boogers from olympus: the reviewing game

Over at a Alligators In A Helicopter that most-excellent blog from my buddy Scott the Reader, there's a post discussing movie critics and their odd response to the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie, Dead Man's Chest. Simply put, though the movie continues to absolutely dominate the summer box office like few movies in recent memory, critics have been oddly personal and mean-spirited in their complaints about the screenwriting team of Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott, the men behind both this movie as well as the previous POTC flick which these same critics near-universally loved.

Now, I'll gleefully confess to possible bias in this debate, as I am personally acquainted with Ted and Terry, and I'm likely prone to give them (and their work) a great deal more credit than what many reviewers might. But I do not think that I am such fame-blinded fanboy that I'll dismiss all criticisms as unvalid and off the mark. I liked the movie a lot, and I very much want to see it again, but I do not love it in the same way that I did POTC1, and I can admit that there are moments where the movie (and the underlying story) disappoint me to some degree.

But that's not what I'm thinking about in this post.

What I'm thinking about is the nature of film critics. Their personality. Their general make-up in terms of emotions and motivation and concerns. You see, I have more than a few friends who are, in various degrees, in the game of film reviewing and film criticism. Some are paid pros operating at a high level, while others are more casual — "pro-grade hobbyists," you might say — who write about movies out of pure love rather than for a payday. Others are just active online reviewers who are eager to share their take on movies with anyone interested in visiting theiur site(s).

And here's the thing: after thinking about it for just a few minutes, I get the nagging feeling that a great many reviewers/critics honestly don't like most of the folks who go to movies.

I say this due to the way I see reviewers sneering at such "common" concerns and issues as popularity and revenues. usually the sneering is most pronounced when discussing movies which HE, the reviewer, with his rare and wonderfully perfect insight, has deemed "unsuitable" for consumption by all us mortals slumming around in the mud down here on planet Earth.

By the way these sorts of critics will decry a movie not for a specific fault or failing, but for the way that others refuse to acknowledge or share his views ON this alleged fault or failing.

By the way the critic will say 'well, it's not awful, but it's nowhere as good as [[some other movie]," ignoring for a moment the lunacy of such a comparison (the issue at stake being is THIS movie worth watching" rather than "how do you compare THIS movie to THAT movie in some sort of abstract imaginary mano-e-mano confrontation?"

Imagine if a beauty pageant judge acted that way. "Well, Miss Paducah is fairly attractive, but in all honesty she's NOWHERE nearly so gorgeous as this OTHER woman who's NOT in this contest and who's NOT really under consideration fro awards right now..."

Yet that's what many critics do, and I think often they do this to remind folks (maybe themselves more than anyone) of just how smart and "well-read" (in a filmic sense) they are, reminding us that becasue THEY have slept through, err, I mean watched all of Truffaut's canon, they are therefore more able to say whether or not JACKASS is an amusing way to spend 8 bucks and 100 minutes.

As I said, I have more than a few friends who are reviewers and/or critics, and in most every case I consider them decent intelligent human beings, but they tend to turn various shades of indigo when I remind any of them "you know, it's a luxury to sit back and write only in judgment of the works of others and never have to really expose or risk any part of your own soul with a wholly original creation."

This is not to suggest that film critique and review is not a creative endeavour, nor does it mean that all reviewers are spurned creative writers (though let's be honest — many are...). It's a tough gig to have to contextualize and analyze the creative efforts of others. But consider this: who reviews the reviewers? What standards are they held to? Who publicly rips them a new one when they have an effort that just doesn't come off as planned? Imagine the uproar if a novelist or writer were published in a major magazine or paper and spent 1200 words dissecting every flub and weakly expressed thought in some reviewer's comments?

"While Ebert's analysis initially seems astute and informed, by the end of the piece we realize all too clearly that he is merely recycling cliched hackneyed complaints better expressed in previous reviews, leaving me to suggest readers avoid this review entirely and instead re-read Ebert's more solid opinions from previous years...."

Everyone has a right to heckle the ball player from the sidelines, but there comes a point where, when you realize these hecklers have never and will never actually risk themselves with a moment between the chalked lines, you begin to understand that there are those who play, and those who watch, and those who watch don't always understand the game they are watching as well as what they might like to suggest.

Interestingly, hecklers hate to be heckled. But in movie reviewing as with most everything else, judge not lest ye be judged and found wanting.
.
.
.
B

on the importance of titles

In the screenwriting world, it seems as though different folks put different value on different aspects of any property. Some folks rate the logline as critical, while others are more about the theme, and others rave about the value of “high concept” and some look only at the market value of the attachments to any property.

To be fair, every one of those considerations has importance, and everyone needs to be as rock solid and ass-kicking as possible in order to guarantee the best possible shot at profitability (and don’t even bring up the word “art” in this discussion, as moviemaking is a business, dammit, and you stand as much chance at impressing me with your noise about artistic needs and desires and you do of paying for your Big Mac with just a newly composed sonnet).

But for me, one of the things which can really make or break a project is the title. Some titles simply roll of the tongue in such a way that you smile a little just to hear them—they inspire you and intrigue you and interest you and make you want to hear more, see more, know more.

STAR WARS
THE GODFATHER
CASABLANCA
SNAKES ON A PLANE

Of course, the converse can be true as well: some titles are so clunky and/or uninspired that somehow you wind up feeling exhausted after just two or three words:

HOWARD THE DUCK
NATE AND HAYES
MR. NANNY
STOP OR MY MOM WILL SHOOT!

I’m not going to argue that a title alone can make or break a movie—that’s a bigger debate for someone else’s blog and time—but I will say that in my opinion a good title just works.

And I still don’t have one.

At least, not for the romantic comedy I am trying to hammer into a read-worthy form.

I know the characters cold. I understand my story and outline pretty damned clearly. I have a firm grip on the tone and vibe I’m after. But so far, I have basically nothing in the way of a title. Not just “oh, I have a lame idea,” but “I don’t have jack shit for an idea.”

The title page of the current working draft still reads UNTITLED ROMANTIC COMEDY, which, as I’m sure we can agree, is likely about as inspired as a radio station broadcasting nothing but the sound of a dentist drill.

NOTE: I am not asking for suggestions, and if any are offered I’lll ignoe them and possibly even delete them, as I do not want your damned chocolate in my damned peanut butter. I’m mainly whining that I have a great big hole where a super cool ‘COME WATCH ME” kind of title damned sure needs to go.

And it pisses me off.
.
.
.
B

LA: thur 6 July 2006 (“pt4 — the end of the beginning")

“Hello?”

“Hey. It’s me. Brett. Whatcha doin’?”

“Who?”

“Brett. From online. Aggiebrett. Whatcha doin’?”

“Uh, well, just straightening up for a garage sale, and--“

“Great. You can take me to dinner tonight. It’s Friday, everyone else is at gay disco fashion shows or Mason’s Lodge things or Disney premiers, and I refuse to sit in my hotel room watching Entertainment Tonight and eating take-out. How do I get to your house?”

“Uh, well, I’m not sure that this--“

“Not sure? Come on, now. Talk me in. I’m on the 101, or the 134, something with a 1. Heading west. Where is ya?”

-=-=-=-

Deb is Canadian, which means two things:

1) she’s a little too polite and accommodating for a normal person
and
2) she sometimes drops that odd “aboot” word into conversation.

I know her from The Artful Forum, the waycool screenwriter’s site run by painfully generous Craig Mazin, writer of the more recent installments of the SCARY MOVIE franchise as well as some other cool recent (or soon to be recent) flicks. Deb, aka “Chesher Cat”, and I were sorta destined to cross paths, as she was once a rock star photographer in the early 70s, while I am (apparently) one of the only people in my peer group who know anything at all about rock music from the early 70s. In the thin-aired world of the screenwriter wannabee crowd, that’s enough to pass as “destiny.”

I’d warned Deb that I’d be in LA, and she (being Canadian and polite to a fault) had said “hey, drop me a line!” Likely she meant that in much the same way that people do when they ask things like “So how’s it going?” They don’t expect that you bring out medical charts and bank statements to give a totally accurate update on your condition, and I’m not sure that Deb really intended that I show up on her doorstep early on a Friday evening, half-unannounced and expecting to be entertained.

But such is life.

I find her place without any trouble—turns out she was only ten minutes from where I was when I called—so I arrive quicker than either of us expected. Cute house, nice trees, quiet street.

On the porch, a laundry basket filled with maybe two dozen very well-worn pro-grade wooden baseball bats. I remember walking past and seeing the chipped dinged maple and ash bats and hoping that the damage was from baseballs rather than coldcallers and surprise uninvited guests, but at this stage of the game I’m on the porch and the dog is barking, so forward seems the only option left.

I knock, she answers, and aside from an awkward second or five right after the initial “hey there!” where we both are left grinning like idiots because we both suddenly realize that we’re not at all sure what the next remark is in this sort of odd crossover moment (when someone you’ve bantered with as an online persona suddenly coalesces into an actual living breathing by god potentially creepy living being), she demonstrates commendable courage by saying “come on in.”

