Wild Wild West Revisited, Part 2

A few years after the interview in Part One appeared, an earnest young writer by the name of Kimberly interviewed me for an article about the business of writing movie novelizations. Apparently she was under the impression that this was the sort of writing career one could aspire to have. While I tried to let her down gently, I later learned that there actually is an organization called the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers, and that people actually do actively want to get this sort of work. With that in mind, then, and using Kimberly’s interview as my point of departure, here’s Part Two.
 

(Unused original cover art)

Q: What is your process for writing a novelization, and how does it differ or compare to the movie?

A: Writing a novelization is a lot like selling your soul to Satan, except that in the case of the novelization your literary soul gets remaindered within three months and pulped inside of a year.

Understand, very few writers do screenplay novelizations or media tie-in novels because they want to. Rather, they do them because some publisher comes up to them and dangles a contract and a wad of cash before their eyes, and it looks like easy money. It's also worth noting at the outset that novelization and media tie-in work never goes to aspiring writers just starting out or devoted fans of some movie or TV series. The contracts go to what we call mid-list or mid-career writers, which is to say, writers like me: writers who have an established publication history, and who have proven that they can write competent fiction and deliver it on schedule, but who are not currently experiencing what you might call commercial success.

So the Deal with the Devil works like this: in exchange for your writer's soul, you get offered the chance to do a book that is almost guaranteed to be a huge, best-selling, commercial success. Confronted with this, most writers think "Okay, I'll do just one. Then, once I've got a best-seller on my resumé and the fans know who I am, I'll go back to doing "real" books."

Of course, as in all deals with the devil, there is at least one hidden catch, and the most important one is this: if the book is a huge, commercial, best-selling success, it gets credited to the media franchise that spawned it, whereas if the book tanks, it gets blamed on the writer. The other major catch is that there turns out to be little or no crossover in readership. People who buy media tie-in books very rarely pay attention to books set outside of their favorite movie, TV, or gaming universe. For example, Mike Stackpole tells me people send him fan mail all the time gushing, "I've read ALL your books!" when what they really mean is they've read all his BattleTech books and have absolutely no clue that he's ever written anything else and no interest in reading anything else anyway.

Oops. I don't seem to have answered the original question. Okay, the process for writing a novelization from a screenplay goes something like this:

1. The publisher pitches you on the deal, being careful to give you little or no actual information about the project because "you haven't signed the non-disclosure yet."
   
   
2. With greed in your heart and dollar signs in your eyes, you sign the book contract, and the studio responds by sending you a non-disclosure agreement that would choke your attorney's horse.
   
   
3. You sign that behemoth, and then they send you the script. You read it, grab your forehead as if in pain, gasp out, "Omigod, what have I gotten myself into?", and call your editor to point out the six most salient things that make the novel utterly unworkable and hopelessly asinine. Your editor relays your concerns to the studio, and a week or two later some under-assistant studio liaison calls back to say, "What idiot sent you that script? I'll Fedex the real script out to you first thing tomorrow."
   
   
4. Two weeks later the so-called "real" script finally arrives, and it's even worse than the first one.
   
   
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 five or six times, until you finally realize the grim truth: that a script is just the starting point from which a collective of producers, directors, actors, editors, and other personnel work towards the finished product. Movie productions typically keep a staff of screenwriters on or near the set, and the script is re-written constantly as the film goes through the stages of pre-production, primary filming, and post-production. The director and actors will try things and decide something reads great in the script but doesn't work on-camera; somebody will improvise something and the director will decide that's better than what was scripted and branch off in that direction; scenes will get cut because a stunt goes awry or a special effect isn't working; in many cases unbelievably mundane things will force changes, such as an actor being unable to pronounce a certain word or say a certain line with a straight face or a key prop or bit of set dressing turning out to look laughably bad on-camera.
   
   
6. This, of course, works a certain hardship on the novelization writer, as you come to realize that not only are you trying to document the precise surface topography of a moving river, but that because of the long lead times involved in print production and distribution you also have to have this thing finished six months before the movie hits the cineplex, which means the book is generally declared done while the movie is still in post-production. This accounts for a lot of the differences between a movie and its attendant novelization. Movies are typically edited one last time in response to the audience reactions at test screenings, and this final edit can sometimes be quite late and drastic. (Hence the popularity of "Director's Cuts" on DVDs.) In the case of WILD WILD WEST, they were still rewriting key bits of dialog and overdubbing scenes 30 days before the movie was released.
   
   
7. Finally, you have to realize that a full-length film script contains about one-third of the actual content of a full-length novel. If this seems odd to you, think of the last book you liked that got adapted into a film and remember how much of the book was left out. This means that the writer of a novelization has to come up with a LOT of fluffy filler to expand the story out to book length, without including anything that might possibly contradict the direction the film might take as it evolves in post-production.
   
