In Beyond the Best Seller, Richard Curtis wrote of the inevitability that at some point, the product placement deals that routinely make themselves felt in motion pictures would establish a presence in the publishing world as well. And he was right; with novels, especially, becoming almost prohibitively expensive to produce, procuring a financial boost from, say, Nike, to underwrite a sports novel of some kind, makes sense. At least, it makes business sense; whether it can result in good art is a challenge left to the individual writer.
But, I knew this prospect was out there somewhere, and I shouldn't have been surprised when my agent called to discuss a nebulous proposal that was beginning to come together. My Final Refuge novel, which was predicated on the pivotal role that zoos play in the preservation of nearly extinct species, had been read by and made a favorable impression on a marketing executive at Busch Entertainment Corporation, a subsidiary of Anheuser-Busch and the proprietor of Sea World and Busch Gardens. The movie "Free Willy" was just then current, and in this film, the dirty, greedy, evil animal park people who wanted to kill the whale and collect his insurance, were a thinly disguised Sea World. They were getting hammered with bad publicity, but their attendance was going up. So, rather than advertise and give away tickets, they were considering to just compete in the same arena. Would I be interested in writing a big, sea-going adventure story that would to some extent involve Sea World characters in a positive light?
Well, negotiating the deal and writing the book took six years of my life. Busch flew me out to San Diego, twice, to speak to all the park execs there. They wanted to eyeball me and make sure I wasn't some closet Greenpeace case, and I wanted to eyeball them and make sure that "Free Willy" wasn't really true. Long story short: I wrote the book, about illegal whale hunting, they loved it, they paid me a bunch of money, the book sold to Kensington and was taken as a feature by the Book of the Month Club (so I know it didn't totally suck.) After a career in respected poverty, I was on the threshold of major novel, movie, park ride, action figures, percentage participations, all that. But then, literally overnight there was a coup d'etat in Busch's marketing operation, and the new director dumped the "content oriented" projects in favor of more talking lizard commercials, or something.
The entire experience ripped my liver out, and I've been filtering my body waste through a Purolator ever since. Until, (trumpets, please) a few weeks ago a respected producer happened to see on Discovery Channel a documentary about the Bermuda Triangle, with extensive discussion of seabed methane ice, which was much of the last half of Ghost Pod and he realized that I called all those issues a decade ago. Now he wants to make the movie, Busch is back in the discussion, and while this page is not going to become a blog, you know as much as I do at this moment. Check back.
