Laura Keitlinger Stole My Life

There's a new series on IFC about a girl screenwriter ten years out of film school still waiting for her break in Hollywood. Nope, it's not Julie Goes To Hollywood, starring me, but The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman, starring Laura Kightlinger.

Jackie has a best friend who's an upwardly mobile slut. Julie has an upwardly mobile stripper next door. Jackie has a day job at a second rate indie film rag. Julie had a day job at a second rate Hollywood trade rag. Jackie has a really stupid film school nemesis who becomes a smug overpaid screenwriter. Julie has a really stupid brother-in-law who became a smug overpaid sitcom weenie. Jackie even looks a little like me, if I were eight feet tall and thin and only had one chin and all. Either way, I am starting to feel like Steeley Dan with the whole Cousin Dupree debacle.

I have always liked Laura Kightlinger. I liked her on Saturday Night Live, where they never let her do much other than be brief and sarcastic while vaguely resembling Geena Davis. I liked her on Will & Grace, where she was a writer who also appeared as real life boyfriend Jack Black's nurse when he guested as a doctor. I sided with her in sisterhood when Jack dumped her after seven years to elope with some hot rocker chick he knew in high school. What do you guess the new Mrs. Black wouldn't even talk to him back then, when he was just another fat guy sniffing after her. Poor, loyal Laura was further humiliated with the requisite instant Hollywood love child who was undoubtedly named for a popular fruit.

Still, I can't forgive the identity thieving. Or the whole getting there first and doing it better thing, if that is indeed the case, which would somehow feel even worse. Laura Kightlinger may not have gotten the guy, but she did get the sitcom with an eight-episode order. Laura, if you happen to visit this blog with any frequency, and I suspect you do, please be advised that I'd be more than happy to give up my imaginary boyfriend for a staff job, or even a sweet little consulting gig. The rest of it will be our little secret. Really it will.

Rogers and Me

I've been thinking a lot lately about Sally Rogers. My favorite character on The Dick Van Dyke Show, she was the first girl comedy writer I ever heard of, so as far as I was concerned, she must be what we were all supposed to look like. If all I needed was a smart mouth, a pair of sensible pumps and a dime store bow in my hair to make it in network television, show me the way to Woolworth's. Imagine my disappointment at learning that they won't let a woman meeting Sally's general description anywhere near the lot nowadays, except maybe to work the cash register at the commissary.

In the pilot episode, Rose Marie, the former film actress who played Sally, was thirty-eight years old. Her writing partner, Buddy, who got his start in vaudeville, was in his fifties, but they were inexplicably portrayed as being around the same age. She even called him "kid," but then she called everybody that. I was never sure what the deal was between Buddy and Sally, since he was supposedly married to somebody else--but even back in third grade, when I became hopelessly addicted to classic TV watching re-runs after school--I felt a certain forbidden tension in their relentless banter.

What really didn't add up for me, though, was the way Sally was far savvier than either Buddy or their head writer Rob at answering the senseless demands behind the scenes at The Alan Brady Show. As smart as she was, the poor girl couldn't get a decent date to save her life. Laura Petrie, meanwhile, was played by a twenty-four-year-old mother of a six-year-old child, putting Mary Tyler Moore in eleventh grade at the time old Dick knocked her up and moved her out to New Rochelle for a life of leisure. Remarkably, this fundamentally accurate depiction of socio-sexual politics driving the industry hasn't changed much over the last fifty years. This despite all that nonsense with the Women's Movement and the thousands of girl soldiers dying and dismembered in Iraq and that loud mouth one with the philandering husband who's running for president.

The upshot of all this is that I'm feeling a tad miffed today at having been unlinked by fellow bloggers Ken Levine and Craig Maizin. This is the blogospheric equivalent of asking a girl to leave a party because of an embarrassing drunken rant. I actually know Ken, peripherally, through his writing partner, a fellow Miamian who came to see me performing in an improv club back before South Beach was a cool place for either one of us to be. Coincidentally, they had a sitcom about a girl writer called Almost Perfect on the air at around the time I came out here. The character was the show runner of a hard-nosed cop show who would call her daddy and cry when the guys beneath her were mean. Although I didn't know it at the time, that too was a spot-on skewering of the goings on in a typical writer's room.

What I like about Ken's blog is that unlike everybody else in Hollywood, Ken actually does know everything, and he really has been around forever. He's not old or anything, just a very young success I'm told was running M*A*S*H* by the time he was in his mid-twenties. I was like eleven at the time, so by all rights the job should have been mine. I suspect the real reason his blog is so popular is that deluded fans like me honestly believe he'll have an astonishing late career success and start doling out jobs based on the pithy one upsmanship going on in his comments section.

Craig I don't know personally, but when he first linked "Things They Don't Tell You In Film School," he probably expected semi-relevant screenwriting tips from someone who actually has some of those to share. A top feature writer and longtime activist, his site offers a valid service to aspirants--though I'd wager that the bulk of his anonymous commentary is left by major screenwriters representing warring factions within the Writers Guild. Half the time I have no idea what the heck they're talking about, the other half I find it a bit hard to care, inasmuch as gender inequity, fat discrimination, how to extend an unemployment claim and other super important stuff that's all about me so rarely comes up among the big boys.

