The One (now Two) Year Push

Just Moved

2008-01-19T15:25:00.000-05:00

Almost two years ago, I began what I'd thought would be a one year push in pursuit of a screenwriting career. As time sped by and the one year turned to two, I changed my focus, and in the spirit of that change, I've changed my title and my surroundings.

Join me at three chainsaws.

Change is in the wind...

2008-01-12T15:16:00.000-05:00

Right now my three week old daughter is napping on the couch with my wife. My son, fresh from his own nap, is asking me for corn flakes (in a minute, buddy). And I'm sitting in the enclosed porch of our house, a converted summer cottage for vacationers, looking out at the January sun, thinking about new beginnings. A new baby, a new year, new outlooks, new issues.

As hinted about over the past month or so, I'm about to change things up here, a shift in focus and a chance to right the push in the direction I wish I'd set it on at the beginning. I hope you'll be there for the ride.

More news here soon. Peace. :)

Now That I Have My Foursome, I Won't Have To Play Golf With Strangers Anymore

2007-12-26T12:01:00.000-05:00

Quick post to let you know we had the baby on Thursday, just in time for Christmas. She's truly beautiful, and The Prince is glad to have her home to admire and protect as big brothers should their younger sisters.

My best to you and yours for a great holiday season and prosperous New Year. I'll be back.

Where Am I?

2007-12-13T23:43:00.000-05:00

It's been an odd month or so blogwise for me since my morale wavered, a month spent wondering how to proceed, whether to proceed. I have to say I'm very grateful for the encouragement I've received here, so thank you again.

A few days after puzzling publicly about continuing the blog and even the idea of continuing to write, I got some notes on one of my scripts from a certain reader, and found more encouragement, so thank you Scott.

But I also recognized a few weeks back that my latest project has a pretty decently-sized problem, so while I've got the first act down pre-trimming, I need to run back over the big picture to see if this will cause me massive grief later. A plus is that I woke up the other morning with a pretty neat setup for another story that I can start prepping and switch off working on with the already-started project.

The most important project that's occuring now though is the very rapidly approaching birth of our second child, our as yet unnamed daughter. Originally slated for arrival just after the new year, it looks like she's going to make her debut sometime in the next week (hopefully not during the nor'easter that's due this weekend). We've been painting and re-assembling furniture and hanging little bits of wall art and now my former office is my daughter's nursery. It's a small room, pretty cramped as the office/faux storage room it turned into, but just the right size for a baby. It will be too small for a toddler, however, so while we knew another child would mean our time in our present apartment was short, it now seems like we'll need to make a move in the next twelve months. Since we know we're not going to have any more children and we're both sick to death of paying rent and having no investment to show for it, this means we'll need to be looking to move into our first house. If we follow this train of thought, this necessitates at the very least a higher-paying job for me (the wife does pretty well, I'm the one bringing up the rear).

So I guess you can see where my head is at right now. When I began the blog, my idea was to write about the things that make me write and the things that make me not write. It's time I achieve a more defined focus.

Coming into a third year of what was going to be (albeit an unrealistic and naive goal) a one year push is stretching common sense, so a change of scene would certainly be necessary, a clean house to run around in. I've got a few changes in mind, I'm just considering how and where.

Whatever I decide to do, I'll let you know here. Stay tuned.

random anecdote

2007-12-03T08:30:00.000-05:00

My sister-in-law spotted a toddler-sized firefighter's outfit online back in September and ordered one for The Prince. It arrived in mid-October. It's a nicely-made outfit, heavy fabric, a solid helmet, his name embroidered on the left breast. When we first unboxed the uniform and showed it to my son, he started pulling off the clothes he had on so he could change into the costume. Since this is the first year he seemed to show interest in Halloween, we figured we had a hit.

Halloween came and unlike the past few years, the weather cooperated with dry skies, if a little cool. My son went to school that day, specifically not in costume as mandated by the school's coordinator. His teachers handed out a packet of M&M's to each member of his class and wished them all a Happy Halloween on the way out. I talked to him when I got home about putting on his uniform and walking around our block like a few children were already doing, but my son just looked up at me quizzically, his brow knitted into one of those punctuation curly brackets laid on its side, peaking between the eyes, as if to ask what this absurd notion had to do with his logical and orderly routine. Despite the Spocking I was getting from my kid, I was still surprised later when he refused to put on his uniform. No tantrum, no screaming, just abject refusal. "No firefighter," he explained to my wife and I, waving us off with a raised hand. Instead, he preferred to sit on our stoop and hold the candy basket for the visiting superheroes, princesses and railroad hoboes, grinning ear to ear. I snapped a photo so we'd have a record of the holiday, but I had a rough time fighting off the disappointment of not being able to walk him around and show him off, my polite and handsome boy dressed as one of his heroes.

A week and a half went by, the uniform hanging in his closet, only the helmet getting occasional play. There was plenty of room to grow in the costume, so knowing he'll be able to wear it next year cushioned the blow, but seeing it there when I'd reach in for his jacket would still make me sigh. I was getting ready for work, not due in until the afternoon. The Prince was busy hugging up his beloved sitter who'd just arrived for the day. I could hear a fire engine honk its horn a few blocks off, but disregarded the sound since we live two blocks away from the local firehouse. Instead, I spent 20-30 seconds looking in the bathroom mirror, wondering why the hell I keep growing what looks like stray strands of black wire on the bridge of my nose.

I heard the engine honk again, closer. A lot closer. Before I could fully ask where it was I had my answer with another honk, right outside our house. As I walked to the front door, my son was hopping up and down at the porch window. "Firefighter!"

My neighbor across the street had called them, I heard her telling the squad from her sidewalk that some grease had caught fire and she'd been able to put it out, but wanted to be certain there was no danger. The firefighters trundled into the house and around back to the kitchen.

I stood on my steps and watched for a moment, thinking about my father, pausing on a scrap of memory I have of being in his station house, somewhere near 1969, 1970, the huge engines right up close, the camaraderie of the firemen. I turned back to the porch window to find my son beaming, watching the flashing lights, counting the firefighters.

I don't think the idea came in a flash, it was just suddenly there, like those moments where you thought you've lost your keys and then they are in hand, right in your pocket where they've been all along. The idea was there and I had everything I needed to make it happen, but I needed to act fast.

"Firefighter? Put. On?"

"That's right, pal, let me buckle you up."

Just like that, my son was in uniform and my camera was in hand. We ran out to the sidewalk and he slowed down and stopped as we neared the fire engine, looking up as though looking at an enormous red beast. I tugged at his hand, but he firmly stood his ground, not scared, but cautious.

I placed his back to the engines and turned to step a few feet away, preparing for my three year old to lose the mercurial interest a toddler holds in most things parents hope they'll enjoy. I turned back to look.

My son stood up straight, shoulders back and let loose a toothy grin, his helmet cocked back, the sun breaking through to shine on his face. I held my camera to my eye and fired off shot after shot as he giggled in joy.

Giving Thanks

2007-11-21T10:21:00.000-05:00

The past several years, I've been a ghost around the house from this week until the first week of January. In my previous career in retail, these next six or seven weeks mean everything, and despite increased commitment each year to spending just the alloted amount of time at work (last year, my boss threatened a bad job review for anyone who went more than 30 minutes overtime for any week), we were never able to get out of the store with less than 45-50 hours each week.

My wife would just wave to me on my way out, no amount of discussion being enough to fix the problem of not having me around to chase The Prince around in his annually-increasing holiday mania or help around the house. I'd come home most nights after they'd gone to bed, wake up before them and take off for work, only to return in time for dinner in a state of mental exhaustion. If my job was normally like fending off a stoning, the holiday shopping season made it like having floor seats for an avalanche.

When I quit that job in May, my very first thought was that I'd get to spend the holiday season with my family, and starting today with an abbreviated shift at my new daygig, that's about to happen. I can give thanks for my wife for her support, to my son for his energy and spirit and to my soon-to-debut daughter for a renewed promise of a great future.

Let this old sap give you a moment of advice: Let yourself enjoy what you've got. I tend to look around at my life and focus on what's not there, but this holiday season I'll be reminding myself that not long ago I didn't have any of what I have now. Sure, it may dampen my drive for a moment, but it will serve as fuel to keep driving.

I Once Had Lunch With Brian Dennehy, But He Must Have Withheld The Tzatziki

2007-11-14T16:49:00.000-05:00

I've been missing my Late Show fix since the strike began, so I'm glad I found the Late Show writers strike page. Thanks for the funny, guys. If only you were smart enough to reprogram the Julie Chen-bot, you could end this strike with a little pillow talk.

Wearing The Red

2007-11-13T20:09:00.000-05:00

I'm in NY and I've got the dayjob to worry about, so although I'd like to show solidarity as some non-WGA members have done in L.A. and gone down to the picket sites, I am unable to do so. Considering that my wife wants Tina Fey to be her new best friend, maybe I should make getting to the picket site in NY a bigger priority, but I don't think I'll be able to, at least this week.

Since I can't make it down there, I can at least change my look here. For the duration of the strike, I'll be wearing red as my background color, black as the text color and my font shall be Courier. Yes, I'll be pimping large like a preteen's MySpace page, but it's the least I can do to show how I feel.

Pass The Mustard

2007-11-11T15:25:00.000-05:00

My last post was short, too short in retrospect to have told the full story of my current thoughts about blogging, writing and blogging about writing. I still stand by what I wrote, with this clarification the exception: When I wrote "I haven't had a reader comment in three months as of today and that's damn pitiful for a blog...", I didn't mean my readers were pitiful, I meant my ability to get readers more involved was pitiful.

That much said, I can see how one might look at what I wrote and consider it childish. That's fair, I guess, but it's obviously not how I look at my present situation. I'm passionate about wanting to get my work produced and frustrated that my management of that ambition and its balance with my home and work lives has fallen short, and that disappointment with my own efforts bled through into that last post (Count to ten, then blog). I received an honest and biting reply that I take full ownership of, and I offer that reply and my counter-reply to you now as further illustration of where I am.

Anonymous said...

To be honest, frank, and, it will be cruel:

I just wanted to see if you had mustard- you don't. You sound like a whining baby who didn't get enough attention and now he's taking his sorry ass back to the bedroom, slamming the door and moping- hoping- praying- that someone will react.

Man, the screenwriting world is a tough place.

And you're soft.

You gotta take the kicks with smiles, not whimpers.

That's just reality.

I mean, who are YOU?

Look at the writers on strike- they've made billions for the studios and yet the studios still treat them like shit.

Who are you? Have you earned a penny from your writing? No? So- get a thick skin and keep plugging and stop complaining that people haven't made a comment in so many months on your little blog.

Write. Keep writing. Through good and bad or get yourself a god damned divorce.

Do you see any of the real writers who are on strike boo-hooing 'cause the boys in suits treat them like last years samonella?

No, you don't. And they're risking their only income.

What are you risking? Your ego- that is all- your ego.

Tom said...

Hey man, you may think I'm kidding, but I appreciate that. These are the very questions I've been asking myself. It's no mistake I made this decision this week, I've been reading what the writers I admire have been saying and questioning whether I've got the stuff to handle what they have been going through, and this strike has shed light on the 48 percent of WGA members who do not have work as well as the midlevel working writers you never hear of that are feeling this strike with every bill that hits the mailbox. It's made me question what I'm doing on this blog and what I'm doing in trying to start a career in writing.

I haven't thought it all through yet, but this much is what I know now:
I'm not as disciplined as I'd like
I'm a procrastinator
I'm more than a hair too needy

However, I do know this from my experience so far reading specs from various online sources, scripts I've reviewed from a small sample (about 100) of the other amateurs out there:
My work is good, a lot better than what I've seen. Maybe as good as stuff that gets produced and certainly better than crap that gets produced. Whether this makes me good enough to get a sale is the question to which I've been hoping to find an answer, either here or elsewhere.

My initial (if unspoken) goal with this blog was to tap into a community that I haven't had access to; I didn't go to film school, I don't work in production, I don't live in L.A.. I have met through this blog some very encouraging folks, but meeting them has also pointed out to me that if I'm going to make this work, there's so much more that needs to be done, and a great deal of it needs to be done on my own.

The conflict I've been putting off from fully dealing with is whether I can commit full-time to my family, my job (and earning more) and trying to make a run at being a screenwriter at the same time. To this point in time, one of these three things has suffered while the others received attention. Although I've let a lot of personal stuff fly here, I haven't let it all out, and while all I am is words on a webpage to most of the people who've read this blog, the reality is I'm 42, married late in life compared to most after wondering if that would ever happen, I have one kid here and another that will be pop out within two months, I have a job that doesn't pay all that great after having changed careers a few too many times, plus some issues this past year that I'm not going to air out here but which took up a lot of time and energy and still do every day. That much I'm not whining about, all that I have now is gold to me and I'm going to protect it, which leaves trying to change careers or even just taking the time to make one lousy sale and then fade off into the ether again something that places third on my list of priorities.

Finding time for third without shorting first and second has been the problem. I thought blogging about it might help. It has, but it just doesn't feel right anymore, not today, not when I watch the efforts my wife goes through to pick up whatever slack I inevitably leave by sitting down at my computer.

Your words are honest and even cruel as promised, but even within the barbed wire I can see the flower of encouragement, so thanks.

Now I Know What A Dead Shark Looks Like

2007-11-08T17:57:00.000-05:00

I think it's long past time to take a break from this blogging thing. I haven't had a reader comment in three months as of today and that's damn pitiful for a blog, so it's time to slap up the boards. I'm considering a relaunch under a new title after the new year as I'm going to keep writing, but set an actual schedule and deadline to quit if I haven't sold anything. I'll update here if and when that happens.

I appreciate the relationship I've shared with all of you and wish you well.

The Pitch: Jack Bauer Chases 11 Teams Around The World

2007-10-25T08:43:00.000-04:00

I'm stoked this week as there are updates on two of my TV favorites. With the quick death of Viva Laughlin (two episodes over four days and gone), CBS has filled the gap with arguably one of their top five shows, The Amazing Race. 11 new teams were introduced yesterday and the new season starts Sunday, November 4th. I could do without scheduling after football, I always seemed to have timeshifting problems recording the Race during past football seasons, but I'll take the Race where I can get it.

