Lost Causes: Killing a Friend

This book is a sort of writer's odyssey, designed to encourage - well actually more like discourage - budding screen writers who have dreams of making it in the film and television industry. It describes my unsuccessful efforts to sell my TV series Lost Causes, about St Jude's Chambers - a London set of law chambers specializing in defending lost causes. (St Jude is the patron saint of lost and hopeless causes.) The heroine - who starts off, in the pilot episode, as the law pupil of the head of chambers - is a young, idealistic female barrister (Emily du Lac) who is desperate to prove herself in the face of accusations of nepotism. Her father is the former head of chambers and she takes on hopelesss cases with the zeal and passion of youth, to show that she is more than capable of being a good lawyer in her own right. To complicate matters, she is estranged from her father, after he deserted her mother for a younger woman. And to complicate them further, her father is now senior treasury counsel - in other words a prosecutor. And in the pilot episode, she finds herself crossing swords with her father when she is called upon to defend a one-legged, homeless man accused of murdering another homeless man in a case that turns out to involve state security and people in high places. I even found a very good young, unknown actress to play the role of Emily and a well-known actor to play her father and another unknown to play the current head of chambers, with whom she works closely. Unfortunately, my efforts to get the pilot script and the series launched were unsuccessful. Along the way, I had many encouraging rejections. But ultimately I failed. So this is basically a story of failure. And yet in contains a note of encouragement because it shows not that persistence ultimately triumphs, but that something just the doing is enough to sustain a person. It actually proves the philosophy of Erich Fromm - a man whose work I once rejected without even reading on the strength of a foolish opinion from Ayn Rand, whom at one time I used to admire. And that philosophy is that life is not about it's about doing! ---------- Please note that this book offers the script as being instructive of the craft of writing. It is hoped that other writers will learn about screenwriting craft from it. The Mini-Bible for the series at the end, shows how to put together such a mini-Bible as a means of "selling" a series. I hope that my fellow writers can learn from it. And never keep up. Keep trying!