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Author:
Georgia Jeffries
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GEORGIA JEFFRIES is an award-winning writer-producer whose scripts have contributed to the cutting edge of television drama. As a showrunner on the critically acclaimed series, “China Beach”, “Sisters”, and “Cagney & Lacey”, she earned multiple Emmy nominations, two Writers Guild Awards, the Humanitas Prize, the Inter-Guild Merit Award and the National Commission for Working Women Award. She has also written numerous pilots for ABC, CBS, NBC and Showtime...
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...Her work in cable films includes the original HBO dramas “The Good Soldier” and “Iron Jawed Angels” as well as adaptations of the Bebe Moore Campbell novel, Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine for Showtime and Dr. Frances Conley’s best selling memoir, Walking Out on the Boys for Lifetime. She was the executive producer/writer of “My Husband’s Secret Life” for USA and “For Love and Glory” for CBS.
Her first feature screenplay, “Nobody’s Fool”, won the Gold Award at the Houston Film Festival and she later wrote “Confessions” for Universal and Jessica Lange’s Prairie Films before focusing on a career in television.
Most recently, Ms. Jeffries completed a screenplay based on her novel, HARD GRACE, which was inspired by the 1983 mystery behind Los Angeles’ “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” murder case.
She holds the tenured position of Associate Professor of Screenwriting at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and is also a Contributing Editor for Written By magazine. She has served as Vice-President of the Board of Trustees of the Writers Guild Foundation and Executive Vice-President of PEN USA West.
A native of Peoria, Illinois, Ms. Jeffries graduated cum laude from UCLA and began her career as a journalist for American Film magazine. Her essay, “The First Time They Told Me I Write Like a Man”, was published in The First Time: Tales from the Hollywood Trenches (Harper-Collins). Her commentary is also featured in Women Who Run the Show (St. Martin’s Press) and Writing the TV Drama Series (Michael Wiese Productions).
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OWN THIS
OWN, verb
1. to possess; to hold as personal property.
2. to admit; recognize; acknowledge.
OWN, noun
1. that which belongs to oneself.
On one’s own – by one’s own initiative
To come into one’s own -- to receive what properly belongs to one.
To hold one’s own -- to maintain one’s place or condition, in spite of criticism.
There is more than one way to skin a conglomerate.
For months now we writers have been obsessed with finding the right formula to achieve our just and fair piece of the corporate pie. But whatever the face of the corporation, peacock, lion, or apple, they all have one thing in common. First and last, they are distribution systems – the self-appointed delivery boys (and yes, the biggest guns are still male) -- that take the meat of our labor to the marketplace.
And that’s always been the deal. We create, they deliver. In exchange for that direct line to the buying audience, screenwriters surrendered the right of copyright in the middle of the last century. A bad deal indeed. But as the U.S. government has proved time and time again with Native-Americans, treaties are meant to be broken when they no longer serve the interests of the guy with the most marbles.
And, like it or not – because with creative power comes that inconvenient evil twin, responsibility - it is the still the screenwriter who has ultimate control of his words. Not unlike the playwright and fiction writer who retain copyright to “lease” the use of their works to their distribution system of choice: Harper Collins today, the Geffen tomorrow, the Pushcart Press the day after that, you get the idea.
At one time or another most screenwriters have adapted a novel, play or short story for film or television. So what’s to stop us from channeling our brilliant characters and concepts to fiction or theater before we script them? The prize is copyright. You are now and forever the originator of your own “source material”, with the legal rights to prove it.
And there is another more subtle benefit. No longer will the screenwriter-playwright or screenwriter-novelist be perceived, in his or other minds, as “only a screenwriter”. That belittling idea began sometime back in the day when the Eastern intelligentsia’s critical darlings of stage and page came west to line their pockets with California gold. Wooed by studio moguls who paid them big bucks for piecework on the studio assembly line, they endured insult and indignity until they decided to demand better treatment.
Because most screenwriters had first been published in other media, they naturally planned to unite with the Playwrights Guild and Authors League. The studio machinery squelched that grand plan through intimidation and blacklisting. When the Screenwriters Guild finally formed, it stood alone without the protection originally sought through unification with its sister writer guilds.
