Editor’s note: Ever asked yourself, “Why go to a conference when my writing is at a standstill (or worse)?” While attending may seem counterintuitive during tough times, it can actually boost your career to new heights, as the following story attests.
Beverly Gray, author of the bestselling and much-reprinted Roger Corman: An Unauthorized Biography of the Godfather of Indie Filmmaking and Ron Howard: From Mayberry to the Moon . . . and Beyond hit a professional wall familiar to many seasoned and even newbie writers. “In 2007, I sold a proposal on a film retrospective of the year 1967,” she recalls. “Because it was a university press, it took them a long time to get the contract together. Meanwhile another book on the exact same subject was published to rave reviews.”
No stranger to sudden shifts in course, Beverly, who after completing her doctorate in contemporary American fiction at UCLA surprised everyone (“especially myself”) by taking a job with B-movie mogul Roger Corman. While at New World Pictures, she edited scripts, wrote publicity material, cast actors and even tried her hand at production, rubbing shoulders with directors Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme and Paul Bartel, earning six screenwriting credits and appearing in several cameo roles. “I never had to take my clothes off once,” she adds with a smile.
So, when confronted with this latest challenge, “my editor and I put our heads together and figured out ways in which we could make it different” from the competing book. She then shifted her focus to a pop culture history of and contrast among the five “Best Picture” Oscar nominees for that year, all of which mirrored the social and political upheaval of the late 1960s. “My editor was happy with the project, even though it kept getting longer and longer.” Finally completed in 2010, the book was sent to two film critics for peer review: “They hated it, so the project was dead in the water. I was devastated.”
Yet she still went to the ASJA conference that year. “There was a lot of discussion about branding and platform-building which I took to heart. I even had a head shot done right afterwards, even though I had no idea where my career was going.”
Although “it took a while” she started a blog, “Beverly in Movieland,” “covering movies, moviemaking, and growing up Hollywood-adjacent,” she says. Since its debut in 2011, the blog has expanded from 3,000 page views per month to over 20,000, “making it seem like” a reel, er “real thing.” She also revamped her Web site, while continuing to write freelance articles and teach screenwriting workshops for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. And “thanks to ASJA and its emphasis on professional self-publishing,” she updated and reissued her now out-out-print Roger Corman book, which not only garnered speaking engagements and subsequent sales but also received a favorable mention in The New York Times.
Beverly also began thinking about “The Graduate,” one of the movies covered in the failed project. “This little comedy was originally supposed to be of the moment and ended up lasting 50 years.” With the encouragement of her longtime agent, she began working on a half-a-century timed proposal “and suddenly the phone began ringing with offers from three major publishers.” This November, in honor of the anniversary, Algonquin will publish Seduced by Mrs. Robinson: How “The Graduate” Became the Touchstone of a Generation.
Thanks to her previous research, “I was able to write the book quickly and had much of the material at hand.” So out of the ashes of one project rose an even more successful endeavor. Moral of the story? Rather than pulling the plug, look for other promising connections.