Damn.
When did now get here so soon?
My printer is smoking through a last second printout of this year's under-the-wire-as-usual Nicholl Fellowship entry. I have no special hope this year, but it suddenly occured to me that it's a cheap 30 dollar lottery ticket compared to the possible payoff, so why not?
MEANWHILE and anywhoo... I am scrambling to play phone tag with a long-lost college buddy who now works in Hollyweird aho might be extremely valuable and useful to a undiscussed new project suddenly boiling rapidly on the front burner. In one of those weird turns, I find myself the middle link in a chain of connections between talented represented writers on one side and hungry desperate producers on the other. It's all... strange. It has the feeling of one of those oddly perfect situations where you through all the puzzle pieces into the air and then they fall onto the tabletop magically assembled and in perfect order.
But we shall see...
AND the other New Thing is simmering along nicely and will likely be ready to throw at Austin Contests (the regular AFF, as well as the Burnt Orange or whatever they call it now, as well as the Sci Fi contest there), and I am laughing aloud as I look at notes and draft ideas, so that's cool.
AND the oddball cowboy thing still lingers in my mind like the stink from burnt popcorn, so that will surely get attention this summer.
AND there are the usual Other Cool Things yammering in the background, trying to distract me...
All in all, I'm suddenly nipple-deep in Cool Shit, and wondering which of these things will break first and become and actual living breathing project of relevance. I'd babble more, but I gotta go call a guy about a thing...
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B
just another online spittoon
30 April 2007
24 April 2007
a funny sense of expectation
OK, so despite the ass-over-teakettle wipeout of a major software burp earlier in the week which cost me 10 great days work at a point where I do NOT have any extra time in which to make up that lost time, I still feel... annoyingly good and optimistic.
Something must seriously be wrong, as I'm hardly ever admittedly self-confessedly (is that a word?) optimistic, but for now I feel good.
Why? I'm not entirely sure. I know that I am buried alive under various distracting and competing obligations— Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts, Little league, PTA, pre-school, dentists, an ongoing family medical crisis (which has not and likely will not rate specific discussion out here), etc., etc., etc.—yet somehow everything still feels pretty cool.
My present theory is that I am on some odd vicarious high stemming from the success and good news so many of my peers and pals seem to be bathing in these days:
• bestest buddy Julie O is currently in New Orleans on the set of her first feature screenplay sale, now in production with Warren Zide of American Pie fame. Julie's screenplay is one that I remember reading in numerous draft variants over the past few years, so watching it "grow up" and bloom into an actual for-real movie is absurdly cool for me (and others) to witness. I can only imagine (or try) what odd feelings of rapturous joy and nauseating anxiety must be hitting her right now. It's one thing to imagine a movie in your head for years, but to see an army of strangers all spending days in a coordinated effort to turn your words into a movie to be shown on a screen in front of millions... well, I can imagine dread and joy dancing an odd tango.
• pals Steve Barr and Tina Joey (Jingleheimer Schmidt) Anderson recently inked a major development deal with Disney/PiXAR for their long-simmering PLANT LIFE project. Again, it seems like I've been hearing about and watching this little project struggle and fight toward the light for years, so when word came down that they'd finally "bagged the big one" as John C McGinley said in WALL STREET, I think a great many of us wanted to do that thing from the end of OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN—just sob and clap and shout "Way to go, Paula! Way to go!"
• online pal Jonathan King continues to ride a tall and perfect wave of joy as his goofy killer farmcritter epic BLACK SHEEP continues to do good business around the world. I met Jonathan live and in person for the first time in Austin a month or so ago after swapping mail and silliness with him online for years through a group of writers and filmmakers we both know. Again, seeing someone you know stand and grin a painfully wide smile of proud joy as strangers line up to slap him on the back and say "hey, man-- great job!" is one of those cool experiences I never grow tired of, as I get to see someone in a totally honest and real moment of joy without having to wrestle with any of the weirdness and confusion that my own self-loathing would prompt if it were ME in that spotlight.
• on the publishing front, longtime online snarking buddy Cornelia Read hit the big time last year when her debut novel A Field Of Darkness came out to stellare reviews and solid sales. Cousin Cornelia wound up nominated for an Edgar (Allan Poe Award) for "Best Debut Novel," and she just turned in a draft of her follow-up, The Crazy School (coming in early 2008).
Cornelia reports that she's suddenly getting attention and interest from Hollywood, with rumors of possible screenwriting offers blowing in the wind like stray newspaper pages ("where do they come from/ How does this start?"). Again, I've watched Cornelia for years as the manuscript for what would become A Field started as an idea, grew into a major project, found a patron, then a publisher, and then started to garner praise and publicity. It's yet one more item of proof in the case that "absurd dreams really can come true... so long as you are stupendously talented and relentlessly dedicated to chasing down that damned rainbow like you are a hungry lion two steps behind a wounded wildebeest.
• also in books, Deb Chesher is nearing completion on work of her self-published coffee-table photo-opus Everyone I Shot Is Dead. a collection of some pretty freakin' incredible candid and private shots of a heartbreaking number of now-departed names from the rock and roll pantheon. Deb is now based in LA and also chasing screenwriting and producing glory, but in some odd previous life she was a rock babe in the early 70s, partying with and snapping shots of pretty much every major band and player you can think of from that time. The new book chronicles just how many of those folks have passed on and are no longer with us. It's a huge labor of love, and Deb's been pouring insane sweat and soul into this for years, so I have ever faith and confidence that her investment will pay huge dividends, as there's no way either to fake or conceal that sort of passion. (BTW-- pre-ordered copies of her book would surely make excellent Christmas gifts...).
Meanwhile, I sit here hammering away on an outline for what well may be the goofiest screenwriting idea I have ever seriously pursued. Without giving away the coolness, just think TREMORS and you'll be close enough for government work, pal. I've got a fistful of names of producers who all claim to want to see this damned thing when I get it written, and I also have some other projects folks seem excited by and hopeful for, and for a variety of reasons all too disconnected and vague and just plain squirrelly, for once in a long time the absence of anything concrete and definitively encouraging is not in and of itself grounds for depression.
Go figure.
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B
Something must seriously be wrong, as I'm hardly ever admittedly self-confessedly (is that a word?) optimistic, but for now I feel good.
Why? I'm not entirely sure. I know that I am buried alive under various distracting and competing obligations— Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts, Little league, PTA, pre-school, dentists, an ongoing family medical crisis (which has not and likely will not rate specific discussion out here), etc., etc., etc.—yet somehow everything still feels pretty cool.
My present theory is that I am on some odd vicarious high stemming from the success and good news so many of my peers and pals seem to be bathing in these days:
• bestest buddy Julie O is currently in New Orleans on the set of her first feature screenplay sale, now in production with Warren Zide of American Pie fame. Julie's screenplay is one that I remember reading in numerous draft variants over the past few years, so watching it "grow up" and bloom into an actual for-real movie is absurdly cool for me (and others) to witness. I can only imagine (or try) what odd feelings of rapturous joy and nauseating anxiety must be hitting her right now. It's one thing to imagine a movie in your head for years, but to see an army of strangers all spending days in a coordinated effort to turn your words into a movie to be shown on a screen in front of millions... well, I can imagine dread and joy dancing an odd tango.
• pals Steve Barr and Tina Joey (Jingleheimer Schmidt) Anderson recently inked a major development deal with Disney/PiXAR for their long-simmering PLANT LIFE project. Again, it seems like I've been hearing about and watching this little project struggle and fight toward the light for years, so when word came down that they'd finally "bagged the big one" as John C McGinley said in WALL STREET, I think a great many of us wanted to do that thing from the end of OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN—just sob and clap and shout "Way to go, Paula! Way to go!"
• online pal Jonathan King continues to ride a tall and perfect wave of joy as his goofy killer farmcritter epic BLACK SHEEP continues to do good business around the world. I met Jonathan live and in person for the first time in Austin a month or so ago after swapping mail and silliness with him online for years through a group of writers and filmmakers we both know. Again, seeing someone you know stand and grin a painfully wide smile of proud joy as strangers line up to slap him on the back and say "hey, man-- great job!" is one of those cool experiences I never grow tired of, as I get to see someone in a totally honest and real moment of joy without having to wrestle with any of the weirdness and confusion that my own self-loathing would prompt if it were ME in that spotlight.
• on the publishing front, longtime online snarking buddy Cornelia Read hit the big time last year when her debut novel A Field Of Darkness came out to stellare reviews and solid sales. Cousin Cornelia wound up nominated for an Edgar (Allan Poe Award) for "Best Debut Novel," and she just turned in a draft of her follow-up, The Crazy School (coming in early 2008).
Cornelia reports that she's suddenly getting attention and interest from Hollywood, with rumors of possible screenwriting offers blowing in the wind like stray newspaper pages ("where do they come from/ How does this start?"). Again, I've watched Cornelia for years as the manuscript for what would become A Field started as an idea, grew into a major project, found a patron, then a publisher, and then started to garner praise and publicity. It's yet one more item of proof in the case that "absurd dreams really can come true... so long as you are stupendously talented and relentlessly dedicated to chasing down that damned rainbow like you are a hungry lion two steps behind a wounded wildebeest.
• also in books, Deb Chesher is nearing completion on work of her self-published coffee-table photo-opus Everyone I Shot Is Dead. a collection of some pretty freakin' incredible candid and private shots of a heartbreaking number of now-departed names from the rock and roll pantheon. Deb is now based in LA and also chasing screenwriting and producing glory, but in some odd previous life she was a rock babe in the early 70s, partying with and snapping shots of pretty much every major band and player you can think of from that time. The new book chronicles just how many of those folks have passed on and are no longer with us. It's a huge labor of love, and Deb's been pouring insane sweat and soul into this for years, so I have ever faith and confidence that her investment will pay huge dividends, as there's no way either to fake or conceal that sort of passion. (BTW-- pre-ordered copies of her book would surely make excellent Christmas gifts...).
Meanwhile, I sit here hammering away on an outline for what well may be the goofiest screenwriting idea I have ever seriously pursued. Without giving away the coolness, just think TREMORS and you'll be close enough for government work, pal. I've got a fistful of names of producers who all claim to want to see this damned thing when I get it written, and I also have some other projects folks seem excited by and hopeful for, and for a variety of reasons all too disconnected and vague and just plain squirrelly, for once in a long time the absence of anything concrete and definitively encouraging is not in and of itself grounds for depression.
Go figure.
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B
21 April 2007
God Bless Texas
"On this field on April 21, 1836 the Army of Texas commanded by General Sam Houston, and accompanied by the Secretary of War, Thomas J. Rusk, attacked the larger invading army of Mexicans under General Santa Anna. The battle line from left to right was formed by Sidney Sherman's regiment, Edward Burleson's regiment, the artillery commanded by George W. Hockley, Henry Millard's infantry and the cavalry under Mirabeau B. Lamar. Sam Houston led the infantry charge.
With the battle cry, "Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!" the Texans charged. The enemy taken by surprise, rallied for a few minutes then fled in disorder. The Texans had asked no quarter and gave none. The slaughter was appalling, victory complete, and Texas free! On the following day General Antonio Lopez De Santa Anna, self-styled "Napoleon of the West," received from a generous foe the mercy he had denied Travis at the Alamo and Fannin at Goliad.
Citizens of Texas and immigrant soldiers in the Army of Texas at San Jacinto were natives of Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Austria, Canada, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Portugal and Scotland.
Measured by its results, San Jacinto was one of the decisive battles of the world. The freedom of Texas from Mexico won here led to annexation and to the Mexican-American War, resulting in the acquisition by the United States of the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Utah and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas and Oklahoma. Almost one-third of the present area of the American Nation, nearly a million square miles of territory, changed sovereignty."
Saaaaaaaaa-lute.
Happy San jacinto Day, y'all.
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fourth-gen B
20 April 2007
just a mild case of inconsolable rage
"Ah, life is like that—sometimes at the height of our revelries, when our joy is at its zenith, when all is most right with the world, the most unthinkable disasters descend upon us."
--A Christmas Story
People sometimes ask me why I am occasionally prone to be perhaps the tiniest bit cynical and negative about things. I contend that I am not negative, but that I do have a healthy and hard-won appreciation for the way heartbreak can jump from around a blind corner, pistol-whip us to the ground, grab our wallets, then kick us in the kidneys twice for good measure before leaving us in a crumpled bloody heap in some sorry damp allegorical alley, gasping and gaping like a carp on the beach.
House odds do not favor the player in this joint we call Life, and if ever you find yourself riding a long winning streak, you'd better damned well bank some winnings while they are still yours to claim, as the worm will turn, my pretties, and when she does, she turns like a screw.
Coarse thread. Long and rusted.
———
The warning signs were all there: things were skimming along way too easily, way too pleasantly.
I'd returned from my most recent Hollywood fly-by a few weeks back with a dangerously and uncharacteristically upbeat outlook.
I'd found a cool new idea to work on which every LA player i've peeked it to has sparked interest with a wide giggling grin.
I'd discovered a great new card-based outlining program which was letting me free-stroke through the design and brainstorming process like nobody's business.
I'd been kicking ass and taking names for a solid week, and the outline was more than 80% completed with only the first half of the last act left to formally line out in written form. I knew where I was going, I knew how to get there, and I knew the twists and turns I'd likely encounter as I roared down the scenic route to that finish line.
Things were clearly going too good, and my Spidey Sense should have told me to keep my head on a swivel as that callous vindictive bitch named Reality was surely coming soon to slap some sense into me.
Well, yesterday, Thursday 19 April 2007, at approximately 4:19 pm CST, she showed up, fully lubed and ready for disco, baybee.
She smiled brightly, put a well-manicured hand on my shoulder, and leaned in close to whisper in my ear with that sultry voice she always seems to use:
Ooooo... remember me, baby?"
Then up comes the knee, square into the groin, and that too-familiar tide of nausea washes over you before all just fades to gray....
———
There are few things as deliciously evil, as perfectly frustrating, as a well-timed software failure.
38 notecards in an outline program—cards filled with loads of great specific line ideas and scene descriptions, something far more like a proto-draft than an outline, maybe 70 pages of material—suddenly goes "poof" and you remember all those times you've advised friends "remember to back up your work!"
Except this time I had. I'd made a duplicate of the file I was working on and had stashed it elsewhere on my drive so that when that bitch came a-knocking, I'd be protected. Safe-guarded. Ready to rumble. She'd do her nasty business, and I'd just smile and laugh.
Well, there was laughter, but it t'werent't mine, as this particular collapse overwrote my BACKUP copy with a backup of the original file which was being totally corrupted.
What specifically happened? Nobody yet seems able to say. The software people have tried to recover both files and they say "it appears the files have not been altered since 10 days ago," when in fact I'd been working like a demon those ten days. The net effect is that all work down since 13 April 2007 is gone—just gone, baybee. Like it never fucking happened.
So that cool new project I was skimming so happily along with? I'm back to square one. Well, not square one—more like square four or five—but given that only yesterday I was motoring past square number 39 or so, it still sucks muchly the same.
Now I sit here and whine lyrically about the raging anger and numbing depression the situation has stirred, but in my heart of hearts I already realize there are but two options today: either buck up or give up. March or die, soldier.
Contest season looms huge on the rapidly approaching near-term horizon—ten days 'til Nicholl, forty 'til Austin—and I sit here with no pages but only the muddled memory of a nearly-finished outline now lost at sea.
The options left to me now seem limited. Either I kick unholy ass in the next week, or I'm left trying to jump-start my stagnated career for the next year using what little attention I can garner by cold-calling and cymbal-banging. Part of me badly wants to grab a softball bat in frustration and just go use the cat for fungo practice, but instead I'll wax my moustache, button up my waistcoat and adjust the brim of my cap to a properly rakish angle as I remember one of the few worthwhile bits of Gallic military inspiration:
"Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent. I am attacking."
-- message to HQ from Gen. Ferdinand Foch
Fuckin ay, bubba. Once more into the breach.
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Tenacious B (too big to kill, too dumb to quit)
10 April 2007
the new new thing
So today I got back to work on actual screenwriting. But rather than sit and stare at the long-languishing rom-com, or devoting more time to a big epic thing that I know will not work as a breakout piece, I decided to commit to doing something odd (for me): storming straight through on a rush project intended and designed for low budget production.
It’s genre, it’s concept, it’s cheesy, it’s easily produce-able, it’s filmable damned near anywhere, it has a kickass poster and tagline just screaming to be plastered on the sides of multiplexes, and it’s adaptable for use in DTV or cable usage. The fact that it’s the fruit of what was thrown out there as a total joke a year ago... well, such is life.
[NOTE-- if, as some do, you know the title and tagline, please please hold your tongue and don’t burn the punchline before the delivery of the joke. I really want to see what I can do with this, and part of the project’s charm is the idiotically perfect cheesiness of it all.]
I have most major set pieces clearly sketched out. I have the basic cast clear in my head. The story arc... well ”it’s a wresslin’ picture, Fink! How hard can it be!?!” By that I mean “the requirements an traditions of this time-honored genre are such that the structure pretty much sits there and waits for people like me to pour Story Sauce straight from the can over the waiting skeleton. Bake at 350 degrees for 88 minutes, bingo bango, you got yourself a low budget feature ready for DVD release.
Basic outline is clear. A more developed “fine outline” is maybe 1/4 done, with loads of great lines and situations revealing themselves every time I look up.
