The Last Samurai (thoughts on Rereading The Last Samurai) 4?

 According to RTLS, I started to run out of money in October 1995. I did not want to go back to temping; I reached a special arrangement to work as an evening secretary at the office of Cravath, Swaine & Moore. A lawyer, Tim Schmidt, came from New York and heard that I was working on a novel. I showed him a couple of chapters. He was impressed. He showed them to his wife, Maude Chilton. She was impressed. They wanted to help me find a publisher, so they introduced me to a friend, Stephanie Cabot, who had recently become an agent.

My understanding is that Konstantinou had a long conversation with Tim Schmidt; constraints of space may have determined how much could be included. As it stands, Schmidt's account misrepresents a very nasty, stupid business.

As I've said, I had had a toxic permanent job before quitting and starting The Seventh Samurai in September 1995.  The book was not finished by the end of September; I needed to have income lined up before my money ran out.  

I did not want a new permanent job, because this would not give me the freedom to take time off as needed to write.  I did not want to work as a temp, because agencies tend not to offer evening shifts - it was, of course, the prospect of an evening shift that had led me to take on my last job.  

It seemed to me, though, that since I had now worked at a US law firm, I could offer my services on a freelance basis to other US firms.  It's quite common for a law firm to have an unexpected rush of work late in the day, or in the middle of the night, when it's too late to contact an agency.  I could be on call for this kind of crisis.

I bought an off-the-shelf limited company, Silverblade Services, so I could work as an independent contractor.  I wrote to various Wall Street law offices in London.  I also mentioned my freelance service to a friend from Oxford who was now a solicitor.  I got a few takers - I worked at Sullivan & Cromwell (who later offered to hire me full-time), for my friend, for a second-tier US law firm who name I forget. Shortly before Christmas I was offered a shift at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, which would be short-staffed around the holidays.

So CSM was just one of a number of freelance gigs, and oh God, oh God, oh God. If I had overcome my horror of permanent jobs and gone to Sullivan & Cromwell I could have finished my book in a couple of months and dodged close to 30 years of breakdowns, clinical depression, suicide attempts. Oh God. 

I turned down S&C and did more shifts for CSM. In early March 1996 a young associate lawyer, Tim Schmidt, joined the London office. After maybe a month (?) he asked about the novel he'd heard I was working on and expressed interest in seeing it. I gave him a couple of  chapters, the painter and the gambler - one written in 3 days, the other in 4, when I was able to work without distraction.

Tim later said he was dreading having to read them.  What would he do if they were terrible?  But he was in the office one Sunday (par for the course for young associates). He went across the river to a pub for lunch and read the chapters, and they were really good! 

He did not want to influence his wife, so he did not say anything or urge her to read them. A few weeks (?) later Maude read the chapters and was blown away, and oh God. If I had gone to S&C I would have been spared so much anguish. Of all sad words of tongue or pen.

Maude, crucially, was an indie producer.  She had made a short film with her sister Eve about ventroliquists, especially Candace Bergen (who had been brought up with her father's ventroliquist's dummy, Charlie, as  kind of brother).  She now hoped to do something more ambitious, a full-length film. She read the chapters, had been given a synopsis of the story, and wanted to option the book for a film on the strength of it!  Tim passed this on to me and suggested we all meet for dinner.  This would have been in May.

I knew nothing about options, but what I imagined was that maybe - maybe! - I might get the princely sum of £1000! Which would buy at least a month, maybe more, off taking assignments.  Maybe instead of buying time to write by work that damaged the ability to write, I could buy time with the book itself! If I could recapture the momentum of the intense, uninterrupted work in September a month might well be enough to finish the book. I could then think about what to do with my life. 

We met, and Maude explained about options.  Instead of buying the film rights outright, it's common to buy an option on a project for a smaller amount of money: the option gives a block of time - could be 18 months, could be longer - within which the buyer has the exclusive right to buy the rights for an agreed-upon amount.  The buyer hopes to raise money for the project which will then make it possible to exercise the option. No specific figure was mentioned, so I went on wondering whether it was conceivable that I might get £1000.

I agreed in principle, hoping for the £1000 that might let me spend all of June, maybe even June and July!, doing nothing but work on the book.

Two terrible things happened.

First, Maude meant well.  She thought I should have representation.  Needless to say, I would have signed anything put in front of me for a quick £1000, but we did not make that quick deal.  Instead Maude put me in touch with a literary agent, Stephanie Cabot, whom I think she knew from prep school. Stephanie had been at the London office of William Morris for about a year, having left a job at Morgan Stanley, so she was new to the biz.  But how hard could it be?  There was an option on the table. All she had to do was turn the contract in a day or two and I would have the money I needed to finish the book.

