My “Day” With Sharon Stone
Like a roll of the dice, it was fun while it lasted
You know that old saw, “you can’t make this shit up?”
Believe it, my friends, as I certainly do. So many of the “adventures” I’ve had on my screenwriting journey ( I’m starting to hate that word), were bizarre beyond belief. Stories that, at first blush would appear to be the half-crazed ramblings of a frustrated writer, but were indeed true.
A bit of background: After all my years stumbling around in the bogs, when it comes to promoting myself and my work, I’m fearless. I’ve had to be as I’ve found that no one, not a producer, agent, or manager, is as hungry as I am. Or wants to see my work make an impression as much as I do. You might wonder, “well, why should they?” Because if one of my projects was to take off, their payday would be considerable. Of course, they don’t want to do the work involved to “package” a project, as that herculean task is the writer’s responsibility. Our job doesn’t begin and end with a stellar script. We have to debase…no, bloody…ourselves in an attempt to secure financing and talent and whatever else is necessary to take a project from the page to the screen.
So, I go for it.
Luckily, I’m not star-struck and never have been. Oh, I respect an actor’s body of work, if that respect is warranted, but I also respect the work of the skilled plumber who visits our home to stop one of our four toilets from “running.”
Actors. Plumbers. They’re both just doing a job and getting paid for it. And both handsomely, by the way. Fifteen minutes with a plumber who tightens a screw here and replaces a pipe there and you’re five hundred bucks in the hole, or the shitter, take your pick.
Recently, I read an interview with Sharon Stone about her memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice. I haven’t looked into it, but reviews have been favorable as the actress candidly talks about her personal life, the twelve years it took for her to “make it” with her uber-sexy, ice-pick-wielding character, Catherine Tramell, in Basic Instinct, and also the stroke that nearly killed her.
I like Stone, but she never really stood out for me until her star-turn in Casino. She kicked ass and proved that she was more than a sex bomb.
In recent years, the actress has added directing to her roster, and, as much as I’ve enjoyed Stone’s work, she was never on my “dream list” of talent for any of my scripts, UNTIL I read that she no longer employs an agent or manager.
No handlers, meaning no gatekeepers!
I was dubious, though. “She has to have someone,” I thought, who takes care of her industry doings, albeit they’ve been few and far between the last several years.
But that said, mine have been few and far between, too, so we’d make one hell of a team!
I looked her up on ImdbPro. My instincts were correct. Stone did employ a publicist. Great. That was someone with whom I could connect in the hope of getting her to read my screenplay, The Month We Fell Apart.
Being only a couple of years younger than me, I figured Stone would be happy to read a script from a woman of her generation. Plus, she survived a stroke and I survived breast cancer! Score!
I shot off an email. And waited. And waited some more. About two or three days later, I received a missive in my inbox that looked rather suspicious. The address was nothing more than two initials and a business I didn’t recognize. In the guts of the email was this message:
“Submissions come here.”
At the end of this was a canned response. A quote from the Persian poet, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī, more commonly known as Rumi.
Hmmm. Spam, I thought. Stupidly, I employed the jerked knee that has royally screwed me in the past and replied:
“Who the F is this?”
It took no time at all for me to receive the following:
“Sharon Fucking Stone.”
Oy.
After doing some quick checking around, including contacting the publicist and confirming that was indeed Stone’s email address and also, that the actress was a big Rumi fan, I replied with the jaw-droppingly lame:
“Well, I’m delighted to meet you. I’m Sherry Fucking McGuinn.”
Damn. I’m quick.
After that, I did what any screenwriter would do. I sucked up. After congratulating her on the success of her memoir, I pitched my script, which finally, after some back and forth, she told me to send.
Oh, happy day! I could practically see the awards piling up!
Stone was kind enough to caution me that she was “on her own” these days and had a pile-up of material to read, saying it might take a couple of weeks for her to get back to me.
Cool. I assured her I was fine with that. What else was I going to say? “Fuck you?”
I decided to put it out of my head and move onto other things. Oddly, I was feeling pretty good about this and imagined my flying out to L.A. to meet with Stone over “high tea,” or something stronger, as we babes of a certain age pissed and moaned about ageism in the industry.
Like a fart in the wind, that imagining quickly dissipated once I received her response, not two weeks later, but more like two hours. This is what I got:
“Thank you for sending this good script. I enjoyed it, but it’s a pass for me.”
After picking myself up off the floor, I made the comment that this was the “fastest turn-down ever,” to which she replied that she was a “fast reader.”
I guess.
I had to ask WHY it wasn’t for her. She never did give me any real clarification, saying only this:
“My new friend, I’m doing only one film and/or mini-series and this isn’t it. Thank you.”
So, that was pretty much the death knell for my major deal with Sharon. Oh, I can call her that now as she referred to me as a “friend.”
I’ve absorbed many psychic blows during this crazy journey, but I have to say that at least Sharon was a human being about it. She didn’t make me wait a ridiculous amount of time before administering her ass-kicking and was ultimately, very kind.
As I’m confident that my script is a great one, I chalked it up to “her loss.”
I didn’t give up without one last thrust, though. I told Sharon I had other projects for her consideration and received a response that suggested “creative excellence be damned” and that first and foremost, she was a savvy businesswoman:
“I take all finance offers.”
So do I, baby. So do I.
© Sherry McGuinn, 2021. All Rights Reserved.
Sherry McGuinn is a slightly-twisted, longtime Chicago-area writer and award-winning screenwriter. Her work has appeared in The Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, and numerous other publications. Sherry’s soon-to-be-ex-manager is currently NOT pitching her newest screenplay, a drama with dark, comedic overtones and inspired by a true story.
