At Ken's urging (and more helpful e-mail reminder), I called John the producer today. Lists are my friend. E-mail reminders even better. I can't stand having things in my in-box and when I receive an e-mail note to do something, I dutifully leave it sitting there until I do it.

So today's action item was to call John the producer. It's been a while, but John is the guy who was (and still is) working on the adaptation project. He's also passed a couple of my scripts to some friends, and they've since disappeared into a black hole. That happens all the time around here, but I thought I'd call to chat, see if that road did indeed dead-end and just to say hi.

The news on the adaptation front is that a well-established studio wants to produce the adaptation. It's not a big one like Warner Bros., but more along the size of Village Roadshow. (They discovered and produced Matrix). John and the studio are working on getting a name actor to sign onto the project. John dropped a couple of names, but my trusty note-taking pen remained still. I'm thinking that the author will be writing the script, so this is just gossip value for me. However, it appears that someone at the studio makes it a cardinal rule to never use the book author as the screenwriter in an adaptation project. Is there hope for me yet? We'll see. The doors are open and the bridges are in good condition.

I asked if the other fellows were interested in my scripts, and he offered to do a follow-up call. I told him I'd just like to know where I stand with them, and he said he'd be more than happy to find out. We plan on getting together for lunch at some point in the near future, after he's made his calls.

I talked about the WWII movie that I'm making, and damned if John doesn't know a B-17 turret gunner who flew in the North African campaign -- same plane, same place and same time as my script is. This fellow lives in San Diego and LA on occasion, so John offered to introduce me so I could meet him and maybe get some war stories. I will take him up on that -- besides getting a feel for material, it would be a cool thing to sit and talk about a war that my grandfather participated in, but never ever talked about.

No word yet from Lynn or JoAnn about my Crossing Jordan spec.

Now, back to the keyboard.