Nicholl Week -- Day the Second (part 1)

Monday was cool. I slept late. And by late I mean “past 8 AM.” I woke, showered, then worked some email and did some light writing on the laptop in the room -- nothing major, but it’s an old tradition for me that when I am on any sort of writing related road trip, by God I WILL do some sort of writing every day.

After 90 or so minutes of screwing around on a keyboard, it’s time to walk the four or five blocks to meet my agent, Brant Rose, for the first time in meatspace (real world, for you non-hip folks). Now, the fact that I have any agent remains a giggle-inducing fact for me, but that this agent is one whom I have long known about and respected and admired and had numerous peers lust after unsuccessfully... well, it is yet one more amazing point in all this Nicholl-related craziness.

Brant Rose Agency is located in Crossroads Of The World, this oddly LA-ish enclave of buildings from the 1930s that is described as America’s first try at a shopping mall. Over the decades the odd little village of cottages and storefronts and Bavarian chalets has been a center for retail, for songwriters, for rock music folks, for porn producers, and now seems to be mounting a baby renaissance for agents and managers and other small-shop movie folks.

I meet Sally, the cool-talking English assistant/receptionist whom I’ve spoken to a dozen times and somehow she doesn’t look exactly as I imagined, but to be honest I have no idea what I imagined. She escorts me down the hall to the small lounge area meeting room where I plop down on a sofa and stare up at a huge vintage poster for the 1968 Jane Fonda wacko classic, BARBARELLA.



As I sit and stare up at Jane’s spectacular boobs, I nod approvingly and think "Yup, I signed with the right agent.”

A moment or two later Toochis Morin, Brant’s partner in the firm, comes in and we meet for the first time. Now, Toochis and I have played and goofed on the phone enough that we have something like a playfully flirtatious proto-friendship going already, so we immediately drop into the same old very silly bantering that we’ve already come to expect. I piss and moan and grumble about the strike, and she does her best to buoy my playfully black mood, and at some point we start drifting toward actual serious client-rep talk as she explains "well, our job is to read your stuff and get you the right meetings based off what we read.”

I take that as a perfect moment to pull a completed spec from my bag and drop it on the small coffeetable separating us. "Well, with that happy thought in mind..."

**PLOP**

Toochis looks at the script, looks at me. I smile, as I have a vague understanding of her confusion: when brant’s office first approached me, they of course requested my Nicholl finalists script, QUEEN OF THE SKY, and when they started getting more serious/curious about taking me on, we talked about some other scripts in my bag, and they seemed to spark to some ideas and actually requested some comedy scripts (which they say were a big part of their decision to bring me on as a client), but unbeknownst to them I held back one cool idea which was already a completed script.

Why? Oh, I dunno. Mostly because I’m a goofy wingnut who likes to surprise people and keep them off-balance. This “secret script” is a goofy campy low budget creature feature comedy I came up with first as a stupid joke and then realized was a great concept for a low budget movie idea, so I’ve been quietly banging away on it for the past few months as a sort of sideline to more serious stuff. The title is great, and the tagline is absolutely killer (and no I am not publicly divulging either right now, so deal with it, sucker...). My pkan was to walk in and surprise Brant and Toochis with a great affordable commercial genre comedy that could be converted into an “easy” (heh) sale.

Toochis blinks, looks at the script, picks it up, reads the title, smiles widely. I hit her with the tagline. She looks at me with shock, then starts to howl with laughter.

”Brant! Get in here!”

Brant wraps up a call and comes in quickly, waves a greeting and takes the script from Toochis.

”Read the title, then hit him with the tagline, Brett.”

He reads, I hit, he looks up and starts laughing loudly. They look at each other and start chattering and laughing. Sally comes running into see what the fuss is about. Brant hands her the script.

"Read the title.”

She reads it aloud and smiles.

Brant points at me as a signal. I again drop the painfully sophomoric tagline. Sally looks up like someone goosed her ass. She starts to scream in laughter.

