You’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?”

Growing interest in long-form storytelling has encouraged Hollywood bloodsuckers to ask more novelists to help them. They want story and backstory for these eight-episode or longer stories the kids like these days.

One agent said, “We are selling more intellectual property to television than ever before. What you’re finding in both television and film now is a recognition that a great storyteller is a great storyteller, regardless of the medium.”

For example, PW points to Gillian Flynn, “who bargained to stay on as the screenwriter of the film adaptation of Gone Girl when it was optioned. Flynn is now signed on to write an adaptation of the British series Utopia for HBO, as well as a planned feature adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train.”

Speaking about a screenplay for Strangers on a Train, Raymond Chandler said this:

When you read a story, you accept its implausibilities and extravagances, because they are no more fantastic than the conventions of the medium itself. But when you look at real people, moving against a real background, and hear them speaking real words, your imagination is anaesthetized. You accept what you see and hear, but you do not complement it from the resources of your own imagination. The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half-piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large. The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.