MEET THE BLOGGER

Although this posting will ultimately reside in my sidebar, every once in a while, a girl feels the need to re-define her blogospheric mission right up front. Also, I don’t have the HTML skills to put something in the sidebar while bypassing the index page altogether. In fact, I can’t do anything fancy unless I’m blogging under the influence of a good stiff martini, which somehow seems to unleash the geek side of my creative self.

Although I’m proud to be counted among a group of screenwriting blogs collectively known as the “scribosphere,” please don’t expect any relevant and insightful tips on screenwriting from me. No structure notes, no WGA news, no thoughts on how to be good in a room. This is not a repository of information about the craft and business of the screenwriter, but rather the scattered reflections of another girl with another big Hollywood dream of becoming a fabulously important one.

Alas, I did not arrive in this town another fresh-faced innocent with nothing to call my own but a photogenic backside and a boyfriend named Bubba bent on leading my management team. While so many aspirants haven’t got much to lose either way, I abandoned what by all appearances had been a dream life. A successful travel writer, I was the original accidental tourist dutifully navigating the globe. Based in Miami, I published popular guidebooks, while also self-syndicating hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles. Though responsible research dictated I eat the free shrimp and sample the umbrella drinks, it became increasingly challenging to hide my only real interest in shellfish, the famous lobster scene from Annie Hall. Rum intrigued me strictly when Erroll Flynn slugged it straight from the jug. I wanted to create the next gritty pirate role for Mel Gibson, not listen to some fat guy with a fake parrot leading another cheesy Caribbean museum tour.

While a whirlwind romance with a Croatian cruise ship maitre d’ felt vaguely cinematic, our hasty marriage amounted to a major indiscretion certain to hold me back for years. On assignment in my husband’s hometown of war-torn Dubrovnik, I happened upon a copy of Syd Field’s Screenplay at an English language bookstore. Wildly inspired, rather than recording the actual events of my trip, I went home and wrote the Hollywood version.

Armed with my completed script, I finally gave the big Croat the boot, severed the rest of the ties that bound, and took my shot out West. In no time at all, the cruel hand of fate delivered a protracted series of near misses conspiring to fuel my mysterious belief in the imminent advent of superstardom. The prestigious fellowship that was just out of reach, the coveted studio apprenticeship falsely promising to result in highly overpaid employment. Ultimately, in exchange for my life savings, my dwindling youth and any likelihood of finding new love with a wage-earning adult, I returned to school. By graduation day I’d amassed a coterie of inappropriate young drinking buddies and a lifetime of student loan debt, earning a fairly useless screenwriting M.F.A. conferred upon me by Arnold Schwarzenegger of all people.

Nowadays, ten years after setting my sights on Hollywood, my life has become a nonstop merry-go-round of studio pitch meetings, passing celebrity interest, seductive commissary lunches and heart-in-mouth script auctions. I’m often invited to develop major studio blockbusters—without any guarantee of pay. Much like the new high-priced call girl in town, an emerging screenwriter can expect to lay out plenty of freebies before somebody meets her quote. My big break recently arrived in the form of a screenwriting assignment at Universal Pictures for two-time Oscar-nominated actor/producer E.N. (I’m using initials these days. Have fun with your guesses, if you must, while expecting neither confirmation nor denial from me.)

If only I were the sort of girl able to judge personal success on the basis of professional achievements. Ironically, my long struggle to build a new life for myself is one rarely seen in the movies—where in very short order the girl gets the job, the guy and the Vera Wang wedding ensemble over a thinner rival with younger looking skin. What big screen career challenge can’t be conquered by a whitened smile and a plucky attitude? What weight problem won’t spontaneously correct itself by the end of a charming musical montage? Armpit stains, broken heel, panty lines? Somebody call wardrobe! This girl’s real life shortcomings serve as daily proof that Hollywood’s reliable sense of justice owes itself mainly to our famous way with illusion.

Hollywood thrives on wish fulfillment, all yours for the price of a ticket. Sometimes even those of us who know better can’t help but seek our own brand of movie magic awaiting somewhere over a rainbow that, in reality, exists only from a distance. Happily, along my quest to become Rocky, the underdog defying the odds, I learned instead that I’m Dorothy. None of that winning nonsense mattered to begin with. What mattered was making it all the way to freaking Oz and hanging with the wizard! Having made the defining journey of my life, I’ll never have to look back and wonder, what if?