In the interim, she had steadily been building her client list and expertise until she had become one of the most powerful agents in the business. She had excellent connections in Hollywood and represented three authors who had had their books turned into big screen box office hits. But when I excitedly asked her about the next step, she told me not to get my hopes up. “Waiting for things to happen in Hollywood is like watching trees grow,” she said. And she would know.

 

So that’s what I did.

 

 

Well, that was weird! By now, the title had been out of print for 13 years or so and I hadn’t been able to make another sale. Then I got an e-mail from my agent telling me that one of the producer’s agents was getting ready to make an offer. She sounded uncharacteristically excited, so I cautiously allowed myself to start getting excited. Then I got another e-mail. The offer sucked, she told me. So she was turning over the negotiations to an agent in Hollywood who specialized in book titles that were made into movies.

 

Then things got really wild. One producer dropped out early on. But two of the producers wanted the title enough that a bidding war ensued. One of the producers was in L.A., the same producer who had approached Simon & Schuster a few years back. One was in New York. I was getting updated regularly via e-mail about what was going on by my agent in L.A. and because of the time difference between the East Coast and the West, I was often waking up and checking my e-mail to find that all kinds of negotiations had been flying while I was still asleep. The terms for the sale kept going up and up. It was insane! I was going to get big bucks for the rights, a percentage of the merchandizing, a percentage of the gross, rights to any amusement park rides that got designed on the basis of my characters or story, first class airfare to the UK premiere … all kinds of stuff.

 

Interestingly, the main character in the story (apart from the Hotdog himself), the boy who shows kindness to the creature, had been named after my nephew Patrick, who was a toddler when I wrote the book. He was now twenty years old and had come to visit Richard and me that summer from Massachusetts, where his family had moved in 1991; so he was here with us for much of the time that the bidding war was going on. (Another bit of interesting synchronicity: The model that the book’s illustrator had used for his illustrations was a little boy he spotted at the library in Seattle whose name was also Patrick.)

 

 

 

I mumbled that no, I wouldn’t, and felt completely chastened. It was funny, though. I’d never made more than a few thousand dollars off the title, and now thirty thousand was deemed a paltry sum. But I knew that my agent had my best interests at heart and had always treated me well. I knew, too, that she was extremely good at what she did and that she was right. So I continued to sit back and watch the drama unfold.

 

Not long after this, my L.A. agent forwarded an e-mail to me from the other producer in which she told me that she and her writer had always loved this title, and that her writer, in her volunteer work, went to various schools and institutions to read to children. She took her favorite titles, many of which were by famous authors, but the hands-down favorite, the one title they always wanted to hear read over and over again, was The Hotdog. This had two different effects on me. The first one was pleasure and pride. But the other one was wondering: If children love this story so much, why was it out of print? Why wasn’t a single publisher interested in reprinting it?

 

I was also starting to feel oddly guilty. I knew that one of these producers was going to lose out, and I felt bad about disappointing either one of them. A television writer friend of mine thought this was hilarious.

 

Eventually, the book agent in L.A. called me to fill me in on a few things. And he talked expansively and this, that, and the other thing, casually tossing off such heady stuff as “So, if they get, say, someone like Mike Meyers to do the voice-over …” and “I’m thinking that one of the producers is what they call a ‘straw man,’ standing in the negotiations for someone like Steven Spielberg so that we don’t ask for too much money,” and “This last time something like this happened, someone brought up the fact that this was their kid’s favorite book at a cocktail party—that’s all I can figure must have happened this time,” and “We’ll wait, of course, to reprint the title with the art from the movie … .”

 

This was totally surreal. Finally, as the negotiations reached a fever pitch, my L.A. agent awarded the title to the producer I had thought he wasn’t favoring. I think he decided that she was, indeed, a “straw man,” and that the other producer, who had a more impressive list of credentials in terms of number of projects produced and who was at one time the president of the Emmy Awards Committee, wasn’t as well poised to actually get the movie greenlighted. But the winning producer was the animation director for an extremely successful box office hit that had had a particularly long shelf life in DVD, and was the Head of Story for another, more recent big animated box office hit. It wasn’t like she was any slouch!

 

So I received an unusually high amount for the option, certainly for an out-of-print picture book by an author who had never published anything else, not stratospheric by any means, but more than I had ever made on my modest royalties. My new L.A. agent invited me to stop by and say hello the next time I was in the neighborhood, so when Richard and I drove to San Diego to visit my brother, I made arrangements to have a meeting.

 

It was, again, surreal. For someone who had struggled so hard to make any inroads in the conventional publishing world whatsoever, with such limited success, I really did feel sort of out-of-body. My new agent was a handsome young guy, and when we went into his office, I could see that his shelves were lined with books from famous authors, ones that had been made into movies. My agent occupied a rarified, elite niche, the niche of representing print properties to filmmakers, and it was only thanks to my literary agent that I had been able to have access such a powerful dealmaker. In our conversation, he continued to dazzle me with the possibilities of my career, throwing around the names of famous directors, producers, and actors, and asking me for copies of all my other stories and my latest novel. Again, I thought I was on my way. Finally.

 

 

Little by little, all promising venues were considered and rejected, and little by little, it began to dawn on me—and my new agent—that the likelihood of this movie being made was becoming remote. The option was renewed once, but after that, when it seemed clear that there was no big name producer lurking in the background, I was dumped unceremoniously by my big deal film agent. And that was that.

 

The mystery of the timing that led to the bidding war became partially resolved when my friend the animation director/producer told me that a colleague of hers worked for the studio that dropped out early in the negotiations had talked her into revealing her pet project, and then tried to beat her to acquiring the option. But the other producer … I remember her from several years’ previous, so I felt that her interest was longstanding and genuine. Why her renewed interest coincided so dramatically with the other producer’s, I simply can’t explain. It was a very bizarre thing.

 

And so The Hotdog slid into obscurity once more. But you never know, this might not be the end of his story. He’s a crafty little devil. And I thought he was as good as dead before … .