C. Steven: So, hi everybody. We're talking to Marie Rose, who is an author. She has written novels, she has written screenplays, whatever you can do when putting pen to paper, she has done. So Marie, could you please introduce yourself and tell us about your background a little bit?

Marie: Sure. I got my start in the entertainment world, because I went to the trouble to get a masters degree in theater, which means I am a performer. But a lot of my graduate school work, they had me with my nose in plays, reading three acts of Aristotelian Structure, which as you know, daddy Aristotle gave us the structure that pretty much all Western cinema adheres to. It's just a commercial way of doing movies and very rarely will Hollywood depart from that three act structure. Every movie you've ever seen, from "Pirates of the Caribbean", if it was a Hollywood movie, to Charlie Chaplin's films, they all have a beginning, a middle and an end, with a resolution, denouement, may be a tragedy or comedy.

I was reading, in college, a lot, a lot of Jacobean Theater, Commedia dell'arte, Renaissance, Restoration, Brechtian Theater and anything I could get my hands on. So by the time I graduated, I really knew story forwards and backwards and sideways. And so I decided to move to Los Angeles, not only to pursue perhaps an acting career, but I ended up getting hired at studios and production companies to read for a living, to analyze screen plays.

So my real 'earn while you learn,' I call that my USC film school boot camp, was you know, in the trenches at studios like Disney or production companies like New Regency, or Mel Gibson's Icon Productions, or Simpson Bruckheimer back when, you know, it was Simpson Bruckheimer, not just Bruckheimer, and places like that.

So I read about 6,000 screenplays, not kidding. I wrote about 6,000 coverages and evaluations over the course of my story analyst career for the studios. And I figured out very quickly what not to do, because not all of those got made, not even a fraction got made, for good reason because they were bad, or lackluster, or couldn't get financing, or somebody didn't like the Star or... there's a million reasons why film doesn't get made, and most of the ones that I read that any story analyst will read, the slush pile just doesn't get made. But it's also your job as a story analyst to find the gems, the crème de la crème, the crème that flows to the top, and call your boss's attention to that. You've gonna protect your boss from reading too much, but you better not let the next Oscar winner slip through the cracks.

So as some of the screenplays that did get made ranged, like diverse, everything from "LA Confidential," which is an Academy Award winner to "Freddy Got Fingered," which was a Raspberry Award winner. So I read a lot of winning scripts, one way or the other. And one thing that I found in doing that was that you know what? One should know what not to do in a script and what to do in a script.

Start writing your own scripts after you have read enough of them, definitely do that. And that's what I started doing, was writing my own scripts, and putting them into contests, and festivals, and fellowships. And I ended up winning the Disney Fellowship in Screenwriting, and then a little while later I wrote, and so I wrote two screenplays under the auspices of, you know, the guidance of Disney executives.

And then I went on to win an American Film Institute Directing Workshop for Women, which is a filmmaking grant because I didn't wanted to transition to direct as well behind the camera, because the writer doesn't really have as much power as you might imagine. The director really, and the producer above that really do. So I wanted to get into the directing and the producing realms and American Film Institute was my next training ground. And my short film that I wrote starred a then six year-old Dakota Fanning in her first starring role. And so that was a wonderful experience.

And as I kept working, I kept you know, I started getting private clients would approach me, writers who I'd worked with in the studios would say, "Hey, I liked your notes. Can we work together to refine my next one?" etcetera.

So from there, I just started building my own private clientele, while I was also pursuing my own projects, and I eventually was a recipient of the Producer Guild of America. Because I wanted to get into producing, I entered one of their wonderful programs and I was selected to be in their Producers Guild of America diversity program.

C. Steven: Have you ever won a lottery ticket?

Marie: I do win some stuff. It sounds like great copy to just talk about in five minutes, but this happened over the span of a 24-year Hollywood career. So and I've, you know, obviously you don't get everything you go after. But I do very much enjoy story and I was writing screenplays, when the spec market was hot. Right now it's, starting about 2006, the spec market isn't so healthy. And really unless you have an obscure Marvel franchise in your hip pocket, you'll not probably be able to write for the videos at this time unless you're already an A list writer, something like that. It's very rare that's why so many people went indie, including myself.