I notice a big blue and silver PowerMac G4 computer and matching Apple monitor on her living room table, and immediately I feel better. Mac people are Good People. She’s trying to show off how well she’s cleaned up her workspace—she’s made numerous online comments about how she works in a dump—and I’m making the polite “yeah, this is great” sort of space-filling response, when I hear the door open behind me. I glance back up the hallway and see a cute 18 year old in cheer shorts prance across the hall into another bedroom. Then another teeny-chick appears, glances my way, sets her jaw and approaches.

“Honey, this is Brett. From Texas.

“You voted for Bush, didn’t you?”

The question is phrased in the form of an accusation.

“Well, er, yeah. But not today.”

She looks at me like I just farted.

“I don’t understand people like you.”

Now, know this if you know nothing else about me: contrary to what some might say and what some newspaper reporting might suggest, I am, at heart, a decent fellow. Within certain bounds and from a certain perspective, what you might call a nice guy. But I also have this childish streak, and when someone tries to get up in my grille and give me shit, I tend to smile and give back. You wanna, dance, little girl? Then let’s dance.

“Yeah, and that’s a real shame, ‘cuz it’s absolutely essential that teenagers like you understand people like me. It’s your understanding of people like me that hold the Earth in her orbit and keep her from skittering off into space. And for the record, I live in Tom Delay’s congressional district, my kids swim at the Ken Lay YMCA, and my hobbies include clearcutting the rainforest and clubbing baby seals using ivory tusks. Are you coming to dinner with us?”

Deb laughs. Teeny Chick doesn’t. I shrug.

Deb and I pile into her car at my behest—I whine about being tired and a tourist, and she (“Canadian”) accommodates without complaint.

We drive to Lucy’s Café El Adobe, a cool little old-school Mexican food joint which suits me just fine.


Apparently Lucy’s is a Hollywood landmark of sorts, as there are all sorts of stories about famous diners there, and pictures of name celebs are all over the place—Linda Ronstadt and Jerry Brown... John Belushi... Orson Welles... (Orson FUCKING Welles!)—but it’s not some frou-frou hoity-toity brasserie. Deb and I enter through the backdoor which halfway takes us through the kitchen, and I am reminded that I’ve never yet had a bad experience in a restaurant which I enter through the kitchen.

The food is fine—like most all California “Mexican” food I’ve had, it’s slightly alien to my Texican sensibilities, but fine and tasty. The one odd food beat is the fact that all the dinners include a side salad. Now, there’s nothing wrong with the concept of the side salad, but it somehow seems odd to get a plate of iceberg and tomato wedges drizzled with Green Goddess right before my steaming greasy plate of chili-covered gooey goodness, in much the same way that it might be to have a sushi chef slide you a little easy open can of fruit cocktail as a prelude to your yellowfin and wasabi. I mean, fruit cocktail in a can—fine. Sushi—fine. Fruit cocktail as an appetizer for sushi... just a tad surprising.

[The dressing, by the way, was not Green Goddess but rather some very yummy homemade house special which seems loaded with garlic, but dammit “Green Goddess” just reads funnier than “house dressing,” so I took an editorial risk. So sue me.]

Deb and I enjoy a perfectly enjoyable long dinner. We chatter and trade gossip on all the online personalities with whom we share any familiarity (and trust me, you all would have been totally humiliated to hear what horrid lies and exaggerations of you we tossed back and forth). I giggle and snicker at a few tables of Beautiful People I notice around the room: there’s a peculiar LA vibe where it’s not enough just to be gorgeous—one must also be noticed and recognized for being gorgeous.

Given that I shanghaied Deb into this impromptu thing, I paid for her dinner (and made sure to defang my chivalrousness by reminding her that she was now obligated to perform sexual favors at the conclusion of our evening), and after ten or fifteen minutes of wrestling and wet-cat complaining about the way Lucy’s handles credit card transactions, we pulled a Reverse Henry Hill and wound our way back out through the kitchen and to her car. We wandered around Melrose, headed back to her place, and then we sat in the driveway and yacked about writing for a few hours.

Here’s the thing: that last bit surely sounds comically dull and nerdy to any non-writers who are (for whatever reason) reading this, but if you are, like me, someone for whom “hanging with other serious writers” is a rare and blog-worthy experience, then you understand exactly why this was so damned cool.

If you live in LA, or maybe in Manhattan, writers are nothing very uncommon or special. If, however, you hail from places like Katy, Texas, or Orlando, Florida, or Pigknuckle, Arkansas, sharing war stories of time in the trenches with another writer who actually understands what the hell youa re talking about... well, that’s gravy, man. A few years back at the Austin Film Festival I remarked to a certain “name” writer (who was slumming with the Little People like me in the Driskill Bar) that he took it for granted, that he had forgotten the loneliness of not yet being a certified recognized card-carrying Pro, and that for folks like me who are still trying to find any way into the party, these odd little painfully brief moments of close contact are like holy relics in some small backwater European village—something we local cherish and protect and hold sacred even while other more worldly types snicker and chuckle at our childish quaintness.

To non-writers, the idea of spending two or three hours sitting in the front seat of a Jeep, talking about writing and act breaks and character development and plot pacing... that all surely sounds approximately as interesting as sorting rice grains by size and shape. But for the lonely aspiring writer, used to always feeling out of place at every neighborhood gathering and familiar with the sensation of having nothing interesting to offer to casual poolside conversation on any random summer afternoon, these nerdy episodes are like splinters of The Cross: real, precious, and beyond value.

-=-=-=-

After a lot of writing chatter, we realize that’s now after 1 am, so I let Deb off the hook when it comes time for the sexual favors thing—that basket of baseball bats and the knowledge that she has a large athletic son who knows how to swing them played no part at all in the decision there—and then I dive back onto the freeway to head back to my little hotel room.

I sail past the Disney Studios, past Warners, past Universal, around thee backside of the hill, then onto the 405, off at Wilshire, and back up that boulevard where I absolutely do not fit in.

As I toss my car keys onto the dresser, I look out my open window, through the blossoming jacaranda tree and over the blue-lit pool below and beyond the roofline of my hotel to the Hollywood Hills just barely visible beyond. Orange sodium vapor lamps light the streets like strings of golden topaz. It’s been a long day—looking back on it, it feels like at least two and maybe three days worth of memories.

Part of me wants to collapse into bed, but there’s another part of my brain that refuses yet to surrender to the tug of slumber. It's 2 am as I kick off my shoes, fire up my iBook, prop it in my lap, and do what that other stranger part of my brain commands.

A breeze wafts through the room, the curtains slowdance in the shadows, and I write:

“On the whole, it was not a bad day....”
.
.
.
B

LA: thur 6 July 2006 (“pt3 — mid-afternoon")

Suze re-emerges from the potty room and we decide we’ve now had too much fun at the Market, so we head out. In the parking lot I look up and notice that across the street is the WGA Library. Again, being from that corner of the planet which is NOT Hollywood, access to the WGA library of scripts and such is something of a rare treat, so I insist on crossing to visit.

We pass through the magnificent Stephen J Cannell gallery to enter the hallowed William Wilder Reading Room. The Billy Wilder room is a smaller than expected but still impressive library featuring a long central table (where three different people are set up with their Mac laptops, all intently banging away on what surely are their own spec screenplays), and loaded shelves filled with nearly identical leather bound volumes.

Screenplays. Thousands of them.

“May I help you?” asks a small yet somehow still intense voice. I turn and find a classic clichéd Spinster Librarian smiling at me with that tolerant smile of a librarian who is tasked with helping an idiot she’d really rather not help.

“Yeah, I was hoping to read a copy of a screenplay today.”

Spinster Librarian walks me in tiny stupid baby steps (as she has already categorized me for life as a paste-eating moron upon entry) through the hyper-complicated process by which a mere mortal might gain short-term access to read a script:

1) you write the title on a scrap of paper
2) you hand the scrap to the librarian
3) she “retrieves the material”
4) you may review the material at your leisure
5) you may NOT remove the material or make photocopies
6) when finished, you return the material to the Librarian

Somehow the Librarian makes it seem as though the process and rules are sacred and arcane, as she takes her time in making sure that I, a toe-sucking moron in her estimation, can understand the intricacies of this hopeless complicated dance.

“Fine,” I say, as Susan excuses herself to the bathroom again, it now having been 7.25 minutes since her last such visit.

I scribble the name of the screenplay on a scrap of paper—I’m almost certain that the paper is high quality linen stuff of the sort normally used only for the resumés of recent college grads eager to seem impressive as they apply for positions as assistant manager of a Luby’s—and slide it to Spinster. She looks at me with that nose in the air and eyes rolled up look that lets me know just how quaint and charming she finds it that a low-order simian is dressed like a human. She’s doing all she can to make me feel like Lancelot Link, and I’m making sure that I just smile smile smile and ignore her dismissive ‘tude.

She looks at the title and puckers in confusion.

“Animal House? You want to read Animal House?”

“Yup.”

“I’m not sure we have that title in our collection.”

“You do. I already checked online. That’s why I’m here.”

“Well...” (she says it with exasperation, now tired of indulging the chimp) “... we’ll see about that.”

“Take your time,” I smile.

I swear — the woman groaned just like Lurch from The Addams Family.”

A few seconds later she comes back, leather bound title carried flat before her in her hands like a tray upon which a delicate object is balanced. I’m half surprised they don’t use the mechanical robot arms like in THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN.

“Here.” She lays The Materials on the counter, but does not sldie it to my side of the counter. “It’s actual title is National LamPOOOOOON’S Animal House.”

