Full Frontal Frat Party

I did not see Robert Redford at Sundance. I saw Saturday Night Live's Rachel Dratch, on a bus. I tried to listen to her conversation, but she didn’t seem to have much to say. Something about going to Swag Village to nab herself a free cell phone. I wanted to remind the original "Debbie Downer" that only the A-listers get the good ones with the Harry Winston diamond-encrusted cases. Mwah, mwah, mwah.

The only other “stars” I saw were unknown actors from the films, who would get up during the Q&A’s afterwards and go on about how much fun it was to work without food or pay. I imagine most walked off with a new agent promising to land them a real movie role with a nice green screen to co-star against, a trainer, and a private catering truck serving meals from The Zone.

Though Jake Gyllenhaal was nowhere in sight, I did see Maggie Gyllenhaal in a junkie movie. Every film I saw had at least one junkie in it. The junkie doesn’t have to be the hero, but it is important that you learn some new bit of junkie business in each moviegoing experience so you know for sure this is art you’re watching, folks. I feel quite confident, for example, that I could find a good vein in my thigh if ever I got tired of snorting my heroin, or smoking it like a common crack whore.

Full frontal nudity is another hallmark of filmic excellence, especially among ugly people. The very first film I saw opened with a young girl fellating a fat Mexican guy. The “disturbing images” the programming guy mentioned in his giddy introduction turned out to mean uncut wee-wees shot in extreme close-up. Though I didn’t keep a tally at subsequent screenings, I’m certain I haven’t seen so much male genitalia since my time in the Marines. Hot lesbian sex was also very in this year, since the only romantic comedy I saw might have been written by Woody Allen if not for all the girl-on-girl action.

Cute, but hardly worth waiting in the ticket line for two pre-dawn hours in the snow. Judging from the crowds standing knee deep in slush outside the theaters, day and night, it was as though Jesus himself was rumored to make his memorable screen debut here at Sundance.  Either him or Justin Timberlake, who did in fact appear in his first movie role as, you guessed it, a junkie.

When I told my manager I was going to Sundance, she warned me it was a big frat party in the snow. She urged me to buy some serious rubber boots and gave me my lawyer’s cell phone number. He was going, of course, and I might need to make a deal right there on Main Street. I didn’t. Nor did I bring home a free cell phone, just a high fever and a case of bronchitis.

There was one movie I liked so much I could have written it, about a dysfunctional family that enters their overweight daughter in a beauty contest. It sold for ten million bucks. I ran into the producer outside, whose name I recgonized as someone who recently passed on my script. "Hey, big guy, don't you want to come back next year?" I wanted to flag him down and inquire, fluttering my lashes against the falling snow. He'd then invite me for hot chocolate back at the chalet, where he'd quickly admit the error of his ways and propose we make movie magic together at once. We'd recount this story over and over for a future Sundance audience. But I didn't want anyone to cut in front of me in line for the next junkie movie, so I just stared straight ahead and, like my old friend Debbie Downer, pretended I was nobody. It really wasn't so hard. Mwah, mwah, mwah.

The Redford Rule and Its Soderbergh Exception

I always said I wouldn’t go to the Sundance Film Festival unless Robert Redford invited me as his date. By some miracle of nature—one well beyond further teeth bleaching and a touch-up on the eye job—he would still be as hot as he was during the Jeremiah Johnson years. In our private hours, he’d remove the hand-trapped pelts, set down the black powder rifle and shave the beard as we settled into the clawfoot tub at his slopeslide chalet. Late at night, just for me, he’d put on the dress whites from The Way We Were. I'd remove them tenderly after he nodded off, just as Barbra Streisand did after he blacked out and slept with her by accident. The next day she’s used all her ration coupons to buy steak and cherry pie so he stays for dinner and they fall in love forever.

Attending the opening night ceremony, Bob would get all misty-eyed when crediting me for being his lifelong rock and muse, despite my tender years. Suddenly slender and doe-eyed again myself, I’d be wearing the tiny Jordache jeans that fit me in high school. Or the Calvins every teenage girl bought after our leader Brooke Shields claimed to be running around in them without panties. A pair of slim-fitting Levi’s 501s I wore in college the year I threw up a lot would work very nicely for public outings, when Bob and I would frolic in the snow among fellow film legends to amuse the paparazzi.

The only other inspiration for my appearing at Sundance would be the premier of some sizzling hot film I wrote, made for a hundred and twenty-five bucks in some guy's backyard and widely expected to win Audience Favorite. After Sony Classics picked up distribution rights for a cool ten mill, I’d become known as this year's “brand new thing,” a Sundance "discovery" of Soderberghian proportions. This according to my newfound "people,” who elect to erase the nightmarish details of the ten years it took me to become an overnight sensation.

Yesterday, a third scenario presented itself when my friend invited me out of the blue. She has a timeshare and two all-event passes. She’s deathly afraid of flying, so she offered me a lift in her mammoth black Escalade. Rather than explaining the Redford Rule and its Soderbergh Exception, I told her I needed to work on my spec script. She said to bring my laptop and she’d look over my pages. This was a rather attractive offer coming from a former network showrunner who’s got a new pilot in the works. The only note of hers I remember on my last script was a hand-scribbled one saying I’d always be welcome at her table.

What could I say besides yes? Hell yes. If we run into Bob somewhere, I naturally added, show me the way to some steak and cherry pie and don’t wait up.

A Very Brady Julie

Last night Mad TV aired a sketch in which Snow White wakes up so set on whistling her happy tune she has no idea she lives in a crack house. Taking to the streets, she directs her clueless euphoria to the he-she hookers and menacing dope pushers of the neighborhood, which I immediately recognize as my neighborhood. My 7-11 overrun by warring street gangs, my Subway cordoned off as a murder scene.