I decided that I had some great screenplays. I got the rights back to them if they were optioned or they wanted to turn around, and I decided I was gonna start novelizing some of my screenplays into novels, because guess what, Hollywood won't buy your spec screenplay, but guess what they will look for, is your, the next big film they're looking for is in book form. They want to adapt books from...it's kind of crazy because let's say you have a script and you couldn't sell it to Hollywood, but you novelize it and you put it on Amazon or you self release, or you indie publish it, and then they have a bunch of book scouts scouring to see what's trending, and you can actually sell the film rights to the book that you based your screenplay on that Hollywood wouldn't buy.

So that's been happening to, you know, many writers lately. And a lot of the big breakout books immediately get snapped up. so I do encourage people, maybe if you love screenplay, definitely have that in your hip pocket but novelize it, get it out there, make it an audio book, get it as large an audience and as big a notice as you can, and then sometimes Hollywood will come and knock. And then can happen easier than winning a lottery ticket.

C. Steven: Wow. Well, first of all, aside the fact that I never wanna compete with you in any contest whatsoever, I wanna go back to your consulting days when you were a script supervisor? What were you? You were a story editor, when you were doing story editing. So I remember when I was over at William Morris, and I was doing coverage and I was passing scripts along, I always had this theory that it was the bottom person who started the ball rolling, was always the person who said, "You know, this actually might be kind of good," And then the people above you don't wanna appear to be non intelligent so they just say, "Well, if he thought it was good, it must be good," And then pass it up. And, "If she thought it was good, it must be good," And it just keeps going up the ladder until somebody finally puts the brakes on it or it gets made.

So in my case, I had a movie that I thought was really fun, and got made and it was one of the most terrible movies ever made. And I was just wondering if you ever had that experience where you saw something that was originally good, but then by the time it made it through everything, you know, it just did not turn out the way you'd hoped or the way it was originally conceived.

Marie: Yeah, that happened to me on "Memoirs of a Geisha."

C. Steven: Wow, okay.

Marie: It was evaluating that as possible back to screen adaptation, and I thought, "Wow, this is a great book." And then I was reading the script and they were going through many, many drafts of the script at the studio and I was like gosh, you know, you guys had it on script draft four and now you're on script draft 16. And I was the only analyst saying we go back, rewind. You know, go back to an earlier draft of the script and start from there again, because they just took kind of wide turn or a left turn that didn't really, execution wise, didn't really, script wise you couldn't really get the depth and the breadth and the feel of that story that you could in the book.

And then the director was, you know, a very good director, obviously very credible. Everybody had their jobs covered because they hired the best director they could for that possible film look wise, but it didn't really translate to, you know, very well.

Another one that was really good when in script form that didn't quite due to, because it's, everything's execution dependent. And the execution was still very good but it was just a better script, was "The Truman Show."

C. Steven: Really? I liked "The Truman Show."

Marie: I read an earlier draft of "The Truman Show," read it because along with the audience, you know, Truman, Truman doesn't know what's going on. In an earlier draft of "The Truman Show" neither does the audience. We're with Truman and we're like, "Why did a light fall from the sky?" We don't know it's a spoiler alert.

C. Steven: Oh.

Marie: And it was just better because it's like becomes this mystery. And then he's on the run and then he's like, then he figures it out and we're like, "Oh my, what?" You know? It was like a big moment. And of course, for some reason the studio didn't trust that the audiences were intelligent enough to get it or whatever was the reason, but in the trailer you find out. In the theatrical trailer you found out it was a reality show. Sorry if I've spoiled that.

C. Steven: It was.

Marie: Because I think it was...

C. Steven: Oh, no.

Marie: So yeah, so that was kind of an interesting, you know, one where I was like, "God damn, I'm still good," I mean, you know, obviously. But if you had read the earlier draft, you would have been a little disappointed.

