The Writers' Life - Writing for Money

In this book, some 48 film and TV writers - among them some of the biggest and longest-serving names in the business - ruminate on a variety of topics from how they got their first break to dealing with unhinged actors. As the title implies, Doing It For Money focuses on the practicalities of being a scriptwriter. It is interestingly divided into two parts - "The Agony" and "The Ecstasy" and these are then further sub-divided into chapters with such quirky titles as "I Only Take Phone Calls When I'm Writing", "Curveballs: Pitching and Selling" and "Visions and Revisions: The Script Monster".

Editor Daryl G. Nickens has gathered a contributors list that reads like a Hollywood's Who's Who of scriptwriting. There's Terry Rossio, one half of the writing duo behind this summer's biggest hit, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest; John August, he of Charlie's Angels and Big Fish fame; and Tom Fontana, whose credits include Oz, St Elsewhere and Homicide: Life on the Street.

Some essays are laugh-out-loud funny as writers recount their Hollywood war stories, of which there are several. For example, Chris Brancato, who worked on Beverly Hills 90210, The X-files and Boomtown, writes about his experience of working on the sci-fi movie, Species II. For those of you who don't know, remember or care, the movie was about an astronaut who becomes infected with alien DNA on a maiden voyage to Mars then runs amok back on Earth.

Brancato turned in a script in which at the end the alien is killed and there's the astronaut's funeral. "Back to the MGM cutting room, where the President announced that three of his previous movies ended in funerals," writes Brancato. "They all flopped at the box office. Though these movies were wholly unrelated to Species II, a funeral scene ending is a no-no. We will have to reshoot."

He dutifully complies and writes a new ending, only to have the producer insist that there is a cat in the final scene. Which takes place in an ambulance.

"The Producer told me to call the President and tell him about the cat. 'No matter what the jerk says,' my Producer warned, 'the cat stays in the picture.'"