The other favorite is 24, and I'll just cop upfront to enjoying last season, although not as much at the end as I did at the beginning. Seeing that bomb go off at the end of the fourth hour took the show off the hook, but by the end the only source of stability turned out to be the very much unstable Jack Bauer as every character from the President on down crapped their pants at least once. They look to have wiped the slate with this new season, CTU is gone although Jack appears to be back working for the government again somehow. New characters and brief glimpses of a couple of old ones and one stupifying comeback for a character we all thought was dead. Here's the trailer:

Edit: In light of the WGA strike and the Fox decision to hold the season premiere until production starts again, Fox has taken the trailer offline.

Progress Report

2007-10-25T08:33:00.000-04:00

Progressing nicely on the current project, I must say. Once I got to the end of the first act, I went back and started cutting until it was where I wanted it to be, at least thus far in the process. Working into the second act now. I can tell I'm on my game when the script starts moving on its own, when I look down and discover I've just coursed through four or five pages. A funny thing happened as I was writing a scene and referred to an unplanned character; I've decided to add him into the mix as a source of conflict between the two newlyweds and he'll join forces with an existing conflict character (one I was thinking wouldn't fit in the third act) later on. I've got enough planned that I write loosely enough to do something like that, it's a good place to be in.

More Human Than Human

2007-10-10T10:16:00.000-04:00

I'm still marvelling five days later at how brilliant the new 'Final Cut' of Blade Runner is. This new version is only playing onscreen in New York and LA, and I was dreading having to watch it at one of the Times Square tackyplexes, but lo and behold, Warner Brothers took the high road and booked the Ziegfeld, my home away from home. The 10:30 opening night show was packed with geeks that applauded each name in the opening credits to varying degrees, eventually making a joke of praising any name that popped up, but then the place erupted with Ridley Scott's credit. A far cry from when I walked out of my first BR viewing in 1982 at the Sunrise Mall in Massapequa hearing disappointed viewers muttering, "That sucked."

To say the digital presentation is good is doing it a disservice. I was expecting a great image, but instead I was floored with the amount of detail in the opening cityscape shots. I could for the first time see the Tyrell pyramids in the distance in the second or third shot, long before the closer shots. It made me recall seeing Siskel and Ebert discuss viewing the Criterion laserdisc version of the film rather than VHS, Roger practically begging viewers to get up and buy an LD player immediately. The image throughout is outstanding, and there are visual tweaks that readjust the editing to better effect, such as the first shots of Batty that had been cribbed from later in the film that now have the incorrect backgrounds wiped out and replaced with the correct scenery, or the much-too-obvious stuntwoman-with-bad-wig inserts in the scene where Zhora crashes through the plate glass. I'd even swear Scott did some tightening along the way, but without a side-by-side comparison, it's hard to tell. Other FX work was done, wire removal and such, and the result is a more enjoyable visual experience.

For the first time, however, this movie really hit me on a gut level. The android replicants live in fear that at some moment they may just fall down dead due to their limited lifespan, but they don't have any idea when they'll reach the end because they don't know when they were incubated. Their emotions are self-generated and erratic and whereas I'd previously seen them as villains, it's not difficult to see them as sympathetic. They're just like us, they don't want to die, and their quest to find out how to live longer is thwarted at every turn. They can do amazing things, superhuman things, but they're doomed and completely vulnerable. In pursuit is Deckard, a cop who is the best at tracking and killing trespassing replicants but lives just like them, surrounded by old photographs from a past long gone. Deckard falls in love with a replicant and the film even posits the idea (even more so than the previous revision in 1992) that Deckard is a replicant himself. Deckard watches Batty expire after they've tried to kill each other, a death that comes with Batty recalling for Deckard the wonderful things he's seen that humans have never known and now will be lost forever. These ideas of living in fear of death and of all you are vanishing with your death were mostly lost on audiences in 1982, myself included, and are very mature themes for what most people thought would be just be a futuristic action film with Han Solo and flying cars. The script is tight, very economical and smart, and it may be heresy to say so, but this is one adaptation that's much better than the original book.

If you have the opportunity, you should see this on the big screen. It's playing until the 18th at The Ziegfeld in NY and at The Landmark in LA. After that, it will hit DVD, BluRay and HD-DVD on December 18th. AV hardware manufacturers like to have big software titles to drive sales, and I can imagine this release having a big impact on both HD optical disc formats.

Five Days

2007-10-05T21:18:00.000-04:00

X X X X X

I've done five days in a row now with at least an hour of writing. Feels damn good. I'm 25 pages into my 'newlywed' comedy and it's coming along great. More work over the weekend should get me to the end of the first act and show me whether the structure works thus far.

Tonight, however, I'm going to catch Blade Runner back on the big screen. I'm geeking out already.

Day One

2007-10-01T19:44:00.000-04:00

I'll pick up a calendar this week, but this is day one of my chain. Feels good. At least one hour a day come hell or high water.

Bad and good news today, the bad being the palpable sense of disappointment at my beloved Mets these last few weeks. You can pick any of the losses over the last twelve and say that was the one that cost them the NL East crown, but the true cause is the attitude the team took on over the last two or three months, and while each player (with exception to David Wright and Carlos Beltran, in my opinion) had some truly astounding lapses in play and/or judgement and Willie Randolph & Omar Minaya need to somehow lose their affinity for older, already-spent players like Jeff Conine, there's one culprit that's been skating by in the media blamelessly thus far: Rickey Henderson.

Okay, he's just the first-base coach, how much harm could he have done? Plenty. When Rickey was a player with the Mets in 1999, he was more of a cancer than a leader to the younger players. The kids that looked up to him soon bore his arrogant swagger, got into scuffles and arguments with officials, if I remember correctly, and then there's the infamous incident in the during Game Six of the 1999 NLCS when Henderson didn't like being taken out late in the game, so he left the dugout and played cards with Bobby Bonilla in the clubhouse instead of remaining with his team. So what do the Mets do with this jerk they couldn't wait to unload in 2000? They bring him in to counsel their golden child Jose Reyes as base-stealing guru and first-base coach, and at first the leap in aggressiveness in snatching bases was dramatic and impressive. Some time later, however, Reyes' boyish attitude gave way to immaturity, a weakness Reyes hadn't possessed in the early part of the season or in past seasons. Now Reyes, the spark plug for the Mets offense, was being instructed by Rickey on how to adopt the mindset he had when he stole 130 bases in one season. That mindset was based on what, according to Rickey himself? Arrogance. Rickey has been quoted this year as saying he was passing along to Reyes the arrogance he felt made him a bullet on the basepaths throughout his career.

Thanks, Rickey. Go back home, your ego is calling. And thanks Omar, it took a lot of mindpower to bring in as counsel to your team's offensive catalyst a guy who made a career of not bothering to learn his teammates names.

What the hell were we talking about? Oh, yeah, good news. I found out today my oldest friend, the produced screenwriter, just wrote and directed a feature out in L.A.. He's in post-production now, he says it looks great even though shot in HDV (good format, nothing to apologize for in my opinion). I'm so proud, can't wait to see it. I've got plenty of time in October since I won't be watching baseball.

Today's Word: "Tsuris"

2007-09-25T17:34:00.000-04:00

Tsuris is a great word, an exotic way of saying turmoil without sounding whiny.

Tsuris describes my last month with regard to the blog, and at the risk of still sounding whiny, I'll tell you that I've been torn about continuing this push. Other than submitting to the Nicholl and the Austin Film Festival contests, I haven't accomplished squat. In fact, I've been so conflicted about this push from the beginning that I'm not surprised that's all I've gotten done (at least I managed to drop the soul-sucking job I'd had for something more promising). This last month, I've taken a leave from writing just to concentrate on the other aspects of life. I celebrated five years of marriage to a great girl, took a few days off with the family to Vermont and started the physical process of getting our living space ready for the new baby.

Wow, I buried the lead there, didn't I? We're expecting a daughter right around January 1st. My wife tells me I'm full of crap, but I really didn't have a preference what sex the baby would be, but now that we know it's a girl, I'm thrilled, it feels right. The Prince is fantastic with babies, so I'm looking forward to seeing the shift in dynamics in our little family (although none of us can be described as little).

And here I am at the end of September, spending too much time watching baseball, not being able to concentrate on anything, feeling dumpy and disappointed about writing but excited about everything else. If writing were a girlfriend, she'd have dumped me by now for ignoring her.

The problem I'm having now is that I don't know if I'd want her back.

Whenever I've faced a crisis like this, I've usually not known what to blame other than broadly blaming myself (there's a confidence booster), but in the past year I've come to grips with the idea that my lack of organization and scheduling of my life has been most of the cause of my disappointments. Do any of you utilize any organizational ideas/platforms/tricks/methods that you can recommend? I'd be interested in hearing what has worked for you.

One thing I've read over the past month that has inspired me came from a source I'd at first been surprised by, but since then have realized makes a lot of sense considering the career he's had: Jerry Seinfeld. The success this man has had bears the earmark of hard work, and some years ago when he was asked for advice on how to become a better comic, below in italics was his reply as posted online by the man who'd asked him, software developer Brad Isaac. My first plan of attack is to schedule my day with what I need to get done, then to follow the advice Jerry gave Brad way back when for each of those tasks. Whether writing will be one of those tasks is what I'm unsure about at the moment.

He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day. But his advice was better than that. He had a gem of a leverage technique he used on himself and you can use it to motivate yourself - even when you don't feel like it.

He then revealed a unique calendar system he was using pressure himself to write.

Here's how it worked.

He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. "After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain."

"Don't break the chain." He said again for emphasis.

This is a method that's probably been handed down by others for years and years, way back to Socrates telling a student to cover a wall in clay and get a big stylus, but when I read this it felt like a bubble had been burst. If it does the same for you, I'm happy to have passed this on.

Trailer Park

2007-08-29T14:15:00.000-04:00

I haven't been to a movie in about a month, but I'm always checking out trailers online. I thought it would be fun to point out some to you that I think are pretty cool.

First up is the trailer for Michael Clayton, a new drama from Tony Gilroy making his directorial debut after his work on the Bourne films. The trailer is tense as hell, especially if you consider the film is about a freaking lawsuit. Great cast headed up by George Clooney in serious mode. I'm on a Clooney high this week after watching Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and digging the hell out of it, despite the goofy Julia Roberts death scene.

Next up is Walk Hard, the faux-biopic (bi-faux-pic?) chronicling the story of Dewey Cox, legendary country singer. John C. Reilly finally gets a leading role and gets support from a good comic cast including Jenna Fischer. The wife's got a crush on Reilly and I wouldn't mind seeing Jenna Fischer all dolled up, so I'm looking forward to this one.

I was never one for Westerns while I was growing up, but Unforgiven made me reassess the genre and I've been slowly pecking away at my own postmodern Western for a while. There are two notable Westerns hitting theaters in September. The first, on the 7th, is 3:10 to Yuma with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, which looks like a good ride, but the more character-driven of the two appears to be The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, with Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck. Casey's been pretty much in the background most of his career, it will be interesting to see him in a more featured role.

Finally, I just re-watched the trailer for Goodfellas this week. It's a great trailer that gives a good sense of the dark humor and danger of the movie and succeeds even with the now-cliched use of the "In a world..." trailer copy voiced by Don LaFontaine. Great stuff.

Progress Bar

2007-08-29T13:43:00.000-04:00

No, I haven't been spending all week partying to celebrate the On The Lot finale, I've been working. Working at the daygig, working at home (painted The Prince's room, looks darn good) and working at writing. I've tried to follow Scott The Reader's lead and write for at least an hour a day, but I have had a couple of days slip by me.

The romantic comedy I'm working on is coming along fine. This is the script I'd created a lot of set-up material for using Writer's Dream Kit, until I reached the point where I wanted to keep a looser approach, at least during the first draft.

I've also got a nonfiction...thing I'm working on. It may end up just being a file on my drive in the end, but it's something I feel like I need to lay out, a story I need to tell, even if it's just telling it to the other ones and zeroes on my computer.

Good Choice, America

2007-08-22T00:23:00.000-04:00

At least those of you that remembered to vote for the On The Lot winner last week.

Congratulations, Will, you won with class and heart and integrity. Now if you want to give another family man looking to make it in the industry a break (wink, nudge), drop me a line.

not so big finish

2007-08-16T17:17:00.000-04:00

I've reached the point where I think someone is engineering On The Lot for failure intentionally. How else to explain the idea behind whittling down a field of filmmakers week after week only to reach a finale where they don't shoot a single frame? Instead, they reran their two films they wanted America to see again before voting.

Somebody, be it Fox or Mark Burnett or Steven Spielberg or the Tooth Fairy, wants to end this thing in the worst way, there's no other way to explain it.

That much said, I'm not that happy with the choice Will made to run the 'Glass Eye' film he made at home for $200 rather than the much better 'Lucky Penny'. If he wanted to show how he could make a film that worked without the production values he had through the contest, then I get the choice, but the goal should have been to put the best works up there. 'The Yes Men' was a no-brainer to rerun, and it's a great indicator of what this guy can do.

Adam followed the same tack as Will and showed his submission film along with his latest film. I just re-read his Lot site profile, I think this guy is someone I'd get along with well if I knew him. Adam's a talented guy and I hope he does well, but I don't think he'll win this competition because he never had one of those standout weeks until it was right at the end.

Jason cleaned his act up a LOT, he actually managed to look like a grown-up and still have some style. I think he stumbled by showing 'Eternal Waters', even though it is technically strong, the story is thin and forced. 'Sweet' was good, but slight. In the end, he was right to make these the two he reran since his other choices were not going to get him any votes.

Who will be the first On The Lot winner? Carrie said Will and Garry said Jason and Brett Ratner didn't show up (the site said he'd be returning this week). I still say Will, and I'm also positive he'll be the last winner of the On The Lot contest since this show won't limp its way to a second season, unfortunately. What a shame.

