Backstory
First entry in the on-going saga of a once and
future screenwriter's return trip to the A-List.
I moved to Los Angeles in 1990. In the five
years that followed, I worked every shit job available in Hollywood. I
suffered. I struggled. I ate Ramen noodles and boxed Macaroni and cheese. I
smoked too much and drank a lot of coffee. In 1995, with my
then-writing-partner, I found myself on a cell phone, dancing in the middle of
Montana Avenue in Santa Monica because 20th Century Fox had just made an offer
on a screenplay we had written. By 9:30 that night, I had gone from the lowest
tax bracket to the highest. We celebrated at Dan Tana's. My writing partner
bought a black Porsche. We both went shopping. We were on our way. And
everyone knew it.
Four
months later, we hit again -- doubling our sale price with a spec script
purchased in a pre-emptive bid for mid against high six-figures by Sony/Tri-Star
pictures. We were up and coming, hot young writers. We wore ratty jeans and
sneakers to meetings, we had tattoos, we made a lot of money and we spent a lot
of it, too. We drove around town in Sasha's Porsche. We were known as "the
boys". We went to all the parties and some of the premieres. We had houses in
nice parts of town. We played paintball out in Riverside with the guys from
Silver Pictures.
We were
supposed to write another screenplay and sell it for a million bucks. Instead,
we directed a tiny, no-budget Indie movie that failed to get domestic
distribution -- although I'm told, or was told at the time, that if you happened
to be on a trans-Atlantic flight and were still awake at three in the morning,
it was the in-flight movie. I don't know if this is actually true. I do know
that this movie destroyed our
careers.
My partner retired. I
dug in at my house in Laurel Canyon and tried to write a solo spec. I'd never
really written alone before. I spent months and months banging through the
pages. Locked away in my office with my computer, several Cokes and my pack of
Camel Lights. A few times a day, I'd take the back way down Sunset Plaza to the
Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. We'd discovered this one before anyone else knew it
was there. A few months later, it was written up in Vanity Fair Magazine as
"The place to see the cast of 'Friends' get their morning coffee." It was never
the same after that. Neither was my
career.
My agents didn't like
the script. No one liked the script. I booked six meetings. Mostly with
people I'd known from my days selling for six figures with Sasha. I think
people felt sorry for me. My career was stalled, edging into what pilots call
'a dead man's spiral' -- an unrecoverable
tailspin.
I fired my manager.
My agent and I agreed that I wouldn't renew with him and he wouldn't bother
sending me the agency papers I could tear up and send back. We yelled at each
other in the halls of his agency. I left. I haven't spoken to him
since.
I dabbled in commercials.
Put together a half-way promising directors' reel. I found myself gajillions of
dollars in debt to the IRS. I lost my house. One of my cars. My wife and my
dog and I moved into another, smaller, house that we shared with two sisters.
Six months later, that house was sold and we moved again. This time into a tiny
one-bedroom apartment near Wilshire and La Brea. It was cheap and they'd let us
keep our dog.
An old friend and
I started writing together. We signed with a new agent. We wrote a few things.
None of them sold. We couldn't get arrested. We'd spend our days bitching
about how we couldn't get arrested. Sometimes we'd actually write.
And then, one day, I woke up...
and years had passed. Six, then seven. My wife and I got a divorce. I kept
the apartment, most of the furniture and all the high-end electronics --
although I could no longer afford cable. She kept the dog and the
car.
Broken, defeated and
hopelessly in debt, I went back to doing what I had done before my brilliant
success: I worked as an office temp and then as an assistant at Disney. As I
walked back onto that lot, I realized I had come full circle. When I was 22, my
first job in the entertainment industry had been as an assistant at Disney. Now
I was 34 and everything seemed to be
over.
Around Christmas of that
year, I started dating another writer -- a successful writer. She had one hit
movie and a lucrative TV deal at a major studio. She had been an assistant,
herself, back when Sasha and I were known as 'the boys', racing around town in a
shiny black Porsche. A couple people she used to work with back in those days
vaguely remembered me.
