Why Nobody Sleeps with The Screenwriter

Filling out a questionnaire yesterday at the doctor’s office, I was struck by my abject failure to meet the standards of normalcy by which the world is apparently judging me.

Are you employed?
Sometimes.
Are you sexually active?
Meaning with other people?
Are your parents still living?
Yes, but they’re on a cruise somewhere off the coast of Turkey and can’t be reached.

Okay, so I don’t work regularly or have any close, meaningful relationships with anyone but the two small dogs I sleep with. I’m not a freak. I’m just a screenwriter. Okay, so maybe I’m a freaky screenwriter. I mean, when my producer called to ask what I was doing for the holiday weekend, I couldn’t decide whether to ask what holiday or what weekend. I don’t care for either one, truth be told, since this is when regular people break free from their desks and take to the streets that otherwise belong exclusively to me. They fill my movie theater, storm my dry cleaner and overwhelm my farmer’s market, bringing their hyperactive children along for added noise and snot.

Even for an avowed misanthrope, working at home can be a double-edged sword. I tend to work many more than eight hours a day, since it’s hard to find a reason to stop. There are no secret office crushes to run into on the way to the bathroom, no coffee klatches, no water cooler chats about who showed up at the Emmys looking like a chandelier. 

On the plus side, it’s after noon and I’m still in my P.J.’s, despite having gotten up early to e-mail a revised outline on my new feature assignment to the studio. It’s a comfy shortie tank set with a built in bralette, so I don’t scare the neighbors with anything pendulous when I go out to fetch the mail and poop the dogs at three, five and ten, after the back-to-back repeat showings of The Office. Until then, they’ll be lying here beside me—Vienna on the couch where I sit to write in front of my laptop; Oscar on a big feather pillow he likes me to set out for him on the floor.

Yes, dogs and screenwriter appreciate the familiarity of routine just as much as the next guy. I generally begin the day with an on-line run through the “Scribosphere,” which feels like saying good morning to my assorted co-workers. With few exceptions, like Ken Levine and Alex Epstein, both former TV showrunners who would thus make excellent party hosts, blogging screenwriters tend to work in the more isolating world of features. One of my favorite chapters in Alex’s new book, Crafty TV Writing, is about making the transition to writing on staff versus writing alone, with passages called “Who Are All These People?” and “Playing Nice With The Other Kids.”

I don’t wanna. I just want to sit here all day and make stuff up, even though in some circles that might be defined as the early stages of psychosis. So what if my doctor thinks I’m crazy. He gets paid to listen to the heart I pour out free of charge. To that end, I’m always surprised when people comment on my blog, or call my manager to set up a meeting, or offer to pay money, of all things, to buy my work. Most of the time, I forget you’re even there.

If Jesus Went to Film School

If Jesus went to film school, his work wouldn’t be terribly well received. “But it’s the greatest story ever told,” he’d say in all humility while pitching it to the Million Dollar Screenwriter in whose eight-member script workshop everybody was clamoring for a spot. “I just don’t get it, Hay-Seuss,” the teacher would say, pronouncing the name as if the Light of the World were another emerging Chicano voice.

“Jee-zus,” the savior would politely correct him. “I’m from Nazareth, not the barrio. Though I do plenty of volunteer work over there.”

Two Overtly Competitive Third Years sitting cross-legged on the floor would roll their eyes at this slick bit of grandstanding. Jesus would forgive them their transgression at once, since he can’t see a future in Hollywood for either one of the no talent bitches. Matter of fact, one will eventually sleep with the other’s husband, marking the end of the fair weather film school friendship. The spurned wife will become a lesbian and start an all-girl Oregon playwriting festival for juvenile offenders, while the unapologetic adulteress will attend her first and only movie premiere as a cater waitress.

“I’m a little concerned about the modern relevance of your tale,” Professor Godbucks would delicately inform Jesus. “Maybe we should focus on something a little lighter that might appeal to say an Adam Sandler or a Jim Carrey.”

“They could do Herrod,” Jesus would say, getting a little annoyed at this point. “Haven’t you ever seen that Andrew Llloyd Weber musical?”

“Good God, talk about dated.” This from a Ballsy Directing Student known for both his experimental visual style and total lack of story sense.  His Perpetually Offended Girlfriend, who once scrawled “If you want to direct, you’re in the wrong bathroom” on the stall of the women’s loo, might be concerned with theme. “I’m offended by the mother obsession. I’m offended by yet another tired take on the whole whore-Madonna angle.”

“What’s up with the ending?” one of the Third Years would chime in uninvited. “Downer.”

“I don’t get the love interest,” her partner the future Jezebel would add, passing some Tic Tacs among a select few cronies. “Are they doing it or aren’t they?”

