Oh! Lucky Man!
by TJ Dawe
@TJ_Dawe
I recently had a play of mine (Toothpaste and Cigars, co-written with Mike Rinaldi) made into a movie (The F Word, starring Daniel Radcliffe, directed by Mike Dowse), which debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival to great acclaim, and garnered a fat distribution deal.
The phrasing of that last sentence implies that I made it happen. I didn’t. If anyone wants advice on how to get their own stuff made into a movie, I have nothing to tell them. Other than this: it takes an extraordinary amount of luck.
Here’s part of the story. A friend who saw the play at the Vancouver Fringe in 2003 liked it enough to offer to pass the script on to a few film contacts (she worked in documentaries). One of them bought the option. What if she hadn’t seen it? What if she wasn’t that crazy about it? What if none of her contacts wanted it?