I try to squeeze her meaning from that oddly-emphasized phrasing.

“National LamPOOOOOON’S Animal House?”

“Yes,” she explains patiently for me in a way that communicates clearly taht she rates me a card carrying idjit, a moron incapable of operating doorknobs or pencils without adult supervision. “National LamPOOOON’S Animal House.”

“Well, I’ll be gentle with it, then.”

She nods and seems reluctant to let me have The Materials, so I surprised her by leaning in and grabbing The Materials from the counter. She seems surprised and serves up a slight gasp, but realizes too late that there’s nothing more to be done.

The Chimp has The Materials.

I plop down and start reading. Suze grabs a magazine—UROLOGY TODAY, I remember hoping—and then we kill an hour. During that time, my cellphone vibrates once, but I ignore it. (Not entirely true. I reposition the phone for increased nerve conductivity and pray for another call, but what I mean is that I did not check to see who the call was from.)

I finish National LamPOOOOOOON’S Animal House and return The Materials to the Spinster. She’s nervous, clearly expecting gunplay or a barfight or something. You can see it in her eyes— Monkeys throw their own poop, don’t they! Oh my god!”

I meet Suze as she comes out of the restroom, and we head back into the light where I check my cellphone for missed calls. We hop into Suze’s car and head up into the hills, up Mulholland Drive. As we cruise around the bends and through the canyons, I return the call that came in while I was in the Billy Wilder Room and end up laughing with Snake, one of my former college roommates, now a lawyer back in Texas.

The reason I’m laughing is that Snake called at exactly the moment I was reading a script about collegiate idiocy, a script which basically mirrors many of the memories that Snake and I share, a script which will no doubt be the model for a script about those memories and experiences, the script which most all of my college buddies have been on my ass to sit down and write for more than ten years now. Somehow, the ridiculously well-timed irony of it all amuses me.

I cut short my chat with Snake as Suze needs to find a restroom, so we pull into a Starbucks atop the hill, and I buy another 4-dollar bucket of go-go juice. Christ Almighty I’m am fried on caffeine, I think excitedly to myself in an internal voice which sounds like The Great Cornholio.

As I sit out front with my 4-dollar hypersweet iced tea, I marvel that this is a totally normal looking little strip center, one that looks not one whit different than any I might find back home, except:
1) it’s crowded by rugged hillsides which look only slightly less fake than the landscaping in a theme park
2) eucalyptus trees tower everywhere
3) there’s a short bald dude in a brown velour jogging suit wandering around the parking lot in front of me, yakking loud into a cell and gesticulating like a wildman, and he’s a dead ringer for a 4/5-scale model of actor Michael “THE SHIELD” Chiklis.

Suze emerges and sits with me.

“Look,” I say. ‘It’s a 4/5 scale model of Michael Chiklis....”

Brown Jogging Suit Guy turns around—apparently he heard me as I didn’t really bother trying to lower my voice—and I find that it’s not a 4/5 scale model of Michael Chiklis..

It’s actually Michael Chiklis -- the genuine article in all its surprisingly not so imposing majesty.

Chiklis seems confused and stunned, but I just laugh and give him a peace sign, and then he laughs loud and goes back to his call. I’d like to think that he told his phone-pal “some redneck Eddie Haskell looking mutherfucker just called me short!”, but perhaps that’s just the romantic in me.

Suze scolds me (she does that a lot—she’s very maternal that way) and we grab her car head off down The Hill. While winding down the backside into the San Fernando Valley, we swing past the home of one of the few Big Time Writer Pals we know, and we call his cellphone—perhaps Suze needed to use the facilities in his stately pleasure domes—but he’s away, likely schutzing with supermodels in Gstaad or smearing coconut oil on supermodels in Bora Bora or windsurfing on Mount Baldy.

With supermodels.

We continue down the hill, slide onto the freeway back to Pasadena, and Suze explains to me that she has plans that evening, as some jazz-noodling pals of her have a CD release party as part of a fashion show at a gay disco.

In case you need help, “jazz” and “fashion” and “gay disco” are not exactly chart-toppers on my interest meter, so I beg off any more fun with Suze and head out into the lengthening shadows to see what last second amusement I can stir up in SoCal.

As I accelerate westbound back onto the 101, I pull my phone list and start running down the names, looking for someone I’ve not yet bothered.

I find a name. I smile, and I dial.
.
.
.
B

LA: thur 6 July 2006 (“pt2 — things forgotten, things denied”)

Whenever I’m on one of these odd solo visionquest sorts of extended weekends (where The Wife and kids are left safely at home and I stumble around in-country somewhere), I tend to squeeze more time from the daily grind by eschewing certain luxuries.

Food. Sleep. Sensibility.

As a result, sometimes the margins grow fuzzy, and memories of one day bleed into one another, or run off the edges of the page entirely, or sometimes don’t get logged at all.

Like Thursday.

I spent the early morning having coffee, the late-morning driving around Hollywood to Pasadena, noon hour barnstorming tourists at Universal, and early afternoon at Big Boy.

I now look up and realize that somewhere in there Suze drove me all the hell around Hollywood.

Including The Farmer’s Market, where we wandered around the stalls while sipping heavily caffeinated coffee drink until finally we wound up at the big shiny Barnes&Noble store at the rear of the fancy shopping area attached to the market. Barnes&Noble is not such a novel experience for me (as I had to explain more than a few times to wide-eyed LA friends, contrary to their mental images, the Houston area does actually have such cutting edge niceties as paving, and indoor plumbing, and cable TV), but what was kinda cool and different was a Barnes&Noble where the “movies and screenwriting” section was not really just half a shelf worth of random oddball trade paperbacks from geeks you’d never heard of. It wasn’t really a surprise—this is Hollywood, after all—but it was cool to see half a wall’s worth of books on and about movies and moviemaking. Several shelves worth of published scripts and screenplays. Pretty much every screenwriting book I’ve ever heard anyone reference online was in evidence that day.

Nerd Heaven.

I poked around and skimmed books (bought nothing), and then Suze excused herself for a potty break (it had been twelve minutes since her previous such break, after all...). I wandered over to the fiction area and looked around.

A table out front pimped “New Titles,” and I just scanned the table quickly while passing by. I’m not normally a big reader of thrillers, but for two reasons I just had to stop and give the table a minute or three of my time:

1) I actually know the author of one of the prominently displaysd books I see on the table

-and-

2) standing there also looking at titles is a shit-hot brunette who looks like Jamie Gertz’s younger less frumpy sister.

Sitting front and center on the table was A Field Of Darkness, a new novel from Cornelia Readan old and dear e-pal of mine. I’ve “known” (in the online banter sense) Cousin Cornelia for something like 5 years now, and I remember her sharing news of every major milestone in the development, pitching, and eventual publication of this debut novel. For that reason the book remains a hugely thrilling thing for me: it’s not my book on display at a major vendor’s endcap display, but dammit that book is proof that normal regular civilians can and do transmute from lead to gold, can move from “struggling aspirant” to “actual By God professional” through the proper application of talent, tenacity, and dumb luck.

Which is all fine and dandy, but I already have my own autographed copy of the book, and I’ve already had a nice fuzzy wuzzy emotional scene over the book before when I met Cornelia at a Houston-area bookstore and we both got a little misty-eyed and hugged and shared that ”one of us actually made it off the island!” struggling artists experience whenever one of their peer group breaks through to real commercial success.

Congrats to Cornelia, blah blah blah... I’m hanging around that table for the Gertzian Brunette Babe. “Yowza.”

I make a good show out of pretending to skim the book jacket notes of a few books. She does the same. I check out Cornelia’s bio. I check out Brunette Babe.

“Cornelia Read,” I say aloud, reading the cover of the book. Brunette Babe glances over at me. I smile. “I know her, you know.”

Brunette Babe stares at me for approximately 1.2 seconds, displaying exactly the proper degree of soul-withering “I so do not give a fuck” ‘tude that my masculine bits are ready to pull the EJECT handle and punch out for parts unknown.

MAYDAY! MAYDAY! WE ARE GOING DOWN!

Brunette Babe gives the tiniest hint of a shrug. I watch her as she heads over the New Age Philosophy.

"Obviously not into guys..." I note to myself.
.
.
.
B

meanwhile, a status report

The term "ass deep in alligators" springs to mind.

July has turned into yet one another scheduling joke (the 28th consecutive such month...), as the kids need dentist visits, and orthodontic visits, and pediatric visits, and parties and sleepovers and camps and so on, and so on. Weekend before last I was in a hotel on the far south side of the Houston area as part of a little league baseball tournament. Last week I was in LA. This weekend I'll be in central Texas on a family vacation. Week after that is a nother baseball tourney. Week after that it's BACK to LA, but this time with zero time and attention to Hollywood as I'll be swinging through as part of oldest son's big Boy Scout camp trip to Sequoia Nat'l Forest. I'll return just in time to head to another out of town baseball tournament, the then the week after that school starts and it's back into the regular grind.

Which, actually, might be preferable and more productive than life on the IRREGULAR grind has been so far this summer.