Fun fun fun. Maybe I’ll get it ready in time for contest season, and trust me—that would be hilarious, ‘cuz the idea of entering something like ... this in the Nicholl contest seems kinda like entering Gus the Field Goal Kicking Mule into the Kentucky Derby.
Which of course, is exactly the sort of idiotic stunt I’d love to pull.
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B
It’s genre, it’s concept, it’s cheesy, it’s easily produce-able, it’s filmable damned near anywhere, it has a kickass poster and tagline just screaming to be plastered on the sides of multiplexes, and it’s adaptable for use in DTV or cable usage. The fact that it’s the fruit of what was thrown out there as a total joke a year ago... well, such is life.
[NOTE-- if, as some do, you know the title and tagline, please please hold your tongue and don’t burn the punchline before the delivery of the joke. I really want to see what I can do with this, and part of the project’s charm is the idiotically perfect cheesiness of it all.]
I have most major set pieces clearly sketched out. I have the basic cast clear in my head. The story arc... well ”it’s a wresslin’ picture, Fink! How hard can it be!?!” By that I mean “the requirements an traditions of this time-honored genre are such that the structure pretty much sits there and waits for people like me to pour Story Sauce straight from the can over the waiting skeleton. Bake at 350 degrees for 88 minutes, bingo bango, you got yourself a low budget feature ready for DVD release.
Basic outline is clear. A more developed “fine outline” is maybe 1/4 done, with loads of great lines and situations revealing themselves every time I look up.
Fun fun fun. Maybe I’ll get it ready in time for contest season, and trust me—that would be hilarious, ‘cuz the idea of entering something like ... this in the Nicholl contest seems kinda like entering Gus the Field Goal Kicking Mule into the Kentucky Derby.
Which of course, is exactly the sort of idiotic stunt I’d love to pull.
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B
01 April 2007
April 1: the least funny day of the year
Apparently some people really like April Fools’ jokes, thinking they are a local pinnacle of wit and hilarity.
Me? Take a wild guess.
For my money, the sort of person who would get crazy into April Fools is probably also the sort who thinks rubber vomit is comic brilliance, the sort of guy who finds knock-knock jokes bladder-burstingly funny, that type of gal who considers a talking birthday card witty and amusing.
I’m not begrudging anyone a desire to seem funny or a desire to join the human circus parade if only for a day. What bugs me is the odd notion that [1] somehow April Fools’ rates special effort and attention, and [2] that pretty much any effort—no matter how lame and clichéd and downright un-funny—deserves kudos. It’s as if at some point we circled the first of April on the calendar and made it a special day where non-funny people are given a free pass, and we collectively give them all the same gold star for effort as if we are in some cosmic pre-school class.
Puh-lease. It all just makes my sphincter pucker, and I think we all understand the discomfort of a white-knuckled sphincter.
Fake news headlines. Fake notice sent to friends and co-workers. The always-original “loosen the top of the salt shaker so that the next loser ruins his meal!” gag. That last one surely got old while pterodactyls still darkened the skies, and likely gave rise to the “crotch-shot” as a comedic chestnut:
I like gags and jokes and childish dirty tricks as much as anyone (OK—a lot more than most), but where and when did we decide to reserve a special day upon which to lower the bar to such a pathetic and sad low level that “Pull My Finger” now seems like a Noel Coward bit?
For the next day or so we’ll have to hopscotch around the internet to avoid those freshly-dropped turds of supposed comedy and wit all the assclowns, dimwits, and booger-eating morons have left for us like unwanted casseroles on the occasion of a dead relative.
Uh... thanks. You shouldn’t have. Really.
April 2 is always one of my favorite days of the year, as it means that April Fools’ day is now another full year away, and we can get back to the serious business of pie fights and pratfalls.
So watch out for the mouth-breathers... they're out roaming in great slobbering dull-eyed herds today.
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a tough crowd of one B
Me? Take a wild guess.
For my money, the sort of person who would get crazy into April Fools is probably also the sort who thinks rubber vomit is comic brilliance, the sort of guy who finds knock-knock jokes bladder-burstingly funny, that type of gal who considers a talking birthday card witty and amusing.
I’m not begrudging anyone a desire to seem funny or a desire to join the human circus parade if only for a day. What bugs me is the odd notion that [1] somehow April Fools’ rates special effort and attention, and [2] that pretty much any effort—no matter how lame and clichéd and downright un-funny—deserves kudos. It’s as if at some point we circled the first of April on the calendar and made it a special day where non-funny people are given a free pass, and we collectively give them all the same gold star for effort as if we are in some cosmic pre-school class.
Puh-lease. It all just makes my sphincter pucker, and I think we all understand the discomfort of a white-knuckled sphincter.
Fake news headlines. Fake notice sent to friends and co-workers. The always-original “loosen the top of the salt shaker so that the next loser ruins his meal!” gag. That last one surely got old while pterodactyls still darkened the skies, and likely gave rise to the “crotch-shot” as a comedic chestnut:
SCENE: A CAVE IN THE PLEISTOCENE
Two Neanderthals hunker together. FIRST NEANDERTHAL readies to eat a drumstick the size of collie. He produces a small silver-topped SALT SHAKER to season his meal. As he sprinkles, the top falls off, dumping a quarter cup of salt onto the meat.
SECOND NEANDERTHAL points and laughs, clearly the mastermind of this brilliant gag.
First Neanderthal looks at the salt, dismayed, then glares at his laughing friend, pissed as hell. First Neanderthal fumes for only a moment before he jams the huge drumstick right into laughing Second Neanderthal’s private bits. Hard.
Second Neanderthal gasps, gags, rolls into a fetal ball and whimpers, suddering and shivering at the echoing aftershocks of History's first great intentional ball-shot.
First Neanderthal chuckles once, then starts laughing. He points at his suffering cavemate and absolutely convulses with laughter.
Still fetal-balled, second Neanderthal starts giggling, too, then ramps his laughter into wild convulsive fits, too.
First Neanderthal gathers himself, still laughing, again rams the huge meaty leg-bone into his pal’s nuggets, and howls with even louder laughter. Second Neanderthal yelps with pain but also laughs at the undeniable brilliance of this amazing new joke.
Later that day, these two geniuses discover fire only to immediately burn down the Sahara Forest as they take turns lighting each other’s farts.
The date? April 1, 1 million BC.
I like gags and jokes and childish dirty tricks as much as anyone (OK—a lot more than most), but where and when did we decide to reserve a special day upon which to lower the bar to such a pathetic and sad low level that “Pull My Finger” now seems like a Noel Coward bit?
For the next day or so we’ll have to hopscotch around the internet to avoid those freshly-dropped turds of supposed comedy and wit all the assclowns, dimwits, and booger-eating morons have left for us like unwanted casseroles on the occasion of a dead relative.
Uh... thanks. You shouldn’t have. Really.
April 2 is always one of my favorite days of the year, as it means that April Fools’ day is now another full year away, and we can get back to the serious business of pie fights and pratfalls.
So watch out for the mouth-breathers... they're out roaming in great slobbering dull-eyed herds today.
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a tough crowd of one B
22 March 2007
A Small Hollywood Adventure: Day 5 (LAX)
Wednesday I wake earlier than I’d expected, so I plod down to the “continental breakfast”, grab some coffee, yogurt, and a muffin, and come back to the room not long past sunrise to go over some more notes, add some thoughts and reflections to the commentary about the meetings and what was said and suggested, and also jot some outline notes for one of the projects I hope to bang out for the Paramount guy.
My flight isn’t scheduled to leave til mid-afternoon, but knowing the way LA traffic can snarl, I’m reluctant to try and schedule very much that last morning for fear that I’ll find myself screaming in a mad dash to get the rental car returned, shuttled to the airport, and checked in at LAX. I try to scare up a coffee date with a few different LA pals, but the half I can get in touch with are swamped at work, and the other half all seem MIA, out of town on personal or professional business.
Of course, that’s when I get in touch with Mr. Big Time Writer Pal via phone, and he groans when it becomes clear that I’ll not be able to hook up for a face to face on this trip—he now lives out in the hills an hour away from Hollywood, so a trek there would likely not be worth the time to get there given the crunch it would leave me in for the departure flight. We chat for ten or so minutes as he wants the details of the meetings, how it went, what good news if any I got. He seems happy enough and says “so, when do you come back?”
“Well, as soon as there’s undeniable reason, or this summer, whichever comes first.”
“Excellent. Well, let’s find a way to work it out when you come back.”
At that point I decide it’s too cool a day to spend it sitting in the hotel room, so I load up, check out, and head back through Hollywood to Larchmont Village, a cool little shopping district lined with cafes and coffeeshops. I throw the rental into a lot, find a window table at Peet’s Coffee, and set up to scribble notes and ideas.
I have to smile as I check my neighbors: to my right a middle-aged woman has a printed screenplay and is marking it up madly. To my left a guy on a cool white Powerbook G4 works on the summary to a new writing project. Through the window in front of me I can see over the shoulder of another guy in a silver MacBook Pro has Movie Magic open and is hammering away at a treatment for what I can clearly see titled “UNTITLED COLD FUSION PROJECT”.
LA, baybee.
I scribble ideas for the two Paramount projects, and I hear snippets of conversations from other tables: “… agent loved the new pages…” “ have a deadline tonight, so I need to get this treatment done…” “…yeah, her COLD CASE script aired last night—it was OK…”.
Suddenly I am reminded that all the whiny fuckers back home sitting at their keyboards lamenting the difficulty of getting something read or produced in H’wood really have little clue about the quantity and quality of the competition already on the ground locally out here. Ever third person you encounter seems either a writer or connected to one somehow, and everywhere there is the manic slightly desperate electric crackle of People Chasing The Dream.
On the one hand it’s humbling to consider just how many damned scripts and ideas are splashing against the cliffs of Island Hollywood, but on the other, I have to smile and take some comfort in the fact that I’m here, now, rolling thee same dice these guys are, and there’s nothing I’ve yet seen that makes me think I am any less likely or less qualified to claim some lucky break than is anyone else I encounter in this chase.
“Survival is victory. Let the other guy quit, and let tireless endurance be your strength…”
I spend a little more than an hour writing and watching, and then I decide to start wandering south toward LAX. Down to Wilshire. Over to La Cienega. Down past the 405 to drop off the rental, then a quick shuttle bus ride to LAX and the counter for Continental. Somehow I catch every light, and encounter none of the traffic I expect, and I wind up at LAX almost a full hour ahead of my anticipated ETA. When I check in I find my flight delayed by an hour, meaning I now have a three hour wait in the terminal.
I hear from one or two LA friends saying sayonara and wishing me well. It’s good to hear their voices, as these are friends whom I love dearly but get to see maybe twice a year—when I travel to LA or they come to Austin for the screenwriter’s conference. We stay in touch online via email and chat, but somehow that often only makes the dull ache of missing them that much worse: to know that they are that close, and that far.
When I try to explain these odd feelings to my wife or my other ‘real world” friends, I’m not sure they truly understand what I mean, what this feeling is. I have other friends that I seldom see—old college roommates, former neighbors, relatives—but those are not people who are fighting this same odd dragons. Writing and screenwriting most especially—is often a lonely business.
Freelancing locally is one thing, but at least there the clients and the peers are within sight and understanding. In screenwriting, if you’re not in LA, you’re largely out of mind for many purposes and events. Swinging through LA for 3 or 4 days is both exhilarating and depressing, as I am momentarily am riding the beast itself, part off the same whirlwind of possibility, but I also have to live with the understanding that at the end of these cool wild exciting days, there is that moment when I will wake up, and I will be back in the real world, where Hollywood—that oddly surreal world where everyone is playing that same game, where everyone totes around an Apple laptop and understands what it means to wrestle with second act difficulties, and every café might put you next to Quentin Tarantino or some other movie make believe character.
Here it the entire world believes in the same impossible magic every hour of every day. Here the sky remains eternally blue, and every jasmine breeze hints of dreams half a hair's breadth from turning real.
”Continental flight 594 offering non-stop service to Houston now boarding at gate 23A...”
And once again the clock strikes midnight, and Cinderella heads for home.
.
.
.
somewhere ‘tween Hollywood and H-town B
My flight isn’t scheduled to leave til mid-afternoon, but knowing the way LA traffic can snarl, I’m reluctant to try and schedule very much that last morning for fear that I’ll find myself screaming in a mad dash to get the rental car returned, shuttled to the airport, and checked in at LAX. I try to scare up a coffee date with a few different LA pals, but the half I can get in touch with are swamped at work, and the other half all seem MIA, out of town on personal or professional business.
Of course, that’s when I get in touch with Mr. Big Time Writer Pal via phone, and he groans when it becomes clear that I’ll not be able to hook up for a face to face on this trip—he now lives out in the hills an hour away from Hollywood, so a trek there would likely not be worth the time to get there given the crunch it would leave me in for the departure flight. We chat for ten or so minutes as he wants the details of the meetings, how it went, what good news if any I got. He seems happy enough and says “so, when do you come back?”
“Well, as soon as there’s undeniable reason, or this summer, whichever comes first.”
“Excellent. Well, let’s find a way to work it out when you come back.”
At that point I decide it’s too cool a day to spend it sitting in the hotel room, so I load up, check out, and head back through Hollywood to Larchmont Village, a cool little shopping district lined with cafes and coffeeshops. I throw the rental into a lot, find a window table at Peet’s Coffee, and set up to scribble notes and ideas.
I have to smile as I check my neighbors: to my right a middle-aged woman has a printed screenplay and is marking it up madly. To my left a guy on a cool white Powerbook G4 works on the summary to a new writing project. Through the window in front of me I can see over the shoulder of another guy in a silver MacBook Pro has Movie Magic open and is hammering away at a treatment for what I can clearly see titled “UNTITLED COLD FUSION PROJECT”.
LA, baybee.
I scribble ideas for the two Paramount projects, and I hear snippets of conversations from other tables: “… agent loved the new pages…” “ have a deadline tonight, so I need to get this treatment done…” “…yeah, her COLD CASE script aired last night—it was OK…”.
Suddenly I am reminded that all the whiny fuckers back home sitting at their keyboards lamenting the difficulty of getting something read or produced in H’wood really have little clue about the quantity and quality of the competition already on the ground locally out here. Ever third person you encounter seems either a writer or connected to one somehow, and everywhere there is the manic slightly desperate electric crackle of People Chasing The Dream.
On the one hand it’s humbling to consider just how many damned scripts and ideas are splashing against the cliffs of Island Hollywood, but on the other, I have to smile and take some comfort in the fact that I’m here, now, rolling thee same dice these guys are, and there’s nothing I’ve yet seen that makes me think I am any less likely or less qualified to claim some lucky break than is anyone else I encounter in this chase.
“Survival is victory. Let the other guy quit, and let tireless endurance be your strength…”
I spend a little more than an hour writing and watching, and then I decide to start wandering south toward LAX. Down to Wilshire. Over to La Cienega. Down past the 405 to drop off the rental, then a quick shuttle bus ride to LAX and the counter for Continental. Somehow I catch every light, and encounter none of the traffic I expect, and I wind up at LAX almost a full hour ahead of my anticipated ETA. When I check in I find my flight delayed by an hour, meaning I now have a three hour wait in the terminal.
I hear from one or two LA friends saying sayonara and wishing me well. It’s good to hear their voices, as these are friends whom I love dearly but get to see maybe twice a year—when I travel to LA or they come to Austin for the screenwriter’s conference. We stay in touch online via email and chat, but somehow that often only makes the dull ache of missing them that much worse: to know that they are that close, and that far.
When I try to explain these odd feelings to my wife or my other ‘real world” friends, I’m not sure they truly understand what I mean, what this feeling is. I have other friends that I seldom see—old college roommates, former neighbors, relatives—but those are not people who are fighting this same odd dragons. Writing and screenwriting most especially—is often a lonely business.
Freelancing locally is one thing, but at least there the clients and the peers are within sight and understanding. In screenwriting, if you’re not in LA, you’re largely out of mind for many purposes and events. Swinging through LA for 3 or 4 days is both exhilarating and depressing, as I am momentarily am riding the beast itself, part off the same whirlwind of possibility, but I also have to live with the understanding that at the end of these cool wild exciting days, there is that moment when I will wake up, and I will be back in the real world, where Hollywood—that oddly surreal world where everyone is playing that same game, where everyone totes around an Apple laptop and understands what it means to wrestle with second act difficulties, and every café might put you next to Quentin Tarantino or some other movie make believe character.
Here it the entire world believes in the same impossible magic every hour of every day. Here the sky remains eternally blue, and every jasmine breeze hints of dreams half a hair's breadth from turning real.
”Continental flight 594 offering non-stop service to Houston now boarding at gate 23A...”
And once again the clock strikes midnight, and Cinderella heads for home.
.
.
.
somewhere ‘tween Hollywood and H-town B
19 March 2007
A Small Hollywood Adventure: Day 4 (Hollywood, pt 2)
Tuesday… just another beautiful day in Hollywood.
I spent the morning making some calls, doing some writing, organizing some notes from the weekend so far, then at 11:30 I met a producer friend who’s now opened his own production company after working for a few years as an assistant with a respected indie producer. This guy is young, smart, eager, and (like pretty much everyone else in Hollywood) looking for financing.
