WRITING small

It's not the size etc. etc.

I recently took part in an industry chat and I had the opportunity to ask TV producers about writers and production budgets: Given that the television industry is in dire straits and there’s even less money available these days (honestly, in my thirty-plus years of being a writer has there ever been a time when the money side of things was great?!), should writers be considering this when writing?

I think this question was slightly misconstrued as a question of zeitgeist - i.e. jumping on current trends - and the answer was “Don’t limit yourself as a writer; write about what you want and let us worry about the budget.”

Yet over the years, I have had agents respond with “Nice idea, but nobody will be able to afford to make this.” I’ve had it with epic film scripts, and recently I’ve had this response with my TV series Backstabbers, with an agent stating:

“the high expense of making anything period, even 1970's is insanely expensive, which is why so much current TV is contemporary.”

*INSERT SHOULDER SHRUG HERE*

Even Russell T. Davies commented on this recently:

“If Disney collapsed tomorrow and we had to go back to making Doctor Who on a normal BBC budget, you know what? We’d all rally round and make it and suddenly the stories would become claustrophobic ghost stories.”

“Writing smaller” reminds me of when I was signed with the Rupert Heath Agency. I had submitted my fantasy action/adventure epic script Border World to PFD who obviously said no, but they recommended contacting Rupert, who had recently set up his own agency. He read the script and said he wanted to me with me to “see if you’re really that mad.”

We met. I signed with him. Rupert admitted from the start that he was ‘more books than scripts’ and that his reach with film scripts was limited. He shopped it about to bigger agents, including PFD who said they liked it - but it was too big. Too expensive. “Only Ridley Scott or Terry Gilliam could make this.”

So Rupert asked me to write a small, British film script, which I did. I tried to keep a heightened “magical reality” feel to it. But what I had written was the total opposite of the reason why Rupert signed me, and given the speed at which I churned it out, unsurprisingly he didn’t like it, and neither did I. (It was essentially American Psycho meets Heathers meets the Unabomber. The hits just keep on coming. That said, part of it is going to live again in Backstabbers IV!)

Rupert loved Border World (he was probably the first person to really “get” my writing, which I’ll always be thankful for). He loved it but couldn’t find a home for it. He asked me to adapt my script into a book, but I completely lacked the confidence at that time to do it.

Rupert sadly died in 2023, but I will always remember him as the one who took the chance. I wrote Border World purely out of frustration - the very definition of not chasing the zeitgeist but writing what I wanted to write and sod everyone else. And it wasn’t perfect. Rupert gave me a ton of notes (including “scrap the first thirty pages”, which I did!), but all of them made the script infinitely better. That experience of working with another to wrestle the script into something more, stretching it to unlock the potential was one I’ll never forget, and how fortunate was I to share it with someone so encouraging and enthusiastic.

Bless you, Rupert!