No. 26: Soman’s Adventures in Hollywood

The Perils of a Novelist Who Wants to Direct (Part 1)

I never planned to be a novelist.

I wanted to be a film director.

All the comments kids left in my high school yearbooks were about wanting to see my first movie or be my date to the Oscars. And no wonder. I was obsessed. I directed elaborate videos in my campaign for student body president, featuring amateur explosions and a full commitment to my megamaniacal slogan: REVOLUTION. I huddled in the cafeteria during study hall, writing screenplays about blind prostitute assassins (god help us) and Irish melodramas (even though I’d never been to Ireland or met an Irish person). I tried to get on the first season of Project Greenlight at age 16 even though you had to be 18 to apply.

I lost all that moxie when I went to college, though.

At that time, the Venn overlap between good Harvard kids and good Indian boys meant you could only leave Cambridge as a doctor, lawyer, banker, or consultant, and so I chose the last, even though I didn’t know what it meant. Luckily, I hated the job, had a raging existential crisis 18 months in, and got myself fired in a blaze of glory. Over the next year, I applied to film school and tided myself over with weird jobs — writing the official Cliffs Notes for the Kama Sutra (still available online!), traveling with the women’s professional tennis tour for Tennis Week magazine, working as an assistant to acclaimed director Mira Nair — before the call came and I found myself seated with the first-year class in Dodge Hall at Columbia University for new student orientation.

My grand debut.

The moxie was back. I was so pent-up with creativity after finally being let out of my cage that I just wanted to shine. At Columbia, then, I was known for making short films that were overambitious, ill-advised, and that either succeeded wildly or imploded in public embarrassment. “Davy & Stu,” for instance, my adaptation of Anton Dudley’s one-act play, was set in a Scottish swamp, so naturally I cast two first-time teenage actors from suburban New Jersey, hired a dialect coach to teach them a Scottish brogue, and substituted Orlando for Aberdeen, enlisting a local film school to be our crew and a high school art class to help build swamp rocks out of paper mache. (“Can’t you just shoot something in Central Park???” my teacher asked, baffled.) My thesis film, “Kali Ma,” was so over-budget that I’m still paying off the loans, and featured an underwater combat scene, a Bollywood actress flown in from India, fourteen locations in 10 minutes, and a shoot so rigorous and riddled with chaos that half the crew threatened to walk off, a pitbull attacked me during pre-production and put me in the ER for 2 days, and the first editor I hired tried to steal the footage and ransom it back to me before I got the police involved. (One of these two films succeeded and qualified for the Academy Awards. One of these films didn’t. Watch them on Youtube and guess which is which.)

In the course of all this mayhem, though, I’d begun to fashion something of an identity — I was the “big story” guy. The one with limitless ambition, a steely work ethic, and the kind of self-delusion that would lead you to an equal chance of triumph or disaster and isn’t that better than 100% chance of something in between?

That’s how I sold myself at least. And Hollywood seemed intrigued.

Two months after graduation, three months shy of my 26th birthday, I had an agent at CAA, a hot script called Love Marriage that a studio wanted to fully finance, a writing gig at Aardman Animation (Chicken Run, Wallace & Gromit) for a Bollywood musical about elephants, a TV deal with a British broadcaster for a drama series about a family-run wedding house, and another gig adapting the classic novel The Pushcart War for a celebrated producer.

I was off and running, a textbook wunderkid, and I didn’t question any of it, because this is what was supposed to happen, right? Just like I figured my film school shorts needed pre-viz action stunts and breakaway glass and steadicam shots and a 6-foot high ice sculpture (don’t ask). I figured that life would accommodate my dreams, no matter how big they were, as long as I chased them like a young, arrogant hooligan.

Then suddenly, it all evaporated.

Looking back now, it had to be fated because of how instant the collapse was. A global financial crisis had taken hold — the market suddenly contracted. In the course of 2 weeks, the studio financing Love Marriage plunged into insolvency, Aardman lost its studio deal, the executive managing the wedding-house project was fired, and the rights to The Pushcart War lapsed.

I went from living the high-life in London, where most of these projects were based, to a $600/month apartment in Harlem with 4 roommates, no job, no prospects, no idea what to do next.

I started tutoring for money — SAT, math, English, economics, physics, anything I remembered from high school — and steadily built a huge business, working 7 hours every evening after spending 8 hours during the day writing new screenplays, none of which went anywhere. Eventually I accepted that the magic carpet ride was over. There would be no moving up from film school. No big-screen movie with my name on it. No fairy tale ending. Instead, I was a full-time tutor. This would be my life. A steward of the privileged child. Not a bad living, I suppose. But somehow a lonely one. (On nights off, I found myself at karaoke bars, singing sad songs, completely sober.)

The vibe.

Then something funny happened.

I had an idea. It happened while walking in Regents Park in London, where I’d gone to sort out the last dregs of my film career. I’d been ambling around in circles, enjoying the nice July day… when the image hit me. Two girls falling from the sky into castles. A girl in pink falling into a black castle. A girl in black falling into a pink castle.

I have many ideas as a writer. 99% of them are not good. But this one seemed different than any I’d had before.

Let me detour to tell you a story from film school —

In my first screenwriting class at Columbia, the professor, Malia Scotch Marmo, was an absolute supernova of personality and passion. (I’d have the privilege of writing early drafts of The School for Good and Evil movie with her at Universal, before Netflix took over.)

I remember something Malia said to us on our first day. She’d been listening to us read the beginnings of our scripts and finally waved us off. “The problem here is that all of these are bushes. You don’t want a bush.”

We all looked at each other quizzically. “What do we want?” someone dared ask.

“A TREE,” she boomed, hands flying up heavenward.

This idea I had many years later, walking in that London park?

This was a Tree.

Every day before tutoring, I worked on a screenplay treatment for a movie tentatively titled The School for Villains before I realized the second castle needed equal billing and changed the title to The School for Good and Evil.

Since a fully written screenplay is 100-120 pages, a synopsis treatment for one should be about 10-12 pages. That’s where this one started. Before it got longer. 30 pages. 60 pages. 80 pages. 97 pages of single-spaced prose, outlining not one movie but three blockbuster, massive-budgeted ones — that I would direct! — an echo of my madcap film school days where I once insisted that we use a crane to follow a trained squirrel because it was a “metaphor for the theme.”

When it was all done, I packaged up the treatment at Kinko’s in fancy binding, hired an illustrator to design a logo, and proudly presented it to Jane Startz, the producer I’d worked with on The Pushcart War, and famed for her adaptations of classic children’s novels, including Ella Enchanted, The Babysitter’s Club, The Indian in the Cupboard.

Jane, a legend in children’s film adaptations.

I came in to her office to meet her after she finished reading it.

“What do you think? Will a studio let me direct all three?” I asked delusionally.

She pursed her lips, tapped the pages gently. “Soman… I don’t think you have movies here. I think you have books.”

Next Week, in Part 2 — how SGE went from movies to books and back to movies.

Next hour: A big surprise on my social media… check it out :)