For years, I've watched their 'ripped from the headlines' telepics about murder, cheating spouses, domestic abuse (The Tracey Thurman story was horrifying. I saw it years ago and it still haunts me).
In the past I could always count on Lifetime to deliver the goods.
Not so much anymore, and that's why I want to write a movie for them because it would be sooooo freakin' easy. Plots no longer seem to be important. Character motivations are unnecessary. Common sense doesn't exist. It's as if the screenplays were written by a computer. A machine without real human emotions.
Having written over 30 novels, I've always sweated the plots, motivations, complications, wanting to make them as real and as compelling as I could. Takes a lot of work, hair pulling and swearing, at times. Frankly, it's exhausting. That's why I started to think about the advantage of writing one of LMN's movies. Far more pay with a lot less work.
The movie that brought me to that conclusion was on last week. It was a pretty blatant ripoff of Sleeping with the Enemy. I saw that movie years ago and thought the holes in it were monumental (didn't read the book so I don't know how faithful the screenwriter was to it). Anyway, in the movie, Julia Roberts has a sadistic husband who controls her every move and beats her regularly. However, he does allow her to go into town where she takes swimming lessons, without him. Hmmm. Now would a control freak allow that? Also, why is she taking swimming lessons, when it would make more sense for her to take karate and beat him to a pulp the next time he laid his hands on her.
Julia's character doesn't think of that. However, she does plan her escape. She decides to fall off the boat she and her husband are in during a storm. How she knows it's going to storm, I couldn't figure out. Maybe she also took weather classes during her swimming lessons. She then plans to knock out the lights on her husband's private beach with a rock so it's dark when she escapes back to the house. She's such a good throw she should be in major league baseball. She then grabs her stuff and makes a run for it (while he's searching for her in the water). However, she stops to take off her wedding ring and drops it in the toilet. Where he finds it. God. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.
The Lifetime movie was equally stupid. The heroine plans her escape (pretends to fall down an incline in a cave, leaving hubby to believe she's dead). She goes to a new city and starts her new life. However, before she took off, she taped all of her documentation for that new life to the back of a picture in her hubby's house where he finds it. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.
He locates her and starts making phone calls. She answers, and when there's no one on the line, it doesn't particularly bother her. Now really. She's an abused woman. Don't you think, she'd wonder a little about the heavy breathing on the other end of the line? And the numerous times the heavy breather called? I would. Then, she sees him passing by a window of a store she's in. Does she take off screaming? Call the cops? Hide? Nope. She looks stunned for a moment, then just continues with her wonderful new life as if she simply imagined seeing the guy who used to beat her everyday. The phone calls continue. She's still not worried.
The husband goes to her new friend's house. The new friend opens the door without asking who's on the other side. You guessed it, he kills the new friend who is also TSTL.
At that point, I lost interest in everything except the possibility of slapping together a dumb plot with little effort and making a ridiculous amount of money for it. That's what I want for Christmas.
Okay, now on to some good and real stuff.
*** Book Four in my Appointment for Pleasure series with Ellora's Cave has just been accepted. Stolen Desire, Book Four in my Outlawed Realm series for Samhain, will be out next March. :)
Tina
Tina Donahue
“Heat with Heart”
ILLICIT INTENT (5 FLAMES - MY READING OBSESSION)
ILLICIT DESIRE (4 STARS - ROMANTIC TIMES)
SENSUAL STRANGER (BOOK OF THE YEAR 2010)
DEEP, DARK, DELICIOUS (HOLT MEDALLION AWARD OF MERIT)
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