Within a
few weeks, I was basically living with her at her new house. We hung out. We
ate dinner. She nearly always paid. She told me to quit my job and use the
time at her house to write. I didn't quit. I barely wrote. I technically
still had a writing partner and an agent but, God, doesn't
everyone?
And then the ax fell
again. I was laid off from Disney after only nine months. Again, she suggested
I take the time to write. She went off to San Diego to shoot a Pilot and I
spent several weeks "working". When she came home, she found me sitting on her
couch, watching Tivo and eating cookies. We broke up. She told me that I just
didn't seem to be doing the things I needed to be doing to get the life I said I
wanted. She was, ultimately, the wrong girl, but she was right about
that.
We broke up on April 13th.
That night, just to see if I could really do it, I sat down and started
writing...alone. Twelve days later I had finished a
spec.
Through a random series of
events and a chance encounter at another Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, I landed a
new agent. I got myself into therapy and promised myself that I was not going
to make the same mistakes again. They were lessons hard
learned.
It's virtually
impossible, statistically speaking, to sell a screenplay in Hollywood. And yet,
people do it every day. I, myself, did it twice. I believed, or at least, I
wanted to believe, that I could do it again. It's hard enough to break in the
first time. When you're young and still naive about the business and the way
things work. It's even harder to do it the second time. You're no longer young
and, unlike the first time, now you know what you're up
against.
That solo spec went out
to buyers. It stayed alive for three weeks in the summer of 2003, but
ultimately, nobody bought it. Mike DeLuca at Dreamworks was the last guy to
pass. I made the rounds. Unlike my first solo effort all those years ago,
there were a lot of meetings this time. I was up for writing assignments. I
even came very close to booking two. My name started showing up on writers'
lists again. And this time, it was just me. No partner to rely on, no
crutches.
I continued to work
crap jobs. The last one ended the week before Thanksgiving. The show couldn't
meet payroll. Our last three weeks, to this day, remain unpaid. The Company
finally filed for bankruptcy. I was destitute. Barely able to afford my
apartment and my car on Unemployment which was about to run out. I borrowed
money from virtually everyone I knew. I was eating once a day. I had erected a
small camp site in front of my television. I had no cable and had sold all of
my DVDs to survive, but there was a video store a few blocks down. I think I
still owe them money. My days consisted of: 1) looking for jobs -- mostly
on-line and chasing leads friends would pass along, 2) banging my head against
the wall looking for an idea I thought my agents could possibly sell, 3) smoking
cigarettes, 4) shuffling between my camp site and my bed -- the only two areas
of the apartment that saw any use. I threw all of my dishes into the dumpster
because it was easier than washing
them.
My friend and former
neighbor, Curt, and I started going out a lot. He usually bought drinks. And
there were a lot of them. One night in January, I ran into an old friend while
out at a bar. She was working at a small production company and thought they
might need someone. I had met with several people the previous year about
becoming a development executive or maybe a lit-manager. I didn't know exactly
what kind of job it might be, but, now, at 35, ANY income was an
improvement.
Two weeks later I
started working for my friend at the small production company. I was running
errands and making copies. My landlord, in an effort to increase rents in our
building, evicted me. I couldn't afford to fight it and didn't have the energy.
Curt and I found a new place to
share. My ex-wife, who remains one of my closest friends, helped me move. She
looked around the old empty apartment and asked, "How did we do this for so
long? How did we live here? It's like the Seventh Gate of
Hell."
Curt, who had recently
taken the leap of faith to become a full-time working actor, fronted the move-in
on the new place and I got yet another chance to start over. Another chance to
not fuck up.
I had finally found
a new idea. In the new place with the new chance, I would get up and go to
work. When I came home, I would open up the laptop and write. Often until two
in the morning. And then, get up, and do it all over again. Curt and I stopped
going out and spending money we didn't have on drinks we didn't need. He
finished a screenplay he had been working on for the last two years. We
nicknamed our apartment "Study Hall".
Posted: Tue - May 18, 2004 at 12:30 AM