I don't personally know any girl bloggers in the Scribosphere, although I like Jane Espensen because she always tells you what she had for lunch. I think that's an important thing to know about people, as is what they choose to wear in front of the computer and whether or not they drink and blog. A turkey sandwich, pajamas, and hell yes are my current stats. Diablo Cody isn't really one of us, since she was a blogger before she was a screenwriter as opposed to vice versa. She's also a former stripper who wrote a memoir called Candy Girl resulting in a three-picture blind deal at Paramount. What can I tell you, powerful men like whores. Not that I'm accusing her of being a whore, just because she sold her body for money and got a career out of it, so please don't have her lawyers call my lawyers. And yes, I am just jealous, especially since she also wrote an impossibly buzzworthy first screenplay, Juno, which white hot director Jason Reitman just wrapped for John Malkovich's production company. It's about a girl who sells her baby and thinks it's funny. I'm predicting this one becomes next year's Little Miss Sunshine. As for Jill Soloway, her post entitled "Courtney Cox's Asshole," may be the funniest piece of American literature to come down the "pike" in the last century.

Sometimes I think we're this big Algonquin Round Table in the sky, and I only wish I were a latter day Dorothy Parker, who never wrote a novel or any real masterpiece and is thus best remembered for her easy way with a quip fueled by talent, martinis and bitterness. If she had a blog in her declining Hollywood years, I might have unlinked the poor dear myself. Other days, I'm good old Sal, only with too much fashion sense to shellac my hair into an immovable wave and paint my lips into a permanent smile--and too many street smarts to believe the truly important thing is to keep them laughing in the aisles. Unless of course you're writing about the bleached anal canal of a certain Mrs. David Cox-Arquette. Damn, I wish I'd come up with that one.

Sister

When I was four years old, I ran off the end of a dock at my family's summer cottage in Upstate New York and fell into the lake. I remember looking up and seeing the shock on my sister's face dissolve to guilt as she accepted the ugly predicament as somehow being her fault. Mary Beth was only six years old herself, but that's the kind of kid she was, a stern little general in a pair of droopy knee socks. Though my refusal to flail and spout and fight for my life eventually became family lore -- early proof of what an odd little girl I was -- I actually liked it down there. It was true peace, my imminent demise, not at all the panicked horror you'd imagine drowning to be. Before I knew it my sister had run into the house and gotten my father, who jumped in, fished me out and warmed me up with my first ever shot of whiskey.



Last night my sister drove up from San Diego to save me again. She didn't like the way I sounded on the phone, she explained to her husband, leaving behind the dog, house, job and brand new pool with an infinity edge overlooking the canyon. She arrived here after midnight, armed with a box of Krispy Kremes and a doll from one of those ridiculous Hallmark kind of shops for people with sizeable balances available on their credit cards. It's a "You Can Do It Wish Doll," wearing a "Hang In There!" dog tag and a bracelet with "Go Girl" and star-shaped charms dangling from it. "Her name's Aurelia," my sister tells me. "That's how she grabbed me, anyway." I look at Aurelia and wonder how much I can get for her at the Fairfax Flea Market.

My sister is not happy about my new plan to sell all my stuff to raise some money, neither when I cry about how sad it is letting my treasures go to the highest bidder, nor when I refer to doing so as "my new business" like some kind of aspiring bag lady. She thinks I need a steady source of income, besides, you know, her. Even if it means putting aside my writing for awhile. I silently vow that my sister's "unflinching support" will not be included in my acceptance speech at any future Golden Globes ceremony.

We take a drive to Office Depot and see a "Help Wanted" sign. She tells me to find the manager and get an application. She'll wait, she says. I act like I can't understand a single word she's saying, like she's speaking some strange, Middle Eastern language where they practically choke themselves to death on their R's and H's. Office Depot. I'd rather take a crow bar to my wood floor and sell it off plank by plank for firewood. I'm feeling very Laura Ingalls Wilder, all of a sudden, hardened by circumstance. "You may call me Half-Pint!" I announce. "I have no idea what you're talking about," she snorts. (She totally does and read the crap out of those books under the covers with a flashlight.).

Cutting to the chase, we pick up a desk-sized tub of cheesy poofs and eat it in her car..

We go to some freaky indie at the Arclight, and she shares my sense of personal indignation that the Sundance Filmmaker's Lab turned down my most recent application in favor of some weird chick   with a faux-hawk who brought this turkey into the world. You have to love that about my sister, the way she knows in her heart that the movies I'm not making are far superior to the crap most everybody else has the gall to put out.

I practically knock over the comic actor Jay Mohr on the way out, but he looks right through me.  He's a pretty small guy with a very small chick on his arm, and clearly they don't acknowledge the larger people. We go to dinner at Chan Dara Larchmont where damn if another small person doesn't wait on us. At least she has the excuse of being Thai.

"Tell her I'm fine," I say as Mary Beth deposits me at the foot of my drive. She'll be reporting my overall state of mind back to our mother in Umatilla before she makes it to the corner. I'm actually okay with this. When you're an artist, it's a good thing to have one or two people who are not artists on hand to love you from a reasonably safe distance.

I know my sister will always be here to save me from drowning. I just wish she didn't have to do it so often. I wish she could understand that sometimes I like hanging out beneath the water line. It's cool and quiet, and all you have to do is hold your breath. How long you can make it down there without any hope of surfacing, well, that's just another one of those things they won't tell you in film school.

-- Originally published July 27, 2005