Hi everyone. My name is Joe Bell, and I used to be a project manager for the State of Illinois. Now that I'm retired, I'm just a grandpa trying to finish telling my granddaughter a bedtime story we started over ten years ago. I began writing it as a novel, but a few years back I converted it to a screenplay, because it really needs to be a movie, or better yet, a miniseries.
Well, there's been an inciting incident. Two weeks ago I finally finished the damn story. Its an 8-episode miniseries about a girl named Penny. Music is her life, a safe place where she can hide from life and the pain that wants to consume her. But late one September evening she rescues a mysterious stranger from drowning, only to have him totally disrupt her safe and private world, and bid her back to life.Sounds cool, right? But I can't produce it it the way it needs to be done. There are dozens of well-known songs. They have to be there. I can't just throw an anonymous score on it. It won't work. The music in this story really is one of the main characters, and the story will lose it's soul without it. I need Marching on Versailles playing on the loudspeaker at the Colosseum when the bad guy is defeated. I need Penny remembering Hans Zimmer's "Time" when she's trapped in the catacombs. I need Christina Grimmie's "Think of You" playing during the final barefoot dash through the snow.
I have a voice acting crew doing a full audio drama version of the series. I hope to eventually pair that with a storyboard of some sort. To get any farther than that, I have to either 1) sell the story to one of the big shops, or 2) put together a real budget with crowd-funding. I do have a tiny little conversation going on with Netflix, but it's indirect, and it's not something I'm counting on.
So, if you are a music supervisor and have some ideas on how I can pull this off, I would love to talk to you. Or even if you are not a music supervisor, but the project interests you, let me know. I'm always glad to talk about this story. I think it's very good, and I'd love to get it out there so others can experience it for themselves.
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I think it's great you turned a bedtime story for your granddaughter into a screenplay, Joe Bell!
Could you write something like "A song like Marching on Versailles plays on the loudspeaker" and so on in your script? That way the composer could come up with similar songs.
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Not really. Part of the theory of this story is that Penny is a real musician, listens to real groups like Ad Infinitum, Escape the Fate, etc., finds they express her feelings, etc. There's just no good way to cut out a lot of the well-known music. Original compositions can't tell that part of the story. It's like when they cut the legs out from under WKRP and denied the music licenses. That show was about the original music. It was part of the story, and it damaged the story when they took it away. I'll end up doing what I have to. For some key songs, if I can't get master use licensing, I'll just have to work with really good covers. But the lyrics are part of my storytelling process. They have to be there, one way or another.