Film Courage: Why did you write Party Girl?
Anna David, Publisher, author, speaker, podcast host, and television personality: I wrote Party
Girl [a novel] when I was four years sober and I realized the PR about recovery was so bad and
that if I had had any idea how fun and funny and joyful recovery would be I wouldn't have
had to go as low as I did. I thought what if I could tell a story if I can help one person
see that it's not recovery is not the end of life but the beginning I will have done something good
how long did it take you to write it I wrote Party Girl very quickly I had no idea how to
write a book I just was very Brazen and just was like well I've read novels I will just write this
and so I started writing it and I actually had one friend who was a novelist and I was with her
one day and she was saying to me oh God when I started off I didn't have a clue I mean I didn't
even know novels had a three-act structure and I remember going you didn't and then I
race home and I look and I have like 400 pages of one act I had no idea there was supposed to
be a structure I didn't know anything and so that was the process of you know what Stephen
King calls killing Your Darlings and I just you know got rid of excised 350 pages that day
and this was in the mid 90s the I wrote the book I I got sober in 2000 and I started and I wrote
Party Girl in 2004 sold it to harpercollins in 2005 and it came out in 2007. and where did you
actually write the book oh physically where was I I was in my apartment on Sweetzer Avenue in
West Hollywood and anybody who's lived in LA everyone's either lived on Sweetzer or
Sycamore or has dated somebody who's lived on Sweetzer Sycamore it's just an LA thing
tell me about the bidding war for the book I know I'm jumping ahead a little bit oh it was
so exciting a bidding war might be over staining things but it was this completely Cinderella
experience because I had been working on this book and literally an agent emails me out of the blue
and says I really like your magazine work so it wasn't completely out of the blue because I was
well known as a magazine writer and he said I I think you're really funny if you ever have a book
let me know and I write them back and say that's crazy I just finished writing a book he said I'm
going to be in L.A tomorrow let's sign and I said fantastic and the next day I wake up and there's
an email from a different agent and she says I just read a bunch of your magazine stories I think
you're really talented if you ever have a book tell me so I write her back and I say that is so
crazy I'm going to sign with an agent literally walking out the door and she said send me your
phone number and she called me and she she said do me a favor do not sign with this person today give
me one day I'll cancel the rest of my day and I'll read your book if I don't like it you don't have
a problem go sign with him if I like it you've got to give me a shot and so I went to lunch with this
guy I said I know I said I was signing but I'm not signing and she loved the book and she said
I can sell this and the way we're going to do this is if you just give a book to editors they
they take forever to read it so I'm going to say Anna's come to town in two days so if you want a
shot at this you got to meet her and you have to have read it before you meet with her and I said
but I'm not coming to town in two days and she said well the worst that can happen is you'll
lose money on a ticket and a hotel but I think I can sell this so and that was a lot of money to
me at the time so I go to New York I go to these two meetings with her and then on my second day
we get a call from Regan books and Regan was like Judith Regan in the 90s was the biggest deal Pub
publisher my wildest dreams I didn't think that I could attract a Judith Regan we get a call when
I'm already there and they say Judith Regan not her herself although anyway they said Regan wants
to meet with you so we go in we meet with them I go home and I and and pillar my agent says
you know we'll know by Monday all weekend long I'm just like I promise I'll be happy for the rest of
my life if this book can sell she calls me Monday morning and she tells me that the two places pass
I'm devastated and then you know I'm like the dream's over and she calls me back she
goes reading books made an offer and and I and I did say I'm going to be happy for the rest of
my life and I was for about two weeks and then I realized oh no thing ever actually makes you happy
at any point in the editors reading the book or Judith Regan reading the book did
they say can you tone it down a little bit or can you ramp it up a little bit
you know they never said tone it down you know the one thing they said toned down I I talked
about like God and spirituality and they were like that really makes people uncomfortable and this is
of course two years before a book called Eat Pray Love Comes Out nobody's freaked out about God At
All by then but that was the one thing they wanted me to tone down in fact the note I got when they
bought the book was and I'm not saying this in a self-aggrandizing way they were just like it's so
perfect it's like you don't you didn't make any mistakes because I come from a world of being
a writer and an editor and you don't you turn in work that you have edited and re-edited and
re-edited and I don't know that the book world was used to that they were used to typos so yeah all I
had to do was like take out some of the god stuff and we were good is that because they thought
that the the some of the topics in it maybe the salacious Parts wouldn't mix with the religion
I don't know I think that there are certain words that freak people out and God is one of them and
so I think that Publishers just like many people just want to take the safest route they want to
not alienate people not freak people out maybe they didn't think it went with all the like crazy
sex and drugs and rock and roll stuff but but I I just said sure whatever you want you guys know
how soon after the book was published did you sell the movie rights the there was an interest
in the movie rights before the book came out and I'm not entirely sure how it happened but sort of
knowledge about the book and its topic leaked out so there was interest you know between a
publisher acquiring a book and releasing it it's like a year or two it just takes forever so during
that time I live in Hollywood I was hearing from people so I I signed with CAA CAA was interested
in representing the book and so I the the actual story about what happened is I got this agent who
couldn't have cared less couldn't have cared less so there everybody who made an offer told me they
had to pursue and pursue and pursue him to even get a call back other friends told me they were
like your book landed on my desk with no cover letter and no explanation so in spite of the lack
of interest of my agent there was a bidding war over it but it was it was really frustrating when
