Will The Real Renie Lake Please Stand Up

Yeah, titles used to be a lot longer, especially when they were on physical books.  But this was of its time and it did quite well for me since it not only became a paperback but a television movie.  It was not something I particularly wanted to revisit because I didn't want to do a rewrite.

Something overcame me and I decided okay I'll just OCR it (cut apart a paperback) and change some of the names but not rewrite/rethink it.  So that's what I'm doing this weekend.

I think what set this book apart at its time and perhaps still is that the male lead is deaf but that's not an issue.  If you have a character with a "disability" that's aways at least part of the engine that drives the story.  In this book, Jan is deaf.  Okay.  There can be a correlation made between Renie not being able to communicate well and Jan being able to communicate very well.  Even though he's deaf.  So which one of them has the disability?

Wow.  Too deep!

Anyway this is the TV movie that I begged the producer to let me do the script but they said the book authors are too close to the project and always F everything up.  Then they went on to totally trash the story and as another television producer later told me "They missed every dramatic set-up you had in the book."  Yeah. 

And the casting stunk, too.

I tried to think of another title but it didn't lend itself to shortening the way In Real Life I'm Just Kate turned so easily into Just Kate.