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Blog.
A Bitter Pill, Part 2.
“Did he offer you the franchise?” asked megabucks writer Charlie A-List. As you read last week in (A Bitter Pill, Part 1) I’d just landed in Charlie’s office after a meeting with a Paramount executive who’d offered me the plum gig of writing the next installment of its blockbuster franchise based on a series of [...]
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A Bitter Pill, Part 1.
Here we go again. The names have been changed for the most obvious of reasons. I met Charlie A-List just inside the threshold of his Paramount office. He was riding high on his mega-hit, which he’d adapted from one of a series of bestselling books penned by Mr. Superstar Novelist. For that and other work, [...]
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Truth, Terrorists, and Turnaround.
This isn’t a sequel as much as it is a companion piece to last week’s A Funny Thing About Homage, where I recalled the late great John Frankenheimer’s brief attachment to a screenplay I’d developed with producer, Gary Foster. The script was initially titled Jackals. But maybe I should add a little context first. Gary [...]
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Funny Thing About Homage.
What’s wrong with this picture? I was an unproduced screenwriter standing at the threshold to my antique, valley domicile. It was my tiny, first-timer bungalow measuring barely eleven hundred square feet. Across from me, standing on my front stoop, was none other than movie director, John Frankenheimer. You don’t know his name? Maybe you’ve heard [...]
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Big Bad Bruce.
It was our first morning at the location. The set, a neo-modern house the art department had dressed up into looking more like a comfortable fortress, would serve as central focus for the next four weeks, most of which would be long and cold nights. The geography was pretty steep, a hillside high above Malibu, [...]
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That Screenplay Thing I Do.
“So whaddayou do, Doug?” It’s the usual, socially interactive question. Adults, stuck in the same mini-sphere, in this particular case it’s at a Little League team party hosted at my San Fernando Valley compound. Okay, it’s not really a compound. Nor is it a hacienda. It’s just your basic suburban domicile with a man-cave-slash-writing-lair in [...]
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Writer’s Nightmare.
I’d just typed FADE OUT for the umpteenth time in my short career. The draft was neat and a tightly wound one hundred and fifteen pages of thrills and chills. It felt bulletproof and as close to perfect as anything I’d yet fashioned. Once it was bound by three brass brads and a cover page, [...]
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You’re Fired.
I think I was twenty-five years old. Pretty young to have come to the conclusion that the man who’d helped me cross over the threshold into showbiz had to be shown the proverbial exit. My career was showing some lift and it was already painfully clear that the sweet old agent wasn’t going to be [...]
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A Million Dollar View.
In a rare early collaboration, I co-penned a script with friend and former agent, Rick Jaffa. Though the partnership eventually collapsed under the weight of unreasonable expectation, the screenplay we wrote possessed a certain fire. It was a World War II action comedy titled Hell Bent and Back. Over six weeks, we’d channeled the best [...]
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Hard Promises.
I’ve written screenplays for all kinds of reasons. For love. For money. I’ve written them as favors. I’ve written them in order to get attention from the right people. Because I thought a particular script might get me to the next level. Because I had something to prove. I’ve written some screenplays because nobody else [...]
Read More »"Doug Richardson never disappoints. BLOOD MONEY is fast and intense and compulsively readable, populated by an unforgettable cast of characters and a plot that twists so many times you'll get dizzy. A great story from a veteran tale teller." J.T. Ellison
"Richardson delivers the goods in BLOOD MONEY with his uncanny ability to glimpse into the brutality and instability not only of the criminal mind, but also a darkness in the heroes." Maya Fleischmann for IndieReader
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