you're a small like you know when you're at one of those big agencies and you're not a huge huge
star that's what happens but but yeah and so the story of the movies amazing do you want me to go
into that now okay so so the very first offer we got a mother-daughter team who had a deal at Sony
said to me they came to me and they were wooing me and we had lunch at this place called Michael's in
New York which is probably long gone but it was this fancy publishing place and they said if you
go with us we will get whatever screenwriter you want and I was obsessed with Reality Bites
so I said if you can get the woman who wrote Reality Bites to write my that my story I'm in
and they come back and they said we got her her name's Helen Childress she's excited here's your
check and they optioned it for twenty thousand dollars which to me now is a fortune because now
they don't really pay anything for options but at the time I didn't know anything I was like great
so then everybody's very excited we're talking about Lindsay Lohan who was a big star at the time
and they wanted to sell it to Lifetime and I just thought this sounds great this sounds like it's
going to be made and other offers were coming in but I was like committed to that one so with that
one then one day I email the mother-daughter team I don't hear back I text them I don't hear back
I never hear anything it's all very Hollywood and one day I get an email from CA that says
congratulations your rights have reverted back to you and I wrote back and I said what does
this mean never heard pack Google it it means oh your movie wanted to turn around it means like
this is not good news and so years pass and I was a freelance magazine writer still and
one time I wrote a story about this experience saying oh and it was all about Reality Bites
and how Troy Dyer who was the main character in Reality Bites how he ruined my whole like
identification about dating and how I was always seeking Troy die or the most screwed up man ever
and I put as an aside I heard a rumor that the woman who wrote Reality Bites wrote the
Party Girl script but I never even found out if that was true sometimes reality really does bite
Helen Childress saw the story and emails me and says oh my god did you seriously never
see the script that I wrote of Party Girl and I wrote back and said I didn't even think they
were telling the truth I never even heard from them again and she sent me the script
so there it is like early so it's like 2011 I'm reading my favorite screenwriters version of my
book which is based on my life from 10 years before it was the most surreal experience ever
and I said to her oh let's let's get the movie going again but when it once it's in turn around
it's that's almost impossible so do you think the lesson though among others is that
word gets out without you knowing how and also no one tells you anything yeah I mean Hollywood's an
evil place I'm sure everyone knows that but you know it's it's basically you know when I have a
book a story like this which has been around now for 15 years and I have seen every incarnation
of producer coming along and I'm whined and I'm dying not really wine but you know and they're
just like this is going to be it we're going to do this and we're going to go there and
then literally you never hear from them again I've now lived in La for so long that I'm used
to this sort of treatment I'm just like oh okay so you don't you don't you you never hear again
you don't we don't really live in a Hollywood is not a place where anybody even really tells
you when they've gone off and moved on to the next hot thing you just have to figure it out
how did you get a meeting with Martin Scorsese's producer this is a great story I am friends with
this couple who have these get-togethers in LA with hundreds of people where basically they'll
sort of interview usually famous people and everybody's watching and then they sometimes have
friends or just people with interesting careers so they were interviewing me in front of this
crowd of about a hundred people at their place in in Bel Air and they were just interviewing me
about publishing and why should people write books and somebody came up to me afterwards and he said
are you a screenwriter because you talk like a screenwriter and I said no but I have this
book that would make the best movie and he said well great I'm a producer and that was
his name is Niels Joel and we were you know we worked together I mean it was a
long time it was a couple years where he tried to sell it and he wasn't able to
but yeah he's great how does a book or novel get on the radar of Hollywood and Hollywood producers
it is a okay a book gets on the radar either because it sells like crazy
it doesn't sell like crazy but gets a lot of buzz like Party Girl the it didn't sell that
many copies but a lot of people were talking about it or because a book scout finds it and
I think with El James and 50 Shades of Gray it really opened up Hollywood to this idea that a
book does not have to be traditionally published for it to make a movie and then Andy Weir wrote
The Martian and then so so people can't producers can't just look at what is on the New York Times
bestseller list what's in airport bookstores they actually have to like have a much wider swath of
where they're looking to find the books why do you think Hollywood keeps buying the rights to your
book but not making the movie Hollywood loves to buy the rights to things and not make them
I think you know it's probably three percent of the books that are optioned are actually made and
you know I just think that everybody in Hollywood there's somebody else that they're answering to
and most people are sort of coming from a place of fear and what just hit and what you know and
so they just want to have as many options as possible literally book options as possible
knowing that they're only going to take a tiny fraction of them and tie them up so that others
can't yeah get to it before they do okay yeah that's interesting when I this is this is kind
of interesting when I used to do coverage when my first jobs when I first moved to LA so I would
read screenplays and you know basically write book reports on them and I remember there was this book
that came out and I read coverage on it and I just thought this is the worst book I have
ever read and I wrote coverage saying this is the worst book I have ever read this is why I
get called into the office the next day and my boss says to me there was a betting War
over that book yesterday and it sold for three million dollars now why are you saying what you
said and I said because it's true it's terrible I later many years later became friends with the
studio head who had made that who bought it for three million dollars and he goes oh yeah that
book was terrible I had to keep it out of someone else's hands so that's why we did it so you know
there are all sorts of reasons that Hollywood digs into its deep pockets to buy things.