Introduce Yourself : My Nudge From Nora by Bill Osinski

I had never met Nora Ephron, when I first dove into screenwriting in the 90s. I had, however, had an encouraging encounter with her back when I was a chutzpah-heavy young journalist, long ago. She was an editor at Esquire then. I was working at the now-defunct evening newspaper in Miami and I was determined to follow a story I'd written about cocaine smuggling back to its source, a town called Turbot on Colombia's Gulf of Darien. When my bosses nixed my proposal, I took vacation time and went anyway. The operators of a banana-growers cooperative showed me how it was essentially impossible to stop the smuggling of cocaine onto their boats, one of which had been confiscated in Miami, after customs officials found huge amounts of coke hidden onboard. The only person who'd stood up to the narcotrafficantes, a harbormaster, had been gunned down in the middle of the main street. It was a pretty damn good story. Nora didn't buy it, but I did sell it to The Boston Globe, a big deal for me then. My impertinence contributed to my getting fired a few weeks later, but, as usual, I landed on my feet. I could write, and back then, papers were always looking for a good writer or two (Now, not so much).

Fast forward 20 or so years. I was a reporter at an Ohio paper, which allowed me the great freedom to go out and look for good stories. I was at the state archives researching something else, when I stumbled across the story of Victoria Woodhull, an Ohio native and the first woman to run for President (1870-72). I also learned she was the first female stockbroker and the first woman to address Congress. Why didn't I know this woman? I had to learn more about her, and the more I learned, the more fascinated I became. Victoria grew up in a family of frontier grifters, who dabbled in fortune telling, spiritualism, faith healing and part-time prostitution. In her early 20s, she dumped her drunkard husband, to whom she'd been sold by her father. Later, she led the clan to New York; in no time, she and her sister Tennie had enchanted Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, then a devoted spiritualist, not to mention the richest man in the world. In a year or so, the barefoot girl from Homer, Ohio had conquered the nation's most important city. More amazing adventures would follow.

What a great movie this story could be, I told myself. But I hadn't a clue about how to write a screenplay. So, I picked up a paperback version of a Raymond Chandler script, an Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake vehicle titled THE BLUE DAHLIA. I wrote my Victoria Woodhull script, copying the paperback's format and titling it VICTORIA THE FIRST. I didn't realize how far from industry formatting rules my eldest child was. In fact, it was an embarrassing mess. But I was blessed by my ignorance and sent it off to Nora anyway.

Nora never mentioned my formatting sins. What she did was to send me an encouraging note suggesting a couple of A-list actresses who might be interested in the role. Not only that, she gave it to her script reader, who sent me an even more encouraging three pages of coverage.

VICTORIA THE FIRST has been optioned five times, but not yet produced. Nevertheless, to have received such a gracious nudge from someone of Nora's stature has convinced me that I'm the guy destined to bring Victoria to life.

I'll close with a quote from my favorite author James Lee Burke's recent novel, "Another Kind Of Eden", when an old farmer tells his farmhand, an aspiring writer, "If you have faith in your gift, you don't talk about it with people who've never paid any dues."