C. Steven: So back then when you were doing story editing, did you, and they weren't accomplished writers like the projects that you're talking about, obviously the people that were involved in that were very accomplished and had been, you know, brought in for those reasons. But when you were dealing with the new people, the people who, you know, this is their first screenplay, these are the spec screenplays, and they're hoping to make something out of them, was there something that was, you know, considered like a red flag? Like you could get five pages into and you go, "Whoop, no," And then, you know, off into the slush pile or up to the trash bin it went?

Marie: Wouldn't that have been nice if I could do that? But I was the one person at the company who had to read all the pages. And I couldn't stop on page five, but by two or five I did know if it was going to be a pass or consider. Oftentimes, if it was a good screenplay you'd take them home late, a big bundle late at night and you'd start reading. And you were under orders that if you sensed something was really hot and good, like with "My Best Friend's Wedding," that happened. And I was calling, you know, that night, they call it, I had that executive on the phone saying, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is good. Yap, yap, it's gonna get..." Sure enough, there was a bidding war, you know, stuff like that.

C. Steven: But Ron Bass was a respected and well known screenwriter at that time, right?

Marie: Yeah, but it was the writing that was good but it was the concept. And Hollywood is very concept driven. I hate to say it but you can write a low concept, beautifully written, would never get made in Hollywood. But if you take a high concept and very badly written, it can get snapped up because we're a concept-driven industry. And they'll hire other writers to punch it up. But if you have a unique concept, that's really what Hollywood looks anymore, hence all the Marvel Temple movies.

C. Steven: Okay. Can we leave your Hollywood career for a second and talk about your children's book career?

Marie: Oh, sure. Well, children's books, whenever I write a story the story tells me what it wants to be. And a couple of times in my life, because I really love children's literature and I always have been a big fan, of course everybody started off reading children's literature, so we're all familiar with children's literature and what our favorite books were, and what really turned us on to reading. And children's literacy is also important to me, always has been.

And so a couple of times a story told me it wanted to be a children's story, a children's picture book. I could see it in my head. And so the first time I did it, I ended up selling my story to a publisher, a small boutique publisher who since went defunct. And the book is now out of print but I never got my rights back because the contract wasn't what it should be. I signed a contract I shouldn't have signed without having it due diligence looked over.

So then from my next book I decided I was gonna self, not self publish, I call it indie publishing because we don't call itself film, we call it indie film. So it's not vanity press like it used to be in the old days or anything like that, it's really you're an independent book producer. You're writer, you're organizing the production of it. And that's what I decided to do for my current release called, "Zwoosh!," which is a...it's like a space, imaginative space creative journey that a child takes on a rocket through our solar system.

And the illustrations done by the amazingly talented Susan Lee, are done in the style of Vincent Van Gogh in his starry night. And he's my favorite painter, and when I took the project to Susan, she was able to give me exactly what I wanted to, lush, thick brushstrokes. She did all of the illustrations in oil. Nobody does that anymore, by the way. It's usually all computer animated graphic art done in the computer.

And she actually took the, you know, 32 canvases and created miniature masterpieces of each panel to follow my story. And so that was a labor of love. That took a little while to get done. If you wanna get into the children's market, the only reason to do it is because you love it. Don't do it because you're gonna get rich overnight. Very, very few people in the children's picture book market can only write children's picture books for a living.

But this was a labor of love. We ended up also making my partner, Chris Chamberlain and I, also made an interactive storybook app on Apple out of the story, where you could touch little elements on Susan's art and it would come alive and do little things and down effects, etcetera. And we also made, even though it doesn't make a lot of sense to do this, we went ahead and did it. We made audio books for audible out of the text of "Swish," which you lose the art when you do that. You don't get to see the lush art, so that might not be as effective as a marketing tool for children's picture books.

Children's picture books for marketing is very tricky. There's need for them [inaudible 00:16:11] with books for emerging readers that you don't have with the [inaudible 00:16:20] of the grownups. And that is because what it might be, who buys those books? Who's the actual decision maker in buying those books? Do the kids go to the bookstore and pick out their own book and pull out their wallet and charge it to their card? They don't, it's the parents and the grownups.

So you really have to make sure that you appeal...and those are also the people who have to read that story over and over and over again, if you're lucky enough that it connects with the child. So you have to make sure that your children's book connects to the four quadrants, young, old, female, male. If you can hit all those four quadrants, you know, definitely you're gonna get a well reviewed book whether or not it's a best seller, because of the saturated market right now.

