Joan Maltese is a LIAR - Do NOT work with her
Yes, Joan Maltese is a damned LIAR - Do NOT work with her!
It has come to my attention that Joan Maltese, a talentless hack of a "writer" who wasted two months of my time in 2009, has been bad-mouthing me online since July of 2010. This person is truly the client from Hell!
Joan Maltese of San Diego, California answered an ad I posted on Craigslist. When she contacted me I explained to her that I wouldn't do work-for-hire but I would send her a collaboration agreement contract which clearly defined among other things my non-negotiable requirement for a NON-REFUNDABLE 50% deposit for my participation in the project.
After a week of haggling over the agreement during which time she negotiated away multiple clauses but not the NON-REFUNDABLE 50% deposit, Joan Maltese signed the agreement and emailed me a nearly incoherent script excerpt entitled "Journey To Gao" filled with incorrect mythology, offensive stereotypes and trite cliches.
Journey To Gao is not a story about a trip to the Government Accounting Office and that is a shame since "Journey To Gao" is the type of script that can only be described as below the "lofty" standards of Direct-to-DVD. Calling it a total mess is an insult to messes everywhere.
While I initially explained that 5 pages from a comic-formatted script could be produced within 14 days, Ms. Maltese hasn't yet (TO THIS DAY) provided a coherent script. Thinking I was dealing with a sane individual I told Ms. Maltese that sorting through her un-formatted outline would take longer than the original projected timetable however I would try to work with it. She promised to format the script and agreed to send it by "End of day" - she NEVER sent it in the entire two months of her wasting my time.
I began work on the synopsis pages at once and would likely have finished in short order, but Ms. Maltese insisted upon approving every single panel of every page. Despite the obvious insanity of this request I did my best to accommodate Joan and sent her all art as it was completed.
As I had explained to Joan Maltese before receiving her signed agreement I had recently taken a full time gig and would be working on Journey To Gao on nights and weekends. She had never raised any issue of scheduling or deadlines and specifically said that she DID NOT have a problem with me fitting the Journey To Gao book into my existing schedule since she didn't have a publisher or any interest whatsoever in the script.
Two and a half weeks later, after ignoring my repeated attempts to contact her via email and telephone Joan announced to me that she was "going in another direction" and hiring another artist so would I mind returning the NON-REFUNDABLE deposit for the project despite all the time and effort I had expended and the considerable aggravation I had endured while working with her on Journey to Gao. Meanwhile I still hadn't received any feedback on the art she had insisted upon pre-approving.
Nine days (and numerous unanswered phone calls to her) later Ms Maltese replied that "I somehow didn't see this in my Inbox, so I'm sorry for the delayed reply. You can see my responses below". Within 3 days she emailed another demand for a progress update, despite having told me two weeks earlier that she was "going in another direction" thereby causing the entire project to come to a screeching halt.
Normally this project would have been long-finished - even with the nights and weekends schedule - had it not been for her meddling and her refusal to return my calls and emails.
I would never have brought any of this to public attention in a blog post but Joan Maltese is an untrustworthy and apparently illiterate LIAR who entered into an agreement with me and then after I worked with her sub-par script outline and her insane demands she had the unmitigated gall to ask that I refund her NON-REFUNDABLE DEPOSIT because I didn't finish the project which she claimed was "going in another direction" and she "was hiring another artist to work on".
I was out-of-pocket on supplies and software purchased for the job as well as the lost time and the frustration of working with someone who may very well be insane. I say she may well be insane because after I told her that barring any unforeseen complications I would be finished with the project prior to the ONLY deadline we ever agreed upon (Thanksgiving) she said "that won't cut it" and that she'd "take what you've got" and go forward from there. Then this crazy person refused to return more of my phone calls and EIGHT MONTHS LATER she posted a blog post containing personal info and a heavily edited copy of one of our email threads which conveniently left out most of the facts. If you intend to do business with this person you've been warned and you do so at your own risk.
So, to sum up the salient points: Joan Maltese SIGNED a collaboration contract agreeing to pay a NON-REFUNDABLE DEPOSIT then ended the agreement not once but twice for not meeting a non-existent deadline after which she refused to return phone calls and then she posted lies and defamation online.
Sorry, Joan Maltese, screenwriter of the laughably moronic Journey To Gao, but you are a LIAR and anyone who chooses to work with you needs to know that you do not respect other people's time and effort and you apparently don't understand NON-REFUNDABLE means exactly that: NON-REFUNDABLE!