Don't get me wrong—there have been some stupidly cool things so far this summer, and by jumped harry I fully expect and demand a few more before Labor Day sneaks up and telethons past like another annual lapmarker. Scripts are out there. People are starting to respond. Connections are starting to blossom into potentially useful relationships. Heretofore disconnected pieces of the puzzle now start to connect to other small sections, so that something kinda sorta like the beginnings of a hint of a Big Picture are maybe possibly starting to coalesce into view.

But dammit it feels like everything is accelerating, and I'm constantly struggling just to keep up. I'm Lucy Ricardo at the candy making line, and the belt is now starting to speed up a little bit.

Hold tight, my pretties. Methinks this ride gets rougher a-fore it gets smoother.

Onwards.
.
.
.
B

LA: some thoughts on "meetings"

In LA, "meeting" seems to be a very different verb than back home. At home, meeting in the social sense refers to an informal casual impromptu short-term thing. It might take 90 minutes total to set up, drive to, meet, shake hands, drive home and be fully and finally done with the “meeting” proper.

But in LA “meeting” becomes half a day's effort. First you play phone tag and swap voicemails announcing the intent to discuss a meeting. Then you finally connect and begin the preliminary negotiations of the where and when, which is a high order algebraic calculation involving the respective locations of the parties involved, their schedule of OTHER meetings, plus what you are having for dinner and with whom.

The preliminary negotiation phase usually ends when the cell phone signal breaks up as one or both parties drives into the hills and canyons, or hangs up and later CLAIMS to have driven into the hills. There then follows a second round of swapped voice mails, and then both parties manage to reconnect to finalize the logistics--- where, when, etc. At that stage both parties get into their cars and sit in traffic surrounded by shiny BMWs and Mercedes and Lexii and the occasional Bugatti coupe, most always driven by people who look vaguely like either Don Henley or Heather Locklear, and who almost always have a cell phone mashed to their ear. You spend an hour floating slowly down a concrete river of steel and fiberglass until you get to the rendezvous point, at which stage you then start to circle in ever-expanding rings in search of anything resembling as parking spot.

Important Rule About LA: no business establishment seems to want more than one or two patrons actually patronizing that business. Every business I visited in this trip had, at most, three parking spots visible, and usually these were clearly and ominously marked “20 MINUTES ONLY”. Cops and private parking enforcers roam the streets, marking tickets and calling tow truck drivers. Every fifth block which you drive down will have a parking lot with space for 15 cars, and there will be 20 cars in that lot--- everyone parks so as to block in other people, and you merely announce a description of your car as you enter the business, and when someone else needs to leave and you’re car is blocking them, everyone smiles and you go move your car so as to let the trapped person back onto the slow moving concrete river still drifting past at just below pedestrian speed.

During the 15 minutes required to actually find a parking space and get back to wherever the meeting itself was supposed to take place, you again swap a round of voicemails, and then manage to meet at the meeting place for the actual meeting as both of you are talking to one another on the phone to alert the other about the unexpected delays and difficulties of the meeting.

Now the meeting takes place. Smiles, airkisses, and everyone sits on a street side table both to see and to be seen. Sitting outside is never a problem in LA as the weather seems slightly less erratic than does the weather in my hotel room. Somewhere there surely is a thermostat where they set the entire LA/West Hollywood are to “sunny and mid 70s” every day. If ever the temperature wavers by more than 8 degrees, or if ever the sun is even partially obscured for more than 7 consecutive minutes, a repair crew fixes the faulty thermostat ad all is immediately set well once again.

During the meeting you will notice a few surprising things:

1) Everyone seems like they are on an off day, where they are just kicking back and decompressing from the rigors of doing actual productive work. In Houston, you see these same sorts and this same vibe, but it’s mingled with other vibes, most commonly the “Jesus H Christ on a cracker, son—we gotta get this goddamned deal done today before it all goes to hell on us and the Mexicans vote in someone new who won’t play ball” or “that sonofabitch blew the deadline and now we gotta find another supplier before the rigs get iced in and we lose 8 months off our production schedule.” In LA, by contrast, there is this odd hazy vagueness to all business calls, as if whatever project is on the table is both a) open ended on the back, and b) tentative at best on the front.

2) everyone in Hollywood is short, attractive (or at least sure that they are), and not really going anywhere in particular. All the men seem to be around 5’9”, either bald, balding, or shaven (but still often with a ponytail), tanned and either oddly fit or surprisingly non-fit. Everyone seems either to be slightly over-worked or under-worked in terms of muscularity. Steroidal hunks, chunky dweebs, and heroin chic emaciated freaks comprise 80% of the males you might ever encounter. Everyone else?

Screenwriter geeks.
.
.
.
all-seeing B

LA: thur 6 july 2006 (“FIRST MORNING”)

[note-- as with most of my travelogues, the post-event wrap-up tends to run longer than would a real-time video record of the events described. If this is a problem for you, there are likely many other blogs more to your liking, and I urge you to go find one.]

I wakened to another damned perfect day, San Diego my intended destination.

There’s an aerospace museum there which is a fair second place to the National Air & Space Museum at the Smithsonian in terms of its orgasmic wonder to airplane nuts (and, for those eager beavers scoring along at home, I am a airplane nut). I’d been wanting to see this museum since summer of ’05, when they hosted a rare reunion of the surviving members of a certain Russian flying corps of WW2. I’ve got a screenplay about this topic circulating around LA, a ridiculously cinematic story about one of these amazing aviators whose story has never been told. The SD museum has a standing exhibit on these Soviet combat flyers in combat, and it seemed worth a look, as did the museum’s expansive collection of vintage aircraft.

I never got there.

When I wake, I started working the phones to touch base with a page long list of LA based names and personalities I’ve been meaning to see when possible. One of these—a woman whom I’ve known through online writing efforts for 5 or 6 years now, but nothing relating to screenwriting—wanted to meet for coffee, so we met.

(And what IS it about “coffee” in LA? I’m stunned by the amount of coffee which gets drunk in this town. I had one producer laughingly but seriously tell me “cocaine is so early 90s. Now everyone is hopped up on Red Bull and Starbucks. The same stupid mistakes get made as before, but we make them a lot faster now, which increases productivity.”)

So I agreed to meet an old acquaintance for morning coffee, thinking it might take an hour, and then I’d be on my way to San Diego. Instead, it took two hours just to actually get to that part of this meeting where we were actually drinking coffee. We met at that sort of LA place which seems to exist on every corner and at least twice more in mid—block between the corners: an old brick place with at least a dozen umbrella shaded tables. We sat around and drank our 4 dollar coffees and wore our sunglasses and effected just the right level of “je ne sais don't give a fuck,” that peculiarly LA ‘tude where you make it as clear as possible that you are at once both indispensably important yet utterly unconcerned with it all.

Gorgeous women wander past with numbing frequency. Guys who look like they are looking for an Abercrombie ad to fall into mill about like pigeons. BMWs and Mercedes and Bugatti coupes whisper past. And at some point I look up and realize that it’s creeping up on late morning, and that a trip to San Diego now will mean sitting on the 405 parking lot for something like 3 hours, leaving me only a few scant hours to see a museum which I know will require many more hours than I now have.

So I wave of the much anticipated SD side trip, and start working the cell, baybee.

A few calls latter I have some things to do, people to see—meetings.

I’m sailing east on the 134, and I start to notice that there are a lot of gorgeous civilians in this damned town. Walking in Westwood or Beverly Hills, I expect to see gorgeous people, but here I am north of downtown on a workday and every car I pass or which passes me seems to be driven by Ben Affleck or Jessica Simpson. OK, every once in a while I spot an Edward James Olmos driving a landscaping truck, Bea Arthur drives a water delivery truck and makes unsignaled lane changes, and don’t quote me on it but I’m pretty sure I saw Grady from SANFORD AND SON at the helm of a Maserati which had seen better days, but they all looked mahvelous.

South on Fair Oaks, and I pass the theater where Tim Robbins kills the screenwriter in THE PLAYER. Everywhere I go in LA I am surprised to recognize locations used from familiar movies and TV shows. Plus, I was constantly fighting back a secret smirk as I recognized pretty much every major thoroughfare’s name from a childhood wasted watching ADAM 12 and EMERGENCY ( “Squad 51, MVA at Pico and Highland. See the man.” “Roger that, Rampart. 51 responding.”).

I pull up at a cute a cute Pasadena bungalow on a tree-lined side street, the home of my pal Susan, and we shoot the shit for a while. Remember, I’d expected to be away south in San Diego, so I’d not really booked much locally for Thursday. Being a Texan (and therefore “good people” in the classic sense of the phrase), Susan has some Texas beer in her fridge, so I partake. She’s supposed to be cleaning the place for a poker and bullshit thing the next night that I’m supposed to attend, but being a good hostess means blowing off the mundane for the profane, so we decide to wander around and see what we can see.

We swing by Universal Studios where we have have a good bud (we’ll call him “Steve,” as do his parents and all other acquaintances) who works in the legal support office—a suit. He’s already pre-cleared us with security, so Suze and I sail in and submit to the cavity check that gets us past the front gate and then we be-bop up to the 3rd floor of the fabulous Lew Wasserman Building like we know what the hell we are doing.

We get there, find his cubicle empty, and are about to start shouting “Hey-- what the hell?” to the semi-concerned observers in adjacent cubicles, when my cell rings. (Seriously, what did people in LA do before cellphones became de rigueur?) Buddy Steve alerts us to come on down—he’s waiting at the open air café across the drive from the Fabulous Lew Wasserman Building.