I was comforted by the realization that Mad TV’s soundstages are conveniently located just around the corner, at the Hollywood Center Studios—former home of the Desilu Playhouse, where they shot the first two seasons of I Love Lucy. The Burns & Allen Show also taped there, as well as The Beverly Hillbillies, The Adams Family, Green Acres and Petticoat Junction. Still, I couldn’t help remark upon what a seedy-looking place I call home.

I grew up in Woodland Hills, in a house that might have belonged to the Brady Bunch. I even knew one of the Bradys, Peter, an older boy who could be stalked onto the playground, near the handball courts. I figured I’d have a Brady kind of life, some day—only not married to a dad who turned out to be gay while dating my oldest stepson behind the scenes, later forced to shill for Wesson Oil.

In eighth grade, my very pretty best friend Debbie went out with one of the Waltons—Ben, I think. He wasn’t much to look at but he had a job and a car. After we grew up, Debbie went into real estate and bought her own Brady Bunch house only blocks away from her parents. I refused to settle down, since I was busy traveling the world before concluding it wasn’t all that interesting. It was Hollywood that fascinated me. When I finally made my way back to pursue screenwriting, I set up residence on the weird side of the hill.

Though mystified by this choice, Debbie might have made the scary journey into the hood more often if my attack dog, Bunny, hadn’t bit her the night before she was to compete on the quiz show Debt. After we’d spent the night in the emergency room, when Wink Martindale appeared on-stage, Debbie had to mime the act of clapping so as not to re-open her bandaged wound. I will always blame myself for her losing after failing to make the correlation between a brass brad and Brad Pitt on some obtuse final question. No matter, Debbie said, as thrilled as I to be standing on Lucy's soundstage, somewhere in the middle of her kitchen, we deduced.

Debbie died a couple of years later, after a long battle with lupus. I heard her parents held onto her house, which remains empty. I have fantasies about heading out to the Valley and buying it from them—although by now it’s probably worth about a million more bucks than I have. Something about it would feel tacky, anyway, as though I were bragging about still having a life, such as it is. Maybe just the fact of being alive should be reason enough to wake up singing—even if I do have to fight off another self-entitled trannie for the last jelly doughnut in the corner shop.

Confessions of a Hollywood Misanthrope

I have a public confession to make and hopefully it’s more interesting than the rest of my public confessions. I don’t go to the movies very often.

Summer's out completely, since I don’t care for comic books, computer games or natural disasters. Though I am a fan of classic sitcoms, they don’t seem to translate well to features even after Jessica Simpson has worked so very hard on her big screenworthy ass.

I don’t enjoy cartoons, no matter how “inspired” and “life-like.”

I’ve never seen a film with the word “man,” in the title, whether Bat, Super or Spider.
Re-makes of gritty foreign films and timeless classics range between rather superfluous and downright insulting, even with that lame "improved technology" argument.

I haven't seen a horror movie since they showed The Shining one Halloween in college. Since then I've seen those blasted twins every time I walk down a hotel corridor.

I couldn’t really follow Gladiator; and didn’t get the one with all those gay English guys on the 18th century boat. I neither saw Armageddon, Men in Black nor Independence Day—nor any of the Harry Potters, Mission Impossibles, or Jurassic Parks. Though Titanic is an all-time favorite, I’d definitely skip Titanic 2: The Revenge. The last Star Wars I went to was the first one. And God help me, I believe the first Godfather says it all.

You’re probably asking yourself why it is I want to be a screenwriter. The obvious answer is the poor bastards need me. Before they started making movies for kids grown-ups might be able to stomach, the good movies were the ones your parents wouldn’t let you watch. When I was little you could keep your Bugsy Malone, I had to see Annie Hall—which my mother decided was a drug movie after reviewing the famous cocaine sneeze. American Graffiti was about gangs and The Sting glorified a couple of petty criminals. Hot damn, I was in—even if it meant sneaking through the side door after being dropped off to see Jodie Foster in the original Freaky Friday.

I’ve been equally inspired by only a handful of movies made after I grew up. Thelma & Louise, Muriel’s Wedding, Cinema Paradiso, Billy Elliott, and Sideways come immediately to mind. I like stories about people—girls, even—and yeah, I’m prepared to read the subtitles. Hardly an art house junkie, I freely admit to enjoying fun but forgettable fare like The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Wedding Crashers and Elf—all original scripts rather than re-makes, sequels or adaptations, it’s worth noting—as much as Mad Hot Ballroom and Whale Rider.

It's mostly getting to the theater that presents such a problem. Since I have less interest in long lines, subterranean parking lots and shopping malls than I do in interplanetary warfare, it’s a real strain come wintertime to see the big Oscar contenders they insist on releasing over a three-day period. My theater of choice is the Arclight, where there aren’t a whole lot of people around—worth the fourteen-dollar ticket in and of itself.

Maybe the real reason I want to write movies is I actually prefer my humanity at a safe distance, up there on the big screen where it belongs. Where everybody seems so much larger than the rest of us, more important, more Robert Redford in his prime. Speaking of my original imaginary boyfriend, the day they re-make Jeremiah Johnson starring Ashton Kutcher, so help me, I’ll give it all up to go to work at the Umatilla Home Depot.

Julie's Big Hollywood New Year's Resolutions

1. Meet and marry Jake Gyllenhaal despite the media's mean-spirited Demi/Ashton comparisons.


2. Legally change name to Julie Gyllenhaal, Ph. D. because I damn well like the sound of it.


3. Go on double dates with Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Saarsgard. Remark on all those cool double As in our names. Consider acessorizing with umlauts.


4. Divorce Jake Gyllenhaal, whom I publicly accuse of fraud after one too many mountain weekends away with "an old fishing buddy."