First 9:00 of The Nines

2007-08-15T18:16:00.000-04:00

All right, I'm hooked.

The Nines - First 9 Minutes

While You Were Watching America's Got Talent

2007-08-09T22:41:00.000-04:00

On The Lot had something of a bombshell this week ("Oh, that was that pop I heard Tuesday night"). Early favorite Zach Lipovsky, the only contestant featured in the advance advertising (blowing up the flying saucer with a bazooka) and the one who was told for weeks on end how great a storyteller he is, got the hook from America after not one but two films based on the same weak premise.

Zach was understandably teary-eyed when he left, but by the time I type this he's got to be swimming in offers to direct commercials, which is really the industry most of these filmmakers can expect to find gainful employment.

Zach was good and will be juuuust fine. Zach : On The Lot :: Jennifer Hudson : American Idol (only Jennifer never slacked off and sang the same song twice in a row). The other four contestants, I'm not entirely sure about.

The remaining White Boy Mafia consists of Adam (Good/Bad Ratio somewhere around 30/70), Sam (60/40), Will (85/15) and Jason (50/50). These guys looked like Zach had died in their arms when he was asked to leave the backlot, and Will said it best when he said that he'd always thought Zach would win, so now anyone could win it if they brought their A-game.

The films this week were all based on a single prize-winning logline, so at last we could finally see what each of them could do with roughly the same material. Incidentally, this was the first night I noticed (or even looked, I'm usually DVR-warping through the end credits) that there are writers credited with scripting the shorts. This makes me wonder about the process again, and it only serves to underline for me the fundamental problem with the show in that it does not give us a story that would possibly open viewers eyes to the creative process. Instead of reinforcing an inappropriate auteur stereotype on these guys, why not show how they coordinate with the pre-production process?

The premise was a man wakes up in a dress with no memory of how he got there. Will was up first with what he described as a Coen Brothers-ish comedy (link). I've liked Will from the beginning, so I'm predisposed to think his films are good, but this one was great on all levels. He even had a ton of dialogue in a My Girl Friday vein, so Carrie Fisher was plotzing with joy.

Sam followed with what should prove to be his last film for On The Lot, a dark comedy about getting revenge on a sexist boss (link). The acting was forced and the idea was stale (Carrie quickly labeled it as Saw meets 9 to 5, hold the originality).

Adam came next with a terrific bit of surrealism that will leapfrog him to the first or second vote tally if the voters play fair, the story of a soldier that wakes up in a tutu (link). I pegged the punchline while watching this, but only because it reminded me of a story I'd written long ago.

Jason wrapped it up with a revenge comedy where a man wakes up in a dress and a C4-laced suicide-belt (link). I'm just not that into Jason, he comes off to me like a phony with the backwards hat and the street slang. He's a young guy, but he's not fourteen, so he should dress accordingly. He shows some real talent, but how does he expect to be taken seriously dressed like a clown? His fans will get him into the final three, even if his film wasn't that groundbreaking.

Sam and Jason should get the lowest amount of votes this week and Sam will get the boot. I don't think anyone would have predicted Will, Adam and Jason for final three back at the start (I'd have gone with Zach, Sam and Marty), so this last competition will be interesting to see play out.

As I'd said earlier this week, my money's on Will. I've been cringing when Carrie has given him grief over little dialogue, I think not having to rely on dialogue to tell his stories is a massive advantage he's got over the other two, plus I just have to pull for the nice family guy looking for a break.

Washout

2007-08-08T23:04:00.000-04:00

I read an article last week that said Hollywood is starting to feel comfortable about setting disaster movies in New York again, citing I Am Legend and the still-untitled J.J. Abrams monster movie (some folks are thinking Overnight is the title, we'll see) as examples and quoting the omnipresent Paul Dergarabedian as saying New York is ready to get trashed.

It's the sort of midweek fluff that would garner a chorus of whatevers on any Manhattan street, but I couldn't help but think of it this morning (during the four and a half hours it took to get to work) as an odd harbinger of what would come to pass when a freak tornado dropped three inches of rain on the five boroughs in two hours (which has got to be some sort of math question on the Meteorology SAT). Had that chatty bastard "Box Office Paul" brought this upon us?

The transit system completely melted down, yet another indication that the subsystems in New York, the ages-old designs that can't support today's huge population, are ready to fail in a colossal fashion. I wish all we had to worry about today was a giant pissed-off upright-walking lizard borne from nuclear waste. At least then the damage could have been avoided by taking the shuttle train to the other side of town. You couldn't get anywhere today. I tried four different train lines before I got one that would take me into Manhattan, and that last train had more smelly people on it than anyone should have to face without a Hazmat suit.

Here's what it looked like, thanks to YouTube:

By the end of the night, however, all is well. The wife made it home all right, the three of us ripped into a great pizza pie (half mushroom, baby) and my Metsies won a squeaker after Billy Wagner made a tight game even more nail-biting. I even did some brainstorming on a script premise that's playing out in reality with some friends of ours, could be interesting. Bad day, pretty good night, not a total washout.

My Money's on Will

2007-08-07T23:31:00.000-04:00

My full rundown tomorrow.

When I Grow Up, I Want To Be John August

2007-08-05T00:47:00.000-04:00

John doesn't need a plug from a guy as far removed from the industry as me, but here it is anyhow. He's directed a film that has played Sundance to much acclaim and is finally nearing release. It's titled The Nines and the trailer has just hit the web. I thought from reading his blog that I had an idea what to expect.

Nope, not even close.

Enjoy.

"I Don't Think They Mean Us, Dear."

2007-08-01T23:01:00.000-04:00

I've been shooting with a Nikon D40 lately, the first digital SLR I've been able to play around with for a good length of time. I mentioned some weeks back that I love Grand Central Terminal, so that was one of my first stops with the D40. I had climbed the steps up to Métrazur restaurant to grab a shot of the Main Concourse and when I was heading back down, I caught a sight that is quintessentially New York.

Whole 'Lot' of Feh

2007-07-31T23:23:00.000-04:00

Believe me, I was ready to eat my hat with cheese on it if Jerry O'Connell, star of Kangaroo Jack, had made a great showing on tonight's On The Lot. Last week's top vote-getter, Jason "Too Cool to Spell 'Room' Correctly on National Television" Epperson, won the right to cast Jerry in his road-themed film to be shown tonight. Jason's been 50/50 so far in my opinion. He's shown good technique, but even in that regard has been getting sloppy. His recent film about old-age breakdancers had the most unintelligible dialogue since Clan of the Cave Bear. He's shown comparative restraint with the use of style and has a good touch for comedy, but he's still got the stink of the bad taste he put in our mouths with his first film that was seemingly making fun of a mentally-challenged person (Jason would want me to say he was just a nerd...No, bro, I'm a nerd. Take a look over at Zach, he's a nerd too. That character of yours was retarded).

But, he got the most votes, so Jason gets Jerry, and to his credit, Jerry acquitted himself nicely. He wasn't playing King Lear, just a guy it turns out is playing a joke on a buddy, but he nailed all one and a half dimensions the story gave him and was a good enough sport to show up for the live show in support (speaking of which, did you spot John Ratzenberger in the crowd? Get him to do one of these films!). Any harm done in Jason's film was done by Jason himself. The story was flat, didn't have a middle or a very good beginning or ending, and in the end the purposely vague dialogue didn't fit what the characters were doing anyway. In fact, it was so unrelated to the story that it's possible the entire script could qualify for special classification as the longest non-sequitor uttered.

I have a feeling Jason's fans will keep him around, though. Sam's film was stronger than last time, but not by much; Zach actually made a sequel to the film that almost knocked him off the show last week; and even my boy Will didn't hit all targets with his film about a car that gets revenge on its ungrateful owner (How ironic that the guy who has been characterizing nonverbal characters all along is told by the guest judge that he wished the car had more personality). Adam's film ran first and played at that point like it was potentially the weakest of the bunch, but against the pack this week, his film seems the most like a sure ticket to the final four.

Pick for final three: Will, Jason and Zach.

Geek Out

2007-07-30T23:45:00.000-04:00

This past weekend brought the annual Comicon to San Diego. What was once primarily a comic book convention has grown into a hot opportunity for the industry to trot out genre product.

This year seems from the coverage to have been especially Hollywood-centric with some high-profile panels and exclusive video footage. There's a video bouncing around the web of the Iron Man presentation (heretofore to be referred to in my house as Big Metal Asskicker) that looks like money bait, and JJ Abrams debuted (officially, it had been leaked online by an unscrupulous poster dealer a few days before) the teaser one-sheet for his still-untitled monster movie (pictured above).

Back in 1982, at my last convention here in New York, the most we got were used book dealers, some free posters and buttons and random geek celeb sightings (a nice older man asked me with a shoulder-tap at a stack of paperbacks if I'd mind letting him take a look and I stepped aside without looking, only to find a moment later that it was Isaac Asimov) and the last of the free autograph signings (I wonder if my mother still has the Jimmy Doohan autograph I scored for her).

Those days, genre was hot, but not cool. These days, if you're hip, you've seen Transformers more than twice, you've put your name on a wait list for a Wii at six or seven area stores, you've got 4300 'friends' on your MySpace page that you'll likely never meet. It's cool to be a geek, and there's so much geek media out there that even a genre fan like myself can't keep up (Case in point: Battlestar Galactica? Never saw one episode).

As we enter August, I can't help but think back to the summer of 1982 again, the
last time I remember this much nerd overload. By this point in the summer, I had seen these movies in the theater, some more than once.

E.T. The Extraterrestrial
The Thing
Blade Runner
Poltergeist
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
The Road Warrior
Conan The Barbarian

There's not one movie on that list that wouldn't have me pinned to the couch in seconds should they appear on the tube. If they're playing in HD, just say goodbye and meet me in two hours.

I have a feeling any member of today's target audience would love or has loved these films too, and as a writer that was inspired to write in reaction to the the depth of my appreciation for these movies, finding that writing in genre is not a limiting move is good news indeed.

On The Not

2007-07-25T14:28:00.000-04:00

Fourteen months ago today, I was saying here that the On The Lot website had gone live and I was contemplating submitting a short. In the end, I didn't shoot one (wrote it out, it would have been cute), and when the deadline came up I told myself that I probably would not have shot it in a dazzling enough fashion to get a berth on the show.

Cut to this week, when the final six contestants ran their films. Their assignment was romantic comedy. Of the six that were shown, the only one with romantic spark was a film about the courtship of two office desklamps.

Wouldn't you guess that after this short (directed by the so far reliably charming Will Bigham, check the film out at the link), Carrie Fisher gave him a hard time about having very little dialogue?

My wife jokes that I am the only viewer that didn't give birth to one of the contestants, and while the ratings could never have been expected to be huge, there's one big honking reason why people are lining up to stay away from this show.

The stories suck. The stories onscreen and the story offscreen as well.

Can somebody get these guys some writers? Please?!

They announced the other night that the lucky winners of this week's show will be fortunate enough to feature Jerry O'Connell in their films next week.

Yeah, that'll fix it. Good work.

The first episodes showed some promise. The directors had made it to L.A. only to find they had to pitch a project the next day on one of five predetermined premises to judges Carrie Fisher, Garry Marshall and Brett Ratner. They spent the night preparing, for me a more relatable and compelling scenario than Idol wannabes who can't learn the words to "My Girl". There were interpersonal conflicts and artistic headbutting, the kind of thing you'd expect to see when you load fifty artists into a room and tell them the other 49 are out to beat them. It was good television.

By the end of the first week, there were 24 contestants left, and a new challenge to direct one page of a script on a real set with real actors in one hour, with six directors going home. The promo at the end of the show said to tune back the following Monday to see who would make the final eighteen.

And then the ratings came out.

And that following Monday brought us, instead of the 24 one-page scenes, 18 directors in a live show with a new host and not only no mention of the six who'd gone missing, but none of the internal conflict that had made the first shows so watchable.

I don't know if it was Fox or Mark Burnett or (most likely) the producers of the show who panicked and gutted the show down so much, but the next thing you know they're running one live show a week instead of the promised two-show formula that has been used for voting-public reality competitions thus far, thereby eliminating the last possibility of keeping viewers interested in the next episode.

There are even allegations online that Fox used the directors submission films that second week as though they'd been made in the intervening week, just to cut a week out of the show's timeline. The last two weeks cut two directors instead of one, and now the finale is set for just three weeks from now.

So, what went wrong? Well, certainly the lack of visible star power after Spielberg's name was thrown about so often in promotions. Could it have hurt to have him show up once in a while as a Trump-like figure? Even if it was just pretaped footage of his reaction to the shorts, you'd have him invested in the outcome throughout instead of the inevitable finale appearance.

The main reason this show has failed, however, goes back to the lack of story. Cutting the backstage conflicts paints too much of a glaze on the process. While there are still behind-the-scenes sequences, it's the same damn thing every week with the host appearing and one or two directors leaving, along with thirty-second capsules of the director at work. If you're familiar with The Apprentice, picture a show where all you see is the end result of whatever wacky promotion Trump has the teams perform, but none of the suite footage, no preparation footage, nothing, just a few minutes at some product launch or charity function. Boring. The story is in how they got there to the endpoint. Without it, there is no investment in the contestants.

What is left is the contestants' films and a horribly-produced live show. The lighting alone may have been responsible for one contestant's departure (she looked like someone smudged her upper lip with motor oil before each episode), and the host has no credibility as the most sophisticated ad-lib she seems capable of is, "That was great, guys."

After all this butchery, though, if these films were great, none of the rest would matter to me, and there are bright spots to be found usually once a week. Where these films fail, however, is universal.

These filmmakers aren't writers. The judges keep looking for story and each week they get less meat and more flash. As long as they're being set up with premises and sets and actors (Jerry O'Connell!) and an assembled crew, give them real scripts!

And when one of your contestants gives you an original take on a cliched assignment like romantic comedy, don't give him grief because he didn't make a lamp talk.

