Picks up untitled funniness project from Jason Sullivan
A week agone, newbie scribe Jason Sullivan had to be goaded to hawk meetings because his car couldn't go more than 45 miles per hour. Now, thanks to Columbia picking up his untitled comedy send off, he is ready to go shopping for a new ride.
Sullivan, world Health Organization studied screenwriting at Loyola Marymount, has been penning spec after spec since graduation piece holding down several jobs at once. At one point, he held five jobs, including apartment manager, script reviewer and a freelance author for a company that hired holders of edgar Lee Masters degrees to write spam e-mails that would catch through filters. One fortuitous job was as an assistant to "X-Men Origins: Magneto" writer Sheldon Turner.
Producer Jennifer Klein was over at Turner's one day and recounting a dinner she had with her husband, who complained how he missed out on a seminal moment in childhood by non attending summer camp.
Sullivan was there too. As an obsessive fan of summertime camp movies like "Meatballs," he saw movie electric potential and years later came up with a treatment and social system. The externalise revolves around three friends in their 30s world Health Organization realize their lives are incomplete because they never went to camp, so they rent out a camp and invite former adults to join them.
Turner and Klein, who have several projects around town, came up with a plan to take Sullivan's pitch to market, though one complication was the unreliability of Sullivan's elevator car.
"If you go over 45 miles per hour, it dies," Sullivan aforementioned. "If you make a sharp left hand turn, it peters out. And at stop signs, it necessarily to be revved all the time or it dies. People think I'm ready to race them in my '97 Saturn."
Sullivan all over up having to be ferried to some of the pitch meetings, which were a blur of bottled water and pocket-sized talk to the nervous newbie.
Columbia bought the project in a six-figure deal. Sullivan said he still can't believe he is being paid to write.
"It feels fantastical, but I'm afraid it's part of an rarify scam, that I'm existence grifted," he says. "I grew up obsessed with summer camp movies, and the fact that one day I might be able to go get wind one that I wrote blows my mind."
As to what he will do with his paycheck, he joked, "I'm going to pimp my car."
Sony's Doug Belgrad and Jonathan Kadin are overseeing the project.
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