Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Scribe (?)

Up late today as I had to pick up my lady from the airport last evening at 11:30. That's about two hours past my bedtime these days, and as a result I slept in until the ripe old hour of 8. The schedule, folks, you want to get anything done in this world it's all about the schedule.

Speaking of which, I started work on a novel yesterday. Why, you ask? Because I wasn't going broke enough trying to sell screenplays and TV ideas. I wanted to break through to a whole other level of poverty. From now on I can claim that not only am I a broke hack screenwriter, but a broke aspiring novelist. Big diff.

So far it's great. I'm three or four pages in and I plan on doing a half hour a day in between the other projects I am trying to get done in my free time. That way I figure in a years time I'll be done with a first draft. And so far it's great. It's the Great American Novel, actually. It's set in America, number one, but number two, so far it's great.

Here's the thing though, if I did a short story, I'd be done a lot sooner. Maybe that's the way to go. And, also, technically writing this cut ten minutes into my writing. All about the schedule.

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Everyone Will Be Famous for Fifteen People

In an attempt to not abandon this completely I'll try to get a little something out every few days rather than building and building and building up to some tedious essay-type fucking snore fest, as is what I usually end up doing here.

So let's just make a quick round up of events.

Been freelancing the last few weeks, both for GSN and for a trailer company called Impact. That means that I'm back on the bed-at-10, up-at-5 routine. I did that for about three years a long time ago...and didn't miss it. It's necessity you understand. Working has been good because the Heist money ran out in June and I mean ran. out. So getting a month or so of work is just what the accountant ordered. I've also been pitching a little bit, hocking a TV drama. So far no bites, but it's still early. I am strategizing with my agent and manager, trying to figure out how to get me a job that doesn't involve writing promos for, say, Star Face, the truly execrable game show with Danny Bonaduce.

This past weekend I saw off my old friend Paul who is heading for greener pastures in New York City. That one's a kick in the pants right there, seeing as how it was at Paul's behest that I moved to this strange, cold city only to bitch about it ever thus. And now he's off to NYC to live with his chick and keep his job at the ten-percentery and be closer to his family. And here I am staring down the barrel of a staff job which starts October 16th. Yep, I'm taking a staffer in six weeks.

Man, leave me alone. I have no money.

Saturday, July 29, 2006

New, Improved, Awesome.

A few links have been added and / or updated to the right. Check 'em out.

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

The Second Part of the Catch-Up

Been spending most of my days up in the writer's loft, a.k.a the barn, a.k.a. the tiger cage (on account of the heat) researching and outlining a pitch I'm putting together for a cable TV show, a one-hour drama about a TV reporter, which just to insure it's a hard sell I've set it in the 70's at the height of the Watergate stuff. So for about a month I've been immersed in documentaries about Vietnam, Watergate, the CIA, and all sorts of fun stuff that's gonna look great on a lunchbox.

Anyway, I'm pretty much done with the outline and ready to pitch. I've really only ever pitched once before, formally, and it was with a partner. But I've been pitching all my career as a promo guy, sitting around a table and trying to get assigned a particularly good spot. I dunno. The first pitch (with the partner) went well. We did what we were supposed to do, which was charm her and tell the story. It went like this:

Walked in the office. Exchanged pleasantries. Made a few funnies, broke the tension a bit, kept things light and casual. Then turned on a dime - at her behest - and got to business. A few jokes on our side. No smiles on the other side. Mental note that jokes are for bullshitting time before the pitch proper, and the pitch proper is all business. Finished up, fielded a few questions, took to heart one or two astute criticisms, and got "I'll take it upstairs and see what we can do." Eventually she passed.

So that's pretty much how I figure it'll go this time, ideally leaving out the pass. Oh, and this go round I'll be pitching to a TV screen; the development person in question is based out of New York. I look at this as an opportunity for comedy. She may look at it as an opportunity to crush someone's dreams via remote control. It remains to be seen who is right.

On other fronts, things grind slowly along with the storied Duvall script. I just got some pages from the director, or should I say writer/director, as he has pretty much rewritten it a hundred times and there is nothing left of my script except the "concept" which is fuck-all as far as I'm concerned. Every time I think about Get Low, it just brings to mind the William Goldman quote, which I'll paraphrase as "If you're looking for creative life as a screenwriter, you won't find it."

