Pomp and Unfortunate Circumstance

Three years ago next week, I graduated from the world's top film school with an MFA in Screenwriting. Since that time I have exhausted two unemployment claims, sold off family heirlooms at the Fairfax Flea Market, worked in the subscriptions department of The Hollywood Reporter as the world's most overqualified temp, and landed a highly overpaid studio writing assignment at the behest of a major movie star. To know what kind of mood I'm in on any given day, I have to check my calendar and get back to you.

The good news is screenplays are either worth nothing at all or a whole lot of coin, and I made enough selling one recently to support myself grandly over the next four years. That is as long as I downgrade my Netflix subscription, cancel Showtime and HBO, and knock off the Starbucks except when I happen to be there on a blind date that's not going well. I may also have to read The National Enquirer in line at the grocery store while cool people point and stare rather than surreptitiously sneaking it into my cart. I did clear the guild minimum to qualify for medical benefits over the next two calendar years, although my Fancy Pants Beverly Hills Lawyer had to call the studio and beg for an extra eight hundred and fourteen bucks, which is coincidentally the amount of his tab at Mr. Chow's when he takes his real clients out to lunch.

As for my creative achievements, I've met with several hundred producers, two of them Best Picture Oscar winners. One invited me to touch his. The other proposed I write a little talking dog movie for him off the clock, which he and I would take out together in the event he liked it. He didn't and we didn't, which was okay by me because Lord knows I didn't. Besides, by the time I was finished with the third free draft he was really busy producing a critically acclaimed box office blockbuster that won the Golden Globe that year. I plan to go back and touch that any day, except in the event that I don't finish my second buzzworthy spec feature in time for the writers strike and have to head back to the flea market with my dwindling box of heirlooms.

I've completed the aforementioned big budget R-rated comedy, which went into turnaround at the studio before the ink was even dry on my contract. I've written three unsold screenplays, this blog, a book proposal based on this blog, and a sitcom pilot about a blogging screenwriter whose life begins to change when she moves into a legendary bungalow village peopled with crazy Hollywood types. This was just picked up as a series at CBS, although it was written by somebody else--and the fledgling filmmaker in question, in a nod to authenticity given the industry's unapologetic gender bias, is a dude. It stars Jeffrey Tambor, who definitely would have played
Opera Boy in my version; and Raquel Welch, who could have been the lonely music magazine editor with the bum leg across across my courtyard who has her beer trucked in from Albertson's once a month and stacked in cases in her living room. I propose a new college drinking game where every time somebody steals my life and sells it to Hollywood for big bucks, another starry-eyed film student must knock back a fifth of drugstore brand gin and change majors.

I remember looking at the merry-making undergrads during commencement ceremonies--a particularly loud and showy bunch, given their status as newly pedigreed theater and film freaks--and thinking, wow, this is the last happy day of your life. Talent is a curse I'd learned to live under all those years I denied mine, and it was hard to watch it preying upon the innocent. The showbiz bug is something akin to a vampire bite promising a swift death followed by an endless quest for fresh blood and the paradoxical promise of immortality. Even with the occasional trickles of success--the thrills of victory, the agonies of defeat--it isn't any kind of life, just a possibility of one that never quite seems to deliver. And I wouldn't trade a day of it for a truckload of drugstore gin and a lifetime of free beer at Albertson's.