Just Like Riding A Bike

2007-07-15T21:44:00.000-04:00

In case you haven't guessed by now, this blog is as much about my own lifelong love/hate relationship with Lady Procrastination than anything else. I haven't so much procrastinated as I have procrastinated about even seeking a solution to my procrastination problem.

A good part of the problem has been physical. I'm a big guy, a big enough guy that guys I thought were big looked at me like I was Godzilla. I'm taller than average, but to be at a healthy weight I think I'd need to be nine-foot-seven. Since this blog is not about playing in the NBA, I think you can figure out that I'm overweight. Being overweight (for those of you water-swilling Speedo-wearing Pilates instructors that might happen to be reading) has its pros and cons. I frequently find that being a 6' 3" bear on the subway means nobody fucks with me when I'm playing Brain Age on my DS. That's a plus. When I get off the train and walk up two flights straight up to the street to go to work, that sucks.

The truth is I'm still mired in bad habits that began when I was young and was sidelined from playing football (I have to say I loved playing and am told I was pretty good, even though I was only 12) because of scoliosis. Coming from a family where everyone is overweight isn't to blame, but it sure didn't help. I've wavered over the years and in the past four or five years have been steadily losing more than I was gaining, just not to the extend I'd like, but still doing so without a plan.

Now that I've been at my new job for two months, the pounds have started to show. My old gig at least kept me on my feet and in motion for most if not all of the day. Now I'm sitting at a desk.

Just over five years ago, I was hired to shoot a cross-country bicycle race called (fittingly enough) Race Across America. I was part of a two-camera crew covering the teams side of the race. I had never heard of the race until two weeks before I was standing in a Holiday Inn parking lot in Portland, Oregon watching these men and women I can only describe as everyday heroes pumping past my lens, grinning through their exertion, too excited to think about the terrifying prospect of racing 3000 miles non-stop to Pensacola, Florida (Here's a shot at the finish line, I'm the goon in the $9 flowered shirt I'd bought across the street). Some of them didn't make it there on their bike, pulling up instead in their team support van to celebrate the finishers. Some of them didn't even make it that far, choosing to turn for home after racking up a 'DNF' (Did Not Finish) next to their name on the standings chart. The following year, one of them didn't make it home at all, losing his life on a stretch of highway in New Mexico to an 18-wheeler. RAAM doesn't race on tracks or on closed roads, but out there on highways, through neighborhoods, across the desert and through the mountains.

I met so many amazing people on that race, all of them there because they were passionate about the sport and the idea that they could take to the road and find out what they were made of. They fell off, got bandaged up and got back on the bike. They scrobbled up meals in seconds and got back on the bike. They slept for twenty minutes and got right back on the bike.

We were driving in the middle of the night through what must have been Oklahoma and caught up to a rider who had lost the ability to keep his head up in a racer's stance. One of his crew members, his former high-school science teacher, devised an impromptu brace of a two-by-four and some duct tape so he could keep racing. He looked like Bob Vila's scarecrow, but there he was riding.

We didn't have it easy ourselves along the way: there were missed turns and bad driving (the third person in our three-man team couldn't shoot video and was there to just drive...and almost killed us all no less than five times over seven days on the road); stretches of time where we couldn't find the next team ahead, only to have to drive back 36 hours to cover the next-closest team; sleep deprivation and arguments over nothing more than what was on the radio. Despite that, I watched these guys ride and thought that I wanted to get on a bike and get fit, not to race 3000 miles, but just to get myself healthy. My partner on the race said I'd be riding the race myself in five years. I doubted that, but I didn't think I'd go that long without getting on my own bike.

I just finished a stretch of late shifts where I was working by myself for the last few hours with minimal work, the perfect time to get some writing in, but I've felt so groggy by the time everyone else leaves that the most I managed was some outlining and spitballing before I'd lose concentration and check the Mets score.

I got tired of that.

Today I bought a bike. I'm playing it safe for now, I only spent a little money, but I hopped on this afternoon and shakily took my first ride up the block in twenty years. It was hot and muggy today, but I'm pretty sure I'd have been sweating as much as I did even in November.

And I can't wait to go back out tomorrow.

Happy 4th

2007-07-03T20:54:00.000-04:00

I was thinking about patriotic movies and how the climate has changed so much over the course of cinema, and while thinking about WWII-era films, my mind came to a screeching halt on Casablanca. The rest of that train of thought derailed as I had to find the ending on YouTube right that second.

Here it is, a great ending of one of the best-written movies ever. Enjoy and Happy 4th of July to you.

Now If Someone Can Explain That Vertical Keyboard To Me...

2007-06-27T14:21:00.000-04:00

Just a quick survey from the multitude of visitors to this site (stop snickering)...

What software are you using for writing? Are you using a story software as well? What was your progression to this point and what would your perfect solution give you?

Just to let you know where I'm coming from, I'm currently a Final Draft user, but through my old job I received a free license for Movie Magic Screenwriter and Writer's Dream Kit, the latter of which I've been using to build the story for my current script. I've recently been checking out Scrivener, although once I typed int. and the application didn't immediately pop that into all caps as I'm used to with Final Draft, I scratched my head (perhaps it's a preferences thing). I'm also using a Mac, but I'm not angling to turn this into a PC v. Mac debate, my personal belief is whatever works for you works for you.

Some of you may also be just using pen and paper, which is totally cool, but it's remarkable to me how alien the idea seems to me now that I've been using a computer for years. I personally went pretty early to computers for writing, having started by using WordPerfect on a Data General One in high school, printing out on a dot matrix printer with the slowest and noisiest print head you can imagine. It was a machine gun and every letter hit the page like a brand.

Comment away.

Update

2007-06-10T23:57:00.000-04:00

Hello, long time no post, I know, but it's not because I don't want to, it's just been an interesting month or so settling into the new daygig. The funny thing about the switch was that I'd at first said to myself, "Hah! No more working nights!"

I've just finished a block where I worked until 9:30 pm all but three nights of the last four weeks.

The work is so much different now, though. If my wife called to check up on me at the old gig, she would invariably find me in the middle of three or four fires I was scrambling to douse. Now I'm relaxed and able to catch up like a human being.

I'm also able to use downtime to think about story, so I've begun writing a first draft of a script I've been outlining for too long. It's coming out a slightly different flavor than I'd planned tonally, but I'm going to keep moving and not look back until I'm done with the first pass.

The wife and I may even grab a movie next weekend. I feel like I'm sneaking out after Mom goes to bed.

Turning The Knob

2007-05-17T20:38:00.001-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, I was visiting the wife at her office along with our son, and since we wanted to leave Manhattan together in our car and it wasn't the end of the day, The Prince and I strolled off (literally, he was in his very smart red Inglesina Zippy) to explore midtown through his eyes.

So I took him to Grand Central Terminal, right into the main concourse. I love that site, it's just an immense space, I can't help but think of this rather than Times Square as the actual Center of the Universe, it seems like every being on the planet passes through there on a daily basis.

I think about what must have gone into the construction of the damn thing. With the same plans, if it were built today, I can't help but think it would take decades before completed.

I was thinking along those lines as I do when alone there, but now I was there with my boy, wondering just what he was thinking. He was smiling, so no worries there, but was he fascinated? Did he wonder where all the people came from, where they were going? Does he feel any fear at being amid hundreds of strangers?

And that's when the writer kicked in. It sounds awful, I know, but I suddenly thought that a nightmare-worse-case parallel universe version of our visit to GCT would make a pretty gripping story. Just not a feature. Believe it or not, I'm tossing the idea like a coin, heads it's a story/novella/novel/whatever, tails it's a Law & Order episode.

I'm still settling into the new job, there's a learning curve, but I've got commute time back to think on the train, to read, to sort through ideas. This is a compelling idea, and I'll be thinking on it a good amount.

There is something that gives me pause, however, and it's the thought of taking a look behind that creaky old door everyone's got in the dark corner of their mind. I like my life right now, I'm not driving home from work furious, I'm spending weekends with the family, the wife and I are happy and The Prince is at a great age where everything is data for his spongy brain. Where I was ten years ago, alone, unhappy and professionally stagnant seems like a million years past. Why would I want to tap into bad thoughts?

To temper my mood while writing this piece, I'll write an Office spec as well. That should keep Tom on an even keel. I'll let you know if Dwight goes postal and kills Kevin.

My Watch Says Half-Past "Put Up", Rapidly Approaching "Shut Up"

2007-05-08T23:00:00.000-04:00

So, what the hell was that all about?

When I began this blog last year, the central point of the thing was how to go about launching a screenwriting career while working at a daygig that was pretty demanding. I couldn't have known then that 'pretty demanding' was going to smash-cut into 'all-consuming'. You know about the long hours, the last-minute-shifting schedule. These were elements of the job that were to be tolerated if I was going to get to do the part of the job I was happy with. In the end, these elements merged with a new force, a change in the people my company was typically targeting to occupy my position.

Previously, there was a place in my company within store management for the technically-minded. I was the regular Joe manager, the guy who'd worked his way up from sales associate. Having that sort of history always garnered surprise and awe from managers from other stores, they knew it was not the norm, either in retail or with my company. I even had my eyes set last year on going further, hoping to take the last step before the store manager title into a senior assistant title. It was too much to hope for, I found, as not only did the job require intense (and pointless...it was almost never a predictor of what would happen next) analysis of sales data on a daily basis, but the decision was made by the regional director to hire for that position only store-manager level candidates from other retailers and demote them rather than promote from within. There was only one example of a store manager who'd worked up from an associate position, and he was in a small market thousands of miles away and has since dropped from the company rolls. I was in the largest-expanding market in the company and they were aggressively searching for those who are ready RIGHT NOW. I wasn't ready, and when my boss and I had progressively-worsening conversations about whether I wanted to get there, I found through my schedule and assigned responsibilities that I was being marginalized and shut out.

In the Age of Litigation, the effective manager is one who can convince the employee that hard work does not always equal a job well done so that when that employee is pushed out, there's no impetus to sue. I was castigated on a daily basis, every move questioned and re-questioned. One of my superiors slipped one day and told me how in her last job she was adept at "working people out of the system", and she drew very quiet when I asked her how that was performed, knowing I now knew her role in what was being done with me. Tasks were arbitrarily added to and removed from my responsibilities and the time previously scheduled to perform them was reduced or cancelled on the fly so I never had solid footing on what I'd be doing one day to the next. I grew depressed, a condition not helped by spending most every night at work and talking to my wife more on the phone than in person.

So, the last six weeks or so have been spent searching for a new job, and last Friday I found one, a good one with room to grow within a very, very successful (did I mention very) advertising/PR conglomerate as an IT tech. I accepted the new job Friday night at 7 pm and walked into the old job Saturday morning at 9:45 to resign.

The stress hasn't all run off yet. Since the new job starts so soon, I didn't get to say goodbye to everyone, so there's a little guilt. There's the anxiety of a new job, new people. A new commute, not knowing yet whether the vagaries of the MTA will play in my favor.

But, no more late night paint jobs, no more closing shift/opening shift combos, no more monthlong stretches where I'm scheduled to work until 10 pm every night while my single and/or child-free colleagues enjoy the 8-5 shift. No more angst about whether I'm any good at the job I don't want, no more weekends spent at work while my wife and son go off to enjoy the company of friends. A quick glance at my May schedule shows me at the store after 9 pm fifteen times out of a possible twenty-two days of work. After I quit and spoke to my boss briefly Saturday morning, I drove home in the daylight feeling like I was playing hooky. I sat at home by myself on a Saturday morning reading a magazine. Later that afternoon, I took a drive with the family to an impromptu barbeque. Not a major barbeque requiring requesting off weeks or even months in advance, but a "hey, come on over, beers and burgers" barbeque with friends. I watched The Prince run off to play with kids who'd somehow grown to twice their remembered size. I cracked open a Sam Adams, helped The Prince climb onto the swing set, listened to my wife laugh on the other side of the yard.

The next move is to set myself a daily/weekly schedule, when I'll be working, when I'll be spending family time, when I'll be writing. Then I'll be pushing.

Because if I can't do it now that my old reasons for not being able to get it done are gone, it'll be easier to just do it than to come up with new reasons.

Once More With Feeling

2007-04-25T01:36:00.000-04:00

Last year, I typed a post while I was at work at 1:15 am waiting for painters to finish their after-hours spotwork at my worksite. I find myself here again in the same situation, tempered a bit by the fact that I have a routine late-night shift each week, albeit one that ends typically at midnight. It's 1:30 now and the painters think they'll be here until 4:30.

So last year's outrage is gone, I knew about this paint job all along, hell, I booked it myself. I'm bored as hell, but I'm laughing inside because every so often one of the painters huffs and puffs and groans like he's in a bad porno and it's damn funny. Okay, it's 1:30 am funny, but after all, it's 1:30 am.

Last year, however much I hated the shifting schedule I live with in this gig, I felt inclined to stick with it since that was what I had. This year, though, I've got wheels in motion to change the gig to something more in tune with what I do best, or at least what I do that's a marketable skill thus far. Since I have a friend that was dooced out of his job last year, I'm reluctant to give details, but I'm 90% sure my days of getting home at 5 am are drawing to a close.

Always in Threes, Aren't They?

2007-04-12T16:58:00.000-04:00

I'll be getting back to regular posting soon, I hope, I'll update you then on the big doin's over this way, but I had to post about three men that passed away this week that I'd never met but still had an effect on my life.

Kurt Vonnegut died Wednesday night at the age of 84 after suffering injuries in a fall at home in Manhattan's Turtle Bay neighborhood several weeks ago. Back when I was a more avid reader than I am now (I spend too much time driving to read, I used to do most of my reading on trains), Vonnegut was a name I meant to get to, wanting to read Slaughterhouse Five in his words after having the movie version etched on my brain during my senior year of high school. Vonnegut was a Serious Author who still had enough of a sense of humor to pop up in "Back To School" as himself, hired to write a term paper on his own work by Rodney Dangerfield (prompting a great punchline from Dangerfield's professor: "Whoever wrote that paper doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut."), and that alone made me think he must have been a cool guy.