In a golf cart.

I laugh, hop in, and away we go.

Now, as I calculate it, there are four possible ways to tour the Universal studios:

1) The easiest and most common is to pay bucks and take the studio tour on the tram.
2) The ballsiest is to simply sprint past the security and see how far into the property you might get before they let slip the dogs of security. The guards themselves seem less than intimidati8ng, as they all seemed a bit older and pudgier than I’d imagined. I asked if we were far from the Joe Don Baker Salon where these guys surely all get their hair helmets coiffed and shellacked.
3) The best way to see the studios is to be escorted around by one of the endless number of gorgeous women wandering around. I’m pretty sure that these trips are reserved for Important People, people with names like Spielberg and Scorsese and Howard, or for guys who have been hired to work with or for these sorts of names. I am not one of those sorts, nor do I work with or for them, but I’m trying, Ringo. I’m trying real hard.

The coolest combination of safety, access, and coolness is Option 4: the private golf cart tour from a friend on the inside, and I heartily recommend it to all. (unless, of course, Option#3 is on the table, in which case, rock on, you magnificent bastard.

Steve zooms away as if he owns the damned lot, which is of course yet more of the proper LA ‘tude: “fuck you, I’m important.” We sailed past various large grey-beige buildings the size of airline hangars, most off which had more Joe Don Bakers standing guard, and which usually had a half dozen young men and women in rumpled suits hanging about, smoking and reading from stacks of stapled pages—actors hustling to keep their lines fresh as crews set up for another shot. We screamed past a crowded tour tram, honking to remind then that Goddammit We Are Fucking Important. I tried to act sleepy. Some of the tourists snapped pictures of us. The ‘tude was full on.

We sail around the back lot at what passes for breakneck speed in a golf cart. We rumbled through the city square set of Back To The Future—complete with the courthouse clock frozen in time as it has always been since 1985.

On the corner of the square is the drugstore soda shop set from BTTF, a set which had also been a drugstore in THE STING (the store in which Doyle Lonigan waited for Hooker’s Western Union man to phone in the racing tips). I called my kids at home to tell them where I was. My 8 year old film freak son wanted to know if the drugstore set was painted more like Back To The Future or The Sting.

Smart kid. Weird, but smart.

Back to the cart and again we run tourist trams off their routes, getting more sidelong glances from wandering Joe Don Bakers, more ugly glares from tram drivers and more adoring waves from star struck tram riders from places like Dubuque and Pisswater, Kentucky.

”Oooooh, LOOK, honey! It’s Steve Martin and Kevin Bacon, driving around in a golf cart! AND THEY’RE WAVING! SNAP A PICTURE! QUICK!”

On one especially surreal psychic whiplash inducing 30 second swing around the hill which dominates the back of the Universal lot we emerge onto Whoville from Ron Howard’s THE GRINCH, turn a corner into the parking lot of the Bates Motel, head up the slope past the spooky Bates home (which turns out to be half-scale so as to achieve a forced perspective, giving the house the odd sense off being part off some demented miniature golf park), then slip past the Desperate Housewives street, make another left and slide through the wrecked airliner in the suburbs set off WAR OF THE WORLDS, and then tear through a cobblestone set that looks vaguely like some cheesy European village of the sort that might be used by the 90210 gang to shoot their European adventures.

“This is where the 90210 gang shot their European adventures” Steve tells me as we cut off another tourist-laden tram and carve a turn towards the Old West street set. The Joe Don Bakers watch and keep things under control, the tram driver glares, tourists wave and flash more photos. We smile and wave. The tourists will get back to Tallahassee and tell great tales off the friendly stars they saw waving at them on the tour.

We careen around the back of the hill to this huge concrete covered bowl shaped area which looks like the world’s biggest kiddy pool or perhaps some crazy underused skate park. Along the far end of the pool stands a huge blank white wall which makes me think of a drive-in movie screen built for some never-popularized Super Ultra Mega Maxi Panascopovision Hyperwide Supreme format, or maybe the Great Wall of Chinatown. In front of that wall stands a huge hydraulic platform, and atop the platform is being built what can only be The Ark. Or, at least, the front half of The Ark. Next to The Ark stands a huge black... “device” which boasts several house sized tanks on the top level, lots of motors and pumps below, and huge trough-like sluices leading from the tank to downspouts next to The Ark.

“Wave generator?” I ask?

“Yeah, this is for the sequel to BRUCE ALMIGHTY. I think Steve Carrel is taking over in HEAVEN ALMIGHTY.”

Somehow, like most everything else on the studio tour, it seems kinda underwhelming and almost comically smaller than it ought to be, but I’m sure the magic of CGI—no doubt that huge wall is a bluescreen backdrop for use in compositing the final shots into some stunningly big shot—will give the final shot a grandeur as yet totally lacking.

We sail around the water tank, scream down a hill past some sort of collapsing bridge last used in the old Bionic Woman TV series (“they refuse to tear up anything which might ever have some use down the line...”), around the JAWS shark tour effect show tank (cheesier than the worst action park lost river ride you have ever seen), and then rumble past the executive bungalows, which of course represent sacred ground for aspiring screenwriters.

These are just a series of small unremarkable ranch style bungalows arrayed in a row like some roadside show park for low-end starter homes. When major directors and production companies are working on a picture on the lot, they set up shop in these bungalows for weeks, months—years—at a time. So if you are a writer, your dream is to get a meeting in one of these bungalows, as they are almost always occupied by Serious Players. Steven Spielberg. Ron Howard. Tori Spelling’s gastroenterologist.

As we sail past, I think we all wanted to make some great snarky joke to minimize and undercut the importance of these bungalows as a goal worth working towards, but none of us could really bring ourselves to do it.

One does not mock Paradise while staring through the still-locked Pearly Gates.

Steve swings back to the parking lot and drops us off. He returns to his job (licking stamps on union work agreements for the studio), while Susan and I get back into traffic and head around towards Pasadena.

Suze and I wander over to Bob’s Big Boy on Riverside. Suze explains to me this particular location holds some quirky significance to us screenwriting geeks, as this is the coffee shop where our heroes and close warm money lending friends Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio used to hang out when first starting out, working on stories in long coffee-fueled stretches. Of course, now that T&T are damned screenwriting superheroes (and when you pen a movie which shatters the three-day opening weekend tally to the tune of $135.6 million, by god you get fitted for a cape), they now likely do their brainstorming on platinum zeppelins over fields of greased supermodels, but per usual I digress.

Over lunch, Suze and I decide to head up The Hill to her favorite Starbucks. I figure “why not—we've had a full morning of ass-sitting and it’s been almost three hours since my last non-fat half-caff semi-frozen reverse-thread 5-speed free-range mochalatté.”

Onwards.
.
.
.
B

LA: wed 5 july 2006 (aka, “THE ARRIVAL”)

The flight was supposed to take 4 hours, but of course, nothing ever really works as smoothly as it’s supposed to in my world. So when I arrive at 1:30 for my 2:36 flight, I find that there IS no 2:36 flight, as the planes for America West airlines have all been delayed or rerouted due to the weather. As the counter lady explains this to me, I stare out the wall-sized windows of the terminal to watch a long happy trail of planes arriving and departing at the neighboring Continental terminal. They seem to wave and wink, as if to say “sorry, man—we wish you’d booked us, too!”

So the 2:36 flight turns into a 4:40 flight, which puts me into Phoenix at 5:40, and of course I am not allowed to continue on to LA on the NEXT flight—leaving at 6:10—but must instead hang around until the 7:45 flight. I’m now scheduled to arrive LA at 9:20.

I call the hotel and rental car desks to alert them of the changed itinerary. Hotel says no prob, the room will be held without any issue, but the rental car folks say “well, if you’re not in our office by 10 AM, you can’t get a car until 5 AM the next morning.”

“”But isn’t this the LAX office?”

“Yes.”

“So you serve one of the busiest airports in the world, yet you shut down before the Red Lobster next door?”

“Yes.”

It turns out to be a non-story, as the plane arrives at 9:15, the baggage pickup takes 5 minutes, I step outside into a waiting shuttle, and 15 minutes later I’m in the queue of velvet ropes at the Enterprise Rental counter. I look out into the big garage area where prepped cars are waiting. I’m fourth in line and I count six cars remaining in their garage, two of them being large Denali-grade SUVs.

When I finally get to the front, the girl quickly confirms my reservation and then leads me to the garage and points to bench.

“Let's see if I can find you a car.”

And away she goes. As do most of the cars in the garage. Half teh cars there drive away as I sit there. Tired, hungry, ready to get some rest, as by my clock I’ve now been traveling for twelve hours, and then she comes back.

“We’re out of the intermediate grade cars—how about an upgrade?”

“So long as it doesn’t cost me anything and I don’t wind up driving an Abrams tank, I’m pretty much fine with anything. She waves, and some dude comes squealing in driving a silver convertible.

So 20 minutes later I’m toodling down Wilshire Boulevard, my top down, yakking into my cellphone as I pass a gleaming black Bugatti coupe coming the other way as we pass a building with a ten-story tall poster of Captain Jack Sparrow leering down at me.

Sparrow seems to wink at me.

