My wife's favorite script of mine - and the one that is most dear to me - is a tale about a bunch of Achaemenid nomads whose existence is threatened by a team of Navy SEALs somehow trapped in the past and gone despotic after 20 years without resupply or contact. I wrote it as a Road Warrior film with horses and heroes. It got sent around back when I was at William Morris. Every exec who read it didn't give the first fuck about a bunch of "Iranians." They wanted the story about the Navy SEALs kicking Persian ass back in 400 BC. What would that look like? they wondered. "A total rout," I said. "Until they ran out of ammo, and then a total rout the other way." No, but you have your guys surviving for 20 years, they said. "Yeah, by not kicking ass very often and doing really boring political things," I said. "You're supposed to tell the interesting story. THIS IS THE INTERESTING STORY." Fast forward 9 months. Anyway. I had no interest in writing about Navy SEALs shooting up a bunch of Achaemenid Persians. That struck me as boring and stupid and after all, we had The Final Countdown back in the '80s. I had no interest in reading Rome Sweet Rome either - boring stupid final countdown yadda yadda. But I wasn't at all surprised when Adam Kolbrenner ended up selling Rome Sweet Rome to Warner Brothers - after all, I'd introduced him to Reddit. I was even less surprised when nothing ever came of it. It's entirely possible that Harper Lee, age 30 in 1956, chose to write a novel about her disillusionment with her father, her ambivalence towards the South, and her search for her place in the world. It's entirely possible that as a pure shit first draft she realized that her self-involvement was harmful to the story everyone else wanted to read. It's also entirely possible that after To Kill A Mockingbird she decided that nobody wanted to know her, they wanted to know the contrived backstory that she made up to justify the second draft of Watchman that she never started. You don't go with a title like Go Set a Watchman if you know what you're doing. You do that before you figure it out. My first titles are almost always awful.