Stan Daniels died last Friday in L.A., leaving behind his wife of 50 years and four children. Mr. Daniels had been a writer on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show", enough of a pedigree to earn him demigod status in my head, but he also was one of the creators of "Taxi", which I watched religiously during its network run and afterward. That formula of good character ensembles working off each other is my favorite sitcom archetype, and "Taxi" had so many very strong characters and great setups to let them gallop through. To paraphrase, goodnight, Mr. Daniels. ("Harrumph.")

The last notable death this week I just read about in the paper this morning. Actor Roscoe Lee Browne died Wednesday in Los Angeles after a bout with cancer. Mr. Browne was one of those actors that could immediately class up the room when he entered a scene, he had such great presence. My wife is a fan of "The Cosby Show" and there's an episode where Mr. Browne and Christopher Plummer get together onscreen and threaten to make it "The Browne and Plummer Show", and that's an episode I'll stop switching channels at 3 am to catch. My primary memory of Mr. Browne, however, is his voice, that great rumbling profundo could always hook me in. When I was 12 and had "Star Wars" on the brain, the only way I could experience even a part of "Star Wars" at home was by listening to my "The Story of Star Wars" 8-track tape over and over, narrated by Mr. Browne. Many a night was spent with Mr. Browne's being the last voice I'd hear before falling asleep.

Rest well, gentlemen, and thank you.

Head, Meet Pavement

2007-03-26T00:13:00.000-04:00

Okay, not as drastic as that, but not far off. No details right now, but it does mean less blog time. I'll let you know what's up soon.

Bodies in Space

2007-03-23T17:04:00.000-04:00

I'd thought when I finally watched The Departed a few weeks back that I couldn't possibly relate to any of the characters. After all, I'm neither a cop nor a criminal nor someone who is one pretending to be the other. I'm neither DiCaprio's jittery and vulnerable schizoid nor Damon's slick and defensive fast-talker, plus no one's shot me in the head lately. So while I respected the movie's workmanship from start to finish, I didn't feel it with the same thud to the chest as Goodfellas or Mean Streets, both of which offered a protagonist that thought he had things under control until events proved otherwise. It seemed like everyone in The Departed had most or all of their plates spinning at once, so the tension wasn't tied up in whether they'd fall, it was just a matter of when.

I just got through a week of little sleep and work-induced stress, and I came home late one night and spotted the Netflix envelope with the Departed disc waiting to go back (yes, if you've been waiting, I'm sorry, I'll send it off tomorrow), and my state of mind at that moment made me think perhaps I did relate to a character, a major character (I won't reveal who, no spoilers) who in the course of his dangerous but routine work finds himself out of his comfort zone and is thrown off a building by some thugs who glumly admit later were probably too hard on him. This major character puts up a brave face, but the circumstances overwhelm him and the next thing that goes through his head is a few square feet of alleyway pavement. It was here that I found the character I can relate to.

My job still affects me like an exposed nerve, always wondering whether or when someone will point and shout, "Faker!" I don't hate going to work, although there are aspects about it I would rather not have to deal with. I met my boss for the first time when he interviewed me for a different position with the company, one more in tune with my experience. He was impressed, but said later he didn't hire me because I was currently in a management position and he felt I was on a better career track there, a source of conflict that has arisen a few times over the past two years. He and I have had multiple discussions about what I'd like to do with the company, and while he still thinks I should stay a manager, he has promised to support a decision to go in a new direction should one present itself. A year ago he lined up a last-minute interview for me in another company location in a different role, more of a teaching position. We've talked about where to find other types of roles within the company. I thought the guy had my back.

Last weekend, however, a colleague told me something in secret. My colleague had been hand-picked by the boss to present a new product at a big convention in the next few months, the privilege of being able to send someone the result of our strong results over the past year. I was happy when I found out, my colleague is a good presenter and I respect his work. However, the product he'd be presenting is almost completely unfamiliar to him beyond its basic conceits, and he'd be presenting to people ranging from amateur to expert. When he was polled by the corporate office on his experience, his answers were immediately called into question and my boss was told he'd have to make another choice. My boss pulled my colleague into his office and told him he'd resubmit his name and try to coach him on the answers this time, but my colleague told him he was uncomfortable with that idea and in fact was now sure he should not be asked to go, but instead felt someone they both knew who had stronger experience in the product and over ten years professional experience in the field should be selected in his place. The boss asked who that was and my colleague said my name.

"HE knows that stuff?" was the response.

The idea I had that my boss, who is doing very well in the company, would think of my talents when the time came, may be a total illusion. I've got a one-on-one scheduled with him in the next few days, so I may wind up finding out I'm being sent instead of my colleague, but I'm prepared to be passed over again.

And why, do you ask, do I care if I'm trying to become a screenwriter?

Because I'm realistic. I have faith in my talent and skill and if I hand you a script, you can be sure I like what I've done. But I won't think I can be a professional screenwriter until a producer shakes my hand and gives me a job. Until that point, I need to know I'm not wasting forty-plus hours a week just to get thrown off a building one day by circumstance.

Still here, still pushing...

2007-03-22T13:47:00.000-04:00

It's just been a late-night kind of week for me, four late shifts in a row and I'm still up in the mornings with The Prince, so not a lot of computer time. I'll be back tomorrow. Stay cool.

Mom and Pop Operation

2007-03-14T01:02:00.000-04:00

Last week, The Prince underwent a bilateral eardrum incision, a fancier way of saying he got tubes in his ears. In case you're unfamiliar, the surgeon makes a very fine cut in the eardrum and pops in a tiny tube to allow fluid that would normally build behind the membrane and become infected to drain out the ear canal. The Prince had the operation just in time, too, he was working on a good-sized headcold that would have guaranteed Ear Infections 8 and 9 and ten days of antibiotics.

My wife and I brought him in early in the morning for the first scheduled surgical slot, a real blessing from the hospital staff (due in no small part to a call from his neurologist a few floors up at my wife's behest) since he wasn't able to eat beforehand. We just scooped him out of bed and threw on his coat over his pajamas. No sooner had we made ourselves comfortable in the waiting room were we called into the recovery ward to get him ready, and thirty minutes later we were carrying him to the O.R.. My wife went in with him while they administered the general anesthetic and then was shown to the waiting room to join me. The procedure was quick, about twenty minutes and he was back in recovery, but that twenty minutes was torture in my head because I don't think a two year old boy and general anesthetic belong in the same room. We were in a great hospital, one dedicated to the care of children, so my fears were not based in any fact, just my own fermenting imagination. My wife, God love her, showed no such worry, even if she felt it, I had no clue. I hope I held up as well externally. In my mind's eye, I looked more like a scared little boy than The Prince did.

We met him in recovery, and he was yelling at everyone. Maybe he felt he'd been tricked into sleeping, or was looking for the balloons the nurse had said he'd be blowing up as a way to get him ready to don the oxygen mask. He didn't even want to watch The Wiggles, usually at least a minute's distraction. He would allow me to hold him, but refused to entertain the idea of a nap, refusing even a sip of juice even though he was cleared to eat and drink. He just wanted to yell.

Thinking back on it now, I wonder how I was in the hospital at his age. I had contracted a heavy-duty fever and was admitted and my parents were sent home, neither one allowed to remain as is the norm these days. All I can picture of that stay comes from an anecdote my mother is fond of telling about the Playtex plastic bottles that were new then. The nurses called her in to supply whatever bottles I drank from at home since I was hurling the hospital's regular glass bottles across the room. As my mother tells it, the nurses used a full box of the little insert baggies over the next 24 hours, unable to get past the novelty of the new-fangled bottle. When I came back to the hospital the next year when I somehow gave myself a hernia, she noted that the pediatric nurses were all using Playtex bottles.

There are seldom mentions of my father in these recounted stories, but I know he was there backing up my mother, supporting his children. My father was a great deal like me, neither of us would be accused of talking too much in new situations. We both lucked out and married women who ably carry the verbal burden in this arena. Where we differ is that while I can use his moments of strength as a model, my father was improvising, going on instinct. He didn't have the memory of a father's example in these situations because his father wasn't much of a presence in his childhood.

My son eventually succumbed with a sigh as I rubbed his back, reaching out to his mother for the juice she'd had ready for him. He settled into my arms and relaxed, only stirring when the blood-pressure cuff around his calf inflated every so often. Finally, the nurse told us his vitals were fine, he could go home. He refused to let us cut off the ID bracelet around his ankle, going for the juvenile house-arrest look. We practically ran to the car to get him home and all three of us fell asleep within an hour even though it was 10 am.

One Bucket of Phlegm Later...

2007-03-12T23:51:00.000-04:00

Feeling much better this week than last, thanks to the makers of Levaquin, the antibiotic that wrung me like a car wash rag until I was so dried out my calves started to cramp. Still some residual congestion, but since it came late to the party, I'm not surprised it's still hanging out down there nursing its beer, looking through my CDs (hell, man, put on the Van Morrison and I'll even b.s. with you for a bottle or two before I kick you out).

I saw two of the blogs I link to The Artful Writer and Man Bytes Hollywood are mentioned in Script magazine's article on screenwriting blogs. As an unapologetic cheapskate, I only read part of the article while standing in a Borders near my work, so I'm not sure what the thrust of the article is, but it's good to see a nice guy like David getting some cred out there in the world. Craig's probably a nice guy too, my Staten Island bias notwithstanding, but he's swimming in cred right now as long as people keep going to see spoof movies (and they will, I think). And don't look at me like I'm some freakshow for reading screenwriting mags in the bookstore and leaving them on the rack, I see you doing it too, and at 7 bucks a pop at the newsstand, it's no wonder.

Ken Levine performed nothing less than a public service for writers last week by running scenes from Steve Gordon's first draft of Arthur on his blog By Ken Levine. My favorite of the three is this one, and although I can see why it was cut (some of the dialogue might be considered on-the-nose), I can visualize it so easily and there's no mistaking the tone and pacing he intended, it's right there on the page. Thank you, Steve Gordon, and thank you Ken for running the scenes.

With a full year having passed since I began the Push, I was thinking back on my progress and found myself thinking again about this encounter, my Irish guilt not allowing me to let it go. It was a brief conversation, about twenty minutes, and it was more of a 'getting-to-know-you' thing than a real interview, yet while I knew then and know now that her project about a young girl of Eastern European descent and her family isn't the first job an agent would try to line up for a writer who tends to toil in high-concept genre work (I seem to remember her calling it My Big Fat Armenian Prom), I still felt a connection toward the end of the conversation. I also remember that it would have paid in the very low four-figures. Like as low as you can go and still be considered four figures. I e-mailed over two scripts, both R-rated thrillers, against my better judgment but at the producer's insistence. Hell, even that felt good that someone wanted to read my stuff, but I thought it would turn her off. She said she wanted to see how I handle a full story and characters over the course of a feature, so off they went, and so did she, never to be heard from again. Our mutual contact, an old friend of mine who's a Real-Life Working Screenwriter™, had a film going with her that seems to have stalled, so perhaps she's dropped the whole racket and moved to Nome for all I know, but I can't escape the feeling that I screwed that one up.

Did You Catch The Number Of That Bus?

2007-03-06T08:30:00.000-05:00

Ten days ago, I was on my way to work and I felt a tightness in the belly. By the time I made it to work, it was fullblown nausea, but I was able to get by. The next day was much worse, and by the end of my shift I was a wreck, yet I couldn't get out of a work committment the next day, so on I scrambled. I've had a constant headache, some dizziness, fever/chills, hacking cough. It really has felt like I've been hit by a bus like poor Zeljko Ivanek on Lost a few weeks back. I thought I was better over the weekend, but it was just the bug moving from my gut to my chest, and now my throat and lungs are hamburger. When I saw my doctor last week, he shrugged his usual shrug and said, "We don't know how to fight these things except with rest and lots of fluids." He added later, "If you call me in a few days to say you're coughing up dark green phlegm, we'll try an antibiotic." Who says there isn't foreshadowing in reality? I now have an antibiotic and it already feels like it's working.

The Answer Is...No,But The Push Goes On.

2007-03-02T23:00:00.000-05:00

So here we are, a year after I started this blog in an earnest attempt to spark a grab at a writing career. I came into this game sick of the books, the lectures (to be fair, all of which have gone unattended by me, but I seem to get all of their advertising), the videos and the debate between other strivers I'd encountered online over which teacher/bible/act structure/margin setting/brad was correct. I suspected then, as now, that these debates mainly existed so the initiator could validate their own choices, kind of like that mutt you see at a sports bar during a football Sunday with a Cowboys jersey, even though you live in Baltimore and you're not even playing the Cowboys that week, but this goon has to jump in your face and tell you why his is America's team and yours isn't worthy of discussion.

Lately I'd been trying to find online guidance through Zoetrope (dot) com, and while I'm sure there are some able-minded folk there and I got a little bit of genuinely thought-out criticism, the atmosphere there descended into thuggery. Opinions weren't to be valued, there were to be pissed on and spray-painted over with your own. Just as I was on my last few weeks there, Scott The Reader spotted my name on a posting and contacted me, having known each other years back. He told me about his blog and I liked it a lot. The more I thought about his blog, the more I wanted to try one out myself, and I thought it would be a good idea to use mine to track a goal-driven effort to get noticed 3000 miles away from the action with no representation.

In the year that passed, however, "The One Year Push" became less about The Push and more about The Obstacles: The Daygig, The Disappointments, The Procrastination. The obstacles I'll face shouldn't be stopping me, they should be inspiring me. I'm awfully good at letting myself stop progress so I can rewrite what I don't like or throw out the page. I should be getting the hell out of my own way more often than I am.

Something else happened over the past four months that impacted my life both inside and outside The Push. It's a personal issue within my family, a health issue for my son. He's fine, and the condition he's got will mean very minor routine medication, but for two months, my wife and I could not think of anything else. Our focus on his well-being pulled us both off our own tracks. She's the stronger one, she's back on track now, learning more about the condition, talking regularly with his doctors. She's better at this than I could be, asks all the questions in the room instead of thinking of them five minutes after we've left like I'm apt to do. My family consistently inspires me to be better and will continue to be the driving force to my Push.