”Is it any good?” Toochis asks. I explain that it is, and that it’s somewhere between TREMORS and PREDATOR in the goofy campy scale.

Things go well from there.

We spend the next two hours talking about this new thing, which then leads me to ask ”so what made you guys offer to rep me so quickly? Other folks from our Nicholl class are having meetings but I’ve not heard anyone being offered a deal. What the hell did I do differently? I’d love to know so that maybe I can try to keep doing it.”

”You came in with a clear entrepreneurial sense of drive and purpose,” Brant explains. ”Great ideas are pretty much a dime a dozen in this town, but it’s exciting when you run into someone who can execute them and who understands how to monetize and market them. You won us over in that first conversation. You get it.” he lifts the new spec as some sort of evidence to support that claim.

”Well, OK. Whatever. So what next?”

We talk about QUEEN OF THE SKY and immediately the discussion turns to casting the lead role of Lilya. Given the WGA strike, there’s no point in even talking about sending the material to studios or producers, but it might be possible and useful to try and attract the strong support of a solid young “name” actress: if we can get some top-drawer 20-something cutie to fall in love with the piece, that might give us enough added momentum to then (eventually) snag the attention and interest of a director or producer of commercial relevance.

We brainstorm ideas for casting the lead roles, and I start to get a strange feeling when it hits me that every name I mention gets scribbled into notes, and often Brant and Toochis swap a comment or two about the reps for these actresses. It hits me that they are talking about sending my pile of pages to actual, you know, actresses. the kind who are in movies.

”Uh... you guys are seriously talking about sending my stuff to these people?”

They both look at me like I farted.

”Uh, yeah, Brett. That’s kinda what we do.”

“Oh. Cool.”

Suddenly it hits me even harder: this is all becoming freaky real.

We then go on to talk about some of the other ideas and specs I’ve mentioned and shown them, and we agree that we can and should use this strike time to go over some of these to ensure that when the white flag again gets waved to resume racing, that we are all fully ready to hit with full force and effect. We talk about how the process will eventually (hopefully) play out, and what I need to stand ready to do when the call finally comes in, and I say ”just get me in the fuckin’ room so I can make money for us all.”

Brant gets a call and says he’ll be back. Toochis and I chatter on. We touch upon the new script again, and it turns out that she and I share some goofy favorite movies in our past. Eventually I toss up my ahnds and ask ”So what do I do next? Gimme a task. A project. A chore. Something.”

”Did I give you the ‘Twenty Ideas In A Week’ assignment yet?”

I glower and shake ‘no.’

”We like all our new clients to go home and give us twenty ideas for movies within one week. We like to see them flex their creativity muscles on a timetable.”

I pull a thumbdrive from around my neck, slide it across the table.

”The Word file is titled ‘SCRIPT IDEAS.’ I think it’s up to 42 entries right now, but it’s always in flux so I might be low or high by one or two.”

Toochis looks at the drive, then shoots me a smile.

”You know how to make your agents very very happy -- you know that?”

We giggle and play around for a few more minutes, then Sally comes in and ruins the fun by reminding all that we each have various other things going at 1 pm, so we say our goodbyes and continue the giggling nonsense until I finally wander off into the midday glare, wandering down flower-draped back alleys toward the gleaming tower of my hotel just a few blocks away.

(to be continued....)
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Nicholl Week 2007 -- Day the First

Rather than bore the 13 people out there who seem to read this damned fool blog by waxing loquacious for 5000 words about every moment of my Nicholl week, I’ll instead make a token futile stab at brevity.

First point: if you are an aspiring screenwriter and you have not entered the Nicholl before or were not planning on entering again this coming year, smack your silly self and get something entry-ready. I do not care what you have heard or read from the so-called “experts” on sites such as Zoetrope and Triggerstreet and elsewhere, the Nicholl is not some goofy artsy-fartsy poetry contest which only wants quiet little “inspiring youth overcomes adversity to triumph quietly” stories. Sure, FINDING FORRESTER and AKEELA AND THE BEE were Nicholl winners, but in this year’s crop of ten finalists there were big FX-heavy sci-fi adventures, period romances, dark scary horror stories, and even one impossible to produce period war movie romance epic lacking a solid mae lead and sporting a third act where the main character falls off the stage entirely.

