Shane Black, screenwriter of Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout has just been paid $4 million for his latest script, The Long Kiss Goodnight. Since a screenplay usually weighs in at about 120 none too densely typed pages, averaging, say, a couple of hundred words a page, I calculate that this makes him at least 333 times better paid, per word, than me. But what exactly do New Line Cinema get for that kind of money? The ultra violent story of a lady assassin with amnesia, director Renny Harlin has described it as “the best script I’ve read in years.” Now, I got a peak at this classic, wherein one character, describing his attraction for the beautiful assassin to a friend, says, “Hell, I’d eat a mile of her shit just to follow it back to the ass it came from.”

And they say if Shakespeare was alive today, he’d be writing movies. I guess for $4 million even the bard might be tempted: “A horse, a horse, I’d butt fuck a whole gang of hell’s angels for a horse!”

The short film I wrote for director Bob Lawrie, Crazy?, receives it premiere in the London Film Festival on the 15th of November. The brochure describes it as “slick, sexy S&M that has to be seen to be believed,” which sounds about right. I note, however, that nowhere is my input into this “gorgeously perverse fantasy” mentioned. Screenwriters have never been a highly regarded part of the movie-making process. One of the oldest movie jokes goes “Did you hear about the dumb blonde who wanted to get into movies? She slept with the scriptwriter.”

At one point in the process, a film exists only in the writer’s head, yet once it starts becoming a tangible entity it ceases to belong to its initial creator at all. I only visited the set once during filming. I have rarely felt so useless. Everybody but me was running around with things to do, animatedly referring to the project as if it had sprung from their own loins. Only the lead actress had anything to say to me, a taut “So you wrote this?” accompanied by a steely glare. But then, she had just spent all day suspended from the ceiling in a metal corset, the kind of thing that is easier to write about than actually participate in.

But I could put up with a lot of that kind of abuse for $4 million. So I’ve been dusting off my obscenities and brushing up on perverse sexual imagery as Bob and I attempt to prepare a full length feature.

AN IDEA IS BORN

The problem is coming up with an original idea. Most of the producers we’ve met seem to talk in a shorthand based on other film titles. So far I have heard several variations on Die Hard, including one set in IKEA; a historical IRA musical that would be a cross between Gone With The Wind and Finian’s Rainbow; and a violent period thriller set in an English country house that was pitched as a cross between Room With A View and Reservoir Dogs. “We’re talking Merchant Ivory, with added blood and sex!” You probably think I’m making this up, but I’m not. A glance at any films listing page will tell you this is exactly what goes on in movie company boardrooms.

I’ve been waking up at night, and jotting down my dreams in the hope of coming up with something fresh. Alfred Hitchcock once reported that he woke in the middle of the night, convinced he had come up with the perfect film plot, which he hastily wrote down before drifting back to sleep. When he found his notes in the morning, they read: boy meets girl. Mine are more likely to say things like: man gets into argument with talking dog before rabid cucumbers take over his house.

My family think I’ve gone insane. Yesterday, we were awoken by the sound of drilling coming from next door. At least we assumed it was next door, where they have been doing building work for the last two months and have woken us at eight every weekday morning with various combinations of DIY noises. But this drilling was especially loud. So loud in fact, that they might as well have set their jack hammers off in our flat. Which, I discovered, when I finally stumbled out of bed to confront another day, is pretty much what they had done.

Peeking inside our chimney, from whence the appalling din seemed to emanate, I was shocked to discover I had a clear view of the workmen next door. They had inadvertently drilled right through to our house. But instead of rushing through the new passage they had created to confront them, going red and effing and blinding for all I was worth, I hurled myself at my computer and started typing furiously.

“Jesus Christ, Neil, have you seen what they’ve done?” screeched my beloved, hastily pulling on a dressing gown lest our new cohabitees catch sight of her in all her morning glory.

“Don’t bother me,” I snapped back, “I’ve got an idea.”

Scene One: A man is awoken by the cacophonic sound of an electric drill. As he sits up in bed an expression of horror passes over his face.

Cut to: Drill coming through the wall.

Man: “Bend me over backwards and make me suck my own dick, but I think the cucumbers have landed.”

Dog: “Go back to sleep will you?”

Well, that’s all I’ve got so far. But it’s a start.