Stephanie had read the 2 chapters and been blown away.  We met in early June. Stephanie said she thought she could get me an advance on 6 chapters so I could 'concentrate on finishing the book'.  This was tricky, because I assumed people would want 6 chapters starting at chapter 1, and the beginning of the book was precisely what I needed time for. But I said I would see what I could do, and in any case it sounded as though the option was under control.

Meanwhile a second terrible thing had happened.  Tim's best friend from Dartmouth, Steve Hutensky, was also a lawyer, now working as Business Affairs Manager (or similar title) at Miramax.  Maude thought Steve, with his experience, could advise her in developing the project. Somehow she found herself with Steve as a business partner. As entertainment lawyer and partner, Steve would be the obvious person to handle the option. 

Oh God. S&C. Life could have been so sweet.

An option is appealing to a hopeful filmmaker because it costs a lot less than the rights, but it imposes a deadline - after which, if there's no funding to buy the rights, the option holder has no claim on the project unless they pay for an extension.  One way of getting around this, if there's an agreement in principle to doing a deal, is to put off the actual signing of a contract as long as possible - this is especially appealing if for some reason the filmmaker can't immediately start work. An entertainment lawyer, in any case, is thinking about a lot of remote contingencies that might conceivably pay off if the film gets made, or at any rate thinks about standard clauses governing such remote contingencies that might pay off for a complete different kind of work - the right to develop an ice show, say. A theme restaurant. A stuffed toy franchise. (Since you've read this far you're presumably familiar with the book and can see for yourself the likelihood of cashing in on any of these.)

So. Stephanie handed the option over to some lawyer at William Morris.  I was working in a law office where lawyers turned 100-page indentures overnight - this was why I could get shifts working from 7 pm to 2 am, 3, 4, 5, even 6 on a busy night.  But William Morris was off in the land that time forgot.  Stephanie was not hounding the lawyer to get me a quick deal so I could finish the book by the end of July (and then, of course, be free to finish the book I'd been working on since 1989).  The lawyer wasn't looking for a quick deal.  And a quick deal wasn't urgently needed by Maude and Steve.  

A contract (a little 22-page document) would eventually surface in April 1997.  There had been no news for months; as far as I could make out, it had spent a lot of time in the inbox of one lawyer or the other, with Steve making Miramax-style demands that 'my' lawyer (when he got around to looking at the document) felt compelled to reject.  (It was only upon seeing that the contract that I discovered my lawyer's determination to retain the ice show rights, theme restaurant rights and so on.)  The option price was $3000. (The purchase price was $50,000 for a film with a budget up to $10 million, with higher prices for bigger budgets.)

By this time it was far too late to recapture the early momentum for the book - I had now been setting it aside for office work for over a year.  And Stephanie had been making blunders of her own. 

But let's pause and ask a simple question. How is it actually possible to be so stupid?

The time when the book was fresh in my mind would not come again.  The window of time in which I might still salvage the earlier book was closing fast. The ONLY THING I CARED ABOUT was getting June 1996 for myself.  And for that the £1000 I had timidly hoped for would have sufficed.  We often hear of film adaptations being worse than the book; in this case, people were sabotaging the ACTUAL BOOK for the sake of ice show rights to a film that might never be made.

The William Morris lawyer, maybe, valued his own convenience above protecting the talent of the client. If the client turns out to be the next Margaret Atwood, this won't transform the life of an agency lawyer. But there was a real opportunity here for Hutensky.  He could get ANYTHING for a quick deal, because I was desperate. He could get a 5-year option.  Or he could get a better deal - offer $5000 to buy the rights outright to close the deal in June 1996.  Just as a reminder, once you have the rights you can take as long as you like to make a film - you can face setbacks for 20 years and the project is still yours. If he wanted to be a hardheaded dealmaker why not go for that?  Why not get Maude unlimited time to make her film instead of faffing about with theme restaurants?

It's hard to be sane.

Meanwhile Stephanie was making a typical rookie mistake.

Maude and I met Stephanie for lunch at the Groucho in early July 1996.  Stephanie had not waited for the 6 chapters she said she wanted; she had been raving about the 2 chapters and sending them out. She raved about them to Robert McCrum by his hospital bed! She raved to Philip Gwyn-Jones at a dinner party for another client!  She raved to Richard Beswick!  Richard Beswick had read the 2 chapters and been blown away! He had asked if it was too early for a preempt and she had said YES!

I think I'll stop talking about this for now.