“If this is supposed to be some kind of black comedy, it’s got to end with a wedding. Not a crucifixion.”

“And forget that lame resurrection. The kids won't even buy that kind of hat trick.”

“You really need to clarify the unique motivations of all these apostle characters. Haven’t you read Legri?”

“Catch up on your Campbell, dude.”

“Aristotle. 'Nuff said.”

Jesus would now be thinking he should have gone to law or medical school like so many other Israelites. Wasn’t this supposed to be a safe, nurturing environment where he could test his dramatic mettle before being thrown like the Lamb of God to the Hollywood wolves? The trouble with film school is everybody knows very well if you can’t reach the top of the heap here—if you’re not recognized with the big scholarships, the best classes, the highest public praise—your chances for any success afterward are very poor indeed.

During break, when the other students huddle within their closed cliques in front of the vending machines, nobody would even notice Jesus turning water into Snapple and multiplying the Pepperidge Farm Goldfish like cheesy little loaves. "Father forgive them," Jesus might even mutter, fading into the background along with the last remaining shreds of his dream. "For they know not what's up."

If only he were lucky enough to have the fates smiling down on him that day, the Loopy Little Theater Major practicing her jazz combination with total abandon in the courtyard might take the empty seat beside him. “Tell me a story,” she’d say, helping herself to some Goldfish. “All you big bad screenwriters have one.”  She’d grab his notebook without bothering to ask, paging through it with a complete lack of guile.

“I’m Jesus, King of Jews,” he’d say. “Bet you thought that was Spielberg.”

“I’m Mary, as in Martin. Triple threat.”

“Mary was my mother’s name.”

“I know,” she’d say, looking up from his treatment with stars in her eyes. “Jesus, this looks like a good movie.”

Pulp Fiction

Aleks never read my screenplays. In our early days—seventeen of them, to be exact, between our meeting and our wedding—he was reading Charles Bukowski in paperback. While I thus mistook my future husband for a hard-bitten intellectual belying the fragile spirit of a poet, the better description might be "blathering drunkard." 

Aleks had been a dog trainer during his mandatory service in the Yugsolavian National Army. He skipped the country on a seaman’s visa before the outbreak of its civil war, when his duel ethnicity would have forced him to pick a side. We met one New Year’s Eve aboard a cruise ship, where I was a rookie journalist researching a travel guidebook and he was tending the midnight buffet in a white dinner jacket. He gave me a wink and a sprinkle of extra walnuts. I liked the way he said the word, as though it began with a “v” and finished with a “shh.”

The next time I heard from him he’d been fired and deported following a fistfight with a roughneck pastry chef from the wrong side of France. He only got as far as Frankfurt, since the Serbs had bombed the airport in his hometown of Dubrovnik. He hoped I’d come help him either escape back into Croatia or use my journalist credentials to return him to the U.S. I was half-way across the Atlantic before concluding, mysteriously, that wedlock was the best plan of attack.

I brought my surprise husband home to Miami, where he joined Mickey Rourke’s back alley boxing gym, discovered illegal drugs and struggled mightily with the pitfalls of capitalism, such as holding down a job. By night, he worked as a bouncer for actor Sean Penn, who then owned a South Beach bar called, ironically, Bash. Intervening during a bar fight one night, Aleks was seriously injured, nearly losing an eye.

He gave me half the court settlement in our divorce, and I used it to move to Hollywood and become a screenwriter. Aleks went to Marseilles to join the French Foreign Legion, but was deemed too large—and I’m guessing too often snockered—for covert operations. Last I heard he was in Dubai bodyguarding a Saudi sheik 

All these years later, people often wonder why I never write about him, my real life hero with so many oversized flaws. Back in film school, when I mentioned the details in an e-mail to Obi Wan Kenobi, my legendary structure professor wrote back, “Is this fiction?” The trouble with writing your life, as Mr. Bukowski might have agreed, is even a fine, aged truth never goes down as whisky smooth as the lies.

Julie's Big Hollywood Dreamhouse

Considering my "emerging screenwriter" price range, I hadn’t been able to get a single real estate agent to return my calls—not even the one with the handlebar moustache and speech impediment I found on some fly-by-night Internet site. Then I met Jerry J. one Sunday afternoon at an open house in Echo Park. He’d staged the place with signature homosexual style, lighting gingerbread-scented candles on the kitchen counter, setting back issues of the New Yorker in the master bath. He asked me to sign his Venetian leatherbound guest book and have a look around the little California bungalow, priced at a “very attractive” six fifty-nine, which stands adjacent to a state-run “rest home,” according to Jerry’s brochure. Personally I’d call it an “insane asylum.” When I stood very still, I’m pretty sure I heard screaming.