5. Surrender double A and any and all future claims to umlaut.


6. Write the great American screenplay; sell in bidding war between The Baron and The Doctor for fifteen thousand yen.


7. Publish juicy Hollywood tell all.


8. Guest star on Oprah, stand on couch, punch air.


9. Despite daily gorging on bacon and chalupas, suffer spontaneous weight loss, like Star Jones-Reynolds.
10. Walk wiener dogs on Harry Winston leashes along the red carpet to the Oscars. Win in a surprise upset over Woody Allen. Thank Mom, Dad, Jesus, my newfound friends at CAA, the unsung heroes of Hurricane Katrina and the troops in Iraq.


11. Finally introduce myself to longtime Imaginary Boyfriend.


12. Dump the big dork, who suddenly expects me to like his friends and his protein shakes while happily washing his undershorts.


13. Suffer bizarre mid-life growth spurt, becoming inexplicably leggy and coltish.


14. Skip naked down Hollywood Boulevard.


15. Ride Tom Cruise’s motorcycle, become mysteriously impregnated, join Scientology, enjoy delightful home sonograms.


16. Publicly heckle that crazy bitch Brooke Shields and Matt "You Are Glib" Lauer.


17. Screw the manual labor already and return to the geisha way of life.


18. Invite many a studly eel to visit the old love cave.

Big Hollywood Homecoming

My father packed me a lunch for my flight back to L.A. Ham salad and liverwurst sandwiches on rye with pickles—food you wouldn’t think of picking off a menu because it’s totally disgusting unless your dad makes it for you. Mine also tossed in a baggie of unsalted peanuts in the shell and two tangerines, which I washed down with a bottle of orange juice hand-squeezed from his little groves by the lake.

We’d picked the fruit together, when he took me for a ride through the mud in his new Mule, showing off a pricey set of upgraded swamp tires. If I were a little girl, I would have clung to the roller bar and squealed in terror. Instead I wondered why there was a roller bar. I made a mental note to research the statistics on tipping these silly machines I would later report back to my mother.

It’s never easy getting on a plane. This might have something to do with the seats getting smaller while my butt keeps getting bigger. It might be about the way I always traveled first class back when I was a journalist, where you get hot nuts and bottomless Bloody Marys, and a "flight attendant" who understands very well this is just a fancier term for "waitress."

More likely, though, it’s that even after all this time returning to L.A. never really feels like coming home. Like some starstruck newcomer, I took a wrong turn exiting the airport and ended up in Redondo Beach. When I finally made my way back toward the West Side, I passed Spike Lee’s landmark Meaty Meat Burgers on Fairfax and noticed its long boarded up windows tagged with graffiti. I remember my sister pointing out the one time hipster hangout the first time I visited her here. What a groovy town, I thought—picturing Spike himself at the griddle flipping burgers while personally re-claiming the hood.

Tomorrow is my tenth anniversary in Hollywood. Traveling by car, I had hit Phoenix at sunset on New Year’s Eve and thought about skipping the roadside motel—reasoning that I could make it by midnight if I could only pick up the pace. On good days, I still believe that. On bad days I realize how very long a ride it’s been, and here I still haven’t made it. How easy it would be to run back home and be a little girl again, to grab onto that roller bar and shriek at the top of my lungs. Which makes me wonder why I couldn’t manage a peep when given the chance.

Along with my little brown bag, Dad sent me off this last time with a bear hug, yet another sizeable check and an apology for the surprise visit to his grave on Christmas Day. “I only wanted you to see my name in print,” he said. I should have said I understood. I didn’t say anything, except goodbye.

Down Home Julie

In film school, many of the screenwriting students swore by the arithmatic-driven, year-long feature film development class taught by Jodie Foster's producing partner. Personally, that stuff scared me to death. I wasn't even sure what "development" was, let alone why I would want to call on such a seemingly businesslike process in the creation of all the quirky little films flickering in my head.

I sat in on class the first night anyway, mostly to see if Jodie would show. She didn't. It must be she already knew that filmmaking requires not a writer, but rather an idea, an accountant, one or more superfluous blowhards, their toadies, and a star. The latter can't be just any old celebrity, mind you, only one proven able to "open a movie" without the help of a co-star, big name director or even a script. While the studio number crunchers can tell you who these rarefied individuals are, concluded our lecturer, you can just as easily put that together yourself. "If you think Uma Thurman alone is going to get your movie made, ask your Uncle Harold back in Podunk," she said. "It's a bad sign if he can't even pronounce the name."

At the last minute, I decided to spend the holidays in the small town in Florida where my parents recently retired. On Christmas morning, my father made me a pecan waffle with Benecol and sugar-free Log Cabin, then took me to see his grave. My mother's, too.

I looked him up and down, checking for a suspicious mole or visible tumor. Mom smiled brightly from the car, where she sat listening to the new Rod Stewart CD she got for Christmas. Maybe they'd made some kind of a pact to crank up "Maggie May" and end it all if they weren't able to reserve a verandah suite on their next Caribbean cruise. "Pretty spot, isn't it?" he boasted, giving the marker etched with their names a little kick like the tire of some sweet new roadster.

"You're sixty-nine years old!" I wanted to shout. "Mike Wallace is eighty-eight and he beats up cops!" But I couldn't speak at all, so I just stood there and started to cry. Female outbursts really aren't Dad's strong suit, so he mumbled something about bringing around the car.

All I could figure is he couldn't face the idea of death without dragging me and my mother along—as if on one of his ridiculous camping trips separating us from another fabulous sale at Lord & Taylor. Or maybe he just wanted to remind me that he wouldn't be around forever so I'd eat the wild pig he'd shot in the woods and pretend it didn't taste like shoes. Or maybe he just wanted to pick the next movie for a change.

After dinner, I put down my fork, knocked back the last of the Sauvignon Blanc and announced my willingness to see King Kong. "I saw the first two," he said. Though relieved, I also knew that trying to sell Brokeback Mountain as a reinterpretation of Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid would be pushing my luck. I suggested The Producers. It turns out he'd already seen that, too, with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. "Wouldn't you like to see the musical version?" I asked. "I hear Uma Thurman wears a thong."

"He doesn't know who Uma Thurman is," my mother chimed in.