   
8. Oh yeah. Then, at the end of the process, the producer or director typically has the right to read the novelization and demand changes, although they're also typically far too busy snorting coke and banging starlets to do so, so the job typically gets dumped on some junior under-assistant co-producer who's still struggling to finish reading that Batman comic book he bought back in 1996, when he thought he had a shot at working for Tim Burton.

Does this sound like fun yet?

Q: Is there a specific target audience novelizations seem to attract, or do you intend to attract a specific audience?

A: Novelizations are, for lack of an adequate English word, tchotchkes. For the movie studio, they're a little -- and I mean little -- extra spot of cash on the side and little extra promotional oomph for the film. For the publisher, they're a chance to piggyback off of and get a little taste of the (hoped for) success of the movie and to sell a lot of cheaply printed and readily disposable copies. For the reader: ah, that's the mystery. As far as I can tell, novelizations sell to people who just can't get enough of a specific movie or TV series and want to spend more time in that universe, in the company of their imaginary friends.

Q: How do you receive royalties or contract rights to the work?

A: It depends on the contract. In all cases, the book is a work-for-hire and the writer has no intellectual property rights. The publisher ultimately owns both the underlying intellectual property and the actual work, and can do whatever they like to it up to and including hiring another writer to completely rewrite the whole wretched thing. In the best of cases, the writer gets a decent advance payment and royalty rate that's typically about half the rate for an original book. In the worst cases, of which there are many, the writer gets a flat fee for writing the book and no royalties ever.

If the contract does include royalties, royalty accounting is typically done on an annual basis and a check is sent to the author at that time. This means that the first royalty check typically arrives 12- to 18-months after the book is released, if ever.

Q: Do you feel that novelizers are not as well-accepted in the literary world as writers of original work? Or do you consider the novelization your original work?

A: Well, why should we be? It's embarrassing to write a novelization. Writers do them for the same reasons actresses do nude scenes or sleep with producers; because they think it will help their career or because they really, really, desperately need the money. Unfortunately, all it does is establish that you are the sort of writer who will do anything for money. So you do get a lot of offers afterwards, but they're not the sort of offers you want.

Q: Is this a hobby or a pastime? What is your full-time job? Is novelizing not a stable-enough career?

A: For me, writing a novelization was more like the last gasp of a dying fiction career. For other writers I know, it's become a full-time job and most of them resent that it takes them away from their "real" writing.

It can be a stable career, but it's not one I'd recommend. If someone wants to make money writing, they're far better off writing non-fiction, as non-fiction pays better and generally involves dealing with sane and ethical people, not Hollywood studio execs.

After my ghastly experience with WILD WILD WEST, I decided to demote writing fiction to "hobby" status and go back to my previous career, which is working in software R&D.

Q: We have been told that there are some celebrity novelizers out there. Can you name a few, besides yourself of course, who are famous for writing these works?

A: The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Alan Dean Foster. Ron Goulart is said to have written a bunch, though generally under pseudonyms. Tim Zahn, Mike Stackpole, Kevin Anderson, and Daffyd ab Hugh are all pretty well-known for their Star Trek and Star Wars spinoffs, as are a few others.

I think everybody who has tried to make a career of writing fiction has dipped their toes in these fell waters once or twice, or if not this, then written a romance novel or maybe some biker porn. As I said earlier, it looks like easy money and a good way to draw attention to your other books.

I think the saddest and craziest case I know of is Terry Bisson, who got tapped to write the novelization of JOHNNY MNEMONIC. I mean, imagine that: Bisson -- who is a brilliant but under-rated writer -- winds up writing the novelization based on the screenplay based on the short story by William Gibson. How much weirder can it get?

There is a writer's joke about landing the contract to write the novelization of the screenplay of the remake of GONE WITH THE WIND. It's one of those jokes born of pain.

[Afterthought #1: Er, everyone here does know that GWTW was adapted from a novel by Margaret Mitchell, right? I mean, I hate to explain punch lines, but I have actually met people who thought Dune was a novelization of the David Lynch movie.]

Q: Do you happen to know who wrote the first novelization, what it was, and what year it was published?

A: Sorry, not a clue. The first ones I can remember seeing were a series of STAR TREK script novelizations that James Blish did back in the mid-1960s, but that's probably just when I became aware of the novelization as a distinct form.

Given the incestuous relationship between books and movies, it's sometimes hard to sort out what's a novelization and what's an original book. For example, I've seen Alduos Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD repackaged as if it were a novelization, to piggyback off some made-for-TV movie that was adapted from the book in the late 1960s.

I'd say the novelization is probably as old as electrical mass media, or maybe even older. I mean, I know that there were Dick Tracy novels published back in the 1930s, but I can't say for sure if they were piggybacking off the success of the comic strip, the radio serial, or the movie serials. Which came first? I don't know.