In other words, the Nicholl is about good writing and not about anything so mundane as "filmable on a budget by an indie crew.”

I arrived Sunday and was immediately impressed by the accommodations. The Renaissance Hollywood Hotel is a gorgeous and slickly modern 20-story affair in the middle of downtown Hollywood, overlooking the Kodak Theater and within easy walking distance of pretty much every Hollywood landmark you can imagine. As part of the Nicholl finalist package, I was put up for a week in the place, and every time I came back into my room I had to smile as I looked out to the Pacific gleaming in the far distance and the lights of Hollywood glittering at my feet. I also laughed every time I had the valet bring around my rental, the fire engine red Chevy compact. Wedged between obsidian black Bentleys and chrome and white Hummers, my ride would not have looked more out of place if it had been covered in pink fur.

Sunday night was cool, as good pal Shawna Benson, swung by to drag me to dinner. We would up at some really yummy Greek place over in Larchmont, then wandered back to Down a few beers at the Pig&Whistle on Hollywood Blvd. Shawna is one of dozens of insanely cool LA pals I’ve somehow made via online farting around. She’s a talented writer in her own right, and will likely have ridiculous success of her own to report in the coming months (but I’ll leave that to her to report...). We swap silly chat messages online several nights a week, and we’ve played around for two years at the Austin Film Festival, so we’re familiar and comfortable, and it’s great to have a good buddy to pal around with on my first night in town.

After our beers, we wandered around the Renaissance, laughing at the accommodations I’d blundered into, when I get a cell message alerting me that some other finalists have hooked up at a restaurant in the adjoining shopping arcade, so we hike over to look for a trio of folks who look like Nicholl Finalists.

Having a few former Nicholl finalists and fellows in my extended peer group, I’d been advised by all those folks to try and get to know your fellow finalists as well as possible as early as possible, as this will provide you with some support group in LA for this weird week of meetings and attention, plus it will let you all share intelligence and information and thereby tip each other off to possible slimeballs and scammers trying to get their hooks into your scripts and careers. For that reason, I’d set up some online discussion between the twelve finalists for the 2007 fellowships, and we already had the beginnings of some relations when we hit town.

Still, there is always that moment of potential awkwardness when first meeting peers who are on some level competitors. Yeas, the final judging for the fellowships had already been done, and we all knew who the big winners were and who the big looozers would be, so it wasn;t as dog-eat-dog as it could have been, but still... there was an undeniable element of caution and reluctance to offer too much too soon whenever a new name was added to the mix. Well, except of course by me. My natural inclination when meeting people in such settings is to come on like a fire hose, soaking pretty much everything within earshot with contempt and sarcasm and abuse and scorn. Playfully, of course, but still in a way that often leaves newcomers either rattled or downright terrified.

Shawna chuckled as she watched this dynamic unfold yet again. We met Sidney King, Dave Mango, and Lisa Gold, and I immediately liked them all but also amused myself somewhat at their expense as I did that thing where I come on as something between Hunter Thompson and Foghorn Leghorn. We all decide that California Pizza Kitchen just does not have the requisite coolness to host the conversation at hand, so we adjourn back to the hotel bar of the Renaissance. Shawna elbows me as we wander back next door: “I think you’re scaring them.”

“Moi?”

Shawna decides to bail at 11 as she has to work the next day, so we do our goodbye hugs in the circle driveway as Bimmers and Benzes swirl around us with nary a Chevy in sight.

