Writing From the Real World:
Dear Future Agent
-Victor D. Infante

        We interrupt our regularly scheduled gentle-insights into the  delicate art of writing to discuss, briefly, a subject much more vulgar. No, not the upcoming November election, but rather, the crass and distasteful business side of writing. To the point, the Agent.

        I really didn’t want to go here, because I realized that somewhere along the way I’d probably have to admit that I do indeed not have an agent, which seems tantamount to admitting that I’m a failure as a screenwriter. Which isn’t really true. Lots of screenwriters don’t have agents. They’re called waiters. But I digress.

        In the recent issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, there’s an hysterical story by Paul Di Fillipo called, “My Lifeand Welcome to Fifteen Percent of it,” depicting a world where the Agent not only receives a 15% commission for selling the manuscript, screenplay, whateverthey also have to pick up 15% of the writer’s household chores. The agent brings the writer lunch, cleans his pool, walks his dog, and furtively hopes that the writer has a script to be sold, or a past due bill to be collected, just so he can get away from all the menial stuff.

        I laughed my ass off, until I remembered that I don’t have an agent, and that 15% of nothing is nothing. So, in the interests of, well, something, I would like to present a list of promises to my future agent:

• I promise to do my share of the lifting on moving the script.
   
• I promise that I will not call day in and day out, seeing if there’s any movement on the script. Indeed, I will call as rarely as possible, because phone calls cost money that could be well spent on asparagus or pornography or something.
  
  
• I promise I will make any reasonable edits you ask of me, unless they involve heat-warming animated characters of dubious racial sensitivity.
  
  
• I promise you will not have to buy me lunch often, because I live far away and only come to L.A. when necessary or hijacked by Muppets.
  
  
• I promise I will stop loitering around outside Kirsten Dunst’s house in a vain attempt to convince her to read my screenplay and let me say she’s “attached” to the project.
  Okay, I promise to stop sending her flowers and asking her to Kaplan’s for some Matzo Ball soup. I understand that this makes it difficult for you to pitch my script. Oh, and I promise to ditch the Spider-Man costume, too. The hanging upside down was making me dizzy anyway.
  
  
• I promise to stop including zombies in my scripts, because everybody makes me take them out, even though they’re really cool and I wholeheartedly believe that vampires will quickly become passe, and that zombies will be the next big thing, mark my words!
  
  
• I promise I will never make a crack again in public about the episode of Dark Angel with Max in heat.
  
  
• I promise David Fury that I will post the sentence “Go Fish was the bestest episode of Buffy ever!” in every single Buffy newsgroup I know of, just to prove to him that no matter what he thinks, I don’t hate it.
  
  
• I promise all this and more. I will be loyal. I will be hard-working. I can DO comedy! I can DO tragedy! Would you like fries with that?
  
  
  (Victor D. Infante is a regular contributor to OC Weekly and the Worcester InCity Times, and the author of the recent screenplay, Nihilist Chic. You can visit him on the web of http://www.quantumredhead.com/victor.)

(c) Victor D. Infante, 2002