But the more I think about it, the more I believe you could make a convincing case that even the dime novels of the 19th century were "novelizations" piggybacking off the success of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, and even Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair wrote a few of those. (They needed the money.) The "novelization" is probably as old as mass literacy.

Q: So with all that said and done: why did you write WILD WILD WEST, and what effect did it have on your career?

A: I wrote the novelization of the WILD WILD WEST script for one very simple reason. I was trying to pitch a completely different book -- an original and still-unpublished book -- to my U.S. publisher, Time Warner. My editor there came back with the bad news that she really liked the book, but owing to the mediocre sales of Headcrash, she could only make an "insultingly low" offer for it.

But -- (Can't you just hear Old Nick warming up his sales pitch?) -- if I would only write a bestseller, then everything would be peachy and she could make me the offer my next book deserved. And speaking of bestsellers, it just so happened that she had this movie tie-in deal sitting there on her desk, for the next big Will Smith summer action/adventure comedy, and the folks down in Warner Bros. accounting were predicting that this one was going to be even bigger than MEN IN BLACK. Original script by Steve Wilson and Brent Maddock (who I knew and respected); promotional budget bigger than the gross domestic products of most Third World countries; it was sure to sell a quarter-million copies no matter who wrote it, and a half-mil easy if the book was at all readable and entertaining.

[Afterthought #2: Now that I think about it, I seem to recall that there was also some talk at the time of this being just the first book in a franchise, and I recall being really excited at the prospect of developing this story into a series of 19th century western "steampunk" novels. Then, after I signed on and was committed to the project, we learned that Time Warner only owned the film rights to Wild Wild West, and by extension the rights to develop one novel based on their film, and that Viacom had sold all other book rights to Fawcett, who put out their own series of remarkably crappy WWWest novels. There would never be any more Time Warner WWWest novels, unless the film was successful enough to warrant a sequel.

In the end, it seems the only people who came out of this smelling like a rose were Viacom, as all they had to do was sit back and collect licensing fees from everyone else.]

So I signed on to do the book, and you can pretty much guess what happened after that. Wilson and Maddock promptly got fired; the guys who were hired to replace them rewrote the entire script a few times, with each draft stinking worse than the previous one, before they got fired; two more guys whose previous screenwriting experience was a couple episodes of St. Elsewhere were hired to finish the thing, and there were rumors of yet one more uncredited screenwriting team getting involved in trying to salvage the mess in post-production.

(Helpful hint: any time you see six writers on the script credits, be afraid. Be very afraid.)

We went through seven complete rewrites of the script, and uncounted minor changes. In the end, some junior assistant producer was faxing me daily changes to the script, and I was expected to rewrite the book to match. Artemus Gordon went from being a master of disguise to being a Dame Edna-like cross-dresser, and a couple of drag song-and-dance numbers were thrown in to underscore the point. Salma Hayek's character kept changing her name, her role in the story, and the side she was on, and in the end they didn't know what to do with her so she simply dropped out of sight for the last third of the film, only to reappear for no purpose at all in the final scene. Huge chunks of Jim West's backstory and character development were chopped out after I'd devoted whole chapters to them, and in their place we got some weak attempts at slapstick humor. Finally, my editor called me up one day and said, "Enough! We can't wait any longer to put this book into production. Whatever you have today is the final draft."

And that accounts for most of the differences between the book and the movie. They were still re-cutting scenes, splicing in new special effects, and re-dubbing dialogue 30 days before the movie opened in theaters.

The result is right up there for all the world to see. Variety predicted that "Warner Bros. should expect reasonably big opening figures based on the appeal of its star, who hasn't had a [box office] misfire yet, but a rapid decline will follow once the odor gets out." Sadly, that assessment was pretty much right on the money. Warner Brothers lost $180 million on that turkey.

The book, needless to say, went straight into the tank, and sales topped out somewhere in the mid-30,000s.

As for the lasting effect this had on my writing career: when I pitched my next book to Time Warner, they responded with a letter -- not a phone call, a letter -- informing me that owing to the failure of WILD WILD WEST, Time Warner could no longer afford to buy new novels from me. So in the final assessment, what writing this book did for me was take me from being a writer whose books were worth only "insultingly low" offers to being a writer who couldn't get any offer at all.

[Afterthought #3: Actually, I continued to get offers after WWWest, but only for projects I wouldn't touch with a 10-foot electric cattle prod. Video game adaptations; role-playing game tie-ins; ghostwriting jobs; and all of them for truly pathetic money. I mean, what the heck, I had to be desperate, right?]

There is a concept in economics called opportunity cost. Simply stated, it's the true cost of something expressed in terms of other opportunities foregone in order to pursue that something. In the case of WILD WILD WEST, I would have to conclude that the opportunity cost of writing this book was devastating beyond my ability to imagine. 

Or as those wonderful folks at despair.com might put it:

____________________________

Don’t touch that dial! There’s more to come tomorrow in Part Three!