It really is heavy

Met with the director yesterday. It was our first meeting to really sink our teeth into the notes. Met at 3:30 at his apartment. Nice place. Oscar prominently displayed. I picked it up. Oscar is heavy! We spread computer printouts of the scene headings (done on 3x5 cards) on his sleek modern coffee table and dug in. We talked a little back and forth and drank our Diet Cokes. Round about the second hour of this, I realized that I would have to talk to him next time about how we discussed notes. We (he) did a lot of jumping around from scene to scene, various places in the script, different scenes, different characters... sort of the Jackson Pollack approach - lay out the canvass and spatter all over the goddamn place. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but after two years of living with this script in my head, I am very much looking to just have the guy tell me where the words go. I'm long over the "subtext" and "metaphors" and "hidden meanings" of everything. You know, there is a time when you are, say, building a building when you talk about the meaning of it all, the beauty, the poetry of the form, the sanctity of the spaces, the allusions, and the themes, and the dynamics...and then there is a time when you order ten million bags of concrete and build the fucking thing. Well, that's where I'm at. Let's build the fucking thing. And I don't blame the guy for wanting to talk and talk and talk... He's still trying to see the movie in his head. I've seen the movie forty times. I want to start the grunt work. So tomorrow we get together again. And hopefully we'll get a better crack at 'er.

New names in the mix: Sissy Spacek and Sidney Poitier. Sindey Fucking Poitier.

Procrast Part Deux

This has been a quiet week in the life of yours truly, fringe-dweller of the Hollywood Good Life. I have returned to the rhythms of that rarest beast, the unemployed, underproductive writer. From 9am rise, to lunch with a friend across town, to 3pm coffeeshop run, to 6 o'clock gym stop... day in and day out the circle remains unbroken. Actually, I left my tennys at a friend's house, so the gym part is a fib. Also, smattered in there is actual work. The rest true.

I was offered a job this week, which I resoundingly passed on. More production work on some crapola cable thing. Money would be nice, but my hand was forced; this is the week Aaron (director) got back to me about how were going to do these notes of his. I'm both relieved and annoyed, since I'm trying very hard to work on something else - a spec, of course, so there's no money. (There's just no money. Ever. Whoever said "do what you love and the money will come" was a severly misguided individual. Probably an insane man in the park, or a tobbacco executive.) So Aaron and I are to meet next week at his apartment in my old neighborhood of West Hell.a., right around the corner from the last stand of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. Ah, the metaphoric possibilities.

As for actual news to report, a big meeting was had with CAA yesterday (I wasn't there), and the official next offers going out on Get Low are to three very big name actors, all of whom you've heard of and all of whom I'm afraid of mentioning here for fear that I might somehow leak some bit of undisclosed business to the world and queer the deal. As soon as the thing happens, you'll know about the thing. In regards to the pilot, Matt and I finished a rewrite and it's now out to a few bigshots who's names I don't remember because they're behind the scenes guys. But hopefull we'll be rich soon. As soon as possible. Please, seriously. Not even rich. Just enough for a steaming bowl of pho every once in a while. I'm hooked on that crazy Vietnamese noodle soup!

Four More Pages

I, like so many of my pinko commie friends, am recovering from the election results. That's all I'll say about it, other than I spent the better part of yesterday shopping, dicking around on the internet (no news sites), and driving around town in an attempt to salve my wounded soul. I even ended up back at the gym.

There, I found myself staring at one of those inspirational posters for the entire time I was on the cross-training contraption. It was Ghandi's quote, and it said "We must become the change we want to see." Now, I'm generally not all that much for the inspirational quote, but this one got to me. I haven't been to the gym in a while because of work. I haven't written much because of work. But ol' Ghandi has a point there. To put it in a professional context, nobody gonna finish my scripts except me.

So what then will I do? Well, I have been tinkering with a script for... oh... about three years now. It's 60 pages complete. I am going to look at it today. I mean buck up and get to it, you know? And I am going to kill myself to get it done by the new year. And as for Get Low, which by all rights should take top priority, this afternoon I will start circling it as a vulture would a dying prospector and see if I can't get back into the mood to work.

It's weird. I like writing. Writing is what I do well. And yet it's so freakin hard that I never really want to do it. Except I do. I don't know. I guess I'm a flip-flopper.