“Welcome to Hollywood, love.”
.
.
.
B

tales of a pilgrim in an unholy land

So... the LA Trip was good.

How good? Good enough that i was near-tearful to see it end, but glad to arrive home when I did, as I was starting to feel truly weird and disconnected — that odd "between worlds" sensation when you start to get half-attuned to some new environment even as the homesickness for the old environment starts to mount. If I stayed a day longer, I dunno that it would have all felt as good and right.

So, in the coming days I'll try to post some odd (and typically longwinded) tales of what went down, and what seemed to happen, and what impressions I took from it all. Hell, a lot of what follows is entirely accurate, while the rest is merely just "true."

If any take exception or offense, you are forgiven. Go blog your own lies and near truths.

Onwards.
.
.
.
B

leaving on a jet plane

Los Angeles. City of Angels. The land where dreams are made real, and the real gets reduced to dreams.

I'll be out there this week — shmoozing and visiting and carousing and networking and touching base and socializing and all that jazz.

It's a surreal thing to think about. Right now I'm ass-deep in Suburbia, with a yard needing mowing, kids in the yard, a homeowner's association complaining about some damned fool thing ("please remove your recycling bin from the curb promptly in the afternoon after pickup!"), and I just spent two days at a little league tournament in the company of a whole bunch of very similar folks: perfectly fine anddecent folks with kids and mortgages and relatively normal lives.

Come Wednesday, I'll hop a jet and three hours later I'll be in LA. Staying somewhere between Bel-Air and Beverly Hills. Meeting with folks whose names appear on DVDs in my movie collection, talking about words I strung together and put onto pages.

I'm wondering if at some point in that flight out there — maybe over the Trans-Pecos region — I'll suddenly switch from Suburban Dad Guy to LA Screenwriter Guy, almost like crossing into an adjacent time zone. I think that particular emotional jet lag will be worse on the return flight, as I have to re-calibrate from Fun Unencumbered Guy Tasked With Radiating Charisma Ceaselessly and crawl back into the cocoon so as to more easily fit back into Normal Life back here at home.

I think Batman might have a similar period of disconnect, as he drives home to the Batcave after a hard day of fighting super-criminality and starts to realize that he (as Bruce Wayne) has a breakfast meeting with the donors from the foundation, then a 10 AM meeting at the lawyers, a noon date with the architects designing the new Wayne Plaza building, and don't forget that the Batmobile needs an oil change and a front end alignment.

What seems normal today will seem unbelievably alien and strange a week from now, even though it remains every bit as mundane and unremarkable as it was before.

"What the hell am I doing?" That's a question I feel myself asking myself a lot these days. Nobody I deal with in Real Life has an idea or understanding of the crazy screenwriting thing I am working towards, and even if I tried to explain to them what it's all like and about, they'd still look at me like I was a sea bass bubbling at them in Swahili. They all try to seem supportive and excited, but if I told them that I was working to become a bullfighter or a lion tamer or a secret agent I think their response and reactions would be largely the same, as all of those — screenwriter included — are occupations that real people don't actually claim.

And yet I have my ticket, and my hotel, and my rent car, and the laptop is loaded, and the scripts are printed, and I catch myself quietly running through trial run responses to such questions as "so what are you working on these days?" or "so what's it about?"

I am Batman, ironing his cape as he looks out the window and watches the neighbors mow the yard next door.

Somehow... it's deliciously ridiculous.
.
.
.
ready but not B

meet the new post...

...just the same as the old post.
.
.
.
maximum r & B

a nasty little secret

One of the odd things about online communication — email, blogs, boards, podcasts, worm attacks, etc. — is the way "hip" cynicism seems the lingua franca of the online world. To be viewed as anything other than a card-carrying Rotarian stick in the mud dullard, one must be cool, which means that one must be disinterested, dispassionate, detached, and above all nihilistic in terms of faith in humanity.

"Everyone else is an idiot, all well-intentioned plans are shit, and a new sucker profile is created every 1.2 nanoseconds."

Fold that notion over upon itself to specifically sub-reference the somehow even more archly hip (read that: cynical) world of movies and screenwriting and frankly it's amazing that the cyberstreets of the online world are not choked with the dead of those felled by terminal cynicism. To listen to the chorus out there, nobody cares about the new guys, you have no hope of success, everyone is out to screw everyone else (and not in the fun or enjoyable way, either...), and at the end of the day nothing matters and what if it did.

But there is a deeper truth out there. One of the truly staggering things I continue to confront is so unsettling, so disturbing, that I have some trouble articulating it here now:

There are a lot of truly decent people out there in the world, and most of them are perfectly willing to give you aid and assistance if you but only ask in a sincere and polite way.

I'm planning an LA trip in a few weeks, the first such trip in which I am actively intentionally focusing upon meeting folks and networking and selling and schmoozing and generally working it. To listen to the standard chorus, you need to live out there for months or years and slowly work your way up the food chain, first palling around with algae and fungi, then moving up to protozoa and rotifers, then to agents, then on to multi-celled organisms.

(See? I lament over-abundant cynicism and what do I do? I bust on agents in a cheesy cynical gag. I'm so ashamed that it might take a good 45 minute nap to fully recover...)

The point is "you don't just show up in Hollywood as a total nobody and score meetings with people."

Except, I'm finding that I'm having no trouble connecting with folks I'm eager or interested to talk to. Producers, managers, fellow writers with whom I have only the most bare-bones minimal familiarity and connection... when I approach them and say "I'll be out there and would really like to meet and say hi, if possible," every single one of them answers with "Wow! That sounds cool! Here's my cell number. Let's meet on (such and such date) at (such and such time)!"

The nasty little secret that I mention in the title? Just this: nothing is as easy or as hard as it looks.

I've said it before: 90% of the people out there claiming to be aspiring screenwriters have no such aspirations in truth. What they do have is some needy desire to be hailed as a talented person, but many want this credit without ever actually doing the work of writing and without ever actually putting themselves at even the trivial risk of being turned down on an email solicitation to have coffee.

As with most things, it boils down to the simple choice described in SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION: "get busy living, or get busy dying."

That's goddamned right.
.
.
.
feeling Farragutian B

the "one cool thing" approach

I will now do something very odd and possibly out of character for me: I will attempt to blog on an actual screenwriting topic in a non-whiny non-self-absorbed manner.

Your prayers are appreciated.

A few years ago, I had opportunity to sit around and converse casually with a big name screenwriter. We were laughing about various theories and philosophies about writing, and as best I can recall (hey-- beer was involved here, so memories are both fuzzy and few) he mentioned something about how he "just wants to make every scene as cool as possible."

That resonated with me, as I have long worked with the notion of "if I were reading this, what would make me smile and go wooowwww...'?"

The conversation led me to two things:

1) an all-over achy feeling the next morning (oy)

and

2) what I call "The One Cool Thing Theory."

Basically, when penning any story, be it prose or screenplay or self-involved essay or song lyrics (hey-- I have depth and shit...), I try to make sure that every major "sub-chunk" of the piece has at least one solid wad of interest for the reader to chew upon. In screenplay terms, that means that every scene in the script — and I mean every last one of them — has to have at least one definable moment where, when you or someone else is reading, the lips twist into a smile and the head shakes in an approving nod and the reader half-whispers to nobody in particular "cooool...."

'Cuz think about it: movies are expensive, both to produce and to consume. Last week I took two of my kids to see OVER THE HEDGE at a matinee and I still dropped more than fifty bucks for tickets, popcorn, and soda. If I'm going to drop that kind of coin on a flick, there had better damned sure be something there to make me smile and say "OK, that was worth my attention and money."

And if I am writing a screenplay which I hope some company is going to invest in to the tune of 50 or a 100 million bucks, I think it's even MORE true.

So when I finish a draft of a new project, one of the first things I do on the first pass read-through is to have a handful of colored pens at my disposal. Red pens are used for general markup, but I always like to have a second color — blue seems the most common for no reason I can fathom — to underline and mark in the margins with a star as The One Cool Thing I am most excited and proud of in every specific scene. And when I get through that first read-through, I then go back and check to make sure that every scene has at least one such blue star. For those scenes where no star is noted, I re-read the scene a second time to see if there is some obvious improvement to be made. If I can;t find it. that scene is marked for serious attention on the first major re-write.

Repeat the process on every new draft.

It's just that simple.

What's funny (to me, at least, and I accede that my sense of funny is perhaps a tad screwy) is that so few other people seem to know and use this or a similar trick. It seems so obvious, so simple, so clearly useful, that I just sorta assumed everyone was doing something like this. yet whenever I go into any detail, I invariably get people who go "wow-- that's a good idea."

Uh, thanks. On a related front, I think "breathing" is kinda useful, too.

So give this simple trick a try the next time you are doing a read-through of your current project. See if you can identify and label the One Cool Thing in every scene of your screenplay — that one moment the audience will most likely take home from that moment of screen time. If your script is overflowing with these blue star moments (lines, twists, reveals, visuals, metaphors, whatever), then chances are you're closer to a truly read-worthy script than not. If, on the other hand, you find that you have a significant number of scenes where there IS no one cool thing, then I'd strongly advice you go back and shovel in more fun.

Lesbians are a good easy place to start, as are giant squids, high-rise explosions, and flying wings.

But dammit put something in there. You want at least One Cool Thing, in every scene, in every story.
.
.
.
B

the new post

This is the new post.