"I do so know Oona Thurman," insisted my father. Though a brilliant, well-read man, his cinematic tastes reveal a childlike sense of wonder. The last really great one, by God, was The Polar Express. On the other hand, he can't seem to get through Sideways because it's about two losers. "I like heroes," he said with a shrug.

It suddenly occurred to me why it was so important for him to show me his grave, and why it was equally important for me to see it. Everybody needs a hero, and here mine sat right across the dinner table, with all his flaws and ticks, for a limited time only. Unlike us Hollywood types, he'd mustered the courage to get up and go to work every day without ever questioning whether or not it was fun. Though I wasn't equipped to argue the concept in film school, finally getting something onto the big screen might well mean knowing less about Uma Thurman and more about Umatilla. It might mean really knowing my dad. "We could just stick around here," I suggested. "I'm not sure if I'm up for hiking, fishing or gunplay, but I am willing to cook up some of that dead pig of yours."

Visions of Cabbage Rolls Danced in Her Head

I don’t talk about my Croatian ex-husband much because people think I’m making it up. “We met at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve,” I’ll say. “On a cruise ship. Somewhere in the Caribbean.”

“Is that so?” some Carlsbad housewife at one of my sister’s parties will patiently respond while opening another juice box for little Maximillian.

“He was a maitre d’. I asked him for extra walnuts on my hot fudge sundae and he demanded a kiss in return. Right there at the buffet table.” As a former journalist, I had helped Aleks escape the Civil War in former Yugoslavia, marrying him seventeen days after we met. “Most of these were in Frankfurt,” I’d explain. “After the cruise line sent him packing for beating up the food and beverage manager in the galley.”

“Speaking of which, how about this spinach dip?” she’d say. "How does your sister do it?" Determined to finish, I would narrow my eyes, backing her into a corner. “The Serbs had bombed the airport in Dubrovnik, so that was as far as they could deport him! He had to escape back into the country by taking a blockade running boat from Vienna!”

“Maximillian!” she’d shout. “Mommy wants you to stop hitting your sister! Now put down the Whiffle bat and take a time out.” She’d then turn back to me, this deluded, would be screenwriter who also fancied herself some clandestine, international figure. “Please. Go on.”

Since Aleks was ethnically part Serbian, returning to Croatia would have proven particularly treacherous. Both armies would try to enlist him. If I hadn't saved him, he’d have never been sure whether to shoot the guy in the distance or the one beside him.

In film school I wrote a political thriller based on these events called “Cruising to Nowhere.” My instructor was Dan Pyne—who’d most memorably written Doc Hollywood and the Johnathan Demme re-make of The Manchurian Candidate—so I figured he’d get both the romance and the intrigue. Wrong again. “Can't we make some of this more plausible?” he asked, thumbing through my draft.

“Et tu, Brute?”

“Sometimes you have to boil even a true story down to its more pedestrian elements. Can you think of any of those?”

“Well, I tried to make his mother’s cabbage rolls one Christmas and it turned out they were Serbian instead of Croatian. He spit on my cookbook and threw it out.”

“There’s your poster moment.”

“No, that’s when his mother came in the flesh the next year and tried to tell me how to cook a turkey. The avowed Communist had my Butterball splayed out across the length of the oven with its legs in the air like a dead cockroach.”

Declining to fly her back over the next year, I kindly requested she fork over the blasted cabbage recipe. For Aleks, being raised in a socialist country had always meant observing the holiday on the non-secular New Year’s Eve. So, four years to the day since we met, I finally got his national dish right—but it was still in the oven when Aleks had to rush off. On the busiest night of the year, my big, hulking husband was set to work the door of a white hot Miami Beach nightclub called Bash, owned by the actor Sean Penn.

Lying alone in the wee hours of New Year's Day, I received a call from the hospital. Aleks had been seriously injured breaking up a barfight, nearly losing an eye.

He had a hard time bouncing back, marking the beginning of the end of our marriage. Living on disability payments, he spent his days drinking espresso and his nights drinking slivovitz, licking his wounds with some equally disenchanted expatriate friends. Finally, I’d had enough, sending him packing back to Europe by year’s end. He tried to join the French Foreign Legion, but was turned away after training, deemed to large for covert operations. Too drunk, too, I'm guessing. “He never got to eat those stupid cabbage rolls,” I told my teacher. “I hate cabbage. Cabbage stinks. That pedestrian enough for you?”

“This isn’t a spy story,” he said, handing me back the draft. “It’s a Christmas story.”

I suppose if I’d ever had the wherewithal to re-write it and submit it to Lifetime, I might have a mini-series under my belt by now. Millions of housewives would be tuning in for the details—including the mother of little Maximillian, president of my fan club's enormous Carlsbad chapter. The trouble is, another thing they won’t tell you in film school is that when truth is stranger than fiction, the bittersweet, life-affirming holiday version—complete with lingering kitchen odors—might just be too much to re-visit.

Thirty Isn't So Young In That Carnival of a Town

When I told my mother over lunch in Miami that I was going to Hollywood to become a screenwriter it was as though I’d announced I was moving to Calcutta to open an Outback Steakhouse. “A screenwriter!” she gasped, as if discovering something alive in her soup. “You’ll end up working as an office temp! You’ll have to eat boxed macaroni and cheese and sell socks at the flea market!”

Not in the farthest reaches of my considerable imagination could I have known that I would indeed suffer these horrors and many more in pursuit of my dream. Alas, my fate had been sealed one Christmas morning by a bookmarker stuffed in my stocking, inscribed with the words of George Eliot, “It’s never to late to be what you might have been.”

With that, I finally mustered the courage, as so few do, to risk it all on the tiniest off chance of satisfying a life-long passion. I also knew instinctively that every scene is a battle one character ends up winning. Clearly I had to win the one with the little woman across the table who’d birthed, loved and supported me were I to have any shot at all of conquering a town as famously unwelcoming as Hollywood. She inquired into the benefits package that came with this supposed screenwriting job. “What about the retirement plan? You don’t want to end up an old woman with high blood pressure living in a trailer park with the poor people.”

