Get Low Update...

It's official. After a lengthy courtship, Sissy Spacek is officially attached to Get Low.

Cocktails!

Money Gets You Honey, or Where Have You Gone Johnny Cash?

Money is on my mind these days. The girlfriend is going to get that Paris job, after all. That means that I've got to come up with enough money to cover airfare, place of residence, and spending money for a month of semi-vacation. Right. So after doing some bills the other day and the crunching what few numbers remain in my checkbook, I basically panicked. I need work. Real hard.

I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon looking for jobs online. Funny, but ain't shit happening in August. Only thing mildly intruiging was a post from the end of July that was for AOL, who is looking for restaurant reviewers for their citysearch-equivalent feature on the LA site. If I read it correctly, they pay $30 for a 150-word review, which seems a little counterintuitive, since $30 is about what it would cost to have enough meals at a place to sufficiently give it a review (excluding a real high-pricer of a place, in which case $30 won't even cover the wine). But broke, looking to procrastinate, and feeling a pang of desire - to live the charmed life of a food critic, that is - I decided to give it a try. I thought, at the very least it would be a $30 investment in my potential future career.

I went to Echo Park's The Bright Spot, for which there is no website otherwise I would provide a link, and determined to think like a restaurant critic as soon as I pulled into the parking lot. Great pains went into describing the sensations on my palette as I ate my chorizo and goat cheese omelette, but I think I most enjoyed trying to capture the detail of the people and the place at 8:15 in the morning. As I sat jotting notes in my restaurant critic's notebook, it dawned on me that I was being a professional people watcher. And if there's one thing a writer must do, it's people watch. So even though I was footing the bill myself, even though I should have been cracking away at a screenplay at that hour, and even though I was hoping to get a gig that didn't promise to be very lucrative, it felt good to be working.

If I could only parlay that into a little Johnny Cash.

The Party (I'm not at)

A modest house in a wealthy part of the world. Somewhere near the ocean, probably East Hampton or maybe on Shelter Island. Old, tall trees, a well-kept lawn, salt water smell, etc. I drive up, knowing that I know the man who lives there. The house looks quiet. Perhaps no one is home. I get out of my car, walk around back, glance at the pool, peek into the garage where there is a parked car, and walk to the front. No lights are on; car in the garage must be a sporty job for the highway. A moment goes by, and then a car pulls up. Out gets my friend, Mr. High Powered New York TV Producer. Oddly, he parks his car in the street and not in his driveway. But he gets out and recognizes me, which I find surprising on account of my beard. He greets me, and asks what I'm doing there. We smalltalk for a bit, then I offer to help him carry in a few things he's got in the trunk of his hatch-back. I take them into the house, where I discover a rather raging party is under way. The first person I see is a scraggly-bearded Joseph Fiennes. Then I spot another celebrity, then another and another. I realize this quiet little house is packed to the rafters with not-quite-A-list-celebrities. Beautiful people. Scenesters. And it isn't long before I'm taking what I brought in - cups, ice, bottles of beer - and not just putting them at the bar, but serving people. Coiffed, aloof, smart alecks who are hectoring me. Making me drop things. Ragging on my clumsiness, the fuckers. Then, insult to injury, I run into several people from an old freelance job, people who are decidedly not celebrated stars or starlets, who have apparently been invited! A deep pang of resentment hits me. THEM? They're invited? I KNOW Mr. High Powered New York TV Producer. WTF?

And then I realized that I am not only the help at a party to which I so desperately wanted to have been invited, I am the uninvited help.

This was the dream that awoke me four minutes before my alarm went off this morning. Surely a direct psychological conduit to my career, as I see it. But I suppose it's also my outlook on life in general: I'm missing the party.

I'll print this one out and send it to my psychotherapist. I suspect the diagnosis will be Persecution Complex, Inferiority Complex, or Gay Panic.

Links

I should be working, but I'm trying to put some links on this jammy. Look screen right and check out some of my favorites...

Get Low Update...

Patrick Wilson has said yes to Get Low. That officially makes him the second attachment to the project. So we've got Duvall, a director, and PW. Jeff Bridges is circling. Sissy Spacek is floating. But Actor Number 2 is a lock. Finally, some progress!

