A while back, I wrote a pilot script for a half-hour comedy based on Notes From the Blender.
I changed a lot from the action of the book but tried to keep the tone and the characters. It was a fun exercise. It did not turn out to be a profitable exercise, but I did have fun with it, and I think the final product is decent.
Here it is in PDF form: enjoy it! Download Blender Pilot 5
As you can tell from the file name, I did several drafts and worked from feedback I got from a number of different people.
Ultimately, as you can tell by the fact that I'm not posting pictures of myself diving into a swimming pool of money, Scrooge McDuck style, the pilot didn't sell.
A couple of the reasons I got for its not being commercially viable follow.
1. You can't make a half-hour comedy about people with all this tragedy in their background.
(great show, by the way. Except for when he talks to his wife's ghost, which is mawkish and awful unlike everything else on the show.)
2. It's too gay.
I like this one too, although it's a little more hit-or-miss. The politics episode was all earnest and no funny. But the kid on this show is fantastic, and Andrew Rannels is hilarious when he's allowed to be. And okay, I did tear up a little at the end of the most recent episode. Dammit.
So, yeah. That's the pilot script. On to William Goldman.
William Goldman, of course, is the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Marathon Man, The Stepford Wives, The Princess Bride, Misery, and many more whose famous dictum about Hollywood (which also applies to publishing and probably any business built on creative works) is "Nobody knows anything."