The Renaissance hotel bar might be the worst hotel bar I’ve ever been in. I suppose I ought not be surprised, as it likely is not intended as a destination but rather as merely a gathering point for Beautiful People then leaving for Beautiful Places where they can drink Beautiful Drinks and have Beautiful Chatter. This place is tucked off to the side of the main entrance, open air and with the ambience of the central concourse of any major airport. There’s an impressive array of bottled liquor on the long back wall behind the bar, but I notice only two beers on tap: Budweiser and some boutique hefeweizen. Now, call me a bar snob, but in my experience, the quality of a bar can pretty much always be determined by the number of different beers on tap. (More is better). Two is the worst ever showing I’ve seen in a bar, and especially for one where money flows like water.

Still, I soldiered on, and drank hefeweizen and then bottled Bass as Lisa and Sidney and Dave and I chattered and got to know each other better. I noted to myself even at this first meeting that I was somewhat surprised and disappointed to enjoy their company so much. It would have been far more convenient to find someone to appoint scapegoat for the week, the object of my unspoken derision and disgust for me having NOT won the 30-grand in fellowship money. Instead, I find that I genuinely like these people and enjoy talking with them until the cute but useless barchick tells us they’ve closed for the evening. At 12:10 am.

Worst. Bar. Ever.

(to be continued...)
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“The Biggest Loozer™” B

back to life... back to reality

Well, the song is over.

Nicholl Week 2007 is come and gone, and I am now back home from a six-day run of funkiness in Hollywood, Topanga, Venice and Beverly Hills.

I have a ton of stuff to process and digest and contextualize and chew upon like cud as I try to make sense of it all. I saw a lot of strange things, and met a lot of great people and a load of great new friends (as hard as I tried, I could never bring myself to dislike or hate or even envy the writers of the five fellowship-winning scripts), and again came away from a week in LA with a weirdly mixed bag of thoughts and feelings.

I made a remark to someone at dinner this week: the honor of the Nicholl finals is, ultimately, irrelevant. It does not guarantee anything, nor does it deliver much anything except for one open door. It falls to the writer to step through that door into a wild new room and then make something of whatever opportunities can be found on that other side.

I'm totally exhausted in every sense of the word, and I'd do it all again right now if they'd give me the chance.

More soon. backlog of bloggery to be dealt with as I can.
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back under the S in TEXAS B

what a revolting development

One of the glories of being me (and trust me, the list of said glories is as long as it is strange) is the ability to dismiss pretty much any setback as trivial and irrelevant. In some ways I'm like a Weeble toy (OK, more than a few ways) in that I can get bumped and knocked around and still I'll wobble and right myself and maintain the same stupid expression. (I am, by the way, also safe for ages 3 and up, and I am dishwasher safe).

Part of this ability is likely due to flawed wiring between the ears: some people look at failure as a sign of failure, while I often look at it as an inspiration for amusing comment. So few succeed in life, after all, while most fail, so why not find a way to get some use out of the more common stuff of humiliating defeat than to hang your hopes on a harvest of success which likely will never come anyway?

I don't mind falling face down, as I'm experienced and accustomed.

What utterly confuses me is success. Knowing as I do the position and motion of every molecule in the Universe gives me the secure understanding that we are all doomed to lonely ignominious soul-crushing defeat and despair, yet sometimes the Universe will play truly dirty pool and throw the foulest jape of all: success.

Like today. I sort through the mail, toss out the 3 pounds of assorted useless crap, and at the bottom of the stack I find that thin one-page note from the Nicholl Fellowship folks, surely that same "thank you for playing *DING!* next?" note Greg Beal sends out to 95% of us suckers, er, I mean entrants into the Nicholl lottery.

"Dear Mr. Nicholson,

Congratulations! You have advanced into the Quarterfinal Round of the 2007 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting. In doing so, yours is one of only 254 entries to survive the First Round."

Well there's a new kick in the old wedding tackle.

How the hell is a card-carrying Gold Circle Member of the Piss and Moan Club supposed to handle such an announcement?

For now I'll likely stay the course and just carry on: "scratch butt, look vaguely annoyed, find something pointless to waste time upon."

But I gotta tell ya: these be strange waters we now sail.
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"hope" is a four-letter word B