Being raised by a struggling single parent—factory worker by day and coat check girl by night—goes a long way toward explaining my mother’s fascination with “the poor people.” Teaching English at a Catholic girl’s school, she’d managed not only to marry well, but also to become highly educated in her own right, earning an advanced degree in British Literature. “Can’t you see the romance of it all?” I asked, reminding her that Ernest Hemingway went to Paris and ate pigeons when he was young.

“Thirty isn’t so young in that carnival of a town.”

“I’m twenty-six, Mother, and if you ever tell anyone anything differently I’ll go totally Jennifer Aniston on you!”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

I narrowed my eyes. “You don’t hear Demi Moore saying anything nice about her mom, do you?

“Or little Meg Ryan either,” she sighed. “I guess the first thing to go out there is the mother.”  Deftly applying her sensibly priced Revlon lipstick without the aid of a mirror, she reached for the check—confident, I’m sure, that she’d won this little lunch scene of ours hands down.

“You’re the one who gave me that bookmarker!” I cried.

“I did not. What bookmarker?”

“The one about becoming who I might have been. You wanted me to know it wasn’t too late.”

“So what if I did?”

“I have everything I need to go and do this thing because you gave it to me. Grandma, too.”

“Grandma? What’s she got to do with it?”

“You always said she was the most independent woman you’d ever known.”

“She was,” she said, tears welling in her eyes for the mother she’d recently lost and the daughter she was about to. “Now I guess that’s you.”

Proverbially, I won the battle but lost the war. While I’d already started to see my life as a movie, mine wouldn’t exactly turn out to be the feel good story of the year. The problem with real life is the heroine doesn’t always wake up in the nick of time, discovering that she’d known the way home all along.

In fact, this is the first Christmas since I first arrived in Hollywood that I won’t be making it home at all. Mom agrees this is a good thing, since the little chunk of money and time resulting from my eviction settlement represents my last chance to make any headway here if I’m indeed to avoid packing up and calling it a day for good.

She called today to say my father had put out every last Christmas light anyway, and he’d planned a snow crab feast, my traditional welcome home dinner, for only the two of them. “There’s always next year,” she said.

“Next year, it’ll all be different, Mom. I’m absolutely, one hundred percent sure of that.”

Another thing they won’t tell you in film school is that winning a key scene, no matter how noble the heroine’s intentions, sometimes involves a little white lie.

Woody and Me, Fairfax and Sunset, Saturday Afternoon

A few weeks shy of ten years ago, I drove into L.A. on a typically sunny New Year’s Day. Continuing west along the I-10 well past my sister’s West L.A. townhouse, I finally reached the beach—where I pulled over and turned on my hazards, since nobody gets to park there for real unless they formerly starred in Baywatch. In fact in order to park at all in L.A., you have to be either famous, with the band, or legally disabled, but of course I didn’t know any of that back then.

Running across the sand to dip a toe in the Pacific Ocean, I realized that just about everything important to me was happening close by, and I could practically hear the intrigue of it all—the movie deals, the tabloid gossip, the entourages clucking after the stars like clueless chicks behind a dismissive mother duck. There was something strangely exhilarating about just standing there, breathing the air in and out. Ever since that day, I’ve often wished I could feel that way again, about anything, just for a moment or two.

Last week I heard Woody Allen would be making a rare, invitation-only personal appearance at the Director’s Guild after a screening of his new movie, Match Point. Armed only with an expired SAG card from having done a few TV commercials in the late 80s, I figured something this big was worth my very best shot. After all, if you asked me to describe in two words what kind of movies I want to make, I’d have to say "Annie" and "Hall." Furthermore, as an ardent follower of the big Hollywood scandal, were there any possibility of spotting Soon-Yi and the kids in the crowd, I’d have waited around the block for a couple of weeks like one of those freaks in line for another rumored Star Wars prequel.

Costumed entirely in black for a Saturday matinee, I sauntered up to the reception desk, declining to remove my sunglasses. “I’m on the list,” I informed the bright-eyed sycophant at the desk. “I’m afraid you’re not,” she said. She let me in anyway, after I threatened to call my fictitious assistant on my non-existent phone. Despite this being a small, one-factory town, I’ve learned over the years that anything can happen here—though if it doesn’t, one need only fill in the blanks. While elsewhere this is called lying—or perhaps even the early stages of mental illness—in this town serving up the wildest brand of self-important mythology is better known as “creating a buzz.”

One of these fell over the theater when Woody Allen walked down the aisle, after pausing in back to tie his signature sneaker. The jaded Hollywood crowd rose to its feet and applauded just because—and in one of those great Hollywood moments where life truly imitates art, when Woody started speaking I honestly thought this had to be a mimic doing him badly.

He talked a lot about luck, the theme of his new film, dwelling on his own good fortunes far more than you'd expect from someone who has carved a career out of neurosis and angst. "I'd rather be a lucky man than a good one," says one of the movie's characters, echoing Woody's belief that his own success befell him by mere happenstance. "If I walked out the door right now and got hit by a bus, I'd have to be okay with that," he mused, thanking the fates for smiling upon him so generously in the past. "I'd be pissed, but I couldn't complain."

As I sat there taking it all in, I was suddenly back on that beach, secure in the knowledge that ten years later I’m still right where I need to be. I suppose a cynic like Alvy Singer would take a dim view of my life here, insisting that my goodness has far superceded my luck, since the reality is not much of any significance has happened since the day I blew into town searching for that elusive parking spot. Ever the optimist, Annie Hall would argue that an afternoon spent quite by happenstance with a world famous living legend close enough to reach out and touch offers further proof that the rest of my dreams simply can’t be far behind.

