Curtis Armstrong has signed a memoir deal with the St. Martin’s Press imprint, Thomas Dunne Books. He has become well-known as the actor who portrayed Booger in the Revenge of the Nerds movie.
Brendan Deneen, an executive editor, negotiated the deal with Matthew Elblonk, an agent at DeFiore & Company Literary Management. The release has been tentatively scheduled for 2017.
Armstrong (pictured, via) had this statement in the press release: “People are always asking me—well, someone did the other day—why it is that after 40 years of capering under hot lights for everyone’s amusement, I’ve never written a memoir. Well, as it happens, while everyone assumed I was just loafing around out here, nursing a drug habit and living off residuals, writing a memoir was exactly what I was doing! Drawing on journals, diary entries, notebooks, letters, pictures, documents and new interviews with some of the prominent players, A Nerd’s Progress will take you behind the scenes of the nerd revolution, and to a time when a perfect mix of belching contests, nose-picking and wonder-joints put a nerd like me on the map in Hollywood.”
Brendan Deneen knows a thing or two about getting a book made into a Hollywood film. He’s not only an author and former literary agent, Deneen is executive editor for Macmillan Entertainment, for which he shops TV and film rights for authors, whether the material is existing or created in house.
In the latest installment of Mediabisto’s So What Do You Do series, we talked to Deneen about the optioning process, why Hollywood so often relies on published bestsellers for content and the best way for an author to break into the movie business (no, you don’t have to be a big name like John Grisham, J.K. Rowling or Nicholas Sparks). Deneen also had plenty of advice to share with struggling authors:
Patience is key. I’m 41 and I wrote my first book when I was 18, and I sold my novel this year. It took me forever. And that doesn’t mean you have to not be putting yourself out there and working your ass off; it just means you may get rejected over and over again like I did when I was 18. It should be a badge of honor. It means you’re getting stuff out there. You need to be constantly writing. If you’re a screenwriter, you should be writing a new screenplay every three or four months. If you’re an author, honestly, you should have a new book every year if you’re serious about it — two years at the most.
To hear more from Deneen, including what he’d like his legacy to be, read: So What Do You Do, Brendan Deneen, Executive Editor Of MacMillan Entertainment?
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