Crazy how the movie business works like this.
Someone has an idea – or a book.
An option is purchased and a script is written.
But then interest wains, or financing falls through. The project is put on a shelf and only a glimmer of it remains.
Until one day. Someone dusts it off, finishes it, and ships it!
Honestly, this is not unlike some of my drafts I have here in WordPress.
All posts start as a simple idea. But some never take off in my mind for whatever reason.
My oldest unpublished draft today is from four years ago!
I mean, I think this was going to be a listicle of books I think 18-year-olds should read.
Maybe I a collection of interviews?
But there it sits, waiting for its day in the light.
Tom Hanks did the same with my novel Boone’s Lick, before leaving it sit on the runway, more or less. Redford may have done the same thing with the Cantrell story. We chatted about it at a party in Austin—a big star keeping in distant touch with a project that might someday go. Clint Eastwood bought Unforgiven and put it in a drawer for seventeen years; then he took it out of the drawer, did it, and did it well. Very few stars are directors who can afford this kind of wait, but when they can a lovely picture often results.