So when you're marketing, you have to gear toward, you know, your book trailer or whatever you're using for your marketing tools, make sure it gets in front of the pop and mom [inaudible 00:17:15] rather than kid's own Amazon accounts.

C. Steven: So what did you do to market your children's book?

Marie: Well, you have to go after and nicely ask all the inundated mommy bloggers, and there are children's book reviewers. Again, I put it up in nominations and just some contests and it did get nominated for a CCLA [SP] award, it's a Colorado Children's Literacy Award, which I was very proud of. And so that got it some notice.

Friends' word of mouth is very, social media is important for authors. I'm pretty sure every author knows that. But how to use that is important. You have to be a presence in it. If you don't like to blog and you wanted, you're gonna start a blog, you're gonna have a problem because you're not gonna maintain that blog and it's not gonna do you any good.

Same thing with your Twitter account. You know, there are ways that you can set up your Twitter using Hoot Suite or using something called Triberr, where you get with a bunch of other like-minded creative art souls on Twitter and you can automate tweeting out each other's tweets so that you're sharing your audience with other people and they're sharing their audience with you. So that can be helpful.

Other than that, it's very difficult to cut through because your competition is going to be oftentimes, the parents who remember the books they loved as a child and they're gonna want to give their child, "Ping the Doc," or "Dr. Seuss" or "Hans Christian Andersen." So you're competing with those guys, those guys who get a big piece of the pie on the giving tree, you know, classics and things like that. Those are often given as gifts.

C. Steven: So this in a way touches on my next question, because I want to, you mentioned, you know, you did the interactive book for iBooks and you did the book trailer. So where does technology start to fit in now that you're, you know, trying to market your book? And not just social media, but I mean, you know, making it interactive. Doing a book trailer, getting the book trailer out there, things like that.

Marie: Well, I mean, there's nowhere else to do it anymore except on social media, whether it's YouTube or...really the big players are Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. And so those, you should have some mastery over if you're a writer. If you don't like to do that, you can hire if you've got a little coin. You can hire virtual PAs, you know, who will schedule all this for you. You still have to come up with some content and things. They can't write your blog for you but they can write your tweet for you. They can post on Facebook for you, as long as you have a body of books to, you know, to basically sell.

Another good thing to do is make networks with people. Make friends in your industry. Go to writers' conferences. Go to, I mean, like the Children's Society of Book Writers and Illustrators has two conferences here, one in Southern California and one in New York. You should make every opportunity to can. But if even if you can't travel to those places, you should have local chapters.

If you're a romance author you should belong to the Romance Writers of America, just for the networking alone on top of all of the other perks. And even if you can't make it to their national conference or something once a year, you can always join your local chapter. And those people are wonderfully supportive. I'm in the romance writing world too under a different name because I keep my name separate in different genres. But the romance people are just the most supportive, nourishing group of writers who can steer you toward opportunities you hadn't heard of, etc.

And if you are a mystery writer or thriller writer, there's groups and guilds for that too. And you should totally be part of that community, so that you can find everything that you would be missing if you're just alone writing in a vacuum, alone in your man cave or your she cave.

C. Steven: So when I was on your website, I noticed that you have a link to indie Rose books for kids. Now is this gonna become a publishing platform for you, for people other than yourself or is this just your own little...?

Marie: Well, right now it's my own little side, you know, it's my shingle for books that I write. I'm not as interested in becoming a publisher for others because I think online publishing is a very specialized skill and animal. It would take me away from my own creativity and from my own story clients.

And that's why I really like the actual nuts and bolts of publishing. I do it out of self defense, I don't do it out of passion for publishing and working on Createspace and figuring out how. As a matter of fact, if it weren't for my partner Chris Chamberlain, all of that probably wouldn't be happening for me. Because he's really got the intelligence and the skill and the experience to reverse engineer all that. I'm very much a right brained, left hander, pretty so.

C. Steven: Are you left-handed?

Marie: I am.

