Only three works of mine, alas, have ever been optioned for the movies: “He’s All Mine” (one of the novellas in Sunburn Lake) was optioned in the late 1980s by the actress and director Anne DeSalvo; Jersey Luck was optioned, also in the late 1980s, by producer Jonathan Brett and director Susan Seidelman; in the early 2000s, it was briefly optioned by a small New York-based production company whose name escapes me (and I can’t find the contracts: no matter). Freaks’ Amour was optioned half a dozen times since its publication in 1979, most seriously–meaning there was more to it than just a check involved, there was at least some development–by Ray Stark Productions at Columbia Pictures in the early 1980s, and, in the early 90s, by the director Alex Proyas and the producer Andrew Mason for Mystery Clock, an Australian film company (Alex and Andrew are both Australian). The actor Ed Asner once tried to option Derby Dugan’s Depression Funnies, but his best offer was $1000 for an 18-month option, and despite my fondness for the “Mary Tyler Moore Show,” I turned it down. Continue reading
Category Archives: FILM
ADVENTURES OF THE GALAXY RANGERS
Sometime in the mid-1980s, my good friend Chris Rowley (we’d met in the late 70s as staff writers for the infamous and short-lived magazine Violent World* ) landed the job as script editor for an animated cartoon series then in development called The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers. I’m not sure how Chris got hooked up with Robert Mandell, the creator and producer of the show, but I’m pretty certain he was hired because he was (and is) a superb science-fiction and fantasy novelist, and because he knew a lot of talented writers from the worlds of science fiction and fantasy. His job primarily was to gather a group of writers and–with one eye always on the series bible–divvy up assignments. The production office, where all of the storyboarding was done, was located in New York City; the actual animation was done in Japan. Continue reading