That’s one of the aspects that seems lost when you frequent the discussion boards dedicated to screenwriting. There you’d believe that the problem in Hollywood is some tragic shortage of Good Ideas, when the truth is there are a tremendous number of great ideas circulating at any given moment in Hollywood. What’s in short supply is the capital—both financial and emotional—to get it made.
Again, I remain impressed that pretty much every Hollywood player I’ve yet encountered over the course of the last three or four years push to get into the game has been very smart and very eager to make good product, but the game is stacked in such a way that it’s ridiculously difficult to get any movie made, and it’s just short of impossible to get a good movie made. The odds of a great movie are so slim, so tight, that I’m pretty sure a mathematical proof could be offered to prove the feat downright impossible.
The producer and I talk about his bizarre yet not especially rare difficulties of independent producers: developing relationships which translate into forward progress, finding material worth committing to, securing adequate financing, etc. He goes on to give a few vague specific details about the way financing can seem to be there, then suddenly evaporate and disappear instantly. I ask about current projects he’s looking at, and he mentions a few that seem interesting, including one where he says he loves the story and the characters, but think the dialog and writing could use a little sprucing up—an injection of sharper more smart-alecky humor. I just smile, stare into the distance and rub my chin, thoughtfully.
“It’s a shame that there’s not some guy… maybe some pudgy pissy Texan whom you met in Austin… who might have some abilities in this specific area....”
He rubs his chin and stares into the same vague distance.
“Yeah... but where would I find such a guy....”
Seriousness then returns to the conversation like swallows to Capistrano. He mentions some cool possibilities lingering just around the potential bend, things which might start to fall into place as early as his next meeting. Some of these possibilities seem potentially interesting and useful for yours truly. We both try to act as though we're not excited by the possibilities, and we're both sure that we've done a better job than the other guy at the table.
He also repeats some very kind things about a script he read from me some months back, one which is (for budgetary reasons) far beyond his capabilities and usefulness for now. We talk about various market forces and trends which might be helping this script’s cause (eventually), as well as some possible ways to make the piece slightly more bankable and commercially viable.
He’s a great guy and has been a loyal and supportive fan of my writing since we met a year ago, and I can only hope and pray that he does find the financing he needs, as there seems clear potential for such a development to have trickle-down benefits for your intrepid narrator.
From there I scoot down to Wilshire to do lunch with another young producer friend. We talk about the strengths and weaknesses of movies we’ve seen recently, and we also talk about what sorts of projects seem most lacking in the market, and what sorts of things writers might best put their efforts into. This was not so much about pitching as it was developing a better rapport with this producer, a guy I deeply respect and admire.
I honestly have no idea if I have anything in my near-term inventory which might interest him, as he seems to like various genres of movies I’m less thrilled by, but “one cannot have too many friends,” especially in Hollywood, a business built almost entirely upon relationships. I know if I ever came up with an idea in his “sweet spot” that he’d be perfectly open to giving me a read, and I also know that this guy is a very sharp cookie whose career is very much on the upswing, so again, my task at this point is to maintain at least the appearance of competence and intelligence.
Shaddup.
Toodling back across Hollywood, I touch base with Deb, another good friend self-producing her own script, and she says “come on by!” So I swing back to the Valley and stop off at her house where she’s prepping to have auditions for the teenaged leads for her movie. She insists that I hang around, so I make a few calls while she starts the auditions, and I wind up watching the last few girls run their lines.
It’s an interesting process, as I am amazed at the odd take some of the girls have for what appears to be the obvious emotional core of the various scenes. Lines that seem like they should be loud and ragged come out as whispered and halting, while lines that might carry more impact if delivered slowly and haltingly come out rushed and blurry. I ain’t no actor, but I ain’t no doorknob, neither, so these performance choices are something interesting to behold.
Some of the girls have their moms with them, while others (the older ones trying to “play” young for the role) come unescorted. As a parent, I am half-amazed at how it works: young girls walking into some stranger’s house in a neighborhood in an semi-suburban LA neighborhood, eager to read lines from a script from a writer they’ve never heard of for a movie which as yet has no financing or studio support. It all sounds like the set-up for either a bad horror movie or an even worse porno movie.
After the last of the auditions, we decide to roll back into Hollywood and grab some dinner at Lucy’s, a really cool old-school Mexican restaurant on Melrose just across from the front gates of Paramount. Good pal Steve Barr had said he’d hook up with me late at night for a last chance beer, so he shows up around 9:30, moments before Quentin Tarantino wanders in (wearing a new GRINDHOUSE promo t-shirt in a lovely bit quaint self-promotion). Tarantino sits two tables away to our side (he ate a chicken taco and a coke, for those scoring at home…), while Steve and Deb and I talked about movies and screenwriting and the rules of zombies and the way some people never seem to wrap their minds about the level and sort of work required to actually make a serious go of screenwriting.
I've said it before: one of the toughest parts of trying to break in to Hollywood from afar is the near-overwhelming sense of isolation and loneliness to that quest. For those of us compelled to fight the fight from such far-flung foxholes as Houston anbd Atlanta and Orlando and London, it can be a painful thing to again confront the notion that there are worlds out there where almost everyone understands what you are chasing. In Hollywood I can go for a plate of enchiladas and a beer at some cool unpretentious mexican dive, and in walks Quentin fuckin Tarantino as we oh-so-casually talk about our meetings at Paramount and the latest from our lawyers and how our auditions went and who just took our latest reqrite for a read. Suddenly that Impossible Dream seems a lot less impossible, and a lot less dream like. here, it's possible, and it's real, and it's the thing that normal people talk about in normal conversation.
Back in the real world of hearth and home and kids and cats and lawn care and such, such talk is like spinning fairy tales to children: people are interested to the extent they can comprehend and are willing to suspend their naive ignorant disbelief, but for them Hollywood—as both a physical place and a euphemism for an actual working career—might as well be Never Never Land or some mystical fantasy kingdom from tale involving knights and dragons and wizards. I'm not sure my friends in LA fully understand just how painful it is to have only brief taunting tastes of this alternative reality where people actually do talk about the movies not solely as entertainment but as an actual vocation, where this quest seems less quaintly quixotic.
After too few hours of beer-fueled chatter, we say goodbye to Steve and head back to Deb’s house to retrieve my car. There I check e-mail and find that Mr. Bigtime Pro Writer Buddy finally deigned to respond to my emails about being in town, and at 10:30 that last evening in LA he’d finally emailed his cell number, but by the time I see this info it’s just after midnight and I can’t bring myself to actually call at that hour (call me old-fashioned, but I’d prefer my first call to the guy not to interrupt anything he’d prefer not be interrupted…), so I hug Deb and head back down the Hollywood Freeway to my cool little room, open the door and find that same jasmine-scented fragrance drifting through my open window.
”Where have ya been, baby?” the scent of Hollywood whispers. “I’ve missed you....”
Reluctant to collapse into bed just yet and let this sensation pass, I instead sit at the window and write for another two hours as the curtains sway on the cinnamon breeze....
.
.
.
B
I spent the morning making some calls, doing some writing, organizing some notes from the weekend so far, then at 11:30 I met a producer friend who’s now opened his own production company after working for a few years as an assistant with a respected indie producer. This guy is young, smart, eager, and (like pretty much everyone else in Hollywood) looking for financing.
That’s one of the aspects that seems lost when you frequent the discussion boards dedicated to screenwriting. There you’d believe that the problem in Hollywood is some tragic shortage of Good Ideas, when the truth is there are a tremendous number of great ideas circulating at any given moment in Hollywood. What’s in short supply is the capital—both financial and emotional—to get it made.
Again, I remain impressed that pretty much every Hollywood player I’ve yet encountered over the course of the last three or four years push to get into the game has been very smart and very eager to make good product, but the game is stacked in such a way that it’s ridiculously difficult to get any movie made, and it’s just short of impossible to get a good movie made. The odds of a great movie are so slim, so tight, that I’m pretty sure a mathematical proof could be offered to prove the feat downright impossible.
The producer and I talk about his bizarre yet not especially rare difficulties of independent producers: developing relationships which translate into forward progress, finding material worth committing to, securing adequate financing, etc. He goes on to give a few vague specific details about the way financing can seem to be there, then suddenly evaporate and disappear instantly. I ask about current projects he’s looking at, and he mentions a few that seem interesting, including one where he says he loves the story and the characters, but think the dialog and writing could use a little sprucing up—an injection of sharper more smart-alecky humor. I just smile, stare into the distance and rub my chin, thoughtfully.
“It’s a shame that there’s not some guy… maybe some pudgy pissy Texan whom you met in Austin… who might have some abilities in this specific area....”
He rubs his chin and stares into the same vague distance.
“Yeah... but where would I find such a guy....”
Seriousness then returns to the conversation like swallows to Capistrano. He mentions some cool possibilities lingering just around the potential bend, things which might start to fall into place as early as his next meeting. Some of these possibilities seem potentially interesting and useful for yours truly. We both try to act as though we're not excited by the possibilities, and we're both sure that we've done a better job than the other guy at the table.
He also repeats some very kind things about a script he read from me some months back, one which is (for budgetary reasons) far beyond his capabilities and usefulness for now. We talk about various market forces and trends which might be helping this script’s cause (eventually), as well as some possible ways to make the piece slightly more bankable and commercially viable.
He’s a great guy and has been a loyal and supportive fan of my writing since we met a year ago, and I can only hope and pray that he does find the financing he needs, as there seems clear potential for such a development to have trickle-down benefits for your intrepid narrator.
From there I scoot down to Wilshire to do lunch with another young producer friend. We talk about the strengths and weaknesses of movies we’ve seen recently, and we also talk about what sorts of projects seem most lacking in the market, and what sorts of things writers might best put their efforts into. This was not so much about pitching as it was developing a better rapport with this producer, a guy I deeply respect and admire.
I honestly have no idea if I have anything in my near-term inventory which might interest him, as he seems to like various genres of movies I’m less thrilled by, but “one cannot have too many friends,” especially in Hollywood, a business built almost entirely upon relationships. I know if I ever came up with an idea in his “sweet spot” that he’d be perfectly open to giving me a read, and I also know that this guy is a very sharp cookie whose career is very much on the upswing, so again, my task at this point is to maintain at least the appearance of competence and intelligence.
Shaddup.
Toodling back across Hollywood, I touch base with Deb, another good friend self-producing her own script, and she says “come on by!” So I swing back to the Valley and stop off at her house where she’s prepping to have auditions for the teenaged leads for her movie. She insists that I hang around, so I make a few calls while she starts the auditions, and I wind up watching the last few girls run their lines.
It’s an interesting process, as I am amazed at the odd take some of the girls have for what appears to be the obvious emotional core of the various scenes. Lines that seem like they should be loud and ragged come out as whispered and halting, while lines that might carry more impact if delivered slowly and haltingly come out rushed and blurry. I ain’t no actor, but I ain’t no doorknob, neither, so these performance choices are something interesting to behold.
Some of the girls have their moms with them, while others (the older ones trying to “play” young for the role) come unescorted. As a parent, I am half-amazed at how it works: young girls walking into some stranger’s house in a neighborhood in an semi-suburban LA neighborhood, eager to read lines from a script from a writer they’ve never heard of for a movie which as yet has no financing or studio support. It all sounds like the set-up for either a bad horror movie or an even worse porno movie.
After the last of the auditions, we decide to roll back into Hollywood and grab some dinner at Lucy’s, a really cool old-school Mexican restaurant on Melrose just across from the front gates of Paramount. Good pal Steve Barr had said he’d hook up with me late at night for a last chance beer, so he shows up around 9:30, moments before Quentin Tarantino wanders in (wearing a new GRINDHOUSE promo t-shirt in a lovely bit quaint self-promotion). Tarantino sits two tables away to our side (he ate a chicken taco and a coke, for those scoring at home…), while Steve and Deb and I talked about movies and screenwriting and the rules of zombies and the way some people never seem to wrap their minds about the level and sort of work required to actually make a serious go of screenwriting.
I've said it before: one of the toughest parts of trying to break in to Hollywood from afar is the near-overwhelming sense of isolation and loneliness to that quest. For those of us compelled to fight the fight from such far-flung foxholes as Houston anbd Atlanta and Orlando and London, it can be a painful thing to again confront the notion that there are worlds out there where almost everyone understands what you are chasing. In Hollywood I can go for a plate of enchiladas and a beer at some cool unpretentious mexican dive, and in walks Quentin fuckin Tarantino as we oh-so-casually talk about our meetings at Paramount and the latest from our lawyers and how our auditions went and who just took our latest reqrite for a read. Suddenly that Impossible Dream seems a lot less impossible, and a lot less dream like. here, it's possible, and it's real, and it's the thing that normal people talk about in normal conversation.
Back in the real world of hearth and home and kids and cats and lawn care and such, such talk is like spinning fairy tales to children: people are interested to the extent they can comprehend and are willing to suspend their naive ignorant disbelief, but for them Hollywood—as both a physical place and a euphemism for an actual working career—might as well be Never Never Land or some mystical fantasy kingdom from tale involving knights and dragons and wizards. I'm not sure my friends in LA fully understand just how painful it is to have only brief taunting tastes of this alternative reality where people actually do talk about the movies not solely as entertainment but as an actual vocation, where this quest seems less quaintly quixotic.
After too few hours of beer-fueled chatter, we say goodbye to Steve and head back to Deb’s house to retrieve my car. There I check e-mail and find that Mr. Bigtime Pro Writer Buddy finally deigned to respond to my emails about being in town, and at 10:30 that last evening in LA he’d finally emailed his cell number, but by the time I see this info it’s just after midnight and I can’t bring myself to actually call at that hour (call me old-fashioned, but I’d prefer my first call to the guy not to interrupt anything he’d prefer not be interrupted…), so I hug Deb and head back down the Hollywood Freeway to my cool little room, open the door and find that same jasmine-scented fragrance drifting through my open window.
”Where have ya been, baby?” the scent of Hollywood whispers. “I’ve missed you....”
Reluctant to collapse into bed just yet and let this sensation pass, I instead sit at the window and write for another two hours as the curtains sway on the cinnamon breeze....
.
.
.
B
16 March 2007
A Small Hollywood Adventure: Day 2-3 (Hollywood)
SUNDAY
I manage three beautiful hours of inebriated slumber before I have to wake and leave. Remember, kids: at dawn I’m passed out in Austin, and my flight for LAX leaves from Houston sometime just past noon, so I shower, shave, pack up and leave as Ronson sleeps soundly and peacefully.
Bastard.
I’m not so much “hung over” as “still lit” from the night before, so the drive east to Houston is hazy and vague in my memory. I stop twice to wander around convenience stores and suck back truly awful coffee. Still, I make good time, suffer no accidents, and slide into the economy lot at Bush Intercontinental right on time. I check in, grab a Starbucks (thank god), then use the half hour of slack time to call The Wife and a few friends as I stand, bleary eyed yett giddy, waiting to board.
The flight seems over in an instant, as I sleep nearly the entire way. I turn on my phone as we sit on the tarmac, waiting to hook up with the jetway at LAX, and suddenly “ping ping ping” I have voicemails piling in. NINE voicemails, almost all from LA people wanting to know if I am in fact in town.
I grab my luggage which seems among the first pieces off the plane, hop onto the waiting shuttle idling outside the door, walk right up to the Enterprise rental counter and get upgraded to a mid-size at no extra charge. I crank the tunes, drop the shades and roll up La Cienega towards Hollywood.
Cuz I’m MONEY, baybee.
I call Joe Conway and we laugh that he’s in Austin, looking for anyone to talk to, while I’m in LA hooking up with producers and directors and starlets oh my. We agree that it must be some sort of FREAKY FRIDAY life-switching thing at work.
I’m talking to Warren “The Screenwriting Life” Leonard when I sail right past the almost hidden entrance to my hotel—it’s not entirely like the entrance to the Batcave on the old Adam West TV show. I check in, find my surprisingly nice and surprisingly large room, and take surprisingly nice nap for an hour before it’s time to get cleaned up for the first of my scheduled LA events: the “Martellopalooza” party for Big Bill Martell, who is celebrating the DVD release of his 19th and 20th features.
There I hook up with several of my LA writer pals—Martell, Steve Barr, Susan Bays, Danny Grossman, Tiny Joey Jingleheimer Schmidt Anderson and others I know from online chatter. I finally meet longtime e-pal Karen Sperling, who somehow has finagled her way into NYC gallery showing for her artwork and thus is far too talented for this room. Karen smiles, shakes my hand, and says "you seem... quieter than I expected based upon your online persona."
"That's because my online persona is not usually sleep-deprived, alcohol-saturated, and jet-lagged. I'll be up to speed in a beer or two."
We laugh through Bill’s abusive color commentary on his new features as they roll on the big screen TV at Lola’s Restaurant. I have a beer, eat some brie, have some more beer, then order a burger.
I wander around and chat with my pals, but dammit I somehow still wind up locked in conversation with a gorgeous young woman (this one blonde)—Elizabeth Hoffman, originally from Dallas but now an LA gal with a USC diploma and a minor acting credits to her name. She’s there cuz she’s been in a few of the SoCal film groups shorts, and cuz LA is a town where it never hurts to mix and mingle with people who might be going somewhere.
At one point I look up and notice one of my buddies (a female) smirking playfully at me as I make time with Miss Blonde Thang. I just shrug and smile. “So sue me—I love talking to gorgeous women. It’s fun.”