I hadn’t even been interested in Echo Park, which seemed a little too, I don’t know, colorful, until I saw Quinceañera. The only film ever to win both Audience Favorite and the Grand Jury Award at Sundance, it was promoted as a coming of age story about a teenager who gets pregnant without ever having sex. What it’s really about is gay couples with great taste initiating turf warfare by painting an entire L.A. neighborhood their own gangland color, Restoration Hardware Green.  I wanted in.

Unfortunately, once an already inflated L.A. real estate market is captured in an award-winning indie, it’s already too rich for my blood. The one property in the entire gang-infested hood priced below four hundred thousand wasn't a house at all, but a "cozy little writer’s cabin” built in the twenties as a hunting lodge. Perched on a solitary hilltop surrounded by meadowlands, its best feature was a wraparound deck where I could have all the “big wonderful dinner parties” Jerry imagined me to be throwing for my “important friends at the studio.” (Jerry apparently thinks I’m Lucy and Ricky Ricardo in their Hollywood years).

On the downside, the place needs a new roof, a missing bedroom wall, kitchen appliances, new flooring, heating and cooling, and an exterior retaining wall before the advent of the mudslide, fire and earthquake seasons. It’s also so tiny that my mortgage broker had to go to a “specialty house,” a mob allusion, I suspect, to secure financing.

But that’s not why I passed on it. I did that because of the homeless encampment at the foot of the driveway, beside the neighbor’s Roto-Rooter truck. Call me a snob, but I like to give at celebrity fundraisers rather than at gunpoint, and get a plumber on the phone when I need one, not lean out the back window and shout, “Yo, Julio!"

The thing about screenplays is that they’re worth either nothing at all or a huge wad of cash. There’s not a whole lot in between. My mother says I have to write my way out of my problems and my manager remains convinced I’ll be writing myself into the right house very soon. The mere idea of being able to write my way into and out of things is the closest I’ve gotten to Hollywood success. That and hanging with Jerry. The day he takes me to lunch at some star-studded greasy spoon at Sunset Junction to sign documents, I’ll know I’m in.

Blonde Ambition

When someone you know from film school makes a major Hollywood script sale, all kinds of things run through your mind. The first is, phew, it really can happen. The second is, damn, why didn't it happen to me? The third is that no talent bitch couldn't write her way out of a paper bag! No way was fellatio not involved here, among a treasure trove of sexual hat tricks picked up during a mysterious "summer job" in a Hong Kong whorehouse. Just wait until that particular footnote makes the alumni newsletter.

It only gets worse when you made all that up, actually like the writer in question, and freely admit that she's super talented. Maybe not quite as talented as you, but ten years younger and maybe half your body weight soaking wet after a fatty meal. My friend C. sold a sitcom pilot last week in a heated bidding war among all the major networks. Included in the prize package was a job as co-exp on her own show, should it get an order, plus a staff writing position on the season's hottest comedy to tide her over until it does.

While nobody's paid my kind of dues, except maybe people who drive sportscars off cliffs while trying, C. has done her time in the trenches. She had been a playwright before grad school, and her work had been produced and published. She'd had some success as an actress, appearing in a couple of B-list movies before signing up with the inevitable staffing agency for celebrity assistants. She housesat for Don Roos, sat on Matt and Ben's phones, assisted Lisa Kudrow's assistant and fetched coffee for Ben Stiller and the little Marcia Bradyish wife he keeps insisting is funny, goddamnit.

Though C. and I hadn't been BFFs in film school, certainly we were allies. As first years, we were were shunned among the advanced students accepted into the class of a certain famous screenwriter. Each week, we would e-mail each other pissy little missives marked "Delete Immediately After Reading!" detailing the evening's perceived barbs and mean spirited notes from film school power brokers, as if that's not a contradiction in terms. She told me she'd been a geek in high school and felt naturally at home among losers, fat chicks and other outcasts, which I wasn't exactly sure how to take. Still, though nowadays she vaguely resembles Elle Woods, I believed her. For someone with a Dentyne smile sporting a perky, blonde bob, she has one too many angry snake tattoos to have escaped adolescence unscathed.

In my charming congratulatory note, I reminded her that I'm still writing a feature for E.N., and was in fact invited to the red carpet East Coast premiere of his new film last week. She replied that she hadn't heard a word of congratulations from Don, Matt, either of the Bens or Marcia, Marcia, Marcia. So instant was her success, so total her newfound power, she didn't even ask me to delete immediately after reading. Man, I love this town. It's not nearly enough to break in. Every now and then, a girl gets to break some balls.