectively around 80 thousand dollars, a very large amount of which was From Hell revenue. Me, I went up the pub and cried into a beer, but Chris got online immediately with a perfectly timed appeal which basically said, "if you were ever thinking about buying one of our books, please do it now, thank you. And here are all our extra special offers..." The response was unbelievable, and Top Shelf was able to continue doing business. I still had froth on my nose when university-educated Rob Venditti realized Chris was going to need extra hands and talked himself into a job as a box-packer:

I had no idea what their line was all about. In 2002, I was very ignorant of what there was out there in comics. I just ended up working for them because I live in Atlanta and that’s where they are. I was trying to get into the industry and trying to find any way to do it, and they were a publisher that was close by. I called Chris up, told him I was a local guy, and asked him if there’s anything I could do to sort of help him out. He said, "I could really use someone to pack boxes" and I said "Yeah, no problem, I can do that." It was very much like you said, the company really was kind of saved overnight. So that was when I got my start with them.

Well, Top Shelf was a pretty small operation at the time, I was the first employee they’d ever had. So even though I started out packing boxes in a warehouse it quickly developed into a job that encompassed other things because, with so few people working at the company, everybody sort of had to be a jack of all trades.
So I was branching out, doing other things, and Chris Staros had known from my discussions with him that I had wanted to be a writer, and we would drive to conventions, and talk about ideas, and whatnot. And I had already been writing The Surrogates when I drove to a convention with him, in July of 2002, when I told him about the idea, and he was very intrigued by it. I could tell that he liked the idea just by the way that he was asking me questions about it - you know, "what is this" and "what is that". He was really getting excited about it. So as I was writing the script, I would turn it over to him, and he would read through it, and he was always very supportive. But he didn’t say he was going to publish it until the thing was entirely written and he saw that I was able to bring the whole thing over the transom.
At that point he decided to publish it. Up till that point, I was just having him look it over, as a way of tightening it up where it needed to be tightened up, and hopefully he would introduce me to other editors, and help me submit it around.

That's from the interview at Broken Frontier, continuing in parts this week. Lots more at the link. Ane there's more at DVDs Worth Watching:

ROBERT VENDITTI: It started with a producer named Max Handelman, who contacted me about the film rights for The Surrogates back in 2006. Both I and Chris Staros at Top Shelf liked Max, and so we decided to let him shop it around. Max ended up bringing in Todd Lieberman and David Hoberman at Mandeville Films, a production company that has its first-look deal at Disney. They put a package together that included the screenwriters and Jonathan Mostow as director, and then made their pitch to Disney. Disney liked what they heard and decided to move forward under their Touchstone label.

How to get into the movie business

don Murphy, movie producer, told me about this a year and a half ago and I've been waiting for something to come of it. There used to be a character who posted regularly in my comments here, who uses the monicker 'Hemlockman'. You could describe him as brash. In one of his posts here took a pop at the From Hell movie. I can't remember his words exactly , but they were probably something witty along the lines of "it was a pile of shit." Right away he set off one of Don Murphy's Google alerts, and the movie producer turned up forthwith in my comments section. What ensued is by now a well rehearsed press release:

REUTERS: Web wrangle leads to movie deal for novelist Sun Jul 12, 2009
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Producers Don Murphy and John Wells have teamed up to option "The Flock," a novel by James Robert Smith. The book tells the story of a group of highly intelligent giant prehistoric birds discovered in the Florida Everglades who are intent on protecting their ancient home when faced with encroachment by theme park developers.
Murphy ("Transformers") discovered Smith and his book by chance. Murphy was on the blog of Eddie Campbell, the artist of "From Hell," an Alan Moore graphic novel whose big-screen translation was produced by Murphy.
Smith was posting comments critical of the film, putting Murphy on the defensive. Eager to find out more about the poster, Murphy discovered Smith had written a book. He quickly ordered it, expecting to hate it and ready to trash it. To his surprise, he fell for it...

So there you go. That's one way to sell your book to Hollywood. Hemlockman doesn't comment here any more, not since he repeated some mean hearsay about Will Eisner. I asked him to delete it and he didn't, so I deleted it myself. Shortly after, I noticed he was trying to get rid of all his Eddie Campbell books under the header "I'm stuck with them." He closed with a cover of Bacchus #1 and the words "Oh well, wine makes me puke anyway." May your movie do well, James.

Speaking of the comments and blog readers, I always preferred Blogger to Livejournal and the rest because I don't have time for this 'friends' business. If you bump into me in a bar, we'll buy each other a drink and solve all the world's problems and we can declare ourselves to be 'friends.' I have a similar dislike of the word 'fans.' A con organizer referred to my 'fans' and I said, "Eddie Campbell doesn't have 'fans,' he has 'readers.' " Well recently they introduced to blogger this business about 'followers'. I haven't looked into it and I don't wish to, and I resent now having to concern myself with how many 'followers' a guy in my position ought to have and whether I'm running behind in that department. However, when I logged in this morning I noticed that while I had 64 followers yesterday, today I'm down to 63. One of them has decided to cancel his or her followship and now I'm forced to spend time fretting about whether it was something i said.

If I were a much bigger man, I'd have 'disciples.' Oscar Wilde I think it was who wrote: "Every great man has his disciples. But why is it always Judas who writes the biography?"

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latest update. Don Murphy takes revenge on vocal critic by buying his book (LA Times)
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update: Everybody's getting in the act. Rich Johnson calls Scorsese an arse to see if that gets him anywhere