To wit I've been thinking more and more about the possibility of writing a novel justforthefuckofit, but the problem is it's time consuming... which I know you're thinking, you've got no job, all you've got is time... but you'd only be half right since I fill find my days writing things I hope will earn me a living, whoring myself essentially, only to have them thrown down the memory hole. As far as a novel goes, I reckon you need money to write one unless you are a true bohemian, a lice-ridden mooching drifter douchebag artist like, say, Henry Miller circa Tropic of Cancer, living in your own filth and schnorring meals off your gainfully-employed friends.

I don't know if I'm quite there but I feel the itch more and more to write something... yes, I'll say it... noble. Also I think it's time to make a short film but that's another post.

Saw Little Miss Sunshine last night. I was ready to be unimpressed, it seemed to be sooooo targeted at my indie sensibilities, what with the Sundance pedigree and the hipster directing duo, and the eccentric soundtrack contibutors. And dontcha know it won me over. What a sweet, sweet, funny (and a little flawed but so what) movie. Get out there and see it, not because I said so but because this world would be a better place if Alan Arkin were in every movie. Not to do dirt to the other actors in it, all were uniformly excellent. Steve Carell just shows more and more promise as the heir the to beaten-down, disaffected Bill Murray crown. God bless them all.

And so...

I hope to get back to a screenplay in the next few weeks. I hope I can find the time. It's a passion project, which probably means I shouldn't bother. But it's in my craw and I'll talk more about it as it starts to develop. For now, it's backburner. Oh, and I didn't even mention my meeting with my former bosses. More on that in the future...

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

That Long-Ago Movie I Made

A few of you who knew me way back when remember me yammering and bitching and complaining and pissing and moaning about how awful it was that someone had paid me five figures to buy a script I wrote and make it into a movie. (See, all you people who currently know me, I was always a kvetch.) Well, I was trolling around MySpace the other day and happened upon a "friend" who promises me that the film - in a newer, shorter, shinier version - will soon be hitting Amazon and Netflix. The significance of this is that the film never saw a release in the first place, and to this very moment I do not own a copy of it in any way, shape, or form. No VHS, no DVD, no digital stream on a website. Nuthin. I saw the thing twice, once at a screening of a rough cut (reeeal rough) and another in a festival that played in Santa Monica - which sounds fancier than it really was since I had to purchase my own ticket. Anyway, point is the thing was shelved and now there is the glimmer of hope that all of you will be able to not just judge me on the merits of my personality, emotional health, ethical moorings, or grooming habits, but finally, finally on my "artistic output." God help me. And hoorah for this, the possibly official release!

No word on either Netflix or Amazon as to a date, even though somewhere on the Myspace page it says Aug. 1, so I have my suspicions... Meantime, count down the minutes. I'll be warming up the new laptop in anticipation of podcasting the commentary track.

Monday, July 24, 2006

The First Part of the Catch-Up

Shout out to my dogg MacDaddy, who reminded me that I wanted to check out crazy* Al Gore in his movie An Inconvenient Truth. So I saw it Friday night. The movie theater was a nice respite from the ass-melting heat we've been enjoying here lately. Yeah, it's hot. I know it's hot in the world generally but you know it's really also hotter than hell here in L.A. So what do I do? Become a bike rider all of a sudden. I hope... nay, I believe I'm reducing the carbon footprint. Gas out here, I mean it's crazy wherever you live - we here in the U.S. just set a record high average price. But California is higher than just about everyone else. And let's not even really open it up to what's going on in the Middle East. You see, the oil is running out. Everywhere. They're circling the wagons. So it seems pretty obvious to me it's high time to get off the petroleum tit in whatever way possible.

"The Dutch conduct 30 percent of all their trips—to work, for errands, socially—by bike. In America, that figure is less than 1 percent. We drive 84 percent of the time, even though most of our trips are less than 2 miles long. More than three-quarters of us commute alone by car, compared with just half a million (way less than 1 percent) who do so by bike, according to the 2000 Census."

That quote is from this article by Bill Gifford from Slate.com. I hope I don't get sued for reprinting it. Anyway.

I'm trying. I'm conducting my business as locally as possible, and riding where I can (yesterday to the video store and Circuit City, today to the Downtown Library). And don't get me wrong, it ain't easy with the temperatures what they are... but... doing my part.

