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Sherry McGuinn
Sometimes They Come Back
On leaving the door ajar and your options open
Throughout the many years I’ve been navigating my screenwriting “journey,” I’ve been repped by three and a half literary managers. I say “half,” because one was half-assed. He was pitching only one of my many projects, an original television pilot called “The Confessional,” about a vigilante priest in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen in the eighties.
It received quite a bit of attention and at one point, Michael Madsen was on board to play my protagonist. Here is the logline, or “elevator pitch:”
In 1983 Hell’s Kitchen, everyone has secrets, including Father Avi Noonan, who, as a result of an assault on a family member, commits an act that finds him going down a road from which there is no return.
You read that right. Father Avi Noonan. His mother is a Jew. And his late father, Irish Catholic.
Like so many projects that almost make it, I don’t recall why the heat on this one fizzled out. Madsen’s a character, I will say that. We had an LOI (letter of intent) from the dude and lots of back and forth between our reps, but somehow, the shit went south.
Folks, if you want to write screenplays and repeatedly bang your head against the entertainment industry’s…