C. Steven: I didn't know that.

Marie: I'm in my right mind, yes.

C. Steven: You're in your right mind, ha-ha, get it.

Marie: Yeah. So anyway, yeah that's, for marketing children's books or publishing children's books, I think that's gonna happen once in a while. My main love right now is writing mainstream fiction. I've got several on the drawing board coming up. I'm working with my clients. I've produced independent feature film that I helped creative develop. I don't always produce what I help creative develop but I can if I really feel strongly about it. And my clients are keeping me busy right now on top of, my partner Chris and I, have started our own audio book business so in that sense I am a publisher, because you do have to produce that. You can't just be the narrator.

But that's where my masters of theater comes full circle and I can be back in the performance world too. And I can do my own books, which I love to do. And then I can also contract with authors to do their books.

C. Steven: Do you find though, basically, that marketing is marketing, it really doesn't matter the genre? Do you think there's a difference between marketing in the fiction world, marketing for romance versus marketing for children, versus marking for general fiction or literature even?

Marie: Yeah, the genres do matter because...I guess it's just finding the right channel. You need to find what channel those romance authors are already attuned to and go there to sell your books, because they're not gonna find you in the mystery for, you know, AOL or, they're not gonna find you...

C. Steven: Right. Right.

Marie: So I mean, you have to find where your group is swimming and go jump in that water. And again, with children's literature it's just, it's its own animal because really the parents are responsible for, they're the decision makers and they're, the power of the buying is with the parents. So you can't market it to kids but you better make sure it appeals to them.

C. Steven: Well, you know, it's generally thought that marketing for nonfiction is a lot easier than marketing for fiction. Have you ever considered going into the nonfiction world?

Marie: I do have one project. I'm just more of a fiction person. But I do have one project that it is a nonfiction project and it's based on a personal experience. And it would be a specialty book that it's not a line that I really pursue. It's one of those things of, what do I have to bring to the table for this particular topic? And I think I do have something to bring to the table for that particular discussion and I don't see a lot of other authors servicing the need for the discussion that I'm thinking of, so in that sense yeah, there's a need for it. There's a demand for it that's not being met and it's something that I'm an expert at because of life experience. I would absolutely consider. I would like to write someday. But I right now it's so many ideas, so little time.

C. Steven: Right, I get you. Well, one of the other things I wanted to circle back to was when you were talking about screenwriting, you were talking about, we were talking about "The Truman Show," in "The Truman Show" about how the audience, the revelation that Truman is actually, you know, being manipulated and is out, is part of a show falls to the audience at the same time it starts to occur to the character. So what do you think about that? I'm just thinking recently of a movie out there, and spoiler alert everyone, "Reveal," I mean, not "Reveal," it was, kind of blanking on the name. It's about the aliens and she's a linguist.

Marie: "Arrival."

C. Steven: “Arrival.” Thank you, "Arrival". Because that way that is revealed to the audience is the same way it's almost revealed to the character, yet we are intentionally manipulated at the beginning of that film.

Marie: I haven't seen that film yet, I was supposed to see it yesterday but I got too busy on a project I'm working on. So...

C. Steven: Oh, we don't have to talk about that.

Marie: But I can't speak necessarily to that but thank you for not spoiling it for me. And that's something that I really am enjoying since I've been out of the studio realm. And it used to be I couldn't go see a movie that I hadn't read, so I knew what every movie was going to. There was every spoiler in the world was in my head. And sometimes I even forgot that I read it until, you know, the opening credits are over and then I'm like, "Oh, I read this. Yeah, the butler did it and then the alien bites his head off and then the crisp..."

C. Steven: I'd see that movie.

Marie: Yeah, I blurted it, I blurted, you know, the spoiler out. So now I'm really, I'm enjoying being surprised by stories and movies again because I haven't read everything that, you know, the spec scripts used to make their way around town and so I, I'd read it at New Regency and then at my desk at Disney I'd read it again and I'd, you know, by the time it... like I don't care if I see it.

C. Steven: Do you find, now that you're no longer living in Southern California, do you find that there's a big difference in terms of your ability to do what you need to do, to network, to discuss, to get people on the phone? I mean, we live in a global world, but is it really?