And here we are in March 2007. Over the past twelve months, I've entered two of the most renowned screenwriting competitions (yes, lost, but you can't win without entering), talked to a producer about hiring me to weave her story into a screenplay (she took my "I'll say I'll call you but really won't" rejection virginity) and laid a bit of my soul out in the open. I've tried a new (oy, is it time-consuming) manner in which to build a script before typing FADE IN:, a 180-degree departure from my usual approach. I've corralled my stable of ideas and picked out the healthiest ones to prepare for market.

I'm ready for the second year. Hope you are too.

Time for a Clean Slate

2007-02-02T21:41:00.000-05:00

It's February 2nd, just about a month away from the official one-year mark of my push, and while I like the progress I've made about approaching screenwriting, I can't say I gave the push much priority. In my defense, there have been things going on I have not mentioned here that I'm not 100% comfortable with discussing in this venue, but there have also been nights where I vegged on the couch watching Firefly rather than writing.

This past month has been busy and mind-consuming with one of those 'things' mentioned above, so nothing's really gotten done. I'm looking to make March 1st, 2007 the start date of the renewed Push, but there may also be something I do this month that would also mark a progression toward making a run at being a screenwriter that I'll get back to you on. Time is a thief and I may lose grip on the slippery bastard, but I'm going to try.

Thanks for your support and I'll see you on March 1st. Peace.

Open Season?

2007-01-08T23:41:00.000-05:00

Would you believe me if I told you it's not you, it's me? It's really not your fault I haven't posted, it's mine.

Having a retail job means you're a stranger at home from Thanksgiving until Little Christmas, and now that it's all over and I'm beginning to recover from the communal chestcold everyone east of the Allegheny River has suffered through this year, I'm jumping all over getting my next script written.

Speaking of spec scripts, does anyone else think we might see a Perfect Storm of spec sales hitting the industry at the end of the month? Between the threat of a strike and the post-Sundance frenzy, I've been reading that it's the right time to get a spec out there. What have y'all been thinking?

Joy To You

2006-12-24T23:30:00.000-05:00

I worked today and I'll be working on the 26th, and if you've worked in retail, you know what that means, so do like me and take advantage of the holiday to reflect and rejuvenate.

Kiss your loved ones, for they keep you standing, and be there for them in their push.

Did You Just Call Me Paranoid?You're One Of Them, Aren't You?

2006-12-10T11:00:00.000-05:00

I've dabbled in paranoia in my days and have usually been called on it by a loved one or a work friend. I grew up in a family of seven, you had to have one eye over your shoulder or you'd find some sort of target on your back, the temptation was too great to not give in to deflecting blame onto someone else. We weren't the moneyed sort, either, so even the outside world became a scapegoat for certain matters like not getting the promotion or even getting fired, it couldn't have anything to do with us, it was THEM.

It wasn't until I lived with The Queen for a while that some of the onion-layers of paranoia were peeled off me, but there's still enough to nag at me once in a while, and when a trusted friend sets you up and then turns on you like one did today, even a recovering paranoid's sponsor would have to admit it does indeed look like that trusted friend and even his friends back home were out to pick my pocket.

Who was that friend? Let's call him Schmeevo.

The wife and I took in Schmeevo about two years ago, offered him space in our place, let him enjoy our favorite shows with us. He wasn't cheap to house, either, he cost us a few hundred just to organize the shows we wanted to record, but he said he'd keep doing that for us as long as he lived. Pretty fair shake, I thought.

Schmeevo was there for us on nights when The Queen or I were up late feeding The Prince during his infancy, ready to watch what he'd recorded for us earlier in the week. Sometimes, when I was at work, I'd realize I'd forgotten to tell Schmeevo what I wanted to see later, but I could get in touch with him over the Internet, and when I'd get home, he'd be waiting, happy to have helped me out and never bragging about having come to my rescue.

As our relationship grew, I began to notice some things about Schmeevo that I didn't like so much. Sometimes he'd forget to which channel to tune, or even insist that he was tuned to the right channel even when faced with proof of the contrary. He just didn't seem to care. Sometimes he'd show up to watch a show looking a total mess, burping and gagging throughout, but before he'd get so obnoxious that I'd have to call his old friends to pick him up, he became well-behaved again and my doubts would pass. Even when I heard that some of his cousins might be better at recording shows for me, recording two at once or even, if I were willing to spend a lot more money, record shows in HD, I'd wave off the thought of parting with Schmeevo. Besides, his cousins didn't want money up front in exchange for promising to help us out for life, they wanted a little bit each month, adding up over time to much more money than I'd paid up front to Schmeevo. Plus, I heard that some of Schmeevo's cousins were offering to send the shows they'd recorded to PCs but not to any of my or anyone else's Macs, and when a Mac owner would ask for their shows, Schmeevo's friends would cough uncomfortably and look in the other direction.

A couple of weeks ago, Schmeevo woke up looking an unhealthy green color and passed me a bold-faced note that he'd encountered a problem and would need up to three hours to figure out the solution. We gave him the time, we were concerned for him, but over the course of the weekend, he kept bringing up some similar problem, sometimes mere seconds after he'd said he was okay. He bounced back for about a week, then got a bad case of the hiccups, interrupting everything we tried to watch, even The Prince's kids shows. I tried talking to him to no avail, then called his friends for help. They asked me a few questions that made me think they'd been through this same problem before, then unceremoniously told me Schmeevo was dead to them and they couldn't help me. I was stunned by their cavalier attitude, but when I pressed further, all they could think about was reminding me that Schmeevo's promise to me was strictly from Schmeevo and that it had died with him. Schmeevo just stared at me as always, one antenna cockily bent to one side.

And wouldn't you figure that this week some enterprising Mac user had figured out a simple way to ask his own friend Schmeevo to send him a show, and before I could try this myself, my Schmeevo quit. It's like his friends knew I'd take advantage of this request of my Schmeevo and they killed him rather than let him do me that favor. He died with some of our most-treasured recordings, shows I know he'd have sent to me if he'd wanted to.

Now Schmeevo's shell is in my basement, his friends having declined to pick him up. To help me adjust, my wife went out and found one of his distant cousins, Deaver, hanging out at the office of our cable provider. He's pledged to pick up where Schmeevo left off, even doing that two-shows-at-once thing and working with HD. Even so, he's not the same. He doesn't speak as well as Schmeevo did, and sometimes he doesn't understand what I'm trying to say. Last night, when The Amazing Race ran past 9 pm due to late football, Deaver just stopped at 9 and switched over to ogle Tyra and some hot models and left us puzzled as to who won the race. He does get us very good recordings, however, better than Schmeevo ever did, and if he ever decides to quit, we can bring him back to that office and find someone to take his place, I'll bet.

So goodbye, Schmeevo. You were good to us at first, when the money we gave you was still in your pocket, but when the money was gone and we weren't going to drop some cash on you every month, you decided you had better things to do. Maybe I'll exact my revenge by swapping out your brain someday. It would serve you right, turncoat.

You Know The Drill...also titled, When The Fuck Will I Wake Up?

2006-11-29T23:52:00.000-05:00

Hello all, hope your holidays are going well. The Royal Family (which would be The Aforementioned Prince, My Queen and myself, The King of Huh, Did I Just Say The Wrong Thing?) spent Thanksiving with my relatives, and although I'm content to spend any off-work time with just my own family, I have to say it was a nice day. The Prince was a hit with my family, and I commisserated with my brother about our respective job-scouting affairs.

In fact, by the time I went to work the day after, the dreaded SuperFriday/Black Friday/Ninth Circle of Retail Hell, I was relaxed and feeling good about working. The home office has loosened some restrictions we had in dealing with customers, leading to less confrontations, and my responsibilities have changed somewhat to where I am doing some of the tasks that I was not privy to in the past, like screening and hiring candidates and the more sedate (if boring) process of HR paperwork. The holiday season is hectic and it will be January before I'm fully moved into the new responsibilities, but there's a novelty to the place I haven't had in a while.

Except...

[Activate Complain-o-Blog]

There's a reason some of the things I was saddled with for a long time stayed with me, and that's because I could actually do them. Generally speaking, most retail managers you'll encounter are exceptional at people motivation and planning and are not so great with technical gruntwork. My colleagues, each with their own talents, nonetheless fit this profile. If you handed them a hammer, they'd use it to hold down their stack of previous-year sales reports.

So, it follows that technical tasks fall to me. We've finally filled our last open management spot, and I'm happy to say that guy will capably take over these tasks, but there was one major task still niggling at me that I had to accomplish, one involving---cue the horrified gasps from handy husbands around the world---the use of my own power tools.

We wanted something done outside of what the company would normally do. One of the great things about my place is that we're trying to do the little things better, and this task would do just that, an organizational job that would save a lot of space in the backroom. I initially took on the responsibility of getting the company to do it, but when they punted back to me, I was forced to run with the ball. I've had to put the job off a bit, but the boss was getting itchy, so I brought my stuff down and went to work today. All was going well until my drill slipped off the ladder I was on and cracked.

Okay, no big deal, you're thinking, get a new drill.

It just so happens that right when the drill fell, I'd been on a train of thought, a train that started at my shoulder, the source of some pain over the last few weeks and especially that moment as I was trying to hoist a sheet of lumber up to the ceiling. The train led to my wallet, lighter from fronting the cost of renting a truck to haul the lumber to my job. From there, the train led to my brain, where the wee drunken men running my thought process were wondering why I hadn't insisted we hire a contractor to do the job.

The train screeched to a halt when my drill snapped on the linoleum, pulling into Indignation Station, the stop I frequently arrive at to go to work. Now I was pissed because I knew what my boss' response would be when I told him I wanted to know whether he thought I should ask the company to replace my personal property that was damaged while I was saving them $150 an hour in labor costs. As it turned out, I was right on the money. If nothing else, my boss is protective of his employer.

After a moment to ruminate on the situation, however, he did say he'd see what provision the company could make. After months of advising me to follow his lead on how to motivate those in my command but still sometimes blithely shutting me down or outright ignoring me, he still shot first, but then remembered to ask himself the question later, the question being how well he was setting an example. So he says he'll go to bat for me. I'm guarded...after all, this is the guy who told me the job I'd been trying to land for a year wasn't right for me, I'd be better off in the job I'd tolerated on the way...but I believe him.

It's a shame, my drill was a gift from good friends on my 40th birthday. It wasn't fancy or packed with superfluous accessories. Instead, it was well-balanced and had a light trigger, but in the end, I'll have to get myself a new drill.

And I'll never bring it to work again.

Two-Thirds of the Way

2006-11-04T14:05:00.000-05:00

Yes, I'm having second act problems.

I noted to myself the other day that it was November 1st, the eight-month mark in my One Year Push. I'm not disappointed, I know so much more now about what I need to do to produce more consistent results with my writing, the problem is actually doing it. I also don't have much of a 'what-next' plan. My one real deep contact within the business has actually been out-of-touch awhile, I feel funny just asking him right off the bat for help, even though he's been nothing but encouraging.

So I'm a long way behind in having my four samples ready to shop. As soon as I finish this post, I'll be continuing work on the outline/storyform for one of my newer scripts (a reader had asked what software, it's Writer's Dream Kit, I got it gratis through work and it's a limited version of Dramatica that's surprisingly full of features). Even if this choice to try the software solution to my outlining problems doesn't work out, it's giving me the opportunity to hash this stuff out before starting page one.

A year was a dream deadline, a manner of making myself concentrate. I'm wondering what March 1st will have in store for me.

Did I Just Get Bit In The Ass?

2006-10-17T10:11:00.000-04:00

So I'm looking at AICN this morning and see an announcement that broke in The Hollywood Reporter about an upcoming comic book named "Blood on the Tracks", concerning a vampire menacing the NYC subway system.

That loud sound you just heard was the girding of my loins (I'm sorry, I'm just trying to find a polite way to say I thought I was going to poop my pants).

Because one of my finished scripts, Underground, frankly the one complete script that I think measures best whatever amount of talent I have to offer right now, is a horror/comedy about a vampire menacing the NYC subway system. As an amateur screenwriter, I had to get the vampire script out of my system, just like most of the rest of you.

(Well, okay, I wrote two vampire scripts, my very first was The Old Guard, about old movie stars that owe their longevity to being vampires.)

What I wanted to do with Underground was combine a NYC comedy with elements of horror and some spy-movie touches as well, I figured that would make an interesting fit and I think I pulled it off (of course now I want to print out and re-read, thanks for reminding me to look at a page rather than a monitor, Scott). I pictured it through rewrites as directed by a Die Hard-level John McTiernan (as opposed to a Rollerball-era John McTiernan), a widescreen high-gloss thrill ride that checks out peripheral characters to give a global picture of how the central story affects everyone else.

I hadn't really expected to shop this around as more than a sample, but with this very similar project now being developed, should I try to sell it? Or is it sunk?

Don't Bury Me...I'm Not Dead!

2006-09-27T22:58:00.000-04:00

I'm still about, folks, still pushing away to a lesser degree. Daygig is exhausting, but we just got back from Disney a few days ago and I'm grateful for the opportunity to enjoy my incredible family (no far-reaching pun intended there).

You'll recall I had asked some months back how folks start their process on a new project as my jump-right-in-blind-and-stupid technique was not always effective, especially without the tequila. Since I'm generally tech-savvy, I decided to try a software application to help me develop a new idea I really liked. So far, so good, it's forcing me to write backstory, think out characters and illuminate my cluttered-closet mind. I'll let you know how it turns out.

I also got back my Nicholl and Austin rejection letters. If you've moved on in these competitions, pat yourself on the back for me, cheers to you.

More Than A Semi To Me

2006-08-30T13:45:00.000-04:00

People are more likely to have jumped here from his blog anyway, but I don't care! I wanted to let you know that Scott The Reader, a long-lost friend and my inspiration for starting this blog, just made the semi-finals of the Nicholl Fellowship competition.

I just flashed back to visiting his apartment in Manhattan years ago and being pleasantly amazed to find a stack of screenplays against the wall. Aha! I thought, a kindred spirit!

