Bantam Press. And they commissioned me to write it. And when that was completed, they sold it to Harper and Row. And then I put it out to every movie studio in town. And they all turned it down.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I had grown up loving movies and had always wanted to write them.
'Rent' was a special project for me. It was my first notable screenplay job. I worked with two wonderful directors on it, starting with Spike Lee in the summer of 2001. I wrote a draft for Spike and he was really good to me.
I had a writing professor at Brandeis who told me I'd never make it - and when I sold my first novel a few years later, I sent him a copy!
'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,' which my father had tried to get made for six, seven years, and I for four, was turned down by every studio. Every studio in the world had passed on it.
I started writing movie scripts. They excited me a lot, but I didn't like them when they were finished because they were simple copies of the films I saw in childhood.
Much of my publishing life was consumed by the memoirs of movie stars - or by attempts to get them to write a memoir.
I wrote Murder at the Windmill. And it was accepted and we made it and it was the first film I made with Danny Angel, well the only film I actually made... I made a lot of it at the Windmill itself.
I think I wrote the first draft of 'Nightmare on Elm Street' in '79. No one wanted to buy it. Nobody. I felt very strongly about it, so I stayed with it and kept paying my assistant and everything. At a certain point, I was literally flat broke.
I want to write a studio movie, but probably one that's for me to be in.
Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.