Marie: Well so far, it's been fine. My clients have followed me to, you know, when I decided to move this year, I had already spent 24 years building my network there. I still have a network there. Everybody still knows who I am, they know I'm still working in the industry. But now with, you know, remote commute with FaceTime, Skype, internet, it's really a different world. You can, and I do, as long as I'm not having to be an on camera performer at a studio in Hollywood, I don't have to be there anymore.

So that, I mean Facetime and internet and all of the quagmire of our social online presence, you don't have to be in Los Angeles anymore unless you're doing physical production. And then guess what, they're gonna send you out of town usually, anyway. So I still can fly back and take meetings, but so far all of my deals I've been making from here were based on networks and relationships I had built when I was in Los Angeles and they've come with me.

C. Steven: That's great. So again, just circling back to one last thing that you said much earlier in the discussion, you were talking about, you know, spec scripts are dead and the best way is to come up with, write your own novel and get that in front of somebody. And that's how stories are getting sold. But that's a very difficult thing. I mean, how would you advise people to get their material in front of the right eyes?

Marie: Well, get it in front of the buying audience first. That's what you wanna do. And some of those eyes will be industry eyes, whether you ever know it or not, because they are scouring at Amazon right now. And if you can crack into the Top 100 list, if you can become a, of course a "USA Today" or "New York Times" bestseller, of course you're going to float to the top of that heap. But there are books scouts who specifically look for this or that kind of thing. So your job, you can't really know where they are.

Sometimes you can go to symposiums or forums and one of those will be on the panel and they'll be nice enough to...and then that's what happened to me. Is I went to the WGA at one time and a book scout was on the panel and she was nice enough to say, she gave her e-mail out to everybody and said, "Just say you were at this one and I'll take a look at your pitch," Type of thing. So that's where you going out and not staying in your writer's cave really matters. You should be going out, especially if you live in Los Angeles, there's no excuse because there's so much industry networking going on and events at all the different guilds.

Another thing that is very helpful, sort of connected to that is, especially if you're a screenwriter, your words were meant to be spoken aloud. They weren't meant to lie flat on the page. So if you can join, get a critique buddy, get a, or even better, a critique group where they'll read sections of people's work aloud every week, and you know, just listening to your words being spoken out loud, you'll immediately know what parts of your dialogue is not working or what part of the action is not working.

And you'll get notes that may or may not be helpful from the writer's afterwards too, but just listening to your own words being spoken aloud is a huge education for any writer. So make your work really good before you release it. I see so many writers who typecast themselves in readers' eyes or in executives' eyes or in a buyer's eyes or producers' eyes as amateur because they won't spell check. They don't know the difference between two, to and too or there, their and they're. And these are things that are very easy to correct.

And then on top of that, you know, don't direct from the page. You know, you've got to show, not tell, if it's a moving picture, if it's gonna be that. Now, in a novel you have all kinds of luxury to go on an interior journey with your narrative description and your internal dialogue with your characters and you can tell us a lot, but you know, in the narrative description that doesn't have to just come out in action and in dialogue like it does in screen.

C. Steven: Gotcha.

Marie: So work really strong before you put it out there.

C. Steven: All right. Well, we're almost out of time so I'm just gonna wrap this up by asking, how can people get in touch with you? Do you even want people to get in touch with you?

Marie: It depends on what they wanna get in touch with me for, of course. But the different, if you want to get in touch because you want to know about audio book consulting for audio book producing and narration, let's say you already have a book out, then you can contact me and my partner, Chris Chamberlain at, our website is chamberlainroseproductions.com.

If you wanna get a hold of Marie as a story analyst and a creative consultant for your book or your film, then you can email me at indierosefilms@sbcglobal.net. My website is undergoing a revamp right now. But I do have one but it's not so easily accessible right now for that. And if you're interested in talking about children's literature, contact me at www.childrenstoriesforbedtime.com.

C. Steven: That's fantastic. Marie, thank you so much.

Marie: Thanks, Grant.

C. Steven: This was terrific.

Marie Rose discusses Children's Books, Movies and why the Spec. Script is Dead

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