Anyway, tomorrow some info on, you know, what this site is supposed to be about. Screenwriting and my career and other such miseries.

*My father won't see the movie claiming that Al Gore is crazy. He said, and I paraphrase: "Al Gore is a crazy person and I don't like him. Could you imagine the trouble we'd be in now if HE were President?"

Sunday, July 23, 2006

It's so hot

It really is just miserably hot. Frikkin carbon emissions. Anyway, this is just a little Sunday morning note (being written on my new MacBook) to mention that I am back among the living. Tomorrow morning I'll do a long post to explain my pathetic absence from this forum. I'm sure all three of you will look forward to that.

In the meantime, I'm going to peel my sticky ass off the couch and get some air. Looks like rain here in L.A. Weird. Rain in the summer. Weird.

Monday, May 22, 2006

An Essay on Nostalgia

I was walking around the Rose Bowl flea market the other day, and to browse around the place is to overstimulate your synapses to such a degree that you yearn to spend your down time as a Japanese businessmen might, floating in a sensory-deprivation tank so the circuits in your don't brain overheat and melt onto the motherboard. It is held on the second Sunday of every month and amasses an entire parking lot full of vendors, hawkers, and bargain-sniffing crap hounds. The stadium itself has a huge capacity and a parking lot built accordingly, which means there are a lot of smelly camper vans with bedraggled owners who've spread their wares on card tables, blankets and carpet remnants solely for your perusal. And a stressful perusal it is. Between the heat, the lack of shade, and the breadth of the landscape, you feel less like grazing and more like walking with mindful determination that you'll conserve time by leaving hidden treasure buried. Alas, as wise a choice as you feel this is, you pass station after station of useless, fetching bric-a-brac and tote the dull irritation that you're missing a good deal on something great that you don't need.

However, I needed what I was looking for. I wanted a chair to replace the pieces of crud acting as placeholders in my new work space. I don't know what kind of shopping experience I was expecting, but I guess I evisioned aisles in the parking lot that one would simply pace up and down until he found his Platonic ideal of a secondhand chair, something worn but stable, comfy but smallish, and of a quality that made its low, low price criminal. My mind's eye anticipated an orderly consumer exchange but it got an utterly ramshackle situation.

I never found my chair. I wasted a good chunk of my time at a vendor's table looking over (and ultimately purchasing) vintage fruit crate labels. I left sunburnt and irate. Why was I drawn to the fruit crate labels? I suppose the glib explanation is that I like old shit. The longer, more honest explanation ties in to why I didn't I get my chair. It isn't that I didn't find enough chairs - there were a taxing variety of choices. I couldn't locate my lounger because I was tricked by my own nostalgia.

I imagine that others who shop flea markets, and for that matter Pottery Barn, Lucky Jeans, Restoration Hardware, and any number of similar such outfits, share this gravitatioonal pull toward old shit. I look around my apartment with its calendar of sepiatone New York photos, its framed postcards of vintage mexican movie posters, its faux shaker furniture, its mock Arts and Crafts lamps, etc., and I'm confronted by the notion that what I find in all of these things is a not just the obvious signifier of my (inexplicable) association with a bygone era, but a conscious and pointed disassociation from the present, a tacit agreement that what was manufactured before my time (or made to look so) is worthy and honest while what is currently being manufactured, in every sense of the word, is questionable, unproven, or phony. What chairs I saw at the flea market were not old enough, honest enough, or pure enough.

The vendor that occupied most of my time had a table full of seafaring equipment caked with rust, plus Jim Crow fetish items, antiquated knives, door handles, church keys, sabers, badges, plaques, plates, and one rather flimsy-looking medieval chastity belt. In this man's trove of detritus I had found my home, a smorgasbord of items with no practical purpose in the modern world but which described a straight line from their past to my present -- which I now realize is an appropriation of them in the quest for some perverse fantasy of truthfulness. The items were genuine and unaffected, handmade and authentic, useful at some earlier time and now merely beautiful; they were "useful" as nothing more than a totem to progress's rapacious appetite. Spread across the hawker's table and hot to the touch from the sun's rays, I envisioned them displayed on a shelf or on top of a desk saying to whomever should come across them (or just me in my private moments) that here was someone who understood - valued - the honesty of the past and the authenticity of the implement and time from which it came. Of course the implicit statement made by exhibiting these things is that times were better back then, which is as much a bromide as genuinely referring to The Good Old Days.