We hang out til 11 pm or so, but since it’s a SUNDAY night and some people have jobs to go to that next day (apparently they lack both the testicular fortitude and gritty frontier spirit to push on in the stark absence of rest and sleep…), we end the night at a reasonable hour, and I am in bed before midnight for the first time in weeks.
The curtains slow dance in a slight breeze, and that odd scent whispers to me as I fade away to the sounds of Hollywood.
-=-=-
MONDAY
I sleep in the next day, rising around 8:30 and feeling more than a little refreshed. I check messages, make some calls, and agree to meet pals Susan over at Larchmont Village for coffee and whatever. Again I love this hotel’s location, as I get to my Hollywood destination in under 15 minutes, grab a coffee and then sit outside to watch the weirdly pretty LA people wander past. 80% off the men here seem to cut their own hair (or, more likely, overpay badly for a cut they could duplicate at home), resorting to the all-over #1 clipper cut popularized by Jean-Luc Picard.
Suz and I have some fun convo, and then she has to get to work, so I call up pal Deb Cheshire and say “amuse me for an hour, OK?” She says “well, let me put on some clothes first,” and then I say something rude, and she responds with more rudeness, and this is how it goes, so I drive over to her place and we sit around talking movies and producers and laughing as I say awful things about nice people and nice things about awful people and then it’s time for me to leave.
I swing by the Batcave Motel, freshen up, grab a clean cool shirt, and ten til 3 I’m pulling through the front gates of Paramount and giggling: “I am driving through the gates of Paramount for a meeting.”
I’ve seen other studio and production complexes, but Paramount just seems like what a studio entrance is supposed to look like, likely because these same damned gates have been featured in movies from the silent era through the Bob Hope years and then through the Beverly Hillbillies and on to the present: somehow they just LOOK like the Hollywood you imagine.
I bebop around the small city off tan buildings and palm trees and brick-paved walkways and find my way back to the corner where MTV Films is sequestered and walk in to meet with Luke Ryan, VP of Production for MTV Films. I've had some email relations with Ryan since well before his move to MTV, still the hows and whys of this meeting still baffle me a bit, prompting me to ask “so explain—exactly why the hell ARE you seeing me?”
Ryan and I have a very cool and interesting hour long session, and we discuss the sorts of things he’s most interested in seeing in script form, and we toss back and forth some very ragged ideas about some of them, and given that he laughed when appropriate and never once faked a heart attack or threw a stapler at me or whistled for security, I come away with the impression that perhaps he didn’t totally hate and despise me, which is a nice thing. He says “you do have all my contact info, right?” and I say “likely, but if you have a card I’d be happier to have it than to find later that I need it.”
“I’ll be in touch,” I say. “Excellent,” he says. “I’m looking forward to it.”
As I stop at the security checkpoint on my way out, the young uniformed guy checks me off his day-pass list, and smiles. "Good meeting?"
"Yeah," I smile back. "Good meeting." Realistically, there was no chance that I was going to enter Paramount's gates a stranger and leave with a paying gig under my arm, so I managed to accomplish all I had a hope to accomplish: I met the guy, we connected, I made him laugh, we found some common ground, and we had a good anjoyable never-dragging hour-long discussion about what I might do to help him make more movies and more money, and at the end he made it clear that we could and would continue talking in the future. I remember one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite movies, and I smile: in THE RIGHT STUFF, Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn) sits on the launchpad and utters what I've heard called "The Test Pilot's Prayer:"
"Dear Lord, please don't let me fuck up."
Amen.
While toodling back through Hollywood I’m back to working the cellphone, and I manage to firm up another pair of meetings for Tuesday, so suddenly the trip is starting feel like an actual working trip rather than just some frivolous waste of money exercise in pretend.
Monday evening is a bit odd—everyone in LA whom I’d be interested in hanging out with is occupied elsewhere, and I can’t quite bring myself to just sitting in my room, so I go for a drive and wind up remembering how good a good rock station can be (Houston radio sucks, while LA gets the legendary KROQ 24/7, and life remains unfair).
I toy with the idea of going to see “300,” but I can’t find a theater where it’s showing at a time which makes sense, so I just drive around Hollywood and then over the hill on Mulholland and around Universal City and back up Cahuenga and I grab a burger from some little mom and pop place where I sit alone and marvel how some place can at once seem so familiar and welcoming yet at the same time so damned alien.
A mom comes in with her son dressed in a Cub Scout uniform, and I think of my own sons back home and suddenly feel a pang of homesickness, and I wonder what will happen if one day one of these odd trips to LA blows up into something real: an assignment, an option, a sale, a career. For now this place remains interesting and exciting and exotic, but if ever it became “home”—even if only temporarily—how would I survive that change? Would I even want to try? It's a strange dichotomy: while here, I feel at home, but this place is nothing like home, and I can’t really imagine what life for my family might be if we were compelled by finances and circumstance to relocate.
It’s the one aspect of the whole Hollywood Question which remains unpleasant and not at all fun to consider. The rest is pretty damned interesting and attractive.
Back in my hotel room I sit at the desk with the window open, and that weird jasmine scented breeze keeps teasing me, and once again that gorgeous woman touches with a smile and leaves me to wonder about all those things which might be....
.
.
.
B
I manage three beautiful hours of inebriated slumber before I have to wake and leave. Remember, kids: at dawn I’m passed out in Austin, and my flight for LAX leaves from Houston sometime just past noon, so I shower, shave, pack up and leave as Ronson sleeps soundly and peacefully.
Bastard.
I’m not so much “hung over” as “still lit” from the night before, so the drive east to Houston is hazy and vague in my memory. I stop twice to wander around convenience stores and suck back truly awful coffee. Still, I make good time, suffer no accidents, and slide into the economy lot at Bush Intercontinental right on time. I check in, grab a Starbucks (thank god), then use the half hour of slack time to call The Wife and a few friends as I stand, bleary eyed yett giddy, waiting to board.
The flight seems over in an instant, as I sleep nearly the entire way. I turn on my phone as we sit on the tarmac, waiting to hook up with the jetway at LAX, and suddenly “ping ping ping” I have voicemails piling in. NINE voicemails, almost all from LA people wanting to know if I am in fact in town.
I grab my luggage which seems among the first pieces off the plane, hop onto the waiting shuttle idling outside the door, walk right up to the Enterprise rental counter and get upgraded to a mid-size at no extra charge. I crank the tunes, drop the shades and roll up La Cienega towards Hollywood.
Cuz I’m MONEY, baybee.
I call Joe Conway and we laugh that he’s in Austin, looking for anyone to talk to, while I’m in LA hooking up with producers and directors and starlets oh my. We agree that it must be some sort of FREAKY FRIDAY life-switching thing at work.
I’m talking to Warren “The Screenwriting Life” Leonard when I sail right past the almost hidden entrance to my hotel—it’s not entirely like the entrance to the Batcave on the old Adam West TV show. I check in, find my surprisingly nice and surprisingly large room, and take surprisingly nice nap for an hour before it’s time to get cleaned up for the first of my scheduled LA events: the “Martellopalooza” party for Big Bill Martell, who is celebrating the DVD release of his 19th and 20th features.
There I hook up with several of my LA writer pals—Martell, Steve Barr, Susan Bays, Danny Grossman, Tiny Joey Jingleheimer Schmidt Anderson and others I know from online chatter. I finally meet longtime e-pal Karen Sperling, who somehow has finagled her way into NYC gallery showing for her artwork and thus is far too talented for this room. Karen smiles, shakes my hand, and says "you seem... quieter than I expected based upon your online persona."
"That's because my online persona is not usually sleep-deprived, alcohol-saturated, and jet-lagged. I'll be up to speed in a beer or two."
We laugh through Bill’s abusive color commentary on his new features as they roll on the big screen TV at Lola’s Restaurant. I have a beer, eat some brie, have some more beer, then order a burger.
I wander around and chat with my pals, but dammit I somehow still wind up locked in conversation with a gorgeous young woman (this one blonde)—Elizabeth Hoffman, originally from Dallas but now an LA gal with a USC diploma and a minor acting credits to her name. She’s there cuz she’s been in a few of the SoCal film groups shorts, and cuz LA is a town where it never hurts to mix and mingle with people who might be going somewhere.
At one point I look up and notice one of my buddies (a female) smirking playfully at me as I make time with Miss Blonde Thang. I just shrug and smile. “So sue me—I love talking to gorgeous women. It’s fun.”
We hang out til 11 pm or so, but since it’s a SUNDAY night and some people have jobs to go to that next day (apparently they lack both the testicular fortitude and gritty frontier spirit to push on in the stark absence of rest and sleep…), we end the night at a reasonable hour, and I am in bed before midnight for the first time in weeks.
The curtains slow dance in a slight breeze, and that odd scent whispers to me as I fade away to the sounds of Hollywood.
-=-=-
MONDAY
I sleep in the next day, rising around 8:30 and feeling more than a little refreshed. I check messages, make some calls, and agree to meet pals Susan over at Larchmont Village for coffee and whatever. Again I love this hotel’s location, as I get to my Hollywood destination in under 15 minutes, grab a coffee and then sit outside to watch the weirdly pretty LA people wander past. 80% off the men here seem to cut their own hair (or, more likely, overpay badly for a cut they could duplicate at home), resorting to the all-over #1 clipper cut popularized by Jean-Luc Picard.
Suz and I have some fun convo, and then she has to get to work, so I call up pal Deb Cheshire and say “amuse me for an hour, OK?” She says “well, let me put on some clothes first,” and then I say something rude, and she responds with more rudeness, and this is how it goes, so I drive over to her place and we sit around talking movies and producers and laughing as I say awful things about nice people and nice things about awful people and then it’s time for me to leave.
I swing by the Batcave Motel, freshen up, grab a clean cool shirt, and ten til 3 I’m pulling through the front gates of Paramount and giggling: “I am driving through the gates of Paramount for a meeting.”
I’ve seen other studio and production complexes, but Paramount just seems like what a studio entrance is supposed to look like, likely because these same damned gates have been featured in movies from the silent era through the Bob Hope years and then through the Beverly Hillbillies and on to the present: somehow they just LOOK like the Hollywood you imagine.
I bebop around the small city off tan buildings and palm trees and brick-paved walkways and find my way back to the corner where MTV Films is sequestered and walk in to meet with Luke Ryan, VP of Production for MTV Films. I've had some email relations with Ryan since well before his move to MTV, still the hows and whys of this meeting still baffle me a bit, prompting me to ask “so explain—exactly why the hell ARE you seeing me?”
Ryan and I have a very cool and interesting hour long session, and we discuss the sorts of things he’s most interested in seeing in script form, and we toss back and forth some very ragged ideas about some of them, and given that he laughed when appropriate and never once faked a heart attack or threw a stapler at me or whistled for security, I come away with the impression that perhaps he didn’t totally hate and despise me, which is a nice thing. He says “you do have all my contact info, right?” and I say “likely, but if you have a card I’d be happier to have it than to find later that I need it.”
“I’ll be in touch,” I say. “Excellent,” he says. “I’m looking forward to it.”
As I stop at the security checkpoint on my way out, the young uniformed guy checks me off his day-pass list, and smiles. "Good meeting?"
"Yeah," I smile back. "Good meeting." Realistically, there was no chance that I was going to enter Paramount's gates a stranger and leave with a paying gig under my arm, so I managed to accomplish all I had a hope to accomplish: I met the guy, we connected, I made him laugh, we found some common ground, and we had a good anjoyable never-dragging hour-long discussion about what I might do to help him make more movies and more money, and at the end he made it clear that we could and would continue talking in the future. I remember one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite movies, and I smile: in THE RIGHT STUFF, Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn) sits on the launchpad and utters what I've heard called "The Test Pilot's Prayer:"
"Dear Lord, please don't let me fuck up."
Amen.
While toodling back through Hollywood I’m back to working the cellphone, and I manage to firm up another pair of meetings for Tuesday, so suddenly the trip is starting feel like an actual working trip rather than just some frivolous waste of money exercise in pretend.
Monday evening is a bit odd—everyone in LA whom I’d be interested in hanging out with is occupied elsewhere, and I can’t quite bring myself to just sitting in my room, so I go for a drive and wind up remembering how good a good rock station can be (Houston radio sucks, while LA gets the legendary KROQ 24/7, and life remains unfair).
I toy with the idea of going to see “300,” but I can’t find a theater where it’s showing at a time which makes sense, so I just drive around Hollywood and then over the hill on Mulholland and around Universal City and back up Cahuenga and I grab a burger from some little mom and pop place where I sit alone and marvel how some place can at once seem so familiar and welcoming yet at the same time so damned alien.
A mom comes in with her son dressed in a Cub Scout uniform, and I think of my own sons back home and suddenly feel a pang of homesickness, and I wonder what will happen if one day one of these odd trips to LA blows up into something real: an assignment, an option, a sale, a career. For now this place remains interesting and exciting and exotic, but if ever it became “home”—even if only temporarily—how would I survive that change? Would I even want to try? It's a strange dichotomy: while here, I feel at home, but this place is nothing like home, and I can’t really imagine what life for my family might be if we were compelled by finances and circumstance to relocate.
It’s the one aspect of the whole Hollywood Question which remains unpleasant and not at all fun to consider. The rest is pretty damned interesting and attractive.
Back in my hotel room I sit at the desk with the window open, and that weird jasmine scented breeze keeps teasing me, and once again that gorgeous woman touches with a smile and leaves me to wonder about all those things which might be....
.
.
.
B
15 March 2007
A Small Hollywood Adventure: Day 1 (Austin)
PROLOGUE
There’s something fundamentally odd about Hollywood: a faint stink of impossibly perfect non-reality wherever you turn. The cars are all fancier, the sky is always clear, the temperature is always 70 degrees—surely somewhere there sits a giant thermostat where the Lord of Hollywood adjusts things to keep them ever always just-so.
The hills are hillier. The rock station kicks the living hell out of the station back home. Even the bums seem bummier, as if they are the best applicants at some sort of “Central Bum Casting” where the finest bums come to strut their stuff.
I found a pretty cool hotel—cheap, but still clean, new, safe, quiet, and impossibly well-situated. Three blocks south of me sits the El Capitan Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, while a block the other way sits the Hollywood Bowl, and beyond that the easiest on-ramp in LA to the 101 Hollywood Freeway, giving easy access to Pasadena or the Valley.
The hotel is nothing the least bit fancy, yet even here there is a weirdly non-real bent to things: the courtyard and surrounding hillsides are covered by some sort of tree which fills the air with a bizarre scent that seems equal parts wisteria and cinnamon.
I’ve never smelled anything quite like it, yet I step out of my tras-fabo Kia rental sedan every day after meetings and again struck by this smell. That same happy chill/rush you get when a gorgeous woman “accidentally” brushes your am and looks back with a sly smile… that noticed-to-none-but-you wink that hints of great things available for the asking… my nose gets to experience every damned day.
What sort of town does this to a person?
-=-=-=-
SATURDAY
Saturday I awoke bright and early, packed my bags and drove west to Austin. At noon I hooked up with several film pals all at once: Jonathan King, a Kiwi filmmaker in Austin to host the US premiere of his new comedy-horror movie BLACK SHEEP, producer Keith Calder in town to oversee the TX premiere of his new teen thriller ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE, and writer Ronson Page whom I’ve known for years through online association and mutual friends.
We walk the five or six blocks over to Stubb’s BBQ to eat some burnt cow, and we laugh at the odd way things bring people together these days. I know Jonathan only through a very cool little online “club” of writers and producers. We’ve swapped comments and thoughts to each other (and other folks) on this discussion list for years, and I remember when he started talking about this idea for a “killer sheep” horror movie script. Now, a few years later, it’s a gorgeous reality, with FX from the WETA group of LOTR and KING KONG fame.
Calder, meanwhile, is also part of that group, and I am taken back to that afternoon a year and a half ago when, while at the Austin Film Festival, Keith mentioned that he was filming a little movie in Bastrop, a small town maybe 30 miles east of Austin. Now, 18 months later, here we are as he hosts a premiere for the movie.
Ronson, meanwhile, is another member of that group, and we’ve swapped mail and comments and insults for almost three years now, since just after he was a Nichol fellowship finalist. Since then he’s had two kids, and optioned two scripts, and will likely have me back in Austin within the next year or two to see one of HIS damned movies.
Lunch is great—Keith shows off a teaser from an incredible-looking new CG animation project his company is working on, while Jonathan regales with tales of audiences in Europe responding to his odd little New Zealander movie. King has to scoot for an appoint, but the rest of us decide to go find a place to kick back and chat, so we wind up slouched in the deliciously well-broken in leather sofas of the Driskill Hotel Bar, the HQ for the Austin Film Festival every year.
I can hardly count (or remember—same difference) the hours or beers I’ve enjoyed there over the past few years, but this afternoon was a tiny bit odd as suddenly we were the only people there. Instead of wall to wall bustle of writers and networking, it’s just our small group of 5 or 6 folks. We have a few beers, meet Brian Udovich, a co-producer on Mandy Lane, and then discover that Keith managed to score us comp passes to his movie.
