Dear Celebrated Filmmakers,
It is with the greatest of pleasure I am writing to you. I do really worry where this all could have gone if this had not at first found its way into our slush pile. Perhaps in an alternate timeline people have paid hard-earned cashola to sit down in a movie theatre to watch this and are coming out at the end of it all finding more narrative cohesion in Tik Tok videos. In any case, I am over the moon to put a fence between this and the Hollywood/Pinewood lots.
In terms of where you could go from here, I would suggest the next time you maybe sketch out a trilogy trajectory before steaming ahead with a mystery-box-a-minute approach. Or, at the very least, stray away from directly undermining the critically-lauded previous film’s narrative. Making a protagonist related to a villain only works when this creates a convincing conflicting fissure within that self, and should not just be used as solely a means of injecting nostalgia into the fans who have come to watch. Nobodies can be somebodies without having to have been sired by strong Forceful men.
We wish you all the best in finding a fiery home for this in the future.
Kind regards,
Integrity
***
Dear Celebrated Filmmakers,
We do not usually reply to emails in response to rejections, but in this case we have decided to outline our quite plain and obvious thoughts once again.
Just because you have placed work in similarly prestigious avenues does not mean new ventures will or should be accepted elsewhere. Prior works are not something we take into consideration when judging the merit of a submitted piece. Furthermore, we all unanimously came to the agreement that a shared corpus of such titles as Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Justice League and Star Trek Into Darkness quite evidently speaks for itself. We understand that you are people with a certain degree of blockbustery clout but we execute our right to retain our original decision of not accepting your script. Simply put, we find your decision to relegate important leading characters of colour as well as your penchant for bluster rather than sense to be quite at odds with our intention for the ninth and final chapter of Star Wars.
For future submissions, I would again direct you to our company’s mantra: surprise us, don’t abide us.
Kind regards,
Martha
Mythology
P.S.
You ruined Darth Vader.
***
Ashley Bullen-Cutting is a snow-haired creative-critical English Literature PhD candidate at The University of Sheffield. His poetry and prose has featured in over a dozen journals. He is a current fiction editor at Barren Magazine and the sole fiction editor for the 2020 Route 57 special ‘Traces’. @abullencutting
Rejection Letters 