Something happened to me last week in my other life as a fiction writer that made me flash back to my Hollywood days. I was a Story Analyst there in the 90s. That’s a fancy title for a Reader for a production company. It was the ideal way for us writers to have access to otherwise unapproachable industry players. We were the first and lowest line of separation between the public (strictly via a literary agent) and our employer. We didn’t have the power to get a project made, just enough to choke it off and maybe crush the screenwriter’s dream forever.

I wrote the script for the growing, yet unfortunately still limited, number of independent anti-woke producers now giving audiences what they want.
Our job was to write a report — known as Coverage in the screen trade — on the viability of a book or script as a film or series. We understood this meant commercial potential more than artistic merit, although the two frequently intersected back then. Coverage consisted of four sections, including a Logline encapsulating the story, a Synopsis detailing the plot, and Comments expressing our expert analysis of the project.
But producers often didn’t read past the first section of the coverage, the grid at the top, where we put our jobs on the line. This part gave the title, format — Feature, MOW (TV Movie of the Week), or Series Pilot — and genre of a project, then the reader’s all important judgment with one of three words: Pass, Consider, Recommend.
A Pass meant the property was essentially dead at our company, our employer trusting us enough to make the call. The only danger was if the material got produced elsewhere and turned out to be Forrest Gump, we would “never work in this town again!” The safer bet was Recommend, which kicked the work up to a higher executive to champion or discard. Of course, if the exec hated it, we’d take some heat for wasting his or her time. Our riskiest rating was Recommend, signaling a hot property that needed to be read by a producer right...