With 90 minutes til showtime, Ronson and I decide it’s a good time to go find the EconoDump fleabag we’re sharing later that night, so off we go, and then we’re right back into Austin to start the night’s fun. We head to the Alamo Drafthouse South, one of several Alamo Drafthouse theaters, an idea so damned cool that it boggles the mind that they haven’t copied it everywhere. Instead of a normal theater, every alternate row of seats has been removed and replaced with a small bar-like table stocked with menus and notepads. You sit, order some grub and choose from the 30 or 40 beers they offer, and then sit back to watch a movie as you are served quietly during the flick. It’s a painfully civilized way to enjoy a movie.
Hanging around out front at the Alamo I see Joe Conway, a stupidly nice and stupidly talented writer from Austin now living and working in LA, except now he’s in Austin for the SXSW film festival (the reason for all this action). Joe and I had talked earlier in the week when I knew I was coming to LA, and we were bummed to find he’d be out of town. Til we figured out that he’d be in Austin. As would I. So here we are, and in another of those oddly incestuous arrangements which suggest that the world is in fact only 100 actual individual people, Joe has told me that he’s been trying to meet up with this producer named “Keith Calder.” I laugh and say “I’m there with Keith— I’ll hook you up, man.”
Joe laughs.
“I’M the produced writer, I’M the guy living and working in LA, yet YOU are the guy who seems to know everybody. How does that work?”
“I’m just a people person, man.”
Oh, how we laughed.
As it works out I am unable to hook Joe with Keith, as Keith is running around getting his movie set up to run, while the house is packed and Joe can’t get a seat for himself and his buddy, we say “we’ll hook up later.”
Of course, after MANDY LANE (very cool looking movie--- very impressive piece of producing) I am (ahem)) “marooned” at a cast and crew party where I spend an hour having a very fun conversation with Marissa, the painfully cute 19 year old girlfriend of one of the MANDY LANE stars (Michael Welch — "Emmet"). Marissa, as it turns out, is an assistant to an agent at Innovative Artists, and she also happens top be a dead ringer for the dark haired Meg Ryan from JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO, so of course I will listen to anything she has to say so long as she keeps smiling and keeps twinkling those eyes.
[Sigh.]
Lord, but I do love women.
[NOTE—I am extremely and happily married, and I have zero interest in any sort of dalliance or extra-curricular nonsense with any of these women, and I’m 99.999% sure that The Wife knows and understands this, so please don’t think that when I talk of other women in glowing terms that I am suggesting any desire or interest to engage in any sort of stupid behavior. I just like women. A lot.]
After this part we wander Stub’s again, this time late at night when they become a rocking music venue, and we laugh that Snow Patrol, of #1 hit “Chasing Cars” fame, is jamming out their signature hit. Ahhh… Austin.
We wander with Keith over to The Whiskey Bar on 4th Street where King’s distribution company is hosting a pre-show party. Posters for Black Sheep cover the walls, and that weird mish-mash of beautiful LA folks rubs elbows with the more raucous Austin contingent (it’s not just a simple cliché—Texas people really are louder and brasher than their snotty West Coast counterparts.)
We’re talking about the movie when I look back and notice actor Paul Rudd standing behind me, admiring a poster. Rudd is wearing a well-aged BOSTON concert T, so I ask “I have to know—is that just odd synchronicity or do you have enough snap to wear that for Brad?” (note--- Boston front man Brad Delp had just passed away the day before). He smiles and shakes my hand. "It's totally for Brad, man.” There I am chatting with Paul Rudd for a few minutes about the great voice of Brad Delp, about how many times we’ve both worn through the grooves on that first Boston release, and when Rudd asks “are you here for the movie?” I say “Well, sorta—I’m a writer pal of the director, so I’m here for him.”
Around then it’s time to head on over and get in line for BLACK SHEEP, but of course since we (Ronson and I) are on the director’s guest list, we get slipped in first. We manage to talk the doorman into letting our pal Keith Calder slide in with us, cuz yeah we have that kind of heavy-swinging pull in the movie biz.
Ahem.
BLACK SHEEP totally kicks ass—the packed theater (downtown Alamo Drafthouse) is raucous and laughing and cheering and screaming, and Calder even picks up the tab for my beer and fish tacos cuz he’s just that kind of guy. Jonathan charms the room with a quick Q&A session afterwards, we all cheer again, and then we wander back across Austin to find the garage where my car is stashed.
Along the way, we cross paths with Jonathan one last time, and he walks with us and seems genuinely high at the reception he’s getting. It’s a joyous thing to see someone fully in their moment of bliss, when their dreams are actually totally really coming true, and I come away from the odd little three block chat more hungry than ever to have that kind of feeling for myself: to be able to look on a screen and see that some odd imaginings of my own invention have been made real into movie light and shadow by a team of magicians and an army of financially connected strangers.
Ronson and I get in, laugh again at the coolness of it all, and then fade to sleep somewhere around 4 AM, giggling about obscenely oversized bowel movements and the legal ramifications of such in a Hyatt brand hotel. My alarm is set to wake me in three hours.
It’s been one day, and I feel like it’s been a week already.
Hang on, my pretties—it looks like another bumpy ride....
.
.
.
B
There’s something fundamentally odd about Hollywood: a faint stink of impossibly perfect non-reality wherever you turn. The cars are all fancier, the sky is always clear, the temperature is always 70 degrees—surely somewhere there sits a giant thermostat where the Lord of Hollywood adjusts things to keep them ever always just-so.
The hills are hillier. The rock station kicks the living hell out of the station back home. Even the bums seem bummier, as if they are the best applicants at some sort of “Central Bum Casting” where the finest bums come to strut their stuff.
I found a pretty cool hotel—cheap, but still clean, new, safe, quiet, and impossibly well-situated. Three blocks south of me sits the El Capitan Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, while a block the other way sits the Hollywood Bowl, and beyond that the easiest on-ramp in LA to the 101 Hollywood Freeway, giving easy access to Pasadena or the Valley.
The hotel is nothing the least bit fancy, yet even here there is a weirdly non-real bent to things: the courtyard and surrounding hillsides are covered by some sort of tree which fills the air with a bizarre scent that seems equal parts wisteria and cinnamon.
I’ve never smelled anything quite like it, yet I step out of my tras-fabo Kia rental sedan every day after meetings and again struck by this smell. That same happy chill/rush you get when a gorgeous woman “accidentally” brushes your am and looks back with a sly smile… that noticed-to-none-but-you wink that hints of great things available for the asking… my nose gets to experience every damned day.
What sort of town does this to a person?
-=-=-=-
SATURDAY
Saturday I awoke bright and early, packed my bags and drove west to Austin. At noon I hooked up with several film pals all at once: Jonathan King, a Kiwi filmmaker in Austin to host the US premiere of his new comedy-horror movie BLACK SHEEP, producer Keith Calder in town to oversee the TX premiere of his new teen thriller ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE, and writer Ronson Page whom I’ve known for years through online association and mutual friends.
We walk the five or six blocks over to Stubb’s BBQ to eat some burnt cow, and we laugh at the odd way things bring people together these days. I know Jonathan only through a very cool little online “club” of writers and producers. We’ve swapped comments and thoughts to each other (and other folks) on this discussion list for years, and I remember when he started talking about this idea for a “killer sheep” horror movie script. Now, a few years later, it’s a gorgeous reality, with FX from the WETA group of LOTR and KING KONG fame.
Calder, meanwhile, is also part of that group, and I am taken back to that afternoon a year and a half ago when, while at the Austin Film Festival, Keith mentioned that he was filming a little movie in Bastrop, a small town maybe 30 miles east of Austin. Now, 18 months later, here we are as he hosts a premiere for the movie.
Ronson, meanwhile, is another member of that group, and we’ve swapped mail and comments and insults for almost three years now, since just after he was a Nichol fellowship finalist. Since then he’s had two kids, and optioned two scripts, and will likely have me back in Austin within the next year or two to see one of HIS damned movies.
Lunch is great—Keith shows off a teaser from an incredible-looking new CG animation project his company is working on, while Jonathan regales with tales of audiences in Europe responding to his odd little New Zealander movie. King has to scoot for an appoint, but the rest of us decide to go find a place to kick back and chat, so we wind up slouched in the deliciously well-broken in leather sofas of the Driskill Hotel Bar, the HQ for the Austin Film Festival every year.
I can hardly count (or remember—same difference) the hours or beers I’ve enjoyed there over the past few years, but this afternoon was a tiny bit odd as suddenly we were the only people there. Instead of wall to wall bustle of writers and networking, it’s just our small group of 5 or 6 folks. We have a few beers, meet Brian Udovich, a co-producer on Mandy Lane, and then discover that Keith managed to score us comp passes to his movie.
With 90 minutes til showtime, Ronson and I decide it’s a good time to go find the EconoDump fleabag we’re sharing later that night, so off we go, and then we’re right back into Austin to start the night’s fun. We head to the Alamo Drafthouse South, one of several Alamo Drafthouse theaters, an idea so damned cool that it boggles the mind that they haven’t copied it everywhere. Instead of a normal theater, every alternate row of seats has been removed and replaced with a small bar-like table stocked with menus and notepads. You sit, order some grub and choose from the 30 or 40 beers they offer, and then sit back to watch a movie as you are served quietly during the flick. It’s a painfully civilized way to enjoy a movie.
Hanging around out front at the Alamo I see Joe Conway, a stupidly nice and stupidly talented writer from Austin now living and working in LA, except now he’s in Austin for the SXSW film festival (the reason for all this action). Joe and I had talked earlier in the week when I knew I was coming to LA, and we were bummed to find he’d be out of town. Til we figured out that he’d be in Austin. As would I. So here we are, and in another of those oddly incestuous arrangements which suggest that the world is in fact only 100 actual individual people, Joe has told me that he’s been trying to meet up with this producer named “Keith Calder.” I laugh and say “I’m there with Keith— I’ll hook you up, man.”
Joe laughs.
“I’M the produced writer, I’M the guy living and working in LA, yet YOU are the guy who seems to know everybody. How does that work?”
“I’m just a people person, man.”
Oh, how we laughed.
As it works out I am unable to hook Joe with Keith, as Keith is running around getting his movie set up to run, while the house is packed and Joe can’t get a seat for himself and his buddy, we say “we’ll hook up later.”
Of course, after MANDY LANE (very cool looking movie--- very impressive piece of producing) I am (ahem)) “marooned” at a cast and crew party where I spend an hour having a very fun conversation with Marissa, the painfully cute 19 year old girlfriend of one of the MANDY LANE stars (Michael Welch — "Emmet"). Marissa, as it turns out, is an assistant to an agent at Innovative Artists, and she also happens top be a dead ringer for the dark haired Meg Ryan from JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO, so of course I will listen to anything she has to say so long as she keeps smiling and keeps twinkling those eyes.
[Sigh.]
Lord, but I do love women.
[NOTE—I am extremely and happily married, and I have zero interest in any sort of dalliance or extra-curricular nonsense with any of these women, and I’m 99.999% sure that The Wife knows and understands this, so please don’t think that when I talk of other women in glowing terms that I am suggesting any desire or interest to engage in any sort of stupid behavior. I just like women. A lot.]
After this part we wander Stub’s again, this time late at night when they become a rocking music venue, and we laugh that Snow Patrol, of #1 hit “Chasing Cars” fame, is jamming out their signature hit. Ahhh… Austin.
We wander with Keith over to The Whiskey Bar on 4th Street where King’s distribution company is hosting a pre-show party. Posters for Black Sheep cover the walls, and that weird mish-mash of beautiful LA folks rubs elbows with the more raucous Austin contingent (it’s not just a simple cliché—Texas people really are louder and brasher than their snotty West Coast counterparts.)
We’re talking about the movie when I look back and notice actor Paul Rudd standing behind me, admiring a poster. Rudd is wearing a well-aged BOSTON concert T, so I ask “I have to know—is that just odd synchronicity or do you have enough snap to wear that for Brad?” (note--- Boston front man Brad Delp had just passed away the day before). He smiles and shakes my hand. "It's totally for Brad, man.” There I am chatting with Paul Rudd for a few minutes about the great voice of Brad Delp, about how many times we’ve both worn through the grooves on that first Boston release, and when Rudd asks “are you here for the movie?” I say “Well, sorta—I’m a writer pal of the director, so I’m here for him.”
Around then it’s time to head on over and get in line for BLACK SHEEP, but of course since we (Ronson and I) are on the director’s guest list, we get slipped in first. We manage to talk the doorman into letting our pal Keith Calder slide in with us, cuz yeah we have that kind of heavy-swinging pull in the movie biz.
Ahem.
BLACK SHEEP totally kicks ass—the packed theater (downtown Alamo Drafthouse) is raucous and laughing and cheering and screaming, and Calder even picks up the tab for my beer and fish tacos cuz he’s just that kind of guy. Jonathan charms the room with a quick Q&A session afterwards, we all cheer again, and then we wander back across Austin to find the garage where my car is stashed.
Along the way, we cross paths with Jonathan one last time, and he walks with us and seems genuinely high at the reception he’s getting. It’s a joyous thing to see someone fully in their moment of bliss, when their dreams are actually totally really coming true, and I come away from the odd little three block chat more hungry than ever to have that kind of feeling for myself: to be able to look on a screen and see that some odd imaginings of my own invention have been made real into movie light and shadow by a team of magicians and an army of financially connected strangers.
Ronson and I get in, laugh again at the coolness of it all, and then fade to sleep somewhere around 4 AM, giggling about obscenely oversized bowel movements and the legal ramifications of such in a Hyatt brand hotel. My alarm is set to wake me in three hours.
It’s been one day, and I feel like it’s been a week already.
Hang on, my pretties—it looks like another bumpy ride....
.
.
.
B
10 March 2007
gone to LA, man
I had a much longer and cooler post about this, but the inter-web monsters reared up and ate it, so this will have to do.
I leave in about a half hour for Austin (SXSW Film Fest, where I have two different pals both premiering features), then back tomorrow morning, fly to LA, part in Hollywood Sunday night (MARTELLAPALOOZA!), then do a few days worth of meetings, including a Monday afternoon stop at Paramount.
I just love saying that.
If anything blogworthy comes out of this long strange trip, you can probably count on seeing details here after I get back late late Wednesday.
Til then, enjoy this holiday from the obligatioon to hang on my every word. The Big Bad B will return soon enough, twice as loud and geeked to the gills, no doubt.
Sayonara, suckers....
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B
I leave in about a half hour for Austin (SXSW Film Fest, where I have two different pals both premiering features), then back tomorrow morning, fly to LA, part in Hollywood Sunday night (MARTELLAPALOOZA!), then do a few days worth of meetings, including a Monday afternoon stop at Paramount.
I just love saying that.
If anything blogworthy comes out of this long strange trip, you can probably count on seeing details here after I get back late late Wednesday.
Til then, enjoy this holiday from the obligatioon to hang on my every word. The Big Bad B will return soon enough, twice as loud and geeked to the gills, no doubt.
Sayonara, suckers....
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B
02 March 2007
March 2, 1836
The Unanimous
Declaration of Independence
made by the
Delegates of the People of Texas
in General Convention
at the town of Washington
on the 2nd day of March 1836.
"When a government has ceased to protect the lives, liberty and property of the people, from whom its legitimate powers are derived, and for the advancement of whose happiness it was instituted, and so far from being a guarantee for the enjoyment of those inestimable and inalienable rights, becomes an instrument in the hands of evil rulers for their oppression.
When the Federal Republican Constitution of their country, which they have sworn to support, no longer has a substantial existence, and the whole nature of their government has been forcibly changed, without their consent, from a restricted federative republic, composed of sovereign states, to a consolidated central military despotism, in which every interest is disregarded but that of the army and the priesthood, both the eternal enemies of civil liberty, the everready minions of power, and the usual instruments of tyrants.
...
The necessity of self-preservation, therefore, now decrees our eternal political separation.
We, therefore, the delegates with plenary powers of the people of Texas, in solemn convention assembled, appealing to a candid world for the necessities of our condition, do hereby resolve and declare, that our political connection with the Mexican nation has forever ended, and that the people of Texas do now constitute a free, Sovereign, and independent republic, and are fully invested with all the rights and attributes which properly belong to independent nations; and, conscious of the rectitude of our intentions, we fearlessly and confidently commit the issue to the decision of the Supreme arbiter of the destinies of nations."
Happy Texas Independence Day, y'all.
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damned proud B
27 February 2007
only cuz I know you care
UPDATE:
WAR DRAMA -- starting to slide out to various folks, none of whom yet seem to be so bowled over that there is a crush of check-waving folks at the door. Yes, that was the hope and expectation. No, I am not serious. Yes, I will gladly act as if I am serious if any check-wavers actually appear....
ROM COM -- now again sliding towards some sort of readable form after a month or more of... just... sitting... there. Mocking me. I think I have a handle on what it needs (or maybe what it doesn't), and I'm plodding along addressing those moments and scenes and large chunks of script where these changes and deletions and additions need be made. Hopefully I'll have it ready for people to look at within a week or two, because....
LA TRIP -- back in October I sorta made a mental note to stand ready to head back to LA in the Spring of 2007 in order to press the issue and chase down whatever contacts and meetings and face-time I could manage. As 2007 broke onto the scene I decided i'd not just blow off that self-made promise but would instead see if I could hold myself to it, so now I'm sitting here chasing leads and contacts and acquaintances to see what meetings (if any) I migth manage if/when I arrive in-country in mid March for a hurry up whistle-stop tour of town. "We shall see."....