The Humorist Makes Fun of Herself

Back in film school, my Legendary Story Structure Professor, the Obi-Wan Kenobi of screenwriting, told how he was once asked by a Los Angeles Times reporter if he's able to predict who among the students is most likely to make it. After all, he's taught so many of the town's Million Dollar Screenwriters over the last forty years—surely he must recognize a pattern.

After a long, signature pause, he replied, "It all depends on how well they deal with panic and despair." This was not the answer the reporter expected. He thought an early marker of success would involve the perpetual wearing of sunglasses, perhaps, or being left-handed and smoking filterless cigarettes. Panic and despair aren't words people want to associate with prosperity.

I had a phone meeting with three Paramount executives yesterday. I'm not sure what this level of effort signifies, other than I'm not important enough for anybody to get dressed up for. In retrospect, maybe they were fully coiffed and clothed and I was the only one sitting there in my jammies. It seems the new regime at the studio, all abuzz with new regime professions of looking for hot, new talent, has greenlit a film about knitting. Yes, and crocheting, too! Apparently yarn is all the rage across America and I've somehow managed to miss yet another hot trend, just as I have houka clubs, speed dating and, thankfully, the wearing of knickers and newsboy caps popularized by those sickly looking Olsen twins.

I yammered on and on about my affinity for the home arts, which happens to be accurate, though I'd have been no less enthusiastic on the topic were I weaving a yarn, so to speak. While I'm always happy to have the opportunity to pitch a big studio movie, it's so very tough to lose out in the end to the director's "niece," Spielberg's cousin, or Nora and Delia Ephron. This inevitable rejection is especially hard to take after robbing time from my own projects to break a story I'll never get to write.

While I don't know anybody who can claim to deal happily with being rebuffed, I realized that my way of handling panic and despair is to do the suffering in advance. Count myself out up front and it's no surprise when I lose by a hair's breath in the end. Just in the nick of time, I've subscribed to The Writer's Almanac, a daily e-mail compiled by Garrison Keillor. Today's edition featured humorist James Thurber, who, like so many writers who eventually made it, had a circuitous route to the top—and a tip for getting there that's been as close at hand as my trusty dark sunglasses and easy way with a quip. What is the opposite of suffering, after all, but choosing to have a good time, come what may? "The wit makes fun of other persons," Thurber wrote. "The satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself."

It's the birthday of the humorist James Thurber, born in Columbus, Ohio (1894). He was one of the most important early staff writers for the New Yorker magazine, but he had a lot of trouble getting started there. He started submitting humor pieces to the New Yorker in 1926, when the magazine was barely a year old. He said, "My pieces came back so fast I began to believe the New Yorker must have a rejection machine."

He took a job at the New York Evening Post, but he knew he wanted to write humor, so he kept at it. He was living in a basement apartment with his first wife. She thought that after twenty of his humor pieces had failed to find a publisher he should probably give up. But one night, he set his alarm clock to go off forty five minutes after he'd fallen asleep, and he woke up in sleepy daze and wrote the first thing that came to mind: a story about a man going round and round in a revolving door, setting the world record for revolving door laps. It was the first piece of his published in the New Yorker.

Best Little Whorehouse in Hollywood

The reason Christmas occurs in so many romantic comedies is because there’s something so viscerally sad about being alone this time of year. Who could forget the image of Sally dragging home her own tree after she and Harry had made the formidable task look like such fun the year before? Or Miracle on 34th Street, ostensibly a children’s movie, where it ultimately becomes just as important for Natalie Wood to believe in Santa Claus as it does for her jilted mother to know that men don’t necessarily suck. One of my favorite holiday songs is “Hard Candy Christmas,” which Dolly Parton sings in Best Little Whorehouse In Texas after Burt Reynolds dumps her because he’s a cop and she’s a whore, and all this finally occurs to them. Gets me every time.

Last night I heard it on the radio while driving home from the mall, where I’d finally given in and bought a double bed. “Are you sure I couldn’t interest you in the queen?” said the queen running the big holiday mattress sale. Translation: “Although you evidently sleep alone, dear, you’re hardly a petite woman.” The salesman bearing a suspicious resemblance to Reuben Kincaid from The Partridge Family had a tuft of curly red hair teased into a ball of cotton candy atop his head. I somehow doubt his bedroom is exactly a catalogue spread for Abercrombie & Fitch. “I just moved,” I informed him. “Smaller bedroom, smaller bed.” Translation: “Who are you to judge, shop boy? And by the way, how are Laurie and Keith? Danny is just a mess, judging from the scandalous promos for Breaking Bonaduce.”

But then, so what if he really was a former sitcom star relegated to selling down-sized furniture to single women at Robinson’s May? If my life had gone differently, I would be the mother of all mothers. I’d be the perfect scout leader in whose highly accomplished troupe only the exceptionally clever girl had the slimmest hope of landing a spot. My own children, a religious musical ensemble known far and wide for their pitch perfect, five-part harmonies, would always headline the church pageant because I’d be the one hand stitching the meticulously researched shepherd regalia costuming the entire city of Bethlehem. My holiday cookies, brownies and fudge would raise more money for the PTA than any other confectionary assortment in the history of the Annual Holiday Bake Sale; while my Christmas lights would be the star attraction along the Seasonal Parade of Homes in some sleepy hamlet known for its painstakingly restored Victorians, most notably mine.

Instead, I came to Hollywood, where to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, I put all my eggs in one bastard. This was my choice, of course, and whatever the future may hold, I’m proud to have made it so unflinchingly. Besides, it’s not my Croatian ex-husband I miss at Christmastime, it’s who he was supposed to be. He was supposed to be Fred Gale delivering the winning courtroom argument about who gets Santa's mail; and Billy Crystal and Burt Reynolds when they woke up and came back. He was supposed to be my hero, while I ended up having to be my own. Another thing they won’t tell you in film school is that while lots of people have a tough time during the holidays—when they look at their own reflection in some storybook Christmas window and suddenly realize that their lives haven’t turned out exactly as they’d dreamed—you already know all that.


