I started to find this article interesting but every time I tapped “x” on an ad to dismiss it, no more than five seconds later, the same ad would appear at the bottom and distract me. Over and over.
sorta piling on here, but it's also worth noting that this problem goes away (and the article is quite readable) in a browser with javascript turned off (and no adblocker).
You're definitely looking for something other than the writing and even the plot. For example, the novel "The Firm" had a ridiculous ending but they fixed it for the screenplay.
I dropped of a book to this guy that I had just finished called "The Hotel on the Roof of the World," and he later told me that they optioned the author. Unfortunately the film never got made, but if you read it you'll see it has the bones of a really nice film.
How did he get that job? I imagine you have to prove you have good "taste" for what makes a good movie... I imagine some difference from what makes a good book
I think it was a combination of right place/right time, knowing everything about film-making (and you're right, what makes a good adaptation) and was just a naturally cool, interesting guy, so that everyone who met him just liked him.
It didn't last forever. The last time I saw him was one of those wild random coincidences. I was visiting Cannes during the festival (as a tourist) and ran into him on the Croisette. We went for coffee and he told me that he had become a television producer.
I would imagine this sucks the fun out of some books and also forces you to read a lot of dreadful books. I knew a bibliophile who worked for a publisher and was sad to hear from him that he rarely got time to read for pleasure.
Reminded me a bit of the man who 100-percents (completes all achievements) and reviews video games for a living, usually a couple per week but it varies by time of year and industry cycles:
I was once unemployed for a year when I was young (about 19) and I rather frighteningly read about one (probably 0.75) fairly serious novel a day (think Graham Greene sort of stuff). I have loads of time on my hands now (I'm 72) and thankfully could not get anywhere near that today.
To me the interesting question about a job like this is "How can you tell if you're doing it well?" It involves such high-stakes, high-uncertainty and highly variability that it has to be nearly impossible to know. I mean you're predicting distant outcomes from creative pursuits which must first survive a gauntlet of wicked complexity and randomness.
Only a few percent of your judgements are ever tested (by surviving being optioned, produced and released) and, of the ones that are, at best you only get a small sampling of false positives over a sea of potential false negatives. I imagine he's incredibly interested in the fate of any titles he didn't recommend which end up being produced (perhaps by another studio). Having filled a similar role in a different industry with similar high-stakes 'unknowables', I thought a lot about this. It was pretty obvious what practically mattered was how much my output "felt right" to downstream decision-makers vs actually being right.
While my stakeholders were quite happy with my work, actually targeting such ephemeral and uncorrelated feedback felt unproductive and dumb. Eventually, I settled on making the evaluation process fully transparent and consistent. I ensured all objective criteria were documented and each subjective judgement had clear confidence intervals. This was more challenging than it sounds. In the end, it was still hard to know if I was really improving year to year. For that, I still had to rely on my own, mostly subjective, self-assessment but at least I had some objective tracking data to calibrate on. That at least helped me feel like I was executing with diligence and integrity. It also increased my confidence no one else in the industry was doing it any better.
On a similar note, I have friends who watches TV Series and Movies before they come out to create/review the subtitles. Sounds like fun job but gets boring really fast.
There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line in the summer because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work, and then they would resign.
This is my retirement plan in circa 40 years from now: own a small bookshop/cafe and sit around reading a book all day. Without the pressure of reviews or deadlines.
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[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 51.3 ms ] threadI dropped of a book to this guy that I had just finished called "The Hotel on the Roof of the World," and he later told me that they optioned the author. Unfortunately the film never got made, but if you read it you'll see it has the bones of a really nice film.
It didn't last forever. The last time I saw him was one of those wild random coincidences. I was visiting Cannes during the festival (as a tourist) and ran into him on the Croisette. We went for coffee and he told me that he had become a television producer.
https://youtube.com/@mortismalgaming
Not for him though, he loves it.
What surprises me is that he only reads about 50 more books a year than I do, and he does it full time.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA&t=5039s
Only a few percent of your judgements are ever tested (by surviving being optioned, produced and released) and, of the ones that are, at best you only get a small sampling of false positives over a sea of potential false negatives. I imagine he's incredibly interested in the fate of any titles he didn't recommend which end up being produced (perhaps by another studio). Having filled a similar role in a different industry with similar high-stakes 'unknowables', I thought a lot about this. It was pretty obvious what practically mattered was how much my output "felt right" to downstream decision-makers vs actually being right.
While my stakeholders were quite happy with my work, actually targeting such ephemeral and uncorrelated feedback felt unproductive and dumb. Eventually, I settled on making the evaluation process fully transparent and consistent. I ensured all objective criteria were documented and each subjective judgement had clear confidence intervals. This was more challenging than it sounds. In the end, it was still hard to know if I was really improving year to year. For that, I still had to rely on my own, mostly subjective, self-assessment but at least I had some objective tracking data to calibrate on. That at least helped me feel like I was executing with diligence and integrity. It also increased my confidence no one else in the industry was doing it any better.
There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line in the summer because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work, and then they would resign.
-- Mark Twain