CRAZY HISTORICAL ADVENTURE -- it's still there, and the outline is roughly 90% clear in my head, but there's a critical sequence of scenes and beats down the homestretch which for now do not yet reveal themselves to me. I am plotting and planning and poking and prodding, but there's a double black diamond run of events I need to take place—logically and justifiably yet surprisingly—which I've not been able to work out to my own satiusfaction. I know the solution exists, and I know I haven;t found it, and I know I will, so for now this project sorta simmers as I walk slow circles around it....
MIXED UP WESTERN -- there is an outline, and it gets me from FADE IN to FADE OUT, but it's not really thrilling me, nor is it giving me the major rush I expect and demand the story to give me for this piece. It's an odd mix of genres at work, a mix which creates a special sort of problem in making the two story mechanisms play nice together—kinda like getting a DVD to play in your Betamax—but I know I'll eventually figure it out. Or get sucked away by a twister or something....
BUDDY COMEDY ADVENTURE -- years ago I came up with a major action sequence (actually a major story mechanism) which was too good to forget, and it keeps bubbling up as the possible lynchpin for a sort of ensemble buddy adventure movie. Think something like OCEAN'S 11 or THE STING in that there's a caper, and the fun is figuring out how it will (or won;t) work, but the mix of characters in the caper are as much fun as the caper itself. I have entire sequenbces clear in my head, but I need to work out a few more cool story wrinkles and twists before it's truly ready to start sketching out in outline form, but damn it's making me smile to think about....
COLLEGE ROMP -- my own personal albatross, the beast which will hang round my neck til the end of all time. In some ways this one seems familiar enough that I'lll not write it so much as just recite it from memory—recount it more than construct it—but it's also just not the top-most item on the old interest poile this week, so for now....
Nicholl Fellwoship deadlines are on the horizon, as are the deadlines for the Austin contest and a slew of others. I remain hopeful to be ineligible ASAP, but one should always prepare for the worst even while laboring to deliver the best. So I'll likely have some new crap to fling at strangers by May 1.
Unless I don't.
Hooo-waaah.
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B
WAR DRAMA -- starting to slide out to various folks, none of whom yet seem to be so bowled over that there is a crush of check-waving folks at the door. Yes, that was the hope and expectation. No, I am not serious. Yes, I will gladly act as if I am serious if any check-wavers actually appear....
ROM COM -- now again sliding towards some sort of readable form after a month or more of... just... sitting... there. Mocking me. I think I have a handle on what it needs (or maybe what it doesn't), and I'm plodding along addressing those moments and scenes and large chunks of script where these changes and deletions and additions need be made. Hopefully I'll have it ready for people to look at within a week or two, because....
LA TRIP -- back in October I sorta made a mental note to stand ready to head back to LA in the Spring of 2007 in order to press the issue and chase down whatever contacts and meetings and face-time I could manage. As 2007 broke onto the scene I decided i'd not just blow off that self-made promise but would instead see if I could hold myself to it, so now I'm sitting here chasing leads and contacts and acquaintances to see what meetings (if any) I migth manage if/when I arrive in-country in mid March for a hurry up whistle-stop tour of town. "We shall see."....
CRAZY HISTORICAL ADVENTURE -- it's still there, and the outline is roughly 90% clear in my head, but there's a critical sequence of scenes and beats down the homestretch which for now do not yet reveal themselves to me. I am plotting and planning and poking and prodding, but there's a double black diamond run of events I need to take place—logically and justifiably yet surprisingly—which I've not been able to work out to my own satiusfaction. I know the solution exists, and I know I haven;t found it, and I know I will, so for now this project sorta simmers as I walk slow circles around it....
MIXED UP WESTERN -- there is an outline, and it gets me from FADE IN to FADE OUT, but it's not really thrilling me, nor is it giving me the major rush I expect and demand the story to give me for this piece. It's an odd mix of genres at work, a mix which creates a special sort of problem in making the two story mechanisms play nice together—kinda like getting a DVD to play in your Betamax—but I know I'll eventually figure it out. Or get sucked away by a twister or something....
BUDDY COMEDY ADVENTURE -- years ago I came up with a major action sequence (actually a major story mechanism) which was too good to forget, and it keeps bubbling up as the possible lynchpin for a sort of ensemble buddy adventure movie. Think something like OCEAN'S 11 or THE STING in that there's a caper, and the fun is figuring out how it will (or won;t) work, but the mix of characters in the caper are as much fun as the caper itself. I have entire sequenbces clear in my head, but I need to work out a few more cool story wrinkles and twists before it's truly ready to start sketching out in outline form, but damn it's making me smile to think about....
COLLEGE ROMP -- my own personal albatross, the beast which will hang round my neck til the end of all time. In some ways this one seems familiar enough that I'lll not write it so much as just recite it from memory—recount it more than construct it—but it's also just not the top-most item on the old interest poile this week, so for now....
Nicholl Fellwoship deadlines are on the horizon, as are the deadlines for the Austin contest and a slew of others. I remain hopeful to be ineligible ASAP, but one should always prepare for the worst even while laboring to deliver the best. So I'll likely have some new crap to fling at strangers by May 1.
Unless I don't.
Hooo-waaah.
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B
18 February 2007
do or do not
If you've not seen it already, wing over to the LA Times site to see The Envelope, a roundtable interview from Jay Fernandez featuring the five nominated writers for this years Best Original Screenplay Oscars: Michael Arndt ("Little Miss Sunshine"), Guillermo del Toro ("Pan's Labyrinth"), Peter Morgan ("The Queen"), Guillermo Arriaga ("Babel"), and Iris Yamashita ("Letters From Iwo Jima").
I'll not waste time cribbing lines or thoughts from the piece, as there are too many worthwhile bits of insight and opinion. I found it amazingly uplifting and empowering to see that these guys, all operating at the very top of the game, have some points of clear agreement and other points of total disagreement. The reason I find this encouraging is that lately I've been in a brief introspective funk as I try to sort what it is I am most trying to do in this silly screenwriting chase.
Am I chasing some sort of ideal of quality? Am I chasing after any sort of initial sale to get over the wall and into Fortress Hollywood? Am I pursuing a career where what matters most is That next Deal, and where notions of quality and emotional value are secondary to getting paid by any means necessary?
Yeah, some of this is cart-before-horse time-wasting, but I'm now close enough to the game that I know working pros on the inside. I have friends who have made the leap into the game. I have friends who seem now being escorted into the game for the first time. Other buddies are very clearly on the cusp of Some Great Thing, and might at any moment become major players in the screenwriting game.
Meanwhile, I'm sitting here in my gym shorts, half a continent away, trying to decide which project I want to throw myself into right now. I have a huge expensive difficult to imagine historical epic which seems to claim more of my thoughts than seems safe and sane. I have a mostly outlined and partially written hybrid genre piece which might be the sort of concept project to most easily draw interest from strangers. And I have a third piece which seems the sort of low-budget easily filmable piece that would work great for specifically targeted leads.
(So of course, I work on none of those three but instead work on a blog post destined to be seen by maybe a dozen humans on this damned planet. Wooohooooo....)
The article made me like writing again as, when I read the comments of these five guys, I can actually hear myself saying any of these things they say. They all make perfect sense. There are no major surprises or issues where I go "that is such total bullshit." Note that I am not claiming to be a Del Toro or an Arriaga or a Yamashita. What I am saying, rather, is that none of this seems the tiniest bit alien or daunting. It All Makes Sense.
Which, from a certain twisted perspective, is among the more depressing notions to confront, as it suggests that my slow progress is not due to any innate shortage of ability or understanding, but rather stems from a disease called Laziness.
I hate these sorts of moments of clarity.
"In the end, we get the life we deserve."
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navel-gazing waffle cone B
I'll not waste time cribbing lines or thoughts from the piece, as there are too many worthwhile bits of insight and opinion. I found it amazingly uplifting and empowering to see that these guys, all operating at the very top of the game, have some points of clear agreement and other points of total disagreement. The reason I find this encouraging is that lately I've been in a brief introspective funk as I try to sort what it is I am most trying to do in this silly screenwriting chase.
Am I chasing some sort of ideal of quality? Am I chasing after any sort of initial sale to get over the wall and into Fortress Hollywood? Am I pursuing a career where what matters most is That next Deal, and where notions of quality and emotional value are secondary to getting paid by any means necessary?
Yeah, some of this is cart-before-horse time-wasting, but I'm now close enough to the game that I know working pros on the inside. I have friends who have made the leap into the game. I have friends who seem now being escorted into the game for the first time. Other buddies are very clearly on the cusp of Some Great Thing, and might at any moment become major players in the screenwriting game.
Meanwhile, I'm sitting here in my gym shorts, half a continent away, trying to decide which project I want to throw myself into right now. I have a huge expensive difficult to imagine historical epic which seems to claim more of my thoughts than seems safe and sane. I have a mostly outlined and partially written hybrid genre piece which might be the sort of concept project to most easily draw interest from strangers. And I have a third piece which seems the sort of low-budget easily filmable piece that would work great for specifically targeted leads.
(So of course, I work on none of those three but instead work on a blog post destined to be seen by maybe a dozen humans on this damned planet. Wooohooooo....)
The article made me like writing again as, when I read the comments of these five guys, I can actually hear myself saying any of these things they say. They all make perfect sense. There are no major surprises or issues where I go "that is such total bullshit." Note that I am not claiming to be a Del Toro or an Arriaga or a Yamashita. What I am saying, rather, is that none of this seems the tiniest bit alien or daunting. It All Makes Sense.
Which, from a certain twisted perspective, is among the more depressing notions to confront, as it suggests that my slow progress is not due to any innate shortage of ability or understanding, but rather stems from a disease called Laziness.
I hate these sorts of moments of clarity.
"In the end, we get the life we deserve."
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navel-gazing waffle cone B
06 February 2007
sick sucks
So, roiughly a week ago one of my kids comes home from school with a slight fever. He misses one day, never really seems especially uncomfortable or out of sorts, and then goes back without a care/ Two days later, I start to feel a little run down, and then I start to hack and cough a bit, and then WHAMMO—suddenly I feel like I've been tossed from a moving train.
I spent the better part of Friday, Saturday and Sunday wrapped in a blanket, in bed, moaning and groaning when i wasn't having weird fever dreams. I had to go make a token appearance at baseballl tryouts on Saturday afternoon, but given that I just needed to sit and make notes on some kids during tryouts, I figured that was low-stress enough to not rate much concern.
I was wrong.
Saturday night I was ready to crawl into a hole and die. I was snorking down so many over the counter cold and flu meds that my world was looking a lot like the Beatles's YELLOW SUBMARINE.
Sunday was 18 hours of sleep, more meds, and then Monday I went to see the doc. By the time I acatually made it in for an appointment, I was feeling a lot better. Doc spends maybe 3 minutes looking into facial openings, checks breathing, takes my temp. "Looks like you had the flu. Seems on the retreat now. Here's a scrip for some strong antibiotics. Don't waste your money unless you're feeling worse on Tuesday. See ya."
Thanks, doc.
So today I feel weirdly out of sorts—like I've been sleeping 18 hours a day for days at a stretch or something—and I have a weird nervous twitchy feeling which is probably the final bit of sinus congestion fading, and suddenly I realize that I've been MIA from productive work for almost 5 days now.
Damn.
Did anything happen while I was away?
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B
I spent the better part of Friday, Saturday and Sunday wrapped in a blanket, in bed, moaning and groaning when i wasn't having weird fever dreams. I had to go make a token appearance at baseballl tryouts on Saturday afternoon, but given that I just needed to sit and make notes on some kids during tryouts, I figured that was low-stress enough to not rate much concern.
I was wrong.
Saturday night I was ready to crawl into a hole and die. I was snorking down so many over the counter cold and flu meds that my world was looking a lot like the Beatles's YELLOW SUBMARINE.
Sunday was 18 hours of sleep, more meds, and then Monday I went to see the doc. By the time I acatually made it in for an appointment, I was feeling a lot better. Doc spends maybe 3 minutes looking into facial openings, checks breathing, takes my temp. "Looks like you had the flu. Seems on the retreat now. Here's a scrip for some strong antibiotics. Don't waste your money unless you're feeling worse on Tuesday. See ya."
Thanks, doc.
So today I feel weirdly out of sorts—like I've been sleeping 18 hours a day for days at a stretch or something—and I have a weird nervous twitchy feeling which is probably the final bit of sinus congestion fading, and suddenly I realize that I've been MIA from productive work for almost 5 days now.
Damn.
Did anything happen while I was away?
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B
29 January 2007
a few of my favorite things
The hazy shadows of a good beer joint at 1:20 AM... the growl of a Merlin engine roaring past... hearing a hall full of people singing the National Anthem with feeling... the sound of a friend laughing... the first sip of coffee, the second pitcher of beer, and the third out of an inning... honor and those who respect it... the Texas flag... being in the zone, when the words are flowing and all seems clear and possible... a well-told story, be it the telling or the hearing... gorgeous women... jalapeños on my cheeseburger... the smell of glove leather and horsehide... movies unafraid to dismiss easy cynical outcomes... when my kids get the joke... the cool water under the shade of a cypress tree on a hot day... sausage on a grill... iambic pentameter... good music and an open road... sunset over water... the smell of my wife's hair... the right scene and line to end a movie... hammering a drive to left center... the happy exhaustion at the end of a day-long project done well... self-sufficiency in all its various forms and incarnations... honesty... skipping stones... John Ford movies... throwing things... beer... heros...exceeding expectations... the smell of BBQ on a summer afternoon... walking under a full moon... converting on third-and-long... knowing how and why things work... history... knowing I did my best....
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von trappish B
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von trappish B
25 January 2007
we have arrived
Apparently I crossed some sort of Rubicon this week, as this blog has never been bothered by spammers and 'bots before, and then suddenly a few days ago I started seeing loads of comments showing up which contained only dozens of hyperlinks disguised as Chinese character comments. I'd delete a batch, then come back later in the day to find a new and different batch in their place.
So from now on we have that random keycode generator check system. Enjoy.
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B
So from now on we have that random keycode generator check system. Enjoy.
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B
24 January 2007
50 things [meme]
Picking up a meme started by "Scribe LA" over at Borderline Inappropriate and then carried on by "Scott the Reader" at Alligators In A Helicopter, here are 50 Things About Me:
-=-=-=-
50. I grew up on a farm in a rural section of Harris County (Houston TX), disappearing every summer into the wilds of the creek bottom in an existence far closer to something out of Huck Finn than ever appreciated at the time.
49. I have never had broken a bone.
48. Among the pets I've tended in my life are: an armadillo, a quail, a cottontail rabbit, a squirrel, chickens, ducks, dogs, cats, horses, fish, cattle, one pig, and a wolf dog named (wait for it) "Wolfie."
47. I've never been waterskiing, and I hate snow skiing. (I hate all cold weather)
46. I started college at the US Air Force Academy, going through basic training at USAFA before deciding/realizing that this was a major mistake. I lost 21 pounds in the seven and a half weeks I was there.
45. I flunked out of my freshman year at Texas A&M when I decided all my aerospace engineering classes were too boring to bother with. I changed majors (to English) and then made some extra spending money for a while tutoring the engineering and physics classmates in those classes I'd flunked out of the year before. Eventually I finished college as a Hisory major at UH (on the Dean's List, as in stark contrast to A&M there was little else to do at UH except go to class and study).
44. I once took a year off from college to work on a construction site (building the Compaq Computer world HQ and manufacturing complex). I worked 55 hours a week (in a hardhat!), was usually the only white guy visible on the job site, and would spend my lunch break eating in the shade beneath a dozer or crane as I read most all of Hemingway's novels that year.
43. I know how to fly a plane, but I never took lessons or bothered with pursuing my license. I have been an airplane freak since I was 3 years old. My younger brother, meanwhile, spent ten years in the Navy as the navigator and then tactical officer on P3 Orion anti-submarine planes.
42. In high school, I was voted "Most Honorable," received the awards for top student in Math, Science, *and* History (first-ever three-subject recipient), but did NOT win for English. I also won a "Best Buns" award.
41. I have never been in a fight in my life (unless you count the 312 knock down drag-outs I had with my brother while growing up).
40. I have a ridiculously good recall of trivia, quotes, and useless information.
39. I once threw a softball 103.5 yards in competition, good enough for (then) #2 all time at A&M.
38. I have launched bottle-rockets at a handicapped college student who was urinating in a Methodist church parking lot in downtown Charlotte, North Caroline, and then later bought him a beer at what I still regard as "The Worst Strip Club In The Universe". (How bad was it? SO bad that mid-way through the evening I found myself fleeing in circles around a pool table as a toothless black stripper chased me, screaming "gimme a dolla!")
37. I'm surprisingly good with tools and carpentry. I've hired out to build porches, barns, cabinets and bunk beds.
36. For nearly a full year my parents separated, I barely spoke a word to anyone in school. The counselors were worried about me. later, when our high school guidance counselor asked me what i wanted to be as an adult, I told him "twins." He never liked me much after that.
35. I grew up in a 100-year old farmhouse on a 120 acrs of range land and cornfields, surrounded by horses and cattle, and used to go riding almost every day after school. Then I was thrown by a horse, my foot caught caught in the stirrup, and the horse dragged me 200 yards across a pasture as my head bounced along inches from his rear hooves. I've never enjoyed horses since.