HARD CANDY CHRISTMAS
Hey, maybe I’ll dye my hair
Maybe I’ll move somewhere
Maybe I’ll get a car
Maybe I’ll drive so far
They’ll all lose track
Me, I’ll bounce right back

Maybe I’ll sleep real late
Maybe I’ll lose some weight
Maybe I’ll clear my junk
Maybe I’ll just get drunk on apple wine.

Me, I’ll be just fine and dandy
Lord it’s like a hard candy Christmas
I’m barely getting through tomorrow
But still I won’t let sorrow bring me way down.

I’ll be fine and dandy
Lord it’s like a hard candy Christmas
I’m barely getting through tomorrow
But still I won’t let
Sorrow bring me way down
’cause I’ll be fine
(I’ll be fine)
Oh, I’ll be fine.

Dialogue Polish

Just when I was counting down the hours remaining in my pointless temp job taking subscriptions at the Legendary Hollywood Trade Paper—thirteen, to be exact, less two lunch hours and three ten minute breaks—Bill Paxton called. "The actor?" I asked, so flustered I then added the following signature witticism: "Wow. Cool."

"That's right," he said, obviously flattered. "Who's this?"

"Julie. It's, yeah. Julie." This sparkling and pithy exchange of bons mots felt like some kind of failed audition for Annie Hall. "You gotta stop sending me all these magazines, Julie." Mysteriously ignoring the invitation to conversation implicit whenever a movie star addresses a girl by name, I told him the offending subscription might be a complimentary mailer from the Motion Picture Academy sent out during awards season. "Don't you need to know who to vote for?"

"I'm thinking I'll see the movies and figure it out. How do you like that approach?"

"Interesting." Interesting? Here's a guy zero degrees of separation from Jim Cameron—a big studio A-lister who's also worth a cool ten mil in foreign independent financing—and I'm somehow electing to keep things monosyllabic between us. Why didn't I just grunt a few times and show off my casual way with Cro Magnan?

I suppose everybody longs for a chance to re-write certain key scenes from their own life stories from time to time. As someone who spends so much time whiny-whining about her god-given, long overdue right to ascend to the rank of Big Hollywood Screenwriter, I propose a Fred McMurray/Barbara Stanwyck-worthy Double Indemnity dialogue polish.

Julie: Subscriptions, this is Julie.
Bill: Hi, Julie. This is Bill Paxton.
Julie: Bill Paxton. You don't say.
Bill: Listen, I need to cancel my subscription. I never even ordered the thing.
Julie: May I make a confession, Mr. Paxton? I've always confused you with Bill Pullman. Though you're clearly the hotter Bill, since you always get the girl, even if it's only in the B-plot.
Bill: I got two of them in Twister. Is there extra credit for that?
Julie: You get that for pulling off a treasure hunter named Brock Lovett in Titanic.
Bill: Most people only remember the name Jack Dawson.
Julie: I'm not most people.
Bill: You're not going to cancel my subscription, are you?
Julie: You've got to give Leo credit for that steamy handprint in the back window of the red Model T. Hottest love scene in movie history.
Bill: That belongs to Redford in Out of Africa. When he tells Meryl Streep to stop moving.
Julie: And she says she can't, but she does and then they're just lying there, breathing each other's breath.
Bill: You don't sound old enough to remember the details.
Julie: I sneaked into the theater on the arm of a helpful college boy.
Bill: You've got a real way with words, kid.
Julie: It happens I'm a writer.
Bill: In this town? Imagine that.
Julie: "Action hero" hardly smacks of originality.
Bill: It happens I'm in the market for something more meaningful.
Julie: It happens I have a Hilarious Little Funeral Comedy on hand.
Bill: Maybe we should talk.
Julie: We are talking.
Bill: Maybe we should do it in person.
Julie: What was all that nonsense about a magazine subscription?
Bill: I have no idea.
Julie: In that case I'll bring the screenplay. You bring the Coeur de la Mer.
Bill: That would be somewhere at the bottom of the ocean.
Julie: Then all you'll have to do is find it.
Bill: Something tells me you're not an easy girl.
Julie: Define easy.

The Clydesdale in My Window

There’s a heartbreaking scene in You’ve Got Mail where Meg Ryan, having lost her late mother’s beloved bookstore, turns around to take one last look. She sees a shadowy memory of herself as a little girl, dancing around the place with her mom. While this film will be best remembered as a genre-defining romantic comedy, to my mind it’s a story about managing loss. So are Sleepless In Seattle and When Harry Met Sally, come to think of it. Meg could never manage to work through her various losses until the very last page, when she’d hook up with her one true love and order a coconut wedding cake with a side of chocolate sauce. Maybe it was her scarecrow build, goofy giggle or sunny blonde hairdo, but along the way she always had a real knack for making profound sadness feel deceptively fun.








This past weekend I emptied out the last of my things from my little Hollywood bungalow as the Santa Ana winds blew through town. The Stripper Next Door, who’s also been evicted, paused knowingly before saying the weather was telling us to “move, move, move.”










She’s always been unusually in touch with her mystical side, so I've come to rely on her translating services. I had a cinematic memory of my own, recalling the night she first came over bearing a stick of orange blossom incense like a torchlight by which to read my tarot cards. Turning over some kind of upside down grim reaper, she flatly informed me I would never have a career in sitcom. I found this pretty hard to believe at the time, since I’d just landed a spot in the comedy writing program on the Warner Brothers lot. “The universe doesn’t lie,” she insisted.

Turning around to survey the empty house gave way to a barrage of these memories, as vivid as movie flashbacks with a bittersweet Harry Connick, Jr. soundtrack. Though he’s been dead for years, I saw my two-hundred-pound Mastiff, Bunny, whose oversized jowls had shaken loose a strand of spittle so violently that it still sticks to the ceiling. I conjured up my friend Debbie, who's also passed on, nervously primping to appear on a game show taped nearby on the old I Love Lucy stage of the former Desilu Playhouse.