For a long moment I stood there considering purchasing a water fountain placard from the segregated south. I was amazed that such a thing was "real" and could be picked up with my own two hands. It was real, all right, but what did it mean? What did it mean that it was for sale? And what would it mean hanging in my office, or more provocatively over the sink?

To me it means perpetuating an illusion. The search for authenticity is the search for an illusion, and it's an ultimately futile one. Pictures in my kitchen of apple vendors on Delancey Street snare me in an illusion more "real" than the walls on which they hang, and gathering signifiers such as any of the ones I've mentioned do nothing more than relieve me of living fully in the present.

I believe the act of writing does the same. I look at a photos of Old New York or Hollywood, or snapshots of anonymous, now-dead black folks posing on a bright St. Louis morning 65 years ago (purchased at a previous flea market) and lose myself in another world. It is not a better or worse world, just a world not my own. When you write novels or screenplays or the like (stories, if you will) you enter another world, and if you're any kind of craftsman you totally immerse yourself in that world in search of the truth. Both immersions (in the bric-a-brac, in the mind) divorce you from reality. You occupy a sphere that obviates the present - the "moment," the acting coaches like to say - out of the desire or belief that your dreamed-up universe is better, simpler, more perfect, or more orderly that the one outside the front door. You control it, after all.

Living in manufactured reality certainly relates to our current president and his cronies -- almost as much as it relates to Hollywood. The business of entertainment has always been the business of manufactured reality, or more simply dreams. Dreams get projected onto a screen and we slip into a narcosis that carries us out of the grinding sameness of everday life and into a more humoruous, adventurous, simplified world. The more familiar these dreams are, i.e. the more sequels, remakes, and adaptations of familiar "franchises" that get made, the more easily our sleep-like state is accessed. When we go to see the umpteenth revisitation of Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Gets Girl Back Again, the bell clangs and set our salivary glands to work. We watch movies of what we imagine movies are supposed to look like, just as we hear press conferences of what we imagine press conferences should sound like, just as we desire the "vintage" toaster from Williams Sonoma that triggers some dream version of domesticity: "Now that's what a toaster looks like."

Let me be clear that I'm not above any of this. I'm in it as hip-deep as anyone else. I like old dive bars and Craftsman homes and fuzzy pieces of glass I find on the beach. I like New Orleans, and I like stores that display tin children's toys but won't sell them because they are the owner's own, and I like restaurants that have unsmiling old men as waiters. I adore Tom Waits, who seems to be a walking example of creating one's own reality out of the dross of bygone days.

It's the stories, of course, the forgotten things that fall back behind the nooks of those refurbished dressers and midcentury modern sofas. As a storyteller I can't help but feel drawn to them. That said, I feel the need to embrace modern life more, to engage as a consumer (since that is how so much of my/our existence is spent in a capitalist society) in such a way as to not reject the times I live in but find a way to navigate them in the present. The faux nostalgia shopkeepers pawn off when they hang signs in quaint fonts that read "Established 1998" hijacks my participation in the modern world even as it, itself, resides in the modern world. Nostalgia is a fact of modern life but I choose to see it for what it is, a marketing tool, and no longer be inculcated by it. I want to belong fully to the era in which I live, or short of that belong to the edge of the era that looks from this moment onward, not from this moment backward. And even though the old timey signs and rusty tools and crumbling photos of negroes on porches whisper in my ear, I believe that it is time to be as alive to what is happening this very moment as I can possibly be.

Gigi Chair, I'm clearing a spot for you right now.

