How to Break into Movies in Only 12 Years

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Sometime after that, an old friend of mine called. He said, "There's this guy I know from Stanford. He was chief operating officer of something called PayPal, which was sold to eBay for $1.4 billion. Now he wants to get into moviemaking and wants to make Thank You for Smoking." I told him my absolute rule is to accept phone calls from people worth $1.4 billion who want to make my novels into movies.

David Sacks called the next day. I told him he must call Mel's people. David spent the next year and a half negotiating back the rights. I congratulated him and went back to assuming that the usual--that is, nothing--would happen.

Then one day a few months later, I got an e-mail from a Washington friend who had moved to Park City, Utah, to become a masseuse. She wrote, "Hey, great news about Aaron Eckhart!" I wrote back, "What news about Aaron Eckhart?" She said, "He's been cast in the lead in your movie." I said, "He has?"

Two days later, I got an e-mail from David: "Pigs are flying, snowballs are forming in hell. Thank You for Smoking is finally in production!"

Great news for David and Jason, but it certainly put the kibosh on my plans for a novel called Thank You for Nothing.