I saw my sister at the kitchen counter, coming to my rescue yet again to cater the last minute wedding of my friend Amy—whom she’d only met once before. A committee of old film school pals marched by, tying white picnic boxes in tulle netting to be ferried out to a staging area on the lawn.

My father somehow appeared from the past, looking out from my porch amazed that a flock of wild parrots had found its way to a red chili pepper tree abuzz with hummingbirds here in the heart of Hollywood.

“High acid fertilizer,” echoed a distant voice from one of my mother's past visits as she fingered my anemic gardenias.

Snapping me back to the reality of a communal pile of moving rubble, my neighbor handed me a 2002 Traci Lords calendar for which she’d so proudly done hair and make up, and a half-empty bottle of Coco Chanel Refreshing Dew Mist whose oily base had congealed over the top. I don’t know why this made me cry, since emoting wasn’t really something she and I had done much of together as we grew up here side by side, however inadvertently.

Hugging her goodbye, I realized I’d never actually touched her before. “Want my Riverside Shakespeare?” she offered. “I took it off some smart guy I made out with.”

“Couldn’t you have scored a Pelican?” I wailed. “Everyone knows it’s better annotated!”

“Snap out of it,” she finally said. “Can’t you see this is our chance to be someone new? I don’t have to feel naked any more. You don’t have to feel fat.”

 “I am fat!” I cried, stuffing a good two grand worth of Milanese lingerie that no longer fits into a Goodwill bag.

 “The universe is saying we leave all that right here. How many times I gotta tell you that's what the wind's for?"

Here I thought it was meant to keep me up at night.

Lying down to sleep in a brand new place always feels odd, as though you’re some squatter off the street navigating an unfriendly warehouse piled high with cardboard boxes.  In thematic keeping with my big Hollywood circus of a life, however, I moved in the night of the 74th Annual Hollywood Christmas Parade. The event inspired Gene Autry to write “Here Come Santa Claus”—and I quickly discovered I live directly on the original Santa Claus Lane.

Virtually imprisoning me, dozens of high school bands lined up outside my front windows, and just when I’d manage to cry myself to sleep, some overzealous drum major would mark time for a rousing rendition of “Jingle Bell Rock,” heavy on the tuba.

I got up to close the shades and found myself face to face with a Clydesdale blinking back at me—as well as a camel, several elephants, and two hundred members of the California Highway Patrol Motor Brigade. With that, my profound sadness did give way to something strangely fun—and even without the redeeming love of Tom Hanks suddenly I felt perky, and long-limbed, and yes, even blonde! That big, snorting horse had delivered a message, I had to believe, and I somehow knew that maybe, just maybe, the universe might finally be telling me something good.

Originally published November 30, 2005. Since that time the universe has indeed told me a number of things -- some good, some bad, but mostly that neither tends to last long enough to matter either way. So much for a big Hollywood finish.

Turkey Time in Hollywood

People can easily mistake Hollywood for one big movie lot, where there's nothing much but the occasional sandbag propping up the flimsy faces of our trompe l'oeil houses. While it's true that we star-struck, image-obsessed dreamers don't pretend to be nearly as genuine as the folks we've left back in Umatilla, we do have our own traditions—and come holiday time they mean an awful lot to this otherwise soulless bunch.

Last night a big, black Hummer ran a stop, took out a school crossing sign, rolled three times and landed atop my neighbor's car, parked at the foot of the drive. While we don't have football here, we do see some spectacular wrecks this time of year, and this one heralded the holiday season as dependably as Santa's Thanksgiving Day Parade arrival in Herald Square. The model-thin driver enroute from a Big Celebrity Event—judging from the expensive gold party shoe somehow abandoned in the middle of the accident scene—never once dropped her cell phone. She was still yammering away as the self-consciously hot firemen, no doubt aspiring underwear models themselves, strapped her into a cervical collar and wheeled her off on their backboard, nodding to the crowd.

All of the neighbors turned out, the Stripper, the Stuntman, the Jazz Musician Whose Name You'd Recognize, the Failed Comedian Turned Prosperous Private Dick. Even the Drug Dealing Cholos on the corner closed up shop to observe the event, although I'm sure the model wouldn't have turned down a nice dime bag to take the edge off after her inevitable DUI arrest and subsequent stint in re-hab. Nobody brought hot chocolate, but Stuntman produced several pharmaceutical quality ice packs as mysteriously as rabbits from a hat, administering to a pair of pedestrians who'd been injured while hurling themselves out of the path of the corkscrewing truck.

Since I'm moving away in a couple of days, I looked around at this cast of characters I've grown up among, quite by happenstance, over the last nine years. As the music swelled and everything turned to slo-mo, it occurred to me that while so many of us were waiting for our lives to happen, they did. Along the way, our crazy dreams—the wild triumphs, the spectacular disappointments—have been more like those of everybody else than we eccentrics would ever freely admit.

This afternoon I'll sit down to a traditional feast with my Type A Lawyer Sister and her Stockbroker Husband Who Golfs, having fled the carnival today for the all-American normalcy of their San Diego ranch house. In deference to custom, I'll then go home and share the leftovers this one last time with Stripper, since her parents are long estranged and her boyfriends are usually indifferent, married or D-list actors who can't see the stock in taking her out in public. She sometimes brings over this former fan who reminds me of the hulking half-wit from Of Mice And Men, and I've always been worried he might kill her by accident. Sometimes I think I should remind her of that timeless cautionary tale, but then it'll occur to me she probably doesn't know her Steinbeck all that well.

Anyway, she's going to have to watch out for herself now, since it's just not the kind of town where friendship survives a move, even one only a few blocks away. Another thing they won't tell you in film school is that we should all learn to recognize the good old days when they're as close at hand as a brand new pair of party shoes.