If you were expecting something more typographically imposing, or something shinier, or more rhombohedral, or less piquant, or a tad more oblately spheroidal, or a touch less jejeune, feel free to form a line and wait your turn to bite my left ass cheek.

And yes, read this as a signal that my worm has again re-turned yet again to "not so much thrilled about the idea of blogging."

Enjoy.
.
.
.
B

lasers and cave painting and pompous delusions oh my

Every once in a while I have the supreme luck to experience a moment which reminds me in cold hard slap to the face fashion what it is about writing that makes me shiver with joy.

Because let's be honest, kids— it's not the long lonely hours staring at a blinking cursor which refuses to advance even one goddamned character's worth forward. It's not the late bleary-eyed nights sitting up in bed with a still warm-from-the-laser-printer draft balanced on your knee, a red pen on your hand and a confused "what the the holy hell was this crap about?" look on your face as you edit a manuscript. It's not the beautiful Sunday mornings when the rest of the world is mowing a lawn or playing golf or hauling a short board to the coast or biking some hillside trail while you sit in a pair of gym shorts, sucking 5 hour old coffee and trying to rework a flawed outline into a form which might help you find a path of the face of the impossible second act cliff.

I speak instead of The Moment.

The Moment when you hand a sampling of pages to someone — someone not your wife or mother or second grade teacher — and they start to read... and you sit and watch, but try not to let them understand and feel just how closely you are watching, and you stare at their eyebrows, hoping to see the tiniest little furrow signaling that Something Just Happened, and you watch the corners of their mouths, praying that you see the nearly imperceptible twitch telling you they caught the joke, they noticed the curiously wry phrase, they felt a pang of actual By God emotion at exactly the word where you had worked to make it happen.

The Moment when your words — your dark little splotches of fused toner, or smeared ink, or oil on a canvas, or charcoal on a cave wall — bridged the gap separating your conscious mind from that of every other human being which has ever or shall ever walk this rock. That moment when you scream into the wilderness and hear, for maybe the first and please God not the last time, a voice faintly answering back.

"I hear you... I feel you... tell me more...."

The Moment when you, as a writer, finally connect with the person on the other side of the page.

If you're a writer, or have it in you to become a writer, you understand exactly what I am describing. Nobody becomes a writer in order to become rich. Well, no writer does this, though likely many non-writers try the trick, never understanding just how sadly ludicrous the effort seems to the real writers in the room. You become a writer for the same reason that a salmon swims upstream in breeding season. That a goose flies south when the air turns cool. That a plant turns toward the morning sun and a drunk away from it. You do it because that's what you do. You can't not do it without risking a psychic groin pull.

And it's a horrible excruciating soul-devouring way to live, save for those rare moments when you have a page or ten to share with another person, and you summon the testicular fortitude to do so, and that other person reads your stuff and feels something.

I had that happen again this week. Three or four times, actually. (What can I say? "it was a good week.) Specific details about who read what are not important, but at least three different times this past week I showed scribbles to people and my scribbles prompted them to say something.

"Wow" or "cool" or (my favorite) "can I read some more?"

Being writers, we of course have to undersell our reaction in such moments, as writers are Cool People, and Cool People do not react to such situations by jumping up and down on the sofa, screaming "YAHOOOOOOOOO! THEY FUCKIN' LIKE ME!"

[That's actors who pull such stunts — a sad low class of people none of us should long affiliate with.]

No, writers have to remain detached and vaguely bored by it all: "Thanks. It needs more work."

But at some moment later, in private when nobody stands around eager, ready, and willing to judge, we'll pump our fists and hop up and down and grin like stupid grinning things and sing "I Could Have Danced All Night" and do a dozen other equally childish things try to endlessly replay that second and a half when we had our soul hooked up in a direct link to someone else.

Such moments are lightning strikes — flickering instants of brilliant blinding power which leave an afterimage seared into memory. Non-writers sometimes can see the flash or feel the thunder and enjoy the show, but it falls to writers (and chapel roof painters) to understand on the poetic level that these lightning strikes are not just arcs of static electrical buildup between cloud and ground, or even mere instants of shared consciousness. They are, in truth, The Touch of the Divine, God reaching down to tap you on the shoulder when nobody else is looking, and asking with a wink and a sly smile "psst-- wanna know what it feels like to be Me?"

For these moments, I humbly give thanks.

Here endeth the lesson. Now rise, my brothers, and go create.
.
.
.
flying kites in a storm B

i, weirdo

Every so often I am reminded that I am an Odd Little Duck.


And I don't mean in the quaintly affected way that some creative types labor long and hard to seem in a casual sort of way — I don't, for example, wear a beret or drink only some specific brand of bottled water or demand that my clothes be washed and fold In Just The Proper Manner. No, I mean in the "can be quantified and analyzed using standard accepted personality testing methods." Things like the Myers Briggs tests, Enneagram tests, etc.

It's hilarious and somehow comforting (for me, at least) to run these tests and see that I consistently score the exact same for decades at a stretch. Once Upon A Life Gone By, I was... well, "briefly in attendance at a prestigious military academy in Colorado." The whys and wherefores of that odd chapter of my life are not really important here, but that was the first time I started to become consciously aware of just How Different I was from my supposed peers.

Part of the [unnamed academy]'s intake process was a lengthy battery of tests on such things as ethics and personality. There is no "right" or "wrong" answer on these things, but I was struck by how different my scoresheets seemed compared to my classmates as we dropped them into the little "turn-in" bin. Twice I went so far as to borrow a sheet from a buddy, layer it over mine and then hold them to the light to compare my responses.

My sheet was almost totally opposite from his.

I repeated the process quickly with two other sheets. Same result: most sheets were somehow similar, excpet mine was the unmistakably odd one out.

One of the upperclassmen running these intake tests saw me comparing scoresheets and bellowed "NICHOLSON! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?"

"QUANTIFYING MY WEIRDNESS, SIR!"

"Impossible, Nicholson — Infinity cannot be scored on a standardized test. Now drop and give me fifty pushups."

(As I said, my time there was brief, and in hindsight it's not hard to understand why.)

The point of this is simple: I have a goofy personality. On the Enneagram tests graph, I clearly and consistently score as a Type 8: "The Challenger: Powerful, Dominating, Self-Confident, Decisive, Willful, and Confrontational."

So I got that goin' for me.

Meanwhile, over on the Jungian-theory inspired Myers Briggs tests I have consistently scored as a textbook ENTP type for more than twenty years now, which describes me as follows:

ENTPs are known for their quest of the novel and complex. They have faith in their ability to improvise and to overcome any challenges that they face. They are highly independent, and value adaptability and innovation. They may be several steps ahead of others in encouraging and valuing change. They hate uninspired routine and resist hierarchical and bureaucratic structures that are not functional. They need freedom for action.

Other handy euphemistic descriptions for the ENTP type include: Inventor, Visionary, Lawyer. Some of my fellow ENTPs include Ben Franklin, Bugs Bunny, Wile E. Coyote, and Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation, which is cool 'cuz that seems like a fun group of guys to take a beer-fueled roadtrip with.

Of the sixteen personality types in the Myers-Briggs pantheon, the ENTP is among the more uncommon, seen in approximately 2% of the general population. That might be a good thing, actually, as one of the oft-repeated descriptions about the ENTP type is the way they see confusion and chaos not as problems so much as opportunities. Some folks like to spend their lives paddling across calm mirror-smooth lakes, but us ENTP types seem to prefer white water, metaphorically speaking, and often actually create a little pointless chaos just for fun.

Understandably, this can drive non-ENTPs a little batty, as us Improviser types pretty much live by the "well, let's see if THIS works..." mantra.

As writer, this manifests in screwy infuriating surprising ways, as well. Some of my peers seem to operate best in ordered calm organized environments and times. I, on the other hand, often seem bored until things get SO damned muddled and complicated and fucked-up and nigh-impossible that everyone else is heading for cover. I suppose when the going gets weird, the weird get going.

Today, for example, the deadline for one of my most-anticipated screenwriting contests slides by like a beer can floating past the bow of a chugging ship. I missed the deadline, due mainly to... well, a slew of other interesting things which have also been rapaciously consuming my attention. The Wife (who, God Bless her, has somehow survived my battle-loving psycho personality for fifteen years of marriage and twenty years of friendship) came in this morning and expected that I'd be bumming slightly, depressed that I'd somehow failed.

Instead, I was chipper — downright perky, in fact— a state which is entirely abnormal for me in the morning (I detest mornings — always have).

"I thought you'd missed the deadline for the screenplay entry."

"I did."

"And that's sad, right?"

"Yeah (giggle), I s'pose it is."

"But you're in a good mood?"

"Yeah. Now that the situation is impossible, I can finally make some progress. I find hopelessness somehow inspiring."

"You're a freak."

"I love you, too, dear."

So my deadline is passed. My home is overrun by kids (mine, mostly) all on summer vacation. I have an insane schedule of obligations in the next ten days, and my screenplay is a smoldering wreck, with a blown fuel pump in the middle of the second act and a nearly impossible confluence of final conflict forces which have to be braided into a cohesive logical cinematic and appealing unified cord.

No clue, no plan, no path in sight... let's rock.
.
.
.
B

annoying mid-life discoveries

It's odd to find yourself on the far side of 40 years old and still discover major facts about yourself.

