 PEST CONTROL The story synopsis
How the story became a novel Matt Hansen (my frequent writing partner) and I came up with the general idea for Pest Control in May of 1991. We pitched the idea to several production companies during the summer of '91 but no one bought it.
We decided to stop pitching and just write it as a spec script and we had a draft finished by late August. My friend Michael Schroeder, a director, loved the script and took it to producer Peter Samuelson who eventually optioned it. Six months later, when the option period was over, he wanted to extend the option for free. We said no.
A few months before I had a complete draft of the novel, I started looking for a literary agent in New York (since the vast majority of LA literary agents deal exclusively with TV and film writers). I began sending query letters to NY agents in September of '94. 139 rejections later I got the manuscript into the hands of Jimmy Vines. He loved it and I signed on as his client in May of '95. By June of '95 all the major publishers had passed. Jimmy told me not to worry, he was going to sell it. He also told me to get started on my second novel. So I started working on the research for The Organ Grinders.
The next day Daily Variety announced the sale of Pest Control to Spring Creek Productions and Warner Brothers Studios. Sales to Avon Books (U.S.), Tokuma Shoten (Japan), Random House (U.K.), Scherz-Verlag (Germany), and RCS Libri (Italy) followed over the next several months. The final touch, and perhaps the thing that sold more books than the book itself, was the cover art by Bill Mayer. Bill has done all the cover art (US and German editions) for my books -- and I hope Avon continues to hire him to do so. Film Update Paula Weinstein's company, Spring Creek Productions bought the film rights to "Pest Control" back in August of 1995. Paula, who has produced a lot of great movies, including one of my all-time favorites, "The Fabulous Baker Boys" later merged with Barry Levinson's Baltimore Pictures to form Baltimore-Spring Creek Pictures. They first looked at Peter Segal ("My Fellow Americans") to direct "Pest Control" with Jack Kaplan and Richard Chapman doing the first adaptation of the book. After their drafts of the screenplay failed to get the green light, Spring Creek turned to Peter Tolan to either rewrite the Kaplan-Chapman draft or to do a fresh adaptation. Since I'd already been paid, I wasn't kept in the loop on all these decisions. Eventually the project fell out of active development and was just sitting on the shelf. But one day someone got excited about it again and they brought in an actor/writer/director/producer by the name of David Raynr ("Trippin'", "Whatever It Takes"). Mr. Raynr did either a rewrite of the Kaplan-Chapman and/or Tolan draft or did a fresh adaptation. The last I heard, Raynr's draft satisfied the folks at Baltimore Spring Creek who sent it up to the studio executives at Warner Brothers who liked it, but had notes. Raynr then addressed the notes and got a draft that satisfied the studio and now they're out looking to attach some talent. Stay tuned . . . The Missing Sex Scene I started to write a sex scene between Bob and Mary but it turned too silly, so I cut it from the book. Here's what you missed, complete with my notes: Reviews
INSECT TRIVIA They outnumber us about 200 million to one. They come in more species than any other Class of animal -- the estimated number of species is over a million. We discover almost 8,000 new species a year. It is unknown how many undiscovered species become extinct each year. There are roughly 200,000 species of butterflies and moths. There are at least 300,000 species of beetles alone. The largest is the African Goliath beetle (Goliathus cacicus). They can reach six inches in length and weigh up to 3.5 ounces. A cricket's ears are on its knees. The largest dragonfly ever known is a fossilized specimen from the U.S., with a wingspan of almost two feet, larger than many birds. The smallest insects (a species of wasp, I think) can fly through the eye of a needle. The leg muscles of locusts are about 1,000 times more powerful than an equal weight of human muscle. The greatest swarm of locusts ever recorded was in South Africa in 1784. The swarm was blown out to sea by a strong wind and when the tide washed their bodies back to shore the reportedly formed a bank four feet high along the beach for 50 miles. Some insects reproduce sexually, others do it asexually (aka parthenogenesis). Some go through complete metamorphosis (e.g., bean beetles and butterflies), others go through incomplete metamorphosis (e.g., damselflies). Bombardier beetles shoot hot quinic acid from their abdomens when attacked. African bushmen use a chemical derived from the pupae of the african Leaf Beetle to poison their arrows for hunting game. A species of West African termite (Macrotermes bellicosus) lives in a community of about 5,000,000 termites. Online ordering
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June 11, 1991 - Pitch Pest Control to Michael Chinich at Ivan Reitman's company -- pass.
Matt and I schlepped the script around Hollywood for the next couple of years getting it to anyone who would read it. In the summer of 1993, after reading a story about a writer who turned one of his screenplays into a novel, I started doing the same with Pest Control. My girlfriend at the time (now my wife, Kendall) paid for me to take a novels-in-progress course at UCLA Extension. A few months later, my friend Brian Meehl hired me to write the "Insect" episode of the BBC "Eyewitness" series.
Jimmy gave the manuscript to Claudia Citkovitz who was working at Spring Creek Production's New York office. She loved it and sent it to their offices at 
A compendium of reviews from the US and the U.K., as well as my favorite negative reviews from Amazon.com. 