Sloth, thine is my name

Nothing has been done today. I woke up late, I got to the desk late, and here it is pushing 4pm and I haven't done a thing. I feel totally lazy and worthless. A blight on upright, productive society members. Only thing that makes up for it all is that I got a call from a writer in Atlanta, a friend of mine, and he was ecstatic about my latest script. He just loved it. It is obviously nice to hear, but also encouraging. It makes me think that all the time I spent on the thing was worth it and that it's not such a crazy thought to maybe get it made.

So right now I'm trying to decide if the rest of the day should be spent napping, reading, watching a netflix, or maybe going to do my laundry. Of course, I could go get coffee and try and salvage the day by working at the cafe for an hour or two. Maybe I should go to the gym. Yes, love handles, maybe you should go to the gym.

See, this is what's going to finally do me in -- all these petty little choices that you have to make when you're unemployed. I could go do a hell of a lot right now if someone were holding a gun to my head. But no one is, I'm a little too groggy in the head from not enough sleep, thus unequipped to motivate mysef, and the sound of the desk fan is lulling me into a full scale I-want-to-look-at-internet-porn coma. I just want to stare at the wall. God, what a waste of space I have become. Someone should fling me into outerspace and reduce the global over-population problem.

God, I gotta snap out of it.

The thunder

Well, yes, I've gone and joined the band and now what I've got happening is the practices that go until 11pm and so then I get home all jacked up from rocking the drum kit and I don't get to bed until 1:30 or so and then I wake up all groggy and sluggish and sit down and just wait, pray, for the caffeine to kick in and jump start the work. The writing. I'm a writer and all... But I gotta say, the rock is helping to keep away the Black Dog.

What's that you say?

Don't let the bastards grind you down?

Hmph.

I've been working at this idea that I "ripped from the headlines." Great story concerning some War in Iraq shenanigans. I've been researching and reading and looking on-line and formulating and all that, all the while knowing time was of the element and the story was too good to go unnoticed by other on-the-ball writers or producers, etc. Last week I find out via Google that the main guy involved, the guy I'm using as my inspiration, is going to have a book come out in the spring, part memoir, part account of said shenanigans. I get my manager to get off his ass and call the publishing house that just announced their purchase of the as-of-yet-unwritten book to find out about getting the rights. Rights secure my investment in the project and allow me to use it as source material. Well, come to find out the publisher already has the rights sold off to an "A-list" writer and an "A-list" studio. And so I'm screwed. And now, fucking well depressed.

All I keep hearing about is high concept, high concept, sellable scripts, commercial ideas...

It's just not what I do. I try and I fail. I have a colleague who just cranks out stuff like that all the time. "He's a guy who suddenly realizes he can stop time with his cell phone..." Stuff like that. And that has its place, and I don't begrudge the guy what he does since, shit, we're all just trying to make a fucking living... But i just don't do that sort of thing. I can't get it up for spending long hours of my day dreaming up "hooks." Maybe for that reason I'm in the wrong game. Maybe I should write novels. Or fucking billboard copy. I saw the other day that a guy who I met out here on what was our first job just sold his script for, literally, a million dollars. It's about a guy trying to pick the best man for their wedding except all his buddies are deadbeats or something. Sounds sorta funny and exactly like the kind of idea I'd never crap out on a napkin over drinks to then sell for a million dollars.

And so here we are. The one time I have an idea that I think I can make high concept, commercial, sellable AND get behind creatively... I can't get the rights to. I mean, I understand that studios comb through publisher's lists of upcoming releases just so they can obtain properties to develop... but this isn't even written yet. This guy was in newspapers, hasn't written a word. And I'm not saying I thought I couild beat the machine but I mean, fucking forget about getting the rights to material unless you are just completely knee deep in the studio world.

So it's down to this quandry: continue working on the thing, which will have to be rejiggered to not be quite as factually close to the real guy's story, thus making it up pretty much from scratch, in the hopes of having them either buy me out when they go to make it in the hopes that there can be two competing projects at the same time, a la Armageddon/Deep Impact.

The other option is to just scrub it and move on to the next thing. The next uncommercial thing.

Christ, this fucking game.