I like asparagus, for example.

Growing up, I think my mom cooked asparagus maybe two times, ever. The first time was awful, and the other time was worse. All I can remember was an all-consuming sense of "this is some nasty stuff," and fighting every bite all the way down my throat, as if at some point the governor might call and issue a pardon for that mouthful of mushy gray-green unpleasance to which I was suffering in mid-sentence.

Turns out that it wasn't the vegetable at fault at all, but rather the cook. As I grow older, I realize with some amusement that my mom was probably just not that great of a chef, at least, not with vegetables. Mom didn't cook veggies — she interrogated them, subjecting them to heat, pressure, and open containers of Morton's salt until the poor little things confessed to both crimes against The Pope and the abduction of the Lindbergh baby.

Yellow squash, eggplant, zucchini, broccoli, asparagus... all got a bum wrap in my childhood memory due to the way mom would cook them into flavorless semi-soft paste. The Apollo astronauts likely had more texture in their diet as they sucked supper from a series of toothpaste tubes.

Another discovery I've made in surprisingly recent days is that I am a morning writer, and that I cannot write when other people are moving around near me. When I mention this to people they always chuckle. " And all those years where you claimed to be a late night person...!

The thing is, I am a late night person, but I am a morning writer.
If you want someone to carouse and skate around childishly amusing activities of debatable legality and safety, then I'm your huckleberry. But if you want me to do any useful creative writing, you better get to me by noon, and you'd better have a pot of coffee ready, and some quiet disturbance free room in which I can bang the keyboard.

I'm struck by that right now as it's mid-morning and I feel like I ought to be writing, yet due to the fact that The Wife and three of the four kids are in the den, whining and crying and arguing and folding laundry and bugging me with things like "can you look at the Doppler radar online to see if there are storms nearby?"

Hemingway didn't have to deal with this shit. Or, perhaps, maybe he did, and maybe it explains his grisly demise. Regardless, I know that I can't do decent work in such a setting, and it drives me half batty to confront, as I have shit badly in need of getting done:

• a script which I now admit disgustingly will *not* be ready for June 1 contest deadlines as hoped

• another script which could stand one more brush-up before I start seriously flogging it to possibly useful partners

• another script which has made it to 8 or 9 prodcos but (apparently) never for useful effect

That's the stuff I've been working on. Beyond that I have:

• at least three other projects in half-started state, waiting for enough attention to give them a fighting chance at actually becoming "working projects"

• another bizarre and disgustingly commercial idea that is so mercenary and ridiculous that it surely will find interested readers the moment I announce the title, premise, and tagline

• offers from at least three other talented folks to talk about co-writing projects

And now I find (as summer starts, natch) that I am basically incapable of creating stories unless it's quiet, the house is calm, it's before noon, and I have coffee and room to walk around in odd circles. This was a huge discovery for me to look up and notice in recent months, as I'd always assumed I could force myself to write was my schedule allows, when in fact that I have to wrestle my schedule like a flaming alligator in order to get the time I need to do productive work.

Who knew?

Next I'll find out that I'm actually left-handed and had somehow never noticed.
.
.
.
last man to know B

tick tock (and a fistful of Godfather refs)

The clock on the wall goes round and round...
round and round...
round and round...
The clock on the wall goes round and round...
...all through the day.

It's the morning of Thursday 18 May hereabouts. What time is it where you now sit?

I ponder that question as I sit and try to figure out if I truly have any chance of completing this silly damned western-slash-critters movie in time for some June 1 contest deadlines. if it were a question as simple as "can you get 45 pages done in [x] number of days?" that would be one thing, but right now I can’t even tell for sure how many days I have. I mean, I know when the deadlines are, but given the crazy schedule here at the end of the kids's school year, I'm not sure how many of those days I'll actually see.

Little league games. Tournament play. Birthday parties. Sleepovers. Cub Scout trips. Boy Scout projects. Swim lessons. Blah blah blah... yeah, this is the life I have chosen (and suddenly I hear Hyman Roth lecturing Michael about Moe Green...), but that doesn't mean that sometimes it doesn’t get a bit exasperating to look up and take hard inventory of exactly what this life delivers and what it prohibits.

If I had the luxury of writing 6 hours a day, every day, no matter what, my "career" would surely develop faster. But would that really be worth all that it would require that I give up to get there? Some would say yes, some would say no, and some would surely sit and give you the "confused dog face" of a half cocked head and a quizzical uncomprehending look.

Just when I think I'm done with the "distractions" (and let's be honest: these are not distractions so much as they are other obligations upon which I have consciously chosen to place emphasis), more come along. Or, again reffing Michael Corleone, "just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in." The real joke, of course, is thinking that you're ever going to change your own stripes to the point where things will change — can change. In my experience, people by and large don't change much once they get past age 10 or so. After that, the clay is set, the die cast, the grooves too deeply carved, and the best you can do is effectively plan and accommodate the patterns and behaviors you have adopted.

I'm looking at 57 pages in the can for a project which likely will require 95 or so pages to complete. After I get the 95 pages down, I of course have to go back and quickly tighten and improve those pages, and then I ought to have at least one more pass to make sure that things like names and verbs and, you know, words make sense. Then slap down cash, hurl the pages at the contest window, and pray that some faceless Ramen-slurping coffee-slinger with a useless BA didn’t have a bad fight with a girlfriend that day and opt to take out the frustration on my little baby as he skimmed through it as a first round reader.

In other words, I might bust ass to get across the finish line only to find that the effort was totally unimpressive to the one person assigned to score that effort, in which case we just hitch up the lederhosen and start all over again. The one thing that keeps it all from driving me absolutely bat-shit fucking crazy is the third and final Michael ref of the day:

"We'll get there, Pop. We'll get there."

'Course, it might turn out that I was born the wrong brother, and at heart I'm nuthin' but a Fredo.

In which case, worrying is just a waste of time anyway.

Which brings some small portion of comfort.

Onwards.
.
.
.
cannoli-keepin' B

two kinds of wannabees

If you spend any time at all banging your head against the gates of Hollywood in this crazy fever-dream pursuit of screenwriting success, sooner or later you'll discover that there are two very different general classes of writers out there claiming to be pursuing that same goal.

On the one hand you have those folks who commit themselves to learning the craft and developing their skills and networking effectively to discover any possible inroad into the industry. These are the people who do things like work on draft after draft of the same script designed to have commercial appeal and fit established identifiable marketable trends and demonstrate a serious intelligent understanding of the business of the business. These are the people who go to industry gatherings and actually push themselves into the crowd to meet people and make connections. These are the people who work with something like a plan for advancing their career, and who don't waste much precious time at all fretting over every strike call but instead focusing on improving their swing so that the NEXT pitch is the one they hammer for a hit.

These are the folks who find agents, get scripts read, optioned, purchased, produced, and who generaly become actual working writers.

On the other hand you have those folks who commit themselves to portraying themselves as struggling writers prevented from achieving success due to events and personalities beyond their control. These are the people who do things like work for years on one never-quite finished draft of some huge magnum opus of limited or non-existent appeal, a project with no clearly identifiable market appeal and thus no clear justification for ever being considered, much less made. These are the people who opt for ceaseless online flirting and cavorting with fellow aspiring screenwriters and never really do anything to make their presence known to anyone who might advance their career. They very often sit and home and chat all night long with cyber-buddies, and the collaborate by the half-dozen on group scripts which completely camouflage whatever solid input and contributions one talented writer might be able to make to the group, and they swap reads with each other but never actually send a script out to anyone connected with professional moviemaking. These are the folks who often have thundering grand pronouncements to offer about all that is wrong with Hollywood, and usually they have some great insight which would guarantee better movies for all if only the morons in Hollywood would listen.

This group tends to generate a high percentage of the long-term members of online screenwriting groups.

The first group works on becoming better writers, while the latter group writes about how nobody wants to look at their work.

The first group treats the industry as a serious place of business and sets themselves on a course to make themselves sufficiently attractive as an asset that the industry has clear cause to offer them some sort of tryout. The second group treats the industry as a flawed mess somehow unworthy or unwilling to see the genius of of their own personal brilliance and humanity.

The first group works to find a chance in the business. The second group writes about needing a change in the business.

In a sense, this is a variation on the old "when life gives you lemons" scenario: the first group makes lemonade, while the second group shares wondrous recipes they'd use if only they'd been handed canteloupe or mutton or bulgur instead.

Now, it is entirely possible to engage in one or more behaviors from either or both groups. "Not chatting online" for example does not prove that you are a serious screenwriter with potential professional value and relevance (any more than the occasional session of chatting online indelibly marks you as a lost cause). My point is merely this: there are those who are serious about becoming a serious professional writer, and then there are those who like the sound of claiming to be serious about becoming a professional writer.

Neither class of people is somehow more or less worthwhile, but it's important to understand what you are doing (and/or what you are not) in regards to advancing either goal. It's easy to get distracted, and easier still to find yourself surrounded by folks with different priorities and intensities.

Look in the mirrror and be honest. Know your goal, then chase it down. But be careful that you're not wasting time by chasing down the wrong (other) path or running with a pack pursuing different quarry than what you seek, 'cuz either wrong path seems fraught with heartache and disappointment.

Here endeth the lesson.