Friday, May 05, 2006

Let It Be

Yeah, this down time is letting the tug of music get back at me. I usedtacould play drums, something I can still sorta do if I rehearse for a few months to get the rust out. I get funky about time having passed and having let the skills I once had drain away. This week in particular has been tough. I watched a true heavy metal warrior destory his elaborate drum kit at Coachella, then came back to LA the next night for a Gary Louris and Mark Olsen reunion at The Troubadour, then saw my friend Bill's band up the street at The Silverlake Lounge, then read the NY Times article about New Orleans Jazz Fest, then hammering home the final, bittersweet nail in the coffin, read this review of The Replacements new track from the upcoming box set. Now, I don't know how many of you are 'Mats fans or if you know anything about them at all, but these guys pretty much signify everything rock n roll about rock n roll. In the mythology of rock these guys sit atop Mt. Olympus. They grew up in blue collar America, drank hard, fought, started out punk then mellowed (slightly) into a more radio friendly kinda deal, gigged drunk on SNL, one of the guys died, and their moody lead singer is a clinically diagnosed depressive. In other words they are / were arguably the best american band that ever was. And it's good to read that it's all still there, the mythology, the crankiness, the confusion about what the fuck to do with it all, and oh yeah the rock. And I guess the lesson is that even when it's gone maybe it's still there somewhere, deep beneath the layers of recrimination and heavy sighs of past glories, something I'll do well to ponder in this music saturated bout of unemployment slash aimlessness slash depsondancy.

Anyfuckingway look for that box set when it comes out. I know I will. And if you can't commit to four CDs worth, at least do yourself a favor - if you care at all about music - go get yourself Let It Be. And Tim. Fuck it, and get Please To Meet Me, too. Shit will change your life.

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Back in the Saddle

Well, well, well... It's been a while. Where have you been?

This past weekend I was at Coachella, where I had the socks knocked off my ass by Tool. But where have I been since, oh, April, when I last wrote on this thing? I've been through the Hollywood mill, through the network roundabout, through the ratings war. OR I just got consumed with working on the show, and then the show got cancelled. Low numbers, you see. There were some other factors involved, like most of the episodes that aired made no sense, but that doesn't really matter as long as eyeballs are on the TV set. Since that didn't happen, they gave it the old Terry Shiavo. And per my generous NBC contract, I continue to receive a paycheck for six more weeks. I am unemployed and yet not unemployed. I am getting paid to write this right now. I am getting paid to stay at home and watch the DVD's of Showtime's Sleeper Cell, which fucking rocks.

The last few weeks I've tried to decompress from the job, which while not hard had very erratic hours and short, intense bursts of concentration and effort in the middle of long lulls of boredom. It was basically Vietnam without the rice paddies. And we all know how those guys fared when they got back. Now that I'm back to civilian life, I'm just sitting in my apartment, going through the DVR and the stack of New Yorkers and returning some emails and updating my MySpace page so that I can rejoin the brave new 21st Century social scene.

And then it struck me. Convert the garage into a writer's annex. Sweep that shit out and put all the surplus crap from the apartment up there, make it a cozy (and dusty) little work barn so as to get a little sunshine, a little respite from the oppressive sameness of my apartment, and a little motivation to shower and clothe myself each and every morning. Walk up the back steps to the garage with confidence and purpose, and try not to embarrass myself by still rocking a head full of cowlicks and a saggy pair of pajama bottoms at 3pm. Nothing worse than that look from the UPS guy who's been up since the ass-crack of dawn delivering you a package in your underwear.

Needs a little work, specifically a coat of paint and maybe a rug or a little astroturf (my production designer girlfriend's sassy suggestion). But for now, it's just a good little spot to seek refuge from the neighbors constant yammering and neverending construction.

But Chris, but Chris, but Chris, what fresh Hollywood adventure lies ahead?

Yes. That. So I've now got an agent, which is a big step in the right direction, and I'm thinking of just leaving it all in his hands. Or maybe, probably the better idea, yeah, is that I should come up with a plan. I have sort of a plan, but built into that plan is a three week vacation to Italy. That's gonna be hot. As far as the Hollywood plan, I'm working on an idea for a screenplay that I am hoping I can crank out in the few weeks I have before I go to Sicily -- which is an ambitious timetable since my last screenplay took, oh, four years to poop out. I can do it. One thing I learned on the show - and don't ever let anyone know I said *that - was that writing can be done in not a lot of time, and often it can be not terrible. In other words, sometimes just plowing through and getting something down on paper can be a great thing. So long as you don't then put that on the air. No, if you scribble down a few thoughts as a placeholder just to HAVE A SCRIPT, you then can go back and fix and tweak and adjust and Make Better. That's the whole gig, by the way. All writing is rewriting. I think that was Hemingway, or my Dad; not sure, but I know it ain't mine.

So there you go. The latest and greatest from yours truly, a suddenly slightly more established Hollywood TV / Screenwriter / Douchebag. Next post will come sooner than fifteen weeks, I promise. In the meantime, I'm heading up the writer's barn to chip away at the new thing.