34. I do the vast majority of the cooking in our family. I'm very good. I briefly considered chef school many many years ago.
33. My first paying gig as a writer came 30 years ago when a local businessman paid me 20 bucks to design, write and hand letter a Christmas card for his carpet and flooring company.
32. I was once pursued by witches through the streets of the French Quarter in New Orleans. [I'd stolen a voodoo flag from their little stand. I was drunk. The witches were male. This was on a Spring Break trip. The next day I found a 50 dollar bill on the trail in the campground where we were crashing. The day after that I found a stack of free drink coupons as we entered a night club in Florida. I claimed that this was karma for "doing The Lord's Work." My buddies burned the flag as I slept one night.]
31. Once upon a time I could speak, read, and write reasonably well in French. I've also taken several years of German and Spanish, and know a smattering of words in Czech (my grandfather spoke Czech-only until age 3)
30. For a year, I wore a full beard.
29. I separated my right shoulder while body surfing in Acapulco 25 years ago. I never told anyone. To this day that shoulder hangs 2 inches lower than the uninjured one, and it sounds like celery being crunched when I rotate that shoulder through a full range of motion.
28. I have a mild competitive streak (my friends are laughing).
27. There are seven Apple Macintosh computers in my house (four of which still draw some degree of use). Since 1985 my total time using non-Apple PCs totals something like 2 hours.
26. In high school, I once taught my senior year advanced "Trig and Mathematical Analysis Class" for a week. The subject? "Matrix Convolution" What do I recall/retain of that subject? The title. Nothing else.
25. I was the goalie for a six-time A&M intramural champion waterpolo team. Innertube water polo. My career in the sport largely evaporated after college.
24. I have been online under some variation of the same username since 1989.
23. For a 10-year stretch running from junior high through high school and college, I was the stage director for the annual scholarship beauty contest in my hometown. Yes, I used this position to pick up chicks, including one girl who went on to become Miss Texas, as well as three others who eventually were top 10 finishers in the state pageant. Call me shallow, but I like gorgeous women.
22. I have four kids, but I don't post many specific details of them online.
21. I hate to dance. I'm not bad at it—I just hate doing it. It just feels ridiculous.
20. I do not wear black. The tuxedo at my wedding might be the last black clothing I wore.
19. At three different points in my life my hair has been shaved to boot-camp stubble length. At two other points my hair has been long enough to tie back in a ponytail. I usually just wear a baseball cap (but always an actual team cap-- never a commemorative or promotional cap).
18. I'm very good at accents and dialects. I once convinced a substitute teacher that I was an exchange student from Poland (who did not speak English)
17. Few things infuriate me more than effusive insincere praise and familiarity.
16. I am notoriously bad in a canoe.
15. I've never been hospitalized. Yet.
14. I once swam naked in a swamp filled with wild alligators. I did not know there were alligators in the swamp when I stripped and entered the water, but when I saw an 8-foot gator swim past me ten feet away, I figured it out.
13. On the Myers-Briggs personality test, I have always typed as an ENTP. I have always been both amused and a little disturbed at how textbook I am to this particular personality description.
12. I wear cargo shorts and t-shirts 90% of the time, and seldom wear shoes unless I have to. Fashion bores me.
11. I detest golf and everything connected to it. I detest golfers maybe most of all. I love disc golf.
10. I'm now a fat out of shape suburban dad, but I'm still a surprisingly good athlete I love football and basketball, but baseball surpasses all sports in my passion and appreciation. Baseball provides perfect metaphors for basically every moment and aspect of life.
9. I am a Texan and ferociously pugnaciously defiantly proud of that.
8. I am an Aggie and even more pugnaciously defiantly proud of that.
7. I hate all things burnt orange. (One year, one of my sons played youth basketball, and as luck would have it he was assigned to the "longhorns" team. While I served as assistant coach, attending every practice and game, I refused to wear the team jersey or coaches shirt, opting for a white t-shirt instead. The son told me that if I needed to step down as a coach, he'd understand. "It's the longhorns, dad. You don't wear burnt orange.")
6. In a game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Forces of Hell, I'd be the guy in the stands wearing a "GO SATAN" shirt and being asked to please keep the cheering to a reasonable volume.
5. I have to have coffee every morning or my mood and productivity for the day are totally shot.
4. I drink about a half gallon of iced tea per day (decaf)
3. I quite enjoy beer.
2. Three different unrelated people over the years have said that in a previous life I must have been Alexander the Great. I'm not entirely sure upon what this odd claims is based.
1. My all-time favorite, hands-down no-doubt favorite-ever movie is Lawrence of Arabia. Among others I'd have to pack for any extended deep-space journeys: Casablanca, North By Northwest, Rear Window, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Godfather, The Maltese Falcon, MASH, The Searchers, The Sting, The Princess Bride, Chinatown, Pirates of the Caribbean (COTBP), Bull Durham, Leone's "Man With No Name" trilogy, and The Big Lebowski.
-=-=-=-
Everything else... well, that's just details.
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B
-=-=-=-
50. I grew up on a farm in a rural section of Harris County (Houston TX), disappearing every summer into the wilds of the creek bottom in an existence far closer to something out of Huck Finn than ever appreciated at the time.
49. I have never had broken a bone.
48. Among the pets I've tended in my life are: an armadillo, a quail, a cottontail rabbit, a squirrel, chickens, ducks, dogs, cats, horses, fish, cattle, one pig, and a wolf dog named (wait for it) "Wolfie."
47. I've never been waterskiing, and I hate snow skiing. (I hate all cold weather)
46. I started college at the US Air Force Academy, going through basic training at USAFA before deciding/realizing that this was a major mistake. I lost 21 pounds in the seven and a half weeks I was there.
45. I flunked out of my freshman year at Texas A&M when I decided all my aerospace engineering classes were too boring to bother with. I changed majors (to English) and then made some extra spending money for a while tutoring the engineering and physics classmates in those classes I'd flunked out of the year before. Eventually I finished college as a Hisory major at UH (on the Dean's List, as in stark contrast to A&M there was little else to do at UH except go to class and study).
44. I once took a year off from college to work on a construction site (building the Compaq Computer world HQ and manufacturing complex). I worked 55 hours a week (in a hardhat!), was usually the only white guy visible on the job site, and would spend my lunch break eating in the shade beneath a dozer or crane as I read most all of Hemingway's novels that year.
43. I know how to fly a plane, but I never took lessons or bothered with pursuing my license. I have been an airplane freak since I was 3 years old. My younger brother, meanwhile, spent ten years in the Navy as the navigator and then tactical officer on P3 Orion anti-submarine planes.
42. In high school, I was voted "Most Honorable," received the awards for top student in Math, Science, *and* History (first-ever three-subject recipient), but did NOT win for English. I also won a "Best Buns" award.
41. I have never been in a fight in my life (unless you count the 312 knock down drag-outs I had with my brother while growing up).
40. I have a ridiculously good recall of trivia, quotes, and useless information.
39. I once threw a softball 103.5 yards in competition, good enough for (then) #2 all time at A&M.
38. I have launched bottle-rockets at a handicapped college student who was urinating in a Methodist church parking lot in downtown Charlotte, North Caroline, and then later bought him a beer at what I still regard as "The Worst Strip Club In The Universe". (How bad was it? SO bad that mid-way through the evening I found myself fleeing in circles around a pool table as a toothless black stripper chased me, screaming "gimme a dolla!")
37. I'm surprisingly good with tools and carpentry. I've hired out to build porches, barns, cabinets and bunk beds.
36. For nearly a full year my parents separated, I barely spoke a word to anyone in school. The counselors were worried about me. later, when our high school guidance counselor asked me what i wanted to be as an adult, I told him "twins." He never liked me much after that.
35. I grew up in a 100-year old farmhouse on a 120 acrs of range land and cornfields, surrounded by horses and cattle, and used to go riding almost every day after school. Then I was thrown by a horse, my foot caught caught in the stirrup, and the horse dragged me 200 yards across a pasture as my head bounced along inches from his rear hooves. I've never enjoyed horses since.
34. I do the vast majority of the cooking in our family. I'm very good. I briefly considered chef school many many years ago.
33. My first paying gig as a writer came 30 years ago when a local businessman paid me 20 bucks to design, write and hand letter a Christmas card for his carpet and flooring company.
32. I was once pursued by witches through the streets of the French Quarter in New Orleans. [I'd stolen a voodoo flag from their little stand. I was drunk. The witches were male. This was on a Spring Break trip. The next day I found a 50 dollar bill on the trail in the campground where we were crashing. The day after that I found a stack of free drink coupons as we entered a night club in Florida. I claimed that this was karma for "doing The Lord's Work." My buddies burned the flag as I slept one night.]
31. Once upon a time I could speak, read, and write reasonably well in French. I've also taken several years of German and Spanish, and know a smattering of words in Czech (my grandfather spoke Czech-only until age 3)
30. For a year, I wore a full beard.
29. I separated my right shoulder while body surfing in Acapulco 25 years ago. I never told anyone. To this day that shoulder hangs 2 inches lower than the uninjured one, and it sounds like celery being crunched when I rotate that shoulder through a full range of motion.
28. I have a mild competitive streak (my friends are laughing).
27. There are seven Apple Macintosh computers in my house (four of which still draw some degree of use). Since 1985 my total time using non-Apple PCs totals something like 2 hours.
26. In high school, I once taught my senior year advanced "Trig and Mathematical Analysis Class" for a week. The subject? "Matrix Convolution" What do I recall/retain of that subject? The title. Nothing else.
25. I was the goalie for a six-time A&M intramural champion waterpolo team. Innertube water polo. My career in the sport largely evaporated after college.
24. I have been online under some variation of the same username since 1989.
23. For a 10-year stretch running from junior high through high school and college, I was the stage director for the annual scholarship beauty contest in my hometown. Yes, I used this position to pick up chicks, including one girl who went on to become Miss Texas, as well as three others who eventually were top 10 finishers in the state pageant. Call me shallow, but I like gorgeous women.
22. I have four kids, but I don't post many specific details of them online.
21. I hate to dance. I'm not bad at it—I just hate doing it. It just feels ridiculous.
20. I do not wear black. The tuxedo at my wedding might be the last black clothing I wore.
19. At three different points in my life my hair has been shaved to boot-camp stubble length. At two other points my hair has been long enough to tie back in a ponytail. I usually just wear a baseball cap (but always an actual team cap-- never a commemorative or promotional cap).
18. I'm very good at accents and dialects. I once convinced a substitute teacher that I was an exchange student from Poland (who did not speak English)
17. Few things infuriate me more than effusive insincere praise and familiarity.
16. I am notoriously bad in a canoe.
15. I've never been hospitalized. Yet.
14. I once swam naked in a swamp filled with wild alligators. I did not know there were alligators in the swamp when I stripped and entered the water, but when I saw an 8-foot gator swim past me ten feet away, I figured it out.
13. On the Myers-Briggs personality test, I have always typed as an ENTP. I have always been both amused and a little disturbed at how textbook I am to this particular personality description.
12. I wear cargo shorts and t-shirts 90% of the time, and seldom wear shoes unless I have to. Fashion bores me.
11. I detest golf and everything connected to it. I detest golfers maybe most of all. I love disc golf.
10. I'm now a fat out of shape suburban dad, but I'm still a surprisingly good athlete I love football and basketball, but baseball surpasses all sports in my passion and appreciation. Baseball provides perfect metaphors for basically every moment and aspect of life.
9. I am a Texan and ferociously pugnaciously defiantly proud of that.
8. I am an Aggie and even more pugnaciously defiantly proud of that.
7. I hate all things burnt orange. (One year, one of my sons played youth basketball, and as luck would have it he was assigned to the "longhorns" team. While I served as assistant coach, attending every practice and game, I refused to wear the team jersey or coaches shirt, opting for a white t-shirt instead. The son told me that if I needed to step down as a coach, he'd understand. "It's the longhorns, dad. You don't wear burnt orange.")
6. In a game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Forces of Hell, I'd be the guy in the stands wearing a "GO SATAN" shirt and being asked to please keep the cheering to a reasonable volume.
5. I have to have coffee every morning or my mood and productivity for the day are totally shot.
4. I drink about a half gallon of iced tea per day (decaf)
3. I quite enjoy beer.
2. Three different unrelated people over the years have said that in a previous life I must have been Alexander the Great. I'm not entirely sure upon what this odd claims is based.
1. My all-time favorite, hands-down no-doubt favorite-ever movie is Lawrence of Arabia. Among others I'd have to pack for any extended deep-space journeys: Casablanca, North By Northwest, Rear Window, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Godfather, The Maltese Falcon, MASH, The Searchers, The Sting, The Princess Bride, Chinatown, Pirates of the Caribbean (COTBP), Bull Durham, Leone's "Man With No Name" trilogy, and The Big Lebowski.
-=-=-=-
Everything else... well, that's just details.
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B
20 January 2007
gentle writers, start your engines
100 days until this year's Nicholl Fellowship submission deadline.
For those of you (of us) for whom such facts matter, respond accordingly.
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knuckle cracking B
For those of you (of us) for whom such facts matter, respond accordingly.
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knuckle cracking B
writing about writing about writing
The sea is angry today, my friends. Like an old man trying to return soup at a lunch counter.
I suddenly realize that I badly need to revisit my links on this site and make some adjustments: deletions, additions, denigrations, etc. Internet years seem roughly equivalent to dog years, except a website doesn't piddle all over your living room and chew your furniture for the first year and then just become lazy and fat.
Well, some do.
Some of the links I post over in yon sidebar are now dead, while others are posting less, and some are damned near dead in terms of activity. Meanwhile, some other very cool blogs (mostly on writing and/or screenwriting) have now made it onto my Daily Waste of Time beat, so I'll likely add them if only to annoy the site-honchos with what meager yet slobbering traffic I can send.
MEANWHILE... progress continues to progress hereabouts, as the RomCom continues to look more and more like some damned Flying Dutchman of a project which will circle the world and haunt me in my dreams yet never again come in to port. A few initial reads from friends confirmed what I'd optimistically tried to dismiss as self-loathing paranoia (turns out I was right, and the script was not ready for reads after all). There's some stuff in there which I love (amusingly enough, some of which I love most is stuff which some readers liked least, but guess whose opinion carries weight and value in this process... yes, it's good to be king), and then there's other stuff which needs some slight amount of tremendous work and attention.
"Such is life."
I have some ideas and notes piling up for what seem to be the Next Big Things which I'll waste time on, but for now I'll not give details to the sorry likes of you people (I'm not nearly so dim as I seem). Right now I seem to have four (!) next ideas vying for attention, so we'll see how that shakes down.
It's time again to get medieval about writing: to wake every morning with the clear and rabid intent to put good words on paper. Screen.
Whatever.
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B
I suddenly realize that I badly need to revisit my links on this site and make some adjustments: deletions, additions, denigrations, etc. Internet years seem roughly equivalent to dog years, except a website doesn't piddle all over your living room and chew your furniture for the first year and then just become lazy and fat.
Well, some do.
Some of the links I post over in yon sidebar are now dead, while others are posting less, and some are damned near dead in terms of activity. Meanwhile, some other very cool blogs (mostly on writing and/or screenwriting) have now made it onto my Daily Waste of Time beat, so I'll likely add them if only to annoy the site-honchos with what meager yet slobbering traffic I can send.
MEANWHILE... progress continues to progress hereabouts, as the RomCom continues to look more and more like some damned Flying Dutchman of a project which will circle the world and haunt me in my dreams yet never again come in to port. A few initial reads from friends confirmed what I'd optimistically tried to dismiss as self-loathing paranoia (turns out I was right, and the script was not ready for reads after all). There's some stuff in there which I love (amusingly enough, some of which I love most is stuff which some readers liked least, but guess whose opinion carries weight and value in this process... yes, it's good to be king), and then there's other stuff which needs some slight amount of tremendous work and attention.
"Such is life."
I have some ideas and notes piling up for what seem to be the Next Big Things which I'll waste time on, but for now I'll not give details to the sorry likes of you people (I'm not nearly so dim as I seem). Right now I seem to have four (!) next ideas vying for attention, so we'll see how that shakes down.
It's time again to get medieval about writing: to wake every morning with the clear and rabid intent to put good words on paper. Screen.
Whatever.
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B
09 January 2007
06 January 2007
we're cottonelle people
The Wife and I agree on many things— ketchup on hot dogs is just morally wrong, one does not gift with jewelry purchased from cardboard displays in grocery store checkout aisles, etc—but we do have our differences.
For example, I consider myself a reasonably competent human being, while she often considers me a clueless shuffling idiot who would not know to extinguish himself if he were to burst into flames. At least, such is the impression she gives me, most days.
I offer this as a sort of background to the tale I shall now impart, a tale of best intentions and strangest results and anger and confusion and rage and eventually childish petulant victorious smugness.
Friday midday, I took the daughter (our youngest) to Target for what is becoming a sort of tradition. The Wife was scheduled to work Friday night (L&D nurse, night shift, God Be Praised), so she was sleeping all day, and the daughter has no pre-school on Friday, so she and I often go to Target to eat lunch at the snack counter. We both have hots dogs and Cheetos (always Cheetos—absolutely Cheetos) and then we go shopping. Among the items The Wife mumbled that we needed (the night before, as we were cleaning dishes) was "toilet paper."