So what happened to those talented novelists and playwrights who had come to love both the magic of film and the seductive Hollywood lifestyle? Some managed to balance writing for both coasts. Some took the money, built their homes in the hills and decided to construct a new pool instead of a new novel. And some got the hell out of town as fast as their checks cashed.
Flash forward to the 1990’s. Shortly after the phenomenal success of Ken Burns’ documentary on the American Civil War, I traveled to Tennessee to meet with historian Shelby Foote, whose mellifluous voice had graced much of Burns’ narrative. I was writing a CBS pilot set during the Civil War, and the network wanted to hire Foote as a creative consultant to bring cachet to the project. I had already been working with David Bradley, the PEN award-winning African-American author of The Chaneysville Incident, through my MGM deal. Big, but not big enough. This being Hollywood, they wanted a “star” attached, and the name-of-the-moment was Shelby Foote.
In Memphis I knocked on the front door of a lovely colonial, and a woman answered the door. Housekeeper? Wife? I never found out because Foote, still wearing his silk bathrobe and pajamas at mid-day, never bothered to introduce us. Brusque and unsmiling, he ushered me to the drawing room. Flattery being the first line of defense in our business, I explained how thrilled we would be to receive his creative input on our little series. High aspirations, thematic ambition and all that. Then I talked about the importance of an ensemble cast, the perspective of the slave characters, the exploration of the class structure of the antebellum South, etc, etc, etc. I stopped, took a breath, waited.
Still unsmiling, he sipped his coffee or mint julep or whatever was in the mug on the antique table. Finally, he spoke in that mellifluous voice beloved by millions.
“My friend Bill – Bill Faulkner – you know his work?”
William Faulkner, yes, I believe I’d heard that name somewhere.
“Well, my friend Bill had his time in Hollywood. And you know what he told me when he came back home?”
Foote was smiling now, a most charming smile. I smiled back.
“Bill said, for God’s sake, never take the work out there seriously ”
I blinked, still smiling.
“ but you must take the people very seriously. Because they can hurt you.”
Then Foote adjusted the tie on his silken robe and stood up to show me the door, my audience with the man of letters now terminated.
What I took away from this brief encounter (besides the fact that Shelby Foote was no Southern gentleman) is this: a writer never forgives the man -- or woman -- who done him wrong.
Needless to say, Foote did not become a creative consultant on my series which ceased to be my series after I turned in the first draft, and the network decided my approach was “too complex and serious”. (Sorry, folks, that’s just how the Civil War struck me.) Instead the network now envisioned more of a soap opera, kind of a “Dynasty” in hoop skirts. They “knew” I could make the necessary changes. I knew I would not. Because I did take the work seriously. So, for the first (and last) time I took my name off my own pilot. When I finished my MGM deal, I started my first novel. At least I would own those characters, legally and creatively.
Not that I’m going to pitch you a swift and easy happy ending here. That completed novel went through a string of rave rejections, as I like to call them, and has not yet been published. But it will be. Because last year I adapted it as an independent feature script which is now in development with an Academy Award winning producer’s company.
Shelby did all right for himself too. Six months after our meeting in Memphis the trades announced that he’d signed a deal to consult on a new Civil War series developed by Steven Spielberg. That show never saw the light of production either. But the historian knew his history and knew when to go with the highest bidder. His friend Bill taught him a lot. Get even? No. Get smarter.
Sometimes you take the money. Sometimes you take the time instead and tell the same story in a new medium (then beat the bushes in the marketplace for the money down the road). Could be an equity-waiver one-act an article for Vanity Fair the latest installment of a local ‘zine your own autobiographical blog (think diablocody.com) could even be an Internet series called “Quarterlife” which, surprise, surprise, garnered an NBC deal soon after its launch on its fresh new delivery system.
Call it synergy or damned good sense. It works for visionary producers as disparate as Jerry Bruckheimer and Oprah Winfrey. (Stay tuned for her latest repurposing enterprise in cable, the Oprah Winfrey Network, aka OWN). These masters of personal branding learned to squeeze the juice from every potential revenue stream in God’s universe a long time ago. It can work for us too -- if we’re ready to, yes, own up to an old way of doing new business.
Distribution systems come and go. What you write – or what you don’t – will stay with you a lifetime.
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