SoSFDavidO here! Ready to be ground under the millstone that is Lisa’ Story: The Book the Movie?
Link to today’s strip.
Apparently Sisyphus himself had it easy compared to the monumental task of turning a completed book into a screenplay. Evil, money grubbing Hollywood! He’s only had two years to work on it, what do they expect, miracles!? Sure, Les could have turned it over to a couple of really talented screenplay writers that really understand the art, (belong to a union) and have experience but that would have robbed him of his chance to be miserable!
“*I* want to write the screenplay,” Les had told Apple Ann in a huff over the phone.
Well, there ya go, jackass. Not sure what you’ve been doing in the year since you left Montoni’s to work on the screenplay more but it sure hasn’t been working on the screenplay.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Oh yeah, the big movie-option arc. The movie-option arc had its genesis shortly after the huge book-launch mega-arc, when “Hollywood” first came sniffing around the Delicate Genius and his morose masterpiece. Back then Les just couldn’t make up his mind about selling his magnum opus to those sleazy “Hollywood” dirt-merchants, not even after he consulted with Lisa herself. Then he became distracted by Cayla and Susan and the whole thing was just sort of dropped for a long while. Then last year we suddenly learned that Les was indeed cashing in on the cancer book and he’s apparently been writing this adaptation (of an already-written book) ever since.
Look at him there, using his idiotic “tortured artist” persona to justify walking around (at work, no less) with an angry sneer on his face, as if dealing with his Lisa demons again is just too much for his delicate soul to bear. God, I hate him so very, very much. What a dick.
Note Cayla’s appearance! Always a novelty here on FW. Note Cayla’s dialogue being exclusively about Les and Lisa’s story. Never a novelty here on FW.
Yeah, I know Hollywood’s a flaky kind of town, but since when would they grant a first-time “screenwriter” a two-year deadline? And anyway, the Hollywood I know would have nixed this project by now and found something way cooler to turn into a movie.
Poor Les. Maybe he should quit his day job at the high school, too, since that seems to holding him back from fulfilling his real talent. Or maybe just forget about Lisa altogether and try to make the most out of enjoying time with his second wife?
The best part of Les being rendered morose and exhausted (and best of all, silent) is that this smirking jackanape brought it on himself. If only he hadn’t gotten all huffy and possessive over his PWESHUSH SKWEENPWAY he could’ve just kicked back, let someone else do the heavy lifting, and then enjoyed himself. But no; his paranoia and narcissism about Hollywood has come back to bite him and render his life a living death.
It’s so rare in this comic for one of the self-absorbed whiners to do something monumentally self-absorbed and whiny and then pay the price for it. Muahaha.
Every time Batom does one of these “oh the woes of the writer” arcs you can’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it. I mean unless he has a friend or something who’s a really good author, how would he know anything about it?
Having seen Newcastle Ale’s reimagining of various (the football game who’s name must not be mentioned) ads, I really want them to do “Lisa’s Story”.
http://www.youtube.com/user/Newcastle?
Man, those cable network execs must be nervous as hell. The great decision on whether to order those 5 seasons of Will and Grace may depend on Les’ screenplay!!
Meanwhile, Summer is contemplating suicide, Cory is getting his legs shot off, Harry is struggling to make ends meet in his part-time job at Komix Korner, Khan is getting blown up in a terrorist attack, and Susan is homeless. I have no sympathy whatsoever with Les.
Yeah, yeah, this is similar to one I posted last week, but if TB isn’t going to come up with something original, why should I?
I love seeing Les as miserable as he is today. So much better than his default smirk.
Is the Misery Porn Channel really in that great a hurry to greenlight this thing? I mean, surely they already have a backlog of movies staring Meredith Baxter and featuring titles like Help! My Husband Beats Me and My Son Looks at Naked Ladies on the Internet and I Have Lupus….
Funky Winkerbean prop bets:
4-1 – The “Winter Concert” advertised on the school sign will be depicted in the strip on February 12
9-2 – SyFy’s Cancuricane: Lisa’s Story, starring Valerie Bertinelli, will begin production sometime in 2014
1-1 – A school levy will fail
@billytheskink, Noooo! You leave Valerie Bertinelli out of this.
@TheDiva, How come The Comics Curmudgeon got the “A” comment today and we got the “B” comment here?
as pointed out it’s been almost two years realtime since Les got the screen play assigment – and he’s already written the book – and has St Lisa’s diary to help. Unless he’s trying to figure out how to make the story more about him. I don’t see his problem.
Upon reflection – I think this is a cry for help from the Author of the strip – an admission that he wrote himself into a corner when he killed Lisa off and can’t see any way out. Sad really.
“that he wrote himself into a corner when he killed Lisa off and can’t see any way out. Sad really.”
There is an earthquake in Lake Erie and Westview and virtually every person who exists there is completely washed away by the resulting tsunami.
One worthy person lives and is dumped at the border of Centerville where he/she is rescued by Crankshaft and commences a new life in that strip as a fireman who bowls.
Oh for the love of – this is *still* going on? It’s almost been a full year, so I’m really hoping we’re moving into the home stretch.
@DOlz: After spending last night screaming and cursing the heavens* for Denver’s inability to show up to the Super Bowl, much less win it, I was rather groggy this morning and my usual snarking routine got confuzzled as a result.
*Slight exaggeration. I survived Super Bowl XXIV, this was a piece of cake by comparison.
Though it was not intended as such, that image of Less in panel 1 is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in this strip!
We actually should be happy in a sense. After so much dull stuff that was just boring to snark at, we have genuine idiocy to snark at again.
The best part of Les being rendered morose and exhausted (and best of all, silent) is that this smirking jackanape brought it on himself.
I can’t go with that, if only because Les’s misery is not really caused by his demand that he write the script. He’s suffering because he doesn’t know how to do it right, not because he doesn’t want to do it anymore. It’s writer’s block, rather than simply a lack of desire to get the job done.
But as I noted before, it’s extraordinary how everyone indulges this guy, and yet we’re supposed to continue to feel sorry for him. He takes on this script-writing job, and from all appearances he never had anything imposed on him, like deadlines or lack of editorial control. He’s the guy calling all the shots, and he’s getting paid a lot of money to do it. And yet we’re supposed to feel sorry for him because he’s so tortured about telling his dead wife’s story: the story he obviously thinks more of than anything else in his life and one he’s already told in book-form. Hell, look at this strip itself, where Nate has gone to Les’s wife to ask about Les, because of course he couldn’t confront Les directly about how he’s doing. That might disturb the delicate flower, after all.
I’d say more, but I really just can’t get much beyond my incredulous reaction that this is still going on, that the production company really gave Les more than an entire year to write the script. And you know that it’s just going to get worse, as Les will finally overcome his writer’s block with the help of Lisa’s ghost. And everyone will continue to indulge him as he documents for them his psychotic break.
A writer with the popularity of, say, J.K. Rowling might be able to take a couple of years to write a script, and the studio would wait because of the publicity value…but even then Rowling is professional so she’d probably have it done in two or three months.
If all I had to go by was Funky Winkerbean, I don’t think I’d come to the conclusion that “Writing is Hard.” No, I’d have to conclude that writing is impossible…the evidence has been there for a couple of years.