The Waiting Game...

This Sunday will mark four weeks to the day the Sages submitted their most recent screenplay - a brassy, historical epic - to the management company to which we promised a "first look". Submissions are like legislation: just as there's always a dance between the President and the Congress, there's always a dance between the writer(s) and the company. As with a piece of legislation before it goes to committee, the final screenplay product is usually very different from what was originally written.

And, so, the waiting game after submitting a project is like a dance. Desperation doesn't sell and so you don't go pestering your agents and managers - neither, though, is "playing dead" the answer. You are in a relationship with the company and where there is no mutual obligation, there is no relationship.

So, we are left with the dance metaphor. And that alone. Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote movingly of the dance and sometimes I draw comfort from her words as we play the waiting game. She wrote, "We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern."

I don't know if our would-be managers read Anne Morrow Lindbergh, but I am hopeful that they see themselves as partners in a dance. This has to be our hope going forward. Of course, tough economic times is a game-changer in terms of how each side plays "the waiting game." But, writers write. And managers sell screenplays (and if you live, well, you eat). So, perhaps this Script Sages project - this grand, sweeping historical epic - has found just the right dance partners!