Congratulations, Scott!

In Memoriam: Bruno Kirby

2006-08-16T10:38:00.000-04:00

I couldn't let this pass without mention. Bruno Kirby, character actor and unmistakably nice guy, passed away Monday at 57 due to complications from leukemia.

I met Bruno Kirby some years ago on 47th Street, outside what is now known as the Neil Simon Theatre. He'd just taken over the role of Uncle Louie the gangster in Lost In Yonkers, and my girlfriend and I had just purchased tickets for the evening performance. We were walking past the stage door and some cast members had just started to leave after the matinee. It was interesting to see the Ladder of Fame in effect there on the sidewalk; Mercedes Ruehl ran out through a crowd and jumped into a waiting cab while the older of the two boys in the show strolled about in front of the theater, maybe hoping for a little recognition. Kevin Kline came out, having just visited backstage, hailed a cab and chatted with a few older ladies who talked to him like they'd known him for years. He was ever the charmer, only dashing away to help his wife Phoebe Cates down the stage door steps and into the cab.

This all happened in the space of thirty seconds, and my girlfriend said she wanted to see who else might pop out. We were standing right next to the stage door steps, a crowd still hovering around the door, when Bruno Kirby came out. He made it down the steps, waving hello to everyone, but backpedalled as the crowd moved in. He wound up between me and the steps, a convenient way to cover both flanks (I'm 6' 2", no old lady stands a chance getting past me). I was content to watch him work the crowd, signing and having genuine conversations with the audience. He talked about how good the rest of the cast was, even pointing out the older of the boys some ten feet away as a real find. All the while, he checked me out over his shoulder, curious, but amused.

"How're you doin'?" he asked.

"Good. Thanks."

A few more signings. When his hands would empty, he would turn to me, expecting me to ask for an autograph, but I hadn't been prepared, I had nothing, and I told him so, but that we were coming to the evening show.

"Yeah? Have you seen it?"

"I saw it a few months ago with my brother, but now I'm bringing my girlfriend."

"So you've seen it. I'd be interested to know what you think of tonight's show. You'll be here after?"

Are you kidding me?

He checked his watch and let everyone know he had to run. The crowd beamed and disappeared as he walked off with a wave. "See you guys later," he said to my girlfriend and I. We were buzzing for a while, excited, but reminded each other later that he's a public person, especially after a show outside the theater, it's his business to be nice.

After the evening show, we took our time leaving the theater and made our way to the stage door in time to see most of the cast dashing out to their cabs and their plans. Pretty soon we were there with just ten or so people, all of them hanging around to see who would give up first. We were standing in the same spot, as it turned out. Just as we were about to walk away to get a drink, the door opened and Matthew Broderick stepped out. Some of the others gasped, not expecting to see him. He was as surprised as they were and he ducked back inside. He'd recently been peppered with death threats due to his auto accident in Ireland where two women died, so I could understand his reluctance to walk into a strange crowd, but his presence also meant Bruno was probably still there, so we perked up. Sure enough, the door popped back open and I heard Bruno Kirby saying, "Hold on a second, there's someone waiting for me," and he poked his head around the door to see if we were there. "Hey! I'm so sorry, you know, people kept coming backstage, and I said, these two are out there waiting. What did ya think?" he asked as he hopped off the steps. My girlfriend gushed a bit, and he turned to me and asked, "Different?"

"Yeah, a different energy, warmer, but darker."

"Reeeally? Darker?"

"Yeah, but warmer. I got the sense that he cared about the kids, but was still dangerous."

He shrugged and grinned. "It's the writing. How can you go wrong with Neil Simon? And those kids, are they terrific?"

He signed our stubs and shook my hand, asking our names. He thanked us for coming and waiting afterward and said he hoped to meet us again, then he turned to the rest of the now-regrowing crowd. We walked off toward Broadway, touched that he seemed in person like he usually did on film, a nice guy you could talk with.

I'm sad that I won't get the chance to meet him again, but most of all I'm sad for his wife, his father, in whose footsteps he'd followed, and his family. I wish he and they peace.

Kind of a Drag

2006-08-05T00:04:00.000-04:00

A short update, partially to say thank you for the words of encouragement follwing my last post, so thank you very much. Still jobhunting, beating the bushes for contacts. The wife has gone into attack mode, calling on her network of friends to cough up names at the companies to which I'm applying. I picture her leaning over a giant illuminated Lucite map of Manhattan, positioning miniature footsoldiers, mounting the plan.

The daygig still haunts most of my thoughts, how to lighten my load and remain ethically sound, how to keep my head up. I had to admonish someone the other day who'd been working alongside me from the beginning. He'd given his notice a week ago, he was still the same borderline misanthrope with customers he'd been for the last six months or so, but the other day he flat out called a customer crazy, not joking, not defending himself, just turned to another store patron, indicated the customer in question and spoke loud and clear so she would hear him, "I guess I can't talk to you right now, she's crazy and she wants me to herself." I received the fallout from the customer, called my colleague into the back where he shrugged and didn't hesitate to say it was true. He left for good ten minutes later, after a talk with the boss. I went to lunch right afterward and spent the hour angry that someone I'd known that long, had laughed with and tipped a glass with, would force my hand like that. His behavior, certain to result in a conversation with a superior, came when he knew I was the only manager on duty. If he crossed the line he'd spent a good amount of time pushing back as far as he could, he had to have known I'd have to respond. If it were an innocent comment that the customer had misinterpreted, I'd have defended him. He had no remorse, didn't even blink when I asked if he'd been joking. He didn't care if I had to get an earful from someone he'd abused.

My father-in-law likes to say when he hears of some such transgression against his daughter or I, "There's no shortage of assholes out there."

I got my Nicholl letters yesterday. I had hopes for my two babies, I won't lie. I did think as I was submitting them that it was a long shot since they weren't earnest stories of great import, they're not films, they're movies, meant to be seen with a group of strangers in a theater on a weekend, not screened for Academy members for their consideration, but a quick run through titles of QFs from last year shows what must be more than a few genre films or comedies, so go figure. Greg Beal and his team had a rough go this year from the look of things and still managed to make me feel good about not making the quarterfinals this year. Watch out next year, though, when I unleash an amalgam of "Out of Africa", "Kramer v. Kramer" and "The Bridge On The River Kwai" on them.

Not all is a drag, though. The family is going to Disney in a few weeks for four days and The Prince's birthday is coming up soon. I'm smiling thinking about my family and I'm looking forward to the day my job doesn't seem to come first before them.

Enough With The Rocks, I'm Climbing Down

2006-07-24T00:39:00.000-04:00

I'd have no business calling myself a writer if I didn't now see the foreshadowing I was laying out for myself in my last post. Here I was contemplating what it's like to commit a crime and how that crime would affect its victim and a few days after that contemplation, I became a victim of a crime at work.

There's no loss to me monetarily, but I'm feeling the loss in my career and my emotions. I've been reticent to reveal too much about my job since they have a generally strict policy regarding online discussions of the brand and the company by employees, but it's integral to understanding what I'm talking about to know that I work in retail. I'm an assistant manager with a company that sells fairly expensive items and the other night someone took $3000 worth of merchandise from an active sales floor. I was the only manager on and was tied up with a customer that had me captive in his complaint for most of two hours that night, and although I broke away for moments at a time, I was not 100%. There were about ten or twelve employees there, all of them too busy to notice the theft as well. None of the store's cameras caught the theft and I'm only semi-certain about the timeframe, somewhere within a two-hour gap. It's bad professionally, extremely when I consider that I'd been pushing to get a promotion, even though I've been firm in my belief that the position I'm holding is not what I'd wanted to do for the company, it just wound up being where their path led me. I'm not a retail manager at heart, I don't have the multi-tasking skill set, I hate looking at tables of numbers that I can't decipher into their meaning, I don't particularly like the HR aspects of the job. I'd wanted a different job, I came on board before it was available on the advice of my old boss in order to line myself up for it and when the different job came up, the new boss hiring for it asked why I didn't want to be a manager and didn't seem to understand that I didn't want to tell someone when to go to lunch or to argue with a customer over interpretations of a return policy.

I've been trying to make it work for too long now to look at this event as anything other than a sign that it will never work. I'm the guy you call on to get something done, not the guy who delegates to someone else. The job, so much different than it was two years ago, needs someone that can exhibit false sincerity to customers and staff. I've got my heart on my sleeve. People who do this job well like to think they have thick skins. Some of them may, but most of them are just plain shallow. Most specifically, the company's growth means more hires and more opportunities, but for people with retail experience at other companies. I'm beginning to think my company is slowly being absorbed by double-agents from The Gap. I get it, there are skills you want in a manager that you can't necessarily get from a guy who knows the product. I'm the guy at the store with whom the other managers usually begin conversations with the phrase, "How do I...?" I've never had the opportunity to hold a job interview with an applicant. I've never charted out how many staffers I'd need over the course of the next year based on the previous year's numbers. When I've had conversations with employees that I've had to coach, I'm speaking as myself, not with anecdotes I've cribbed from Duke's Coach K's book.

So I'm not that guy, and it took this long to figure out it's up to me not to try to be that guy. It's pretty damn clear from this side of the bubble, but not from inside. Because of the theft, any hope I'd had to get a promotion has evaporated. I'm a dead man walking the sales floor.

It's going to be difficult, but I've got to turn all my energy to getting a new job, something where I can be myself. I'm a hard worker, almost insane at times in my drive to do the job right. I'm not a manager, someone who corrals and fosters workers along. I don't think I've wasted the last two years, I needed the non-traditional schedule of retail in order to take care of The Prince, but I also haven't advanced, despite my boss' insistence that my 'promotion' from a job title the company was phasing out to another job title was a great step forward. I embraced every added opportunity and shouldered the weight of being short at least one manager ever since I came on board. In return I got a minimal raise, no additional training and a kick out of orbit from my plan to use my time to gather marketable skills I could use should this gig not work out. I'll be calling on old contacts and falling back on my old skills, trying to do something I excelled at before but haven't done in a while.

Making this switch will mean putting this push on hold. I can't justify to myself or my family spending time writing pages when I could be making calls and meeting people. My life will be about punching the clock and spending all other time looking for a new gig, hopefully the right gig and not the right-now gig.

This blog will be on hold for now too. This may disappoint the three or four regular readers I've got, but I'm sure you'll understand. The dream lives on, my head is still swimming with ideas, but time is a precious commodity. I'll check in when things change, and if you have tips, advice, a job, a million dollars, feel free to write me at tom.blogger@mac.com.

And thank you all for what you've given me so far in my push.

I'm Not A Bad Person, I'm Just Writing That Way

2006-07-18T12:42:00.000-04:00

You may have been able to pick up by now that I'm a tad self-conscious and maybe too sensitive to what people think of me. Hardly the right toolbox to carry into a writing career, so I'm vowing to remember that professional behavior may seem like it's personal, but it shouldn't be taken that way. Like that producer a month or so back that told me she'd get back to me after the weekend and vanished. If I look at just her interaction with me, I'd think it was rude to me, but she's got more going on in her life than talking to me and considering me for that project she's been shepherding along, so when I look at it from that perspective, I think she made the decision and moved on before thinking to let me know. for whatever reason. I can choose to take it personally or professionally, and I choose professionally.

I was drifting off to sleep the other night and was for some reason thinking of my life ten or so years ago. There was a point where I wasn't working, I'd just been through a bad relationship, money was nonexistant and I didn't see a way out. One night I had a few too many beers in front of the tube. The news was on and I started thinking about how for some people, crime just seems like what they're entitled to do. Those perp walks you see on the news where the alleged criminal is walking with their head up while the others shackled to him are ducking under their shirt collars, that's what I was thinking of. It was this kind of guy I used to worry about when handling cash at movie theaters that I used to manage, some social misfit who wouldn't care if I ended up walking away or lying on the floor after he snatched a few grand out of my hands. I saw plenty of characters that wanted to look tough wandering the lobby, but the guys I watched for were those who'd just stare as you crossed the lobby from the box office to the manager's office, eyes blank.

That drunken night I wondered if I could be like that, cold and ruthless. I pictured myself not as I would have been, deposit bag under arm, but standing off to the side as someone else squired the deposit back to the office. There was one theater I knew of that had it worse, they had to take the deposit to the bank across a dark parking lot. Frequently only one employee handled this task. Who might rob them? Could I be that guy standing tall in the walk from the precinct door to the van taking perps to the county lockup?

It didn't take more than ten seconds to laugh at myself. I'd be thinking of the employee, how the robbery would affect their job, their life.

As I thought back on that drunken night all this time later, I figured this is something I should be writing about, an ordinary guy who is drawn to commit a crime. Finally, a character-driven idea in the midst of all these high-concepts. I'm thrilled with the idea and will develop it along with the comedy I'm plotting out now.

But as I drifted back to sleep after typing out ideas from my little breakthrough, I wondered if people would think less of me for having wondered for a minute all those years ago if I were capable of committing a crime like that. What if someone asked me how I got the idea? I'd have to tell them. And ironically, I'd feel guilty if I didn't tell the truth.

And there I found my answer all over again.

Panic Room

2006-07-14T11:09:00.000-04:00

No posting this week, I know. The daygig has been freaky with the hours, including one day where I started at 6:40 am and left at 11 pm, all in an effort to prep us for an internal audit. I ran through a test run and passed us, even though I was highly critical and cut points rather than granting mercy. The auditor flunked us two days later, citing a whole series of staff violations that literally happened right before his eyes. The salt on the wound? I found out that the list of corrections I'd passed on to the boss was ignored the day before the audit, making my sixteen-plus hour shift the day before pointless.

But, since I did my job (and more), I'm not worrying or taking it personally. I'll take the time to correct some of the more inexperienced staff (as the auditor was lurking to see who had access to a locked room that should not, a staffer with a master key not only walked up and entered the room but offered to let the auditor in as well) and clean some house. I was in danger of being in the wrong frame of mind to take the audit results the right way as I spent the previous few days railing against people I thought were getting up in my face. After I had three or four of these interactions, I still couldn't see a pattern until my wife pointed it out to me. Dealing with frustration when I'm still shackled to one of its major causes is like bailing out a lake with a bucket; I may get some water out, but you know it's just going to run back under my feet and into the lake anyway. The solution is to stop trying, grab a pole and start fishing the damn lake instead, but once I slap on my horse-blinders, such solutions don't always come easy.