I put that in quotation marks because it is a full and accurate description of the item I was told to purchase: "toilet paper."
Being a reasonably competent human being, as I turned the cart down the toilet paper aisle I was flush with confidence that I could somehow manage to successfully purchase product with which to wipe our bottoms. Charmin Super Atomo-Mega Pack was on sale for 2 dollars off, so I tossed a zeppelin-sized bail of tissue onto the cart and muddled on.
Daughter and I get home, she watches Backyardigans as I lug in the 39 small plastic bags of groceries (Tatiana, our Russian accented checkout weasel at Target, seemed proud to put no more than two items in any bag, resulting in a wee bit of excessive packaging...). I then spend the next 45 minutes putting away the metric ton of groceries, finishing around 2:30 just as The Wife emerges from her Beauty Sleep [insert your own joke here—the ice upon which I daily skate stays thin enough already, thank you very little...], plods daintily into the kitchen, glances around, sees the 9000-pack of Charmin on the kitchen table, and says (and again i quote):
"What the fuck is this shit?"
"What say you, my dear? Did I disappoint you in some way?" I query in my always-sweet manner. [Note: The Wife would likely make up the most hideous lies about my response here, claiming that I said something like "It's toilet paper, dumbass—what does it look like?" Believe not a word of it.]
"We don't buy Charmin, stupid. We don't like Charmin."
"I wasn't aware that we cared. I kinda sorta figured that since we weren't exactly gonna treat the little paper squares with a great deal of care or respect, that in the grand scheme most all brands were equivalent."
"We hate Charmin! It smells funny and perfume-y! It's expensive! It's not as good!"
"As what?"
"Huh?"
"What **do** we buy, then?"
"We're Cottonelle people, dumbass!"
Now, I want each of you to take a brief moment to gaze into your own soul and tell me, honestly, if you could ever—EVER—look at another human being and offer any remotely similar declaration. Some people will go to the mat over politics, others over religion. For The Wife, she's ready to gear up and throw down over the concrete unshakable immutable fact that We're Cottonelle People. I tried to determine if Charmin would somehow not perform the basic duties of toilet paper, but she seemed not the tiniest bit eager to have that particular discussion.
"FINE!" I scream lovingly. "Then I'll just drag my ass back to Target and exchange this clearly unusable toilet paper for the right kind, 'cuz stupid old me forgot forgot for a moment that I married a woman with A PRESCRIPTION ASS!"
[Note: The Wife then reacted in a manner which suggested that she found my lovingly offered remarks to be less than loving, but at this point I was not to be swayed from my course: We're Cottonelle People, by God, and right must be done.]
I grabbed the porta-can sized package of Charmin, found the crumpled receipt, and stomped towards the door.
"Where are you going?"
"WE'RE COTTONELLE PEOPLE! CHARMIN SHALL NE'ER SUFFICE!"
"You're seriously going to Target to exchange toilet paper? I can't believe this. It's not that big of a deal..."
THAT remark stopped me in my tracks.
"NOT THAT BIG OF A DEAL? You wake up and the first words—hell, the ONLY words—out of your pie-hole are 'you bought the wrong toilet paper-we're Cottonelle people,' and now for the last seven minutes you've stood there shrieking at me about the depth breadth and width of my failure on this particular purchase. Oh, it's a big damned deal. You've worked too hard for too long for me to not respect the bigness of this deal."
So I drove to Target to exchange the toilet paper.
Gentle readers, if you want to get some curious stares and glances, just try this some day: storm into your local Target with a homicidal gleam in your eye and a Yugo-sized crate of Charmin under your arm. The uniformed Security Guy standing guard at the entrance to Target dove headfirst behind a corral of carts, whimpering "don't shoot! I only make eight dollars and twenty-five cents an hour!"
The Service and Returns area had no other customers (or, hell, maybe they scurried for cover at the thunderous stomp of my approach...), so I set the damnable Charmin on the counter, sighed, and said that I'd like to make a return, please.
The moment of joyful levity in this entire episode occurred at this particular moment, as the blonde counter girl looked at the Charmin for a long moment, looked at me for a sec, then looked back at the Charmin.
"Why?"
I laughed for a moment, but stayed on-task. "Because it's wrong."
Again she looked back and forth between the toilet paper and me. "What's wrong with it? It's toilet paper?"
"Yes, but this is CHARMIN."
"And?"
"We're COTTONELLE people!" I offer with understandable pride.
"What's the difference? It's toilet paper. It still... well, you know.. works, right?"
"Oh, NO!" I counter. "Charmin is for a low class of buttock. Discriminating backsides knows to hold out for the far superior performance of COTTONELLE."
[Note: as God is my witness, I am embellishing not one bit. This is the actual exchange, verbatim]
At this stage, an older black man in a Target shirt came out and stood, watching in confused disbelief. he said nothing, but I could tell he was trying to figure out just what the holy hell was up with this.
Blonde Counter Girl blinks, looks at me, looks again at the Charmin, then again at me.
"Well, did you want to make an exchange?"
"Oh, you bet my happy marriage, I do!"
So I wander back to the t.p. aisle and sprint past the Charmin stacks (noticing a slightly funny and perfume-y fragrance which I will never confess to The Wife even if she tortures me...), find a package of Cottonelle roughly equivalent to a bass boat in size, and then, using a system of rollers and pulleys, drag the carton back to the return desk. I lug the palette of butt-wipe onto the counter and smile triumphantly.
"Found what we needed!"
Blonde Counter Girl did not smile. Older Black Guy squinted in the background, shook his head in something like disgust. I waved. he turned and disappeared back through the door from whence he'd first come.
Blonde Counter girl enters some codes and numbers, scans the Charmin, enters some more codes, scans the Cottonelle, enters some more codes, then sighs and slumps. She looks at me.
"There's a price difference. The Cottonelle is more expensive."
I lean in and nod with a smile. "Because it's BETTER. How much do I owe?"
"Eleven cents."
I laugh very loudly—Older Black Guy peeks around the corner to see if there's trouble—turn to the line of folks waiting behind me and nod. And I think we all agree that it's well worth that eleven cents!"
The Line of People say not a word. The hispanic grandmother right behind me sighs, loud and slow.
I count out eleven pennies, one at a time, slide them across the counter to Blonde Counter Girl. "What's the return policy on this? I ask her.
She glares up at me with a none-too-friendly look. "Returns and exchanges require a receipt, sir."
She hands me my adjusted receipt, shakes her head, and then leans to look around me. "Next in line, PLEASE?"
I decide not to question her on the fact that her "please" sounded a little more sincere, nee desperate, than normal. Instead, I breathed deep, and using my legs rather than my back, lifted the Winnebago-sized package of tissue from the counter and waddled to the door. Security Guy slowly swiveled as I passed, keeping his attention on me and his right hand somewhere near the magnum on his hip (reminding me again how much safer I feel knowing that someone who can't get a job as an ice cream truck driver can still be issued a handgun and a badge to maintain retail shopping peace and order).
As I walk back into the house, I affect my best Ricky Ricardo and shout "Loooooocy! I'm hooooooome!"
The Wife comes around the corner, drying her hair from her shower. She glances at the bail of paper, then at me. She shakes her head very much like an Older Black Guy. "Was it worth all that? A trip there and back just to change brands?" she asks, now apparently eager to distance herself from the issue she herself flamed into an inferno.
"Absolutely," I declare. "After all," I explain, dropping the pack to the floor with a thud loud enough to startle the cats. "We're Cottonelle People."
The Wife rolls her eyes and heads back to getting ready for work, leaving me to stand, hands on hips, riding a towering wave of childish petulant victorious smugness.
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B
For example, I consider myself a reasonably competent human being, while she often considers me a clueless shuffling idiot who would not know to extinguish himself if he were to burst into flames. At least, such is the impression she gives me, most days.
I offer this as a sort of background to the tale I shall now impart, a tale of best intentions and strangest results and anger and confusion and rage and eventually childish petulant victorious smugness.
Friday midday, I took the daughter (our youngest) to Target for what is becoming a sort of tradition. The Wife was scheduled to work Friday night (L&D nurse, night shift, God Be Praised), so she was sleeping all day, and the daughter has no pre-school on Friday, so she and I often go to Target to eat lunch at the snack counter. We both have hots dogs and Cheetos (always Cheetos—absolutely Cheetos) and then we go shopping. Among the items The Wife mumbled that we needed (the night before, as we were cleaning dishes) was "toilet paper."
I put that in quotation marks because it is a full and accurate description of the item I was told to purchase: "toilet paper."
Being a reasonably competent human being, as I turned the cart down the toilet paper aisle I was flush with confidence that I could somehow manage to successfully purchase product with which to wipe our bottoms. Charmin Super Atomo-Mega Pack was on sale for 2 dollars off, so I tossed a zeppelin-sized bail of tissue onto the cart and muddled on.
Daughter and I get home, she watches Backyardigans as I lug in the 39 small plastic bags of groceries (Tatiana, our Russian accented checkout weasel at Target, seemed proud to put no more than two items in any bag, resulting in a wee bit of excessive packaging...). I then spend the next 45 minutes putting away the metric ton of groceries, finishing around 2:30 just as The Wife emerges from her Beauty Sleep [insert your own joke here—the ice upon which I daily skate stays thin enough already, thank you very little...], plods daintily into the kitchen, glances around, sees the 9000-pack of Charmin on the kitchen table, and says (and again i quote):
"What the fuck is this shit?"
"What say you, my dear? Did I disappoint you in some way?" I query in my always-sweet manner. [Note: The Wife would likely make up the most hideous lies about my response here, claiming that I said something like "It's toilet paper, dumbass—what does it look like?" Believe not a word of it.]
"We don't buy Charmin, stupid. We don't like Charmin."
"I wasn't aware that we cared. I kinda sorta figured that since we weren't exactly gonna treat the little paper squares with a great deal of care or respect, that in the grand scheme most all brands were equivalent."
"We hate Charmin! It smells funny and perfume-y! It's expensive! It's not as good!"
"As what?"
"Huh?"
"What **do** we buy, then?"
"We're Cottonelle people, dumbass!"
Now, I want each of you to take a brief moment to gaze into your own soul and tell me, honestly, if you could ever—EVER—look at another human being and offer any remotely similar declaration. Some people will go to the mat over politics, others over religion. For The Wife, she's ready to gear up and throw down over the concrete unshakable immutable fact that We're Cottonelle People. I tried to determine if Charmin would somehow not perform the basic duties of toilet paper, but she seemed not the tiniest bit eager to have that particular discussion.
"FINE!" I scream lovingly. "Then I'll just drag my ass back to Target and exchange this clearly unusable toilet paper for the right kind, 'cuz stupid old me forgot forgot for a moment that I married a woman with A PRESCRIPTION ASS!"
[Note: The Wife then reacted in a manner which suggested that she found my lovingly offered remarks to be less than loving, but at this point I was not to be swayed from my course: We're Cottonelle People, by God, and right must be done.]
I grabbed the porta-can sized package of Charmin, found the crumpled receipt, and stomped towards the door.
"Where are you going?"
"WE'RE COTTONELLE PEOPLE! CHARMIN SHALL NE'ER SUFFICE!"
"You're seriously going to Target to exchange toilet paper? I can't believe this. It's not that big of a deal..."
THAT remark stopped me in my tracks.
"NOT THAT BIG OF A DEAL? You wake up and the first words—hell, the ONLY words—out of your pie-hole are 'you bought the wrong toilet paper-we're Cottonelle people,' and now for the last seven minutes you've stood there shrieking at me about the depth breadth and width of my failure on this particular purchase. Oh, it's a big damned deal. You've worked too hard for too long for me to not respect the bigness of this deal."
So I drove to Target to exchange the toilet paper.
Gentle readers, if you want to get some curious stares and glances, just try this some day: storm into your local Target with a homicidal gleam in your eye and a Yugo-sized crate of Charmin under your arm. The uniformed Security Guy standing guard at the entrance to Target dove headfirst behind a corral of carts, whimpering "don't shoot! I only make eight dollars and twenty-five cents an hour!"
The Service and Returns area had no other customers (or, hell, maybe they scurried for cover at the thunderous stomp of my approach...), so I set the damnable Charmin on the counter, sighed, and said that I'd like to make a return, please.
The moment of joyful levity in this entire episode occurred at this particular moment, as the blonde counter girl looked at the Charmin for a long moment, looked at me for a sec, then looked back at the Charmin.
"Why?"
I laughed for a moment, but stayed on-task. "Because it's wrong."
Again she looked back and forth between the toilet paper and me. "What's wrong with it? It's toilet paper?"
"Yes, but this is CHARMIN."
"And?"
"We're COTTONELLE people!" I offer with understandable pride.
"What's the difference? It's toilet paper. It still... well, you know.. works, right?"
"Oh, NO!" I counter. "Charmin is for a low class of buttock. Discriminating backsides knows to hold out for the far superior performance of COTTONELLE."
[Note: as God is my witness, I am embellishing not one bit. This is the actual exchange, verbatim]
At this stage, an older black man in a Target shirt came out and stood, watching in confused disbelief. he said nothing, but I could tell he was trying to figure out just what the holy hell was up with this.
Blonde Counter Girl blinks, looks at me, looks again at the Charmin, then again at me.
"Well, did you want to make an exchange?"
"Oh, you bet my happy marriage, I do!"
So I wander back to the t.p. aisle and sprint past the Charmin stacks (noticing a slightly funny and perfume-y fragrance which I will never confess to The Wife even if she tortures me...), find a package of Cottonelle roughly equivalent to a bass boat in size, and then, using a system of rollers and pulleys, drag the carton back to the return desk. I lug the palette of butt-wipe onto the counter and smile triumphantly.
"Found what we needed!"
Blonde Counter Girl did not smile. Older Black Guy squinted in the background, shook his head in something like disgust. I waved. he turned and disappeared back through the door from whence he'd first come.
Blonde Counter girl enters some codes and numbers, scans the Charmin, enters some more codes, scans the Cottonelle, enters some more codes, then sighs and slumps. She looks at me.
"There's a price difference. The Cottonelle is more expensive."
I lean in and nod with a smile. "Because it's BETTER. How much do I owe?"
"Eleven cents."
I laugh very loudly—Older Black Guy peeks around the corner to see if there's trouble—turn to the line of folks waiting behind me and nod. And I think we all agree that it's well worth that eleven cents!"
The Line of People say not a word. The hispanic grandmother right behind me sighs, loud and slow.
I count out eleven pennies, one at a time, slide them across the counter to Blonde Counter Girl. "What's the return policy on this? I ask her.
She glares up at me with a none-too-friendly look. "Returns and exchanges require a receipt, sir."
She hands me my adjusted receipt, shakes her head, and then leans to look around me. "Next in line, PLEASE?"
I decide not to question her on the fact that her "please" sounded a little more sincere, nee desperate, than normal. Instead, I breathed deep, and using my legs rather than my back, lifted the Winnebago-sized package of tissue from the counter and waddled to the door. Security Guy slowly swiveled as I passed, keeping his attention on me and his right hand somewhere near the magnum on his hip (reminding me again how much safer I feel knowing that someone who can't get a job as an ice cream truck driver can still be issued a handgun and a badge to maintain retail shopping peace and order).
As I walk back into the house, I affect my best Ricky Ricardo and shout "Loooooocy! I'm hooooooome!"
The Wife comes around the corner, drying her hair from her shower. She glances at the bail of paper, then at me. She shakes her head very much like an Older Black Guy. "Was it worth all that? A trip there and back just to change brands?" she asks, now apparently eager to distance herself from the issue she herself flamed into an inferno.
"Absolutely," I declare. "After all," I explain, dropping the pack to the floor with a thud loud enough to startle the cats. "We're Cottonelle People."
The Wife rolls her eyes and heads back to getting ready for work, leaving me to stand, hands on hips, riding a towering wave of childish petulant victorious smugness.
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B
04 January 2007
5 books, 5 lines [meme]
My big-time novelizing pal Cornelia, picked up an amusing meme on her gang-blog, nakedauthors.com (a meme which she says she originally picked up from Joshilyn Jackson's "Faster Than Kudzu" blog):
Here's my resultant frankengraph:
-=-=-
Key:
DIRECTIONS
1. Take five books off your bookshelf.
2. Book #1 -- first sentence of the book
3. Book #2 -- last sentence on page 50
4. Book #3 -- second sentence on page 100
5. Book #4 -- next to the last sentence on page 150
6. Book #5 -- final sentence of the book
7. Make the five sentences into a paragraph.Here's my resultant frankengraph:
All peoples have epic legends about their tribal ancestors, and these legends often formalize themselves into religious cults. The corollary to never going to a meeting without a strategy is never getting off a jet without a strategy, never going to a screening without a strategy, never going to dinner without a strategy, never going to a breakfast without a strategy. "But there's nothing we can do about it now." "It sounds good to me," said Peebles; "I ain't fer goin' 'ome empty 'anded." By restraining them with the nameless unhewn log, they will not feel disgraced, they will be still, whereupon heaven and earth will be made right by themselves.
-=-=-
Key:
(1) River Out Of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
, by Richard Dawkins(2) Hello He Lied (and other true stories from the Hollywood trenches)
(3) Deliverance
(4) Tarzan and the Golden Lion
(5) Tao Te Ching
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B
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