Paul Blart, a Bartender, and a Dream

Written by Fred Warren

If I’m being brutally honest, I am one of the luckiest people I know and for

that I am truly thankful.

There are so many statical pieces of data that indicate I should be living a

much different life. But by some cosmic stroke of luck, I am able to proudly

say that I am the husband to an amazing woman who has helped me

become a better human being. I am a parent of two incredible children.

And I have been given the opportunity to lay claim to having a role in some

wonderful achievements and successes. The most recent of those being

the publishing of Deadline Dallas, the first published work for my co-writer,

Jason Sutton, and I.

Jason and I began writing years ago. We both worked at the Hampshire

Mall in Western Massachusetts. Jason was a bartender at the restaurant in

the mall and I was a mall security guard. Just think of Paul Blart. Yup,

before the advent of the Segway, that was me.

Jason and I would finish our shifts right around the same time and get to

writing. Eleven at night. Dark, empty mall food court with big ideas and a

notebook. No idea what we were getting ourselves into and no clue how

hard it was going to be to make our goals become a reality. But it did not

matter. We were just two foolish guys with a dream of writing movie scripts

and seeing our visions flashing upon the big white screen of the movie

theater at the far end of the food court in which we were sitting.

It may come as no surprise that our first screenplay was a comedy about

three moronic guys working at a mall and all the crazy things they

encountered. It took us a few months, writing until one or two in the

morning, but we stuck it out and finished. I remember being so proud of

the first version of that script. It was so many pages, one hundred and forty

or so. No clue it was twice as long as a well written comedic script should

be but not even a worry about such details. I could not wait for someone to

read it. But who? That would become the question that would prove to be

far more difficult than ever imagined.

As weeks dragged on, Jason and I meet again to discuss who would read

our script, SSDD as it was titled. Jason mentioned that he had an idea for

our next script. Although we were no closer to actually getting onto the big,

white screen, we jumped into it and starting writing. This time an action

movie. A fantastic story with all sorts of excitement, twists, and turns. I

mentioned that we could tie our story into some real life events to help

make it a bit more believable. Jason agreed and Grover’s Mill started to

come to life. The back story to what turned out to be Deadline Dallas.

It took us about six months to complete the first draft of Grover’s Mill and

we were ecstatic with the result. We knew we had something that was

really marketable. But to who? That question came up again. And with

the same dead end presented itself. We have the script but no one to read

it.

Jason soon moved to Florida for graduate school. I moved on to a different

job and found out that our second child was going to be joining our family.

But we still believed in what we could do. We adjusted our process.

Talking on the phone when we could, continued searching for people to

look of our script, and kept on writing new things. We tried our hand at

writing a television show. We talked about turning Grover’s Mill into a TV

series and even wrote three episodes. We wrote a few more scripts for

completely different films. After five or so years of writing together we had

a handful of movie scripts and no one to read them, until…

Jason called me to say someone was reading Grover’s Mill. Suddenly the

dream was coming to be reality. We waited and eventually got the call.

The script was solid, dialog was great. I just needed a few things pulled out

of it to get it to where it needed to be. Good luck. No make these changes

and I’ll think about paying you tons of money for it. But it was our first bit a

feedback, it was positive, and that was all we needed to keep going.

A few months later, Jason got the script into the hand of someone at

Warner Brothers. And not just someone, but a vice president who could

do something with it. This was really going to be it. But when she go back

to us and said it was missing some things she would want to see in there,

the same things that the first guy had told us to take out, it was devastating.

We were at a crossroads. But it lead us to the realization that we needed

to trust ourselves. We put those things we had taken out back in – learning

to keep old drafts of each script as another learning as that would have

saved a great deal of time – and got the script ready to go back to Warner

Bros only to learn that the person who had shown an interest in the script of

Grovers Mill was no longer with the company. Ugh!

Our writing energy exhausted, we moved into life. Jason got a job at CBS.

I was working for a retail giant. We would check in with each other here

and there and years passed with us doing some writing but rethinking what

we could do with all we had.

Then the idea to make Grovers Mill into a novel. It was what we needed to

re-energize our efforts. We finished and felt that there was more to the

story, so we wrote a second book. When we were done, we felt that we

really had something marketable. But once again, who was going to read

it?

For years we stayed at it, knowing that the second book was really good

and knowing that we were really writers. We kept moving forward, learning

about the industry and writing. Honing our craft and piecing together the

rest of the story.

Nearly twenty years after meeting in the mall, someone read our second

book and wanted to publish it. That book? Deadline Dallas.

Our journey is far from over. We have yet to reach our goals but have

come to realize that we have a great story to share and now have the

chance to share it with people. And while we wait for Deadline Dallas to

reach as many people as we know it eventually will, we will keep writing.

Buy Deadline Dallas Now!