Ciao, ciao!

Friday, March 10, 2006

Wow

It's been... busy.

One of these days I'll get to it...

Sunday, January 29, 2006

Week One

It's going to be tough to keep up with this blog, and I say that knowing that I didn't do a very respectable job when I was positively unemployed, but maybe what I'll try and do is update the major comings-and-goings of the week, once a week. Let's see how that works. So...

Week One:

We fixed up episodes two and three, and "broke" episodes six, seven, eight, and nine. By breaking, I mean we all sat in a room and stared at the writer's assistant poised with his pen in front of a dry erase white board. Then we teased out story lines from the past episodes and tried to figure out what Had to happen, Should happen, and Could happen in the following episodes, in order to make it believable, entertaining and dramatically plausible. This sounds very academic. Really it's a guessing game, it's six or seven people pitching ideas out to the crowd and doing a lot of head scratching and coffee sipping and saying "well what if he..." and "maybe she could..." and "fuck that, that's retarded." It's totally unscientific and completely entertaining in and of itself. I have to say that the show is very plot heavy and thus extremely confusing... and we're the writers. But for me, the new guy, it's fascinating to see how it's done.

I'm a screenwriter by trade and for the most part it is a solitary, lonely process. This is collaborative, and it is collaborative in the most crucial phase of writing, the phase when nothing makes sense and you need someone else to tell you if your idea sucks or the direction your taking is boring or if the way out of the jam that you came up with is totally implausible. It's great. Plus, the lunches are catered, so it's really a pampering.

There are some great people on the show, and I'm going to have to start being very careful about names and places and specifics on this blog from now on; it was one thing to be chatty about this stuff when I was a nobody, but now that someone might actually read this stupid blog, I'm going to have to figure out how to grant the people I work with the respectful anonymity they deserve. Plus, several of the "consultants" on the show are reformed criminals. I don't need to be stepping on any toes and unreforming their criminal tendencies. I could very well wake up in the trunk of a car somewhere far from the Mexican border.

So that's where it stands right now. We're going to be breaking more shows this week, so it will probably be more of the same: confusion, laughter, great ideas from everyone in the room, and lots and lots of coffee...

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Life of Crime

Last Thursday I began work on Mark and Robb Cullen's newest TV show "Heist" (which the New York Times incorrectly credited as having been created by Doug Liman; he directed the pilot). It's stars Dougray Scott, and is a one-hour drama about a jewel caper that will unfold over the run of an entire season, like Prison Break or 24.

This is big news for me. Huge, actually. Primarily it's big because the cold, rusty door of poverty was creaking open to let me in. With only one somewhat depressing employment opportunity looming, I realized I had overestimated my checking balance and, whoops, thought I had three grand more than I did. Sort of that feeling like you're the pilot and you look at the fuel gauge and suddenly it's dipping into the red, and the plane's over the Pacific Ocean.

Needless to say, for reasons of survival and all that, I'm thankful for The Job. As for The Career, getting on this show is an amazing change of pace for me. It's a set direction for at least the next 20 weeks. It's an opportunity to get paid to write. It is an opportunity to learn. It is fucking thrilling, frankly, to meet other writers (one from The Sopranos) and get to sit in a room and talk out story lines with them. It's great.

A few things have come together, too. I finally finished Air Conditioned Jungle and it's going to go out to a few close personals, then to a larger group of folk. Also, agents are calling and it looks like I might be getting an guy at one of the big places. Also, I met with the author of a true crime book about adapting it and he gave me his blessing to see what I could do with it. And we just got the final piece in the puzzle to find out about financing for the Duvall movie. Now we just wait for two weeks to see if the financiers are legit and can come up with the money. In two weeks, I could have a motion picture in the works (and another paycheck in hand).

I'll get more than just news bulletins down in the next post, I just didn't want to sit on the news. So stay tuned, as they say in the TV game...

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

I've been BLACK LISTED!!!

A nice little driplet of benevolence came across the wire just now. My manager sent me something called The Black List, a compendium I've never heard of. Quote:

"THE BLACK LIST was compiled from the suggestions of over 90 film executives and high-level assistants, each of whom contributed the names of up to ten of their favorite scripts that were written in or are somehow uniquely associated with 2005 and will not be released in theaters during this calendar year. THE BLACK LIST is not a “best of” list. It is, at best, a “most liked” list. Enjoy."

