Jennifer Government Blog
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Movie Update: We Have Writers!
I often get asked what’s happening with the Jennifer Government
film, because—well, you know, movies are cool. And it’s been about three years
since Steven Soderbergh & George Clooney optioned my book, and
so far not much has happened. On the one hand this isn’t so
surprising, because making a movie is a major logistical challenge:
you have to get the right people interested, and all available at the
same time, and happy to work with each other, and then you need to pay
them all stupid amounts of money. There are
plenty of films that took ten or more years to make it to the screen.
I really hope mine isn’t one of those, but I’ve held off
getting measured for the tuxedo I’ll wear to the premiere.
What’s mainly happened so far, I think—and bear in mind that I am not involved in this process, because no film-maker or studio exec wants an author hanging around, wringing his hands over changes to his masterpiece—is that Section 8 has talked to writers. At first I thought they were actually hiring writers, then not liking what they produced, but I have since discovered they were just having meetings. Lunches, mostly, I believe.
Until now! Writers have been actually hired, and they are, I’m assured, typing words out and everything. They are Louis Mellis and David Scinto, who wrote the extremely cool British film Sexy Beast. (Seriously, it’s great. And Ben Kingsley will give you nightmares. You should see it.)
Obviously the idea of having a bound screenplay I’ll be able to rub my hands over and say, “Ahhh, it’s not as good as the book,” is very exciting. Also exciting is that Section 8 and Warner Bros. have asked to renew the option, to tie up the rights for another two years. This, coincidentally or not, would take us up to the point where Clooney & Soderbergh’s contract with Warner Bros. expires. What does this mean? I don’t know. But the next 24 months should be interesting.
26 commentsWho do I sue?
As previously
mentioned,
occasionally some wacky marketing stunt I dreamed up for one of my novels
comes true. Films as advertisements, logo tattoos, naming people after
corporations;
no matter how outrageous I try to be, real-world marketers are
scampering along right behind.
But this is something else. First, a few lines from Chapter 1 of Jennifer Government:
The Johns smiled. “We started selling [Nike] Mercurys six months ago. You know how many pairs we’ve shifted since then?”
Hack shook his head. They cost thousands of dollars a pair, but that wouldn’t stop people from buying them. They were the hottest sneakers in the world. “A million?”
“Two hundred.”
“Two hundred million?”
“No. Two hundred pairs.”
“John here,” the other John said, “pioneered the concept of marketing by refusing to sell any products. It drives the market insane.”
This green thing is an invitation to the launch of a new range of Nike shoes that has gotten coolhunters drooling down their buttoned silk shirts. And what’s that down the bottom?
700 pairs worldwide, 140 in the US only
The next step, in Jennifer Government, is to throw open the warehouse doors and try to shift as many pairs as possible before the aura of exclusivity wears off. Also to shoot a few customers to make it look as if demand for the shoes is so hot that people are killing each other for them. If that turns out to be Nike’s plan in real life, too, I’m putting in a call for commission.
I’m a real boy!
The other day some money inexplicably appeared in my bank account.
This intrigued me. I wanted to know more, like: Who put it there?
And: Could they send more? It turned out it was from my agent,
Luke. “Oh, that’s royalties,” he said. “Jennifer Government
earned out the advance.”
Authors earn money in two ways: royalties and advances. Royalties are the cut the author receives from the sale of each book (usually around 10% of the cover price, but can be much higher or lower depending on the edition, country, and how much more famous they are than me). An advance is a payment made to the author before the book goes on sale. It can take a year or more for a book to hit the shelves after a publisher has accepted it, and months or years to sell significant numbers of copies, and six months on top of that for it to show up in a royalty statement with a check attached. So if there were no advances, authors would turn up to bookstore readings with their possessions in a shopping cart. Because this would be embarrassing for all concerned, the publisher makes a kind of bet: they guess how many copies they’ll sell, and pay the author the equivalent of a year or two’s royalties. The author doesn’t earn anything else until actual royalties exceed the advance.
You don’t have to pay back an advance even if the publisher over-estimates, which is fortunate because otherwise I’d be washing dishes in the Penguin Putnam cafeteria. They expected to sell more copies of Syrup than they did, so my royalties have never earned out the advance. On the one hand, this makes me one lucky asshole, because I got overpaid. On the other, it’s largely the reason why Penguin dumped me from their list, so I think it mostly works out.
Anyway, the point is this is the first time I have earned actual royalties. I’m so excited about it. I feel as if I am a real author, not just a guy with an attack-dog literary agent. I’m making a living from telling stories!
More fantasy Jens
It was a slow day in Germany, so Ralf Heinrich decided to whip up a few mock
Jennifer Government posters. (Click for larger versions.) Ralf is
quite the wiz with Photoshop, so lest anyone be deceived: no, these
aren’t official. Officially, teams of screenwriters have been locked in the
Warner Bros. dungeon and are being flogged daily until they produce something
the studio execs like.
Until that happens, I have to amuse myself with posters like this. That’s Jennifer Lopez on the left and Keira Knightley on the right. The J-Lo one is especially appropriate, because originally I thought she’d be a good Jennifer Government, but then I was quietly informed that since Out of Sight, she and George Clooney (whose company is developing the film) don’t get along so well. So I’m glad I didn’t unknowingly toss that one up to George. That could have been awkward.
I told Ralf this and he said:
I selected J Lo only because of her pretty look and not because of her talent as an actor… so I’m happy to hear she won’t starr in the movie.
Aw, now when she reads this she’s going to get all upset. But I’m actually more disturbed by the Keanu Reeves references. Whoa.
I lost! I lost!
About a week ago a guy called Chris e-mailed me:
Just wanted to drop you a note saying that Jennifer Government was my favorite book of 2003, and was a finalist for the Campbell Award for best SF novel of the year.
Naturally, I assumed Chris was deranged. Sure, he has excellent taste in literature, but the Campbell Award was presented almost two months ago. If my book had been a finalist for one of the world’s leading science-fiction prizes, that’d be the kind of thing I’d have heard about, don’t you think? Well, apparently not. I e-mailed my publisher just in case, and it turns out Chris isn’t a mentally unstable nutjob with a penchant for fooling people into thinking they’ve qualified for major awards: Jennifer Government really was a Campbell Award finalist.
Not a winner, alas, which means I’m feeling honored, humbled, and a deep, burning rage toward Jack McDevitt. But still! This is awesome. Now I just need to go apologize to Chris.
The many faces of Jen
I’ve
received a bunch of foreign-edition Jennifer Governments
lately, which is always cool. There’s a Finnish version called
Jennifer
Valtiovalta, a wicked little
Japanese version
called something your computer probably doesn’t have the correct font
to display, and, my favorite, an Italian
Logo Land.
The groovy thing about that is they’ve gone with the original cover
design, but
re-shot it for no apparent reason.
It’s the 1998 Psycho of book covers.
And speaking of covers… and… um… posters, this thing to the left comes courtesy of Rob Treynor, who responded to the Fark.com challenge: “Photoshop a scene from the next movie that Hollywood will make that butchers a good book.” Oh yeah!
(Now I know I’m going to get mail about this otherwise, so for clarity: no, Drew Barrymore has not been cast in the movie. This is just one guy’s amusing vision of hell.)