And along with heavy-hitting screenwriters like Paul Haggis, Chris McQuarrie, Aaron Sorkin, Eric Roth, Robert Benton, Richard Price, Kenneth Lonergan, and Bill Broyles, right there on the list, right there on pg. 7 is my name.

Not too shabby...

Sunday, January 08, 2006

Road Ahead

This could be a big week. We're supposed to hear something from an investor in Get Low. This is an investor that could potentially have the production up and running in a few months - a pretty drastic turnaround from a few short months ago when everyone involved was thinking the thing was dead. What we're talking about here is this person (or company, or whatever) dropping a $10 million dollar check on our doorstep. As stated, it could indeed be a big week.

Also this week I should have word about a job. It would be a network thing, writing on a TV show, so it would be great credit on my resume and it would probably be pretty handsome pay. Thing is, I'm not much of a TV writer, so I don't know how much capital the bosses have to burn with the network people (since they decide and they don't know me from a hole in the fence). But everything I've heard has been positive, so I am going against my nature and trying to believe in the power of positive thinking.

More later, when I have some news and I'm not hungover.

Friday, January 06, 2006

Sleepless

Oh, this city. What have I done? Eight years.

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Broke Hack Mountain

Today is an anniversary for me. This is the day that I moved to L.A. eight years ago, in 1998. Flew in, didn't road trip as I would have liked. Flew in eight years ago. I gave it a half-hearted four years, then left for good in 2001 when my grandfather was sick. I returned three months later. They were shooting my movie, you see. I was subletting a place back then - every intention of leaving again. That was just about five years ago.

They say that out here it takes five years to achieve some success and ten years to get yourself a career. It couldn't be truer for me. I got the indie film shot in my fourth year here, and as I pass the eight year mile marker, I see things lining up to (potentially) set me up for a future in the writing game. It's a good feeling to know you're "on track" although I suppose written into the program is the possibility that the track can give way at any moment and you can be totally derailed. I can't think about those things. I have sacrificed closeness with my very close Italian-American family back home in pursuit of a dream/goal/life-of-my-own, and I don't want to and can't really dwell on the possibility that that sacrifice may ultimately be in vain.

But don't get me wrong, this New Year finds me in light spirits. I have finally, FINALLY removed the hairshirt better know as my screenplay, and I feel god damned good about it. Not the script itself, mind you - who knows if it's any good - the fact that I'm done with it. Truth is, I remember beginning it in that sublet apartment back in the summer of 2001. Back then it was called Cul de Sac (before I knew there was a Polanski film of the same name) and it was a turgid, dramatic snooze-fest a la Magnolia, which is not to disparage Magnolia, rather to say that I admired it so much that I essentially ripped it off. Thankfully, over the years I abandoned all pretenses of trying to Say Something and just worked on telling the best story I could as funnily as possible.

The multi-year gestation would have you suspect the thing is a five hour masterpiece with a hundred locations and a cast of thousands. I'm proud to say it's not that, actually, but a lean little comedy with about 6 principal characters and 20 or so incidentals.

I plan on "going out" with it in the next two weeks: work with my manager to send the script to all manner of producer, talent, and/or production company people in the effort to 1) get my name out there, and 2) get some fans of my work. The byproduct of this, best case, is that someone loves it and wants to champion it and get it made (it's squarely and indie film and therefore of low interest to Big Time Hollywood People and in need of a heroic supporter-of-the-arts). So I feel good.

I am, as ever, broke. Actually, post-holiday travel and general expenses, I am beyond broke I'm, like, Brokeback Mountain. I am in a new realm of destitution, they need to invent new syntax for me. I am bruke, broyken, brkxkn. I'm flat-busted, maybe-won't-make-rent, gonna-have-to-move-in-with-the-girlfriend-and-become-a-mooch, start-suckin-dick-on-the-side-to-make-ends-meet, BROKE as a JOKE. And yet I feel alright. Got a few job prospects in the wings, success is finding my friends (...what's good for the goose...), and there may even be some financing heading toward the Duvall script. How about that. 06 might not turn out that bad.

Someone please remind me of this optimism when I have my head in the oven, say, mid March.