One good thing came out of such an altercation this week: A colleague I've never met from another company location was trying to bully me over the phone to do a routine task for a customer his way instead of just trusting me to handle it as I saw fit. His attitude (he's in a high-falutin' Manhattan location while I'm elsewhere in NY posting higher per capita numbers) fits a character I was developing for the new script, a snooty obstacle to the hero's goal. I'll now have a model in mind and to keep the inspiration fresh, I'm naming the character after him.

If You're Gonna Juggle, You're Gonna Need Some Balls

2006-07-06T22:16:00.000-04:00

I'm in Rumination Mode on my new spec idea, thinking out the characters, watching the story in my head, sensing what tone I want to take. I love the idea, so I'm enjoying this part of the process. Within the week, I'm hoping to take a few hours to hack out a rough prose version to give myself a spine to work from. The story involves a recently-married couple, so my recollections of what that was like the first year or so are fun to thumb through, I feel like I've got plenty of 'local color' with which to drape the story.

I'm feeling recharged somewhat, despite growing pressure at work. We're down a couple of people due to growth and the work has increased with the season. I'm also trying to do what I can to raise my profile, an opportunistic measure I'm ready to tackle. If I'm going to be putting in the hours, it would be foolish not to take advantage of the situation. What's responsible for my renewed energy is a three-day break with the family that included a trip to Sesame Place just before the Fourth. Say what you want about the tactic of stocking a theme park with characters no child can resist, then sprinkling the place with ample parental spending opportunities, but we had a blast. I came back sunburned across my Irish shoulders, wearing an acre of pink on my right arm like a badge of honor at work yesterday, a colleague pointing out my red skullcap late in the day. Aloe vera is my new mistress and I'll be wearing a hat and sunblock for extended periods out of doors from now on, you can bet.

We almost didn't make the trip. Last Friday, while I was watching The Prince in the morning before his sitter arrived, I stole away during a quiet Sesame Street moment to rinse my hands after sweeping up some breakfast debris. As I was turning off the faucet, I heard my son yelling from the living room and wondered if I'd just heard a thud of some sort. He's been yelly lately, the Terrible Two's making an early debut, his temperament sometimes flailing in extremes. His yell at first didn't startle me, yet I still moved quickly to find him. He came around a corner to the hallway, gearing up for a fresh yelp, crying. I didn't know what it was yet, but knew something was off.

I grabbed him up and sat down on the couch, feeling the back of his head, checking his knees and elbows for tenderness, trying to find a sign of impact from whatever had happened. I found nothing at first, and all the while he kept screaming. I wanted to make eye contact, so I turned his chin toward me.

There was now a huge drop of blood on his forehead. It hadn't been there when I picked him up, I knew that, and I tried to make sense of it as I could feel the panic rising. He was alert, his eyes were wide open, so I discounted at least immediate signs of concussion, but he wouldn't let me get a good look at the bloody spot, so I laid him back in my arms and I finally saw it. There was a gash, about a quarter-inch long and too deep not to be checked. Behind it was a rising bump, widening the gash. He more than likely banged his head on a radiator in the living room.

I called my wife back home from her commute and we had our doctor check it briefly before heading to the emergency room, thankfully light on traffic that early in the day. We lucked out further and only had to wait twenty minutes or so for the plastic surgeon to come in from her office. My wife left my son's eyeline as a doctor and I strapped him onto a backboard restraint, then I held my boy down as the plastic surgeon first injected a local and then closed the gash with three stitches. As soon as the surgeon applied some Dermabond over the stitches, we undid the straps and my wife swooped in to comfort him. He glared at me over her shoulder for a few moments, but eventually he let me hold him as he settled down to periodic deep sighing sobs.

I know it's inevitable that I'll see him hurt. In the days since last Friday, I've heard reassuring stories from friends detailing thrown rusty metal buckets, boards with nails, fireworks. I myself recall pilfering my older sister's grown-up bicycle for a ride only to fall off and split my right temple on the curb, healing up and stealing the bike again only to split my left temple on the curb just across the street from the first mishap. Kids get hurt. Watching my boy go through this minor ordeal nevertheless felt like torture. I look at him and feel that moment's neglect and it is killing me.

We didn't think we could go on Monday to the theme park. Since my wife came home that Friday, she had work on a deadline that had to be made up. Her friends at the office bundled it together and overnighted the work to her for Saturday so we could go on Monday. Thanks to them, I'm not still hearing The Prince's screams as I held him down, confused and in pain, for the surgeon to stick a needle through his perfect skin. Instead I'm hearing his joyful babbling as he watched The Count and Cookie Monster march past us, his hands clapping in excitement on the top of my head as I held him on my shoulders to see the Muppet Parade.

This Is Your Wake-Up Call, And If I May Add One Thing, You Suck.

2006-06-24T22:30:00.000-04:00

We've finally got some peace in the house as I type this while The Prince sleeps in the next room. He's been supercranky the past two weeks, but his pediatrician, the one with the New York Magazine "Best Doctors in NY" covers on his wall next to his diplomas and the Xerox of an amusing chart of six cartoon faces in numerically-increasing levels of pain (amusing since The Prince's mug when he's crying and swinging punches makes them all look like he's eligible for nines across the board from the cartoon-pain judges) says he's fine, no Mommy-and-Daddy-undetectable ear infection causing him to wake several times a night. He thinks it's molars coming out, not that we can see them now. It's like we're waiting for an invisible rocket to launch with a two-week countdown clock that tends to go off at three-fifteen in the morning. Making matters more interesting is last night's development: I put The Prince into his crib, leaving the room while he cried in protest and banged his hands against the crib railing. About a minute after leaving his room, I turned back just in time to see him walking out into the kitchen, stunned and scared. He'd escaped his crib. Each time he's been placed in there since, he's climbed out all by himself. I'm considering changing his nickname to The Cooler King, but I'd be the only person who gets the joke, and I'm too damned tired to laugh for all of us.

So it's been a battle royale in our home with the prize being a good night's sleep and no one is the victor. I haven't been writing much, but truthfully, I can't lay all the blame on the baby. Ninety-nine percent of it is on me, because I.O.U., the script I'm working on, sucks.

Yeah, yeah, I hear you, everyone goes through this, self-doubt is an obstacle to be overcome like any other, yada yada.

It still sucks.

The meat of what sucks is in the premise and the treatment of that premise, plus some of the characters are weak and the dialogue, while sometimes funny, is glib and uninvolving.

So I've just decided to stop working on it. For now. I still like it and want to make it work, but I need a better open and better characterization. I wanted a modern screwball comedy with some wise-guy characters, but right now it reads like Damon Runyon translated into Latin, then into Sanskrit, then back into English. I need the distance only time can grant to give me perspective to plunder the gold from the gravel and try again.

But it's okay. In fact, it's really cool. I've found myself thinking a lot on an idea I'd had a year or so ago, a comedy about a newlywedded couple and...well, it's another high-concept plot-driven idea, but it's an idea that has grown on me and I feel like it could be - PLACE OMINOUS MUSIC CUE HERE - a hot idea, one that could make a popular movie, maybe even a hit.

NO, TOM! DON'T WRITE FOR THE MARKET!

Oh, don't worry, I'm not pounding away thinking I'm writing the next Ghost, the first flick that comes to mind when I think of strong word-of-mouth hits, but when I think of this idea, I find myself thinking of two women I used to work with years ago. On Monday mornings they'd talk about the weekend and if one had been to a movie, they'd discuss just the premise so as not to ruin the movie for the other, and sometimes they'd discuss trailers they'd seen too, and hot damn if it wasn't like a logline audition between the two of them. If I could meet them today and talk up this idea with them, I know they'd like it and want to see the movie. It's not the only reason to write the sucker, but it's good enough to kick me in the ass.

The Break-Up Breakthrough

2006-06-09T23:15:00.000-04:00

It was easy when I was younger and unfettered of responsibilities (in other words, immature and without direction) to suddenly decide to go to a movie, but now that I'm married with a toddler and have a full-time job that involves a lot of night work, getting to go to a movie with the wife can feel like a universal cyclical event, like the planets aligning or a visit from Halley's Comet. Sometimes it works out pretty well, like our M:I3 viewing a few weeks ago. Sometimes it doesn't (we're still debating the merits of Wedding Crashers). I see commercials and watch trailers online and can puzzle out what I'd like to see and what I'd pass on, and I have to say I'm not feeling so far like I've missed much. The wife wants to catch DaVinci, we're both wondering if The Prince will make it through Cars and I'm reservedly excited for Superman Returns (I'm still on a minor Spacey embargo after his tantrum a few years back at a Tribeca Film Festival party I was attending), but I'm not jumping out of my skin to get to the multiplex like I was in, say, 1982 to see Blade Runner or The Thing or E.T. or Poltergeist. I just this week heard from a friend, a younger guy than I, newlywed, no kids as yet, movie fan. He tells me despite the box office surge, he thinks the films are worse this year than last and even that a generally well-regarded hit like X-Men: The Last Stand was so bad it made him want to cry.

So I didn't want to get too worked up before my wife and I went to catch The Break-Up. I'd heard some good notices, but the marketing is selling this movie like a romantic comedy, and we've all seen some saccharine stinkbombs in that genre. Vince Vaughn has that chatterbox thing that can backfire and Jennifer Aniston isn't foolproof, but the wife wanted to see it and when I thought about it, I wanted it to be good myself, so we lined up a sitter and on the opening night of The Omen, this millenium's certain winner of the Most Pointless Remake Award (between this and the reverent tones in which he's regarded in interviews about Superman Returns, Richard Donner must be feeling like the most influential filmmaker in Hollywood, which isn't in my opinion too far from the truth), we braved the TeenyPlex to catch an 8:30 show.

What a remarkable achievement The Break-Up is.

Yes, achievement.

I enjoyed it immensely, even considering that I was wincing and writhing in sympathetic agony at some key moments. Anyone who's had a relationship will recognize some element of themselves in these characters, truly the key to getting your audience to appreciate your film. I'd known Jon Favreau was in the movie, but didn't realize until watching the opening credits (great use of the credits for exposition, by the way, in a manner that's not original but is done very well) that the Vaughn/Favreau/Billingsley gang were involved in producing the movie. Great work.

What struck me the most, however, was the depth the story has, and the maturity of the movie. This would have been treated five years ago like a Farrelly Brothers stoogefest, but here it has a certain gravitas and I never felt like it was pandering. It made me think about my own work so far on I.O.U., a more traditional romantic comedy in the screwball vein about a man and a woman who need to fake a wedding to raise money to pay off their loan shark. While the tone is much different, I am left wondering if I can give my characters that third dimension I think an audience would react favorably to. I'm going to continue down the same road I started on with the script, but on my second pass I'll be mindful of what I can do to deepen the story and the characters.

All I wanted was a good movie and I got some inspiration to boot.

Time Out

2006-06-01T09:34:00.000-04:00

Took the Memorial Day weekend off and the family went out of town for a couple of visits. It was good to get the time off, three whole days without having to leave the family behind was relieving.

I've been nursing along I.O.U. in my usual 'just write it' method instead of breaking the story like I'd hoped to. We fall back on old habits and I've never laid out the story before tackling the actual writing, although I have specifics in my head that I'll be using from thinking them out over the ten-plus years I've had this story brewing, including a chase scene (sorry, Scott) and the finale. My first drafts, more so now in the age of software, come out pretty close to what I'd consider ready to shop, but I'd like to have a reference to get an idea where I'm digressing from plan.

I'm reluctant to try and break my manner of working too much, but if anyone has suggestions about what has worked for them regarding prep work, let me know. What would be especially helpful is if anyone has written on assignment and has been expected to show progress somehow, what would a producer expect to see between assignment and finished draft, if anything?

Got 'Lot'?

2006-05-25T09:23:00.000-04:00

The On The Lot site has gone live and I'm sort of surprised (naively, I'll admit) that they're only taking short films as submissions for entry and not short scripts. It's bound to be a divisive show in the aspiring filmmaker community (Aspirosphere?), and certainly owes a lot to Project Greenlight, an idea that had a compelling TV show but a horrible submissions process (really, Stolen Summer was the best script that year?). I was hoping that what will happen with this is the entries will be judged by professionals (or at least their selected appointees) and not judged by other applicants, but since they're stating in the application that submissions will be placed on the web, I'm not so sure now.

Since it says on the site that the show will air in spring 2007 and the application asks that you be available for up to four months in spring/summer 2007, I'm also supposing the show will take an 'Idol' approach and the public will vote off the loser each week.

Well, since it means I'd have to submit a film to apply, it looks like I'll be trying to plan out a short film to shoot this summer.

I've Never Killed A Man

2006-05-21T10:33:00.000-04:00

Still alive here, just working late shift one day, early shift another, late again. Blah. I hate not being able to see The Queen and The Prince other than passing them on our respective trips through the front door. Next weekend I'm off, so we'll have plenty of time together, and I'm counting the days.

I was writing the other night and I wondered as I do periodically about what Christopher McQuarrie is up to. It's been about ten years since The Usual Suspects and six since The Way of the Gun, where today's post title comes from. I can recall reading that he was working on an Alexander The Great project with Scorsese, but that's obviously gone away. He's got a couple of scripts in development according to Wikipedia. The thing that gnaws at me is this guy is what I'd consider to be a great screenwriter. The Usual Suspects got him the Oscar, but I'm more fond of The Way of the Gun for its no-apologies tone and blunt-force dialogue. I can't be the only person with the opinion that this guy can write, so I'm hoping to see his name back up on the screen soon.

One more thing about The Way of the Gun: I read little about it before going to see it, I just knew the cast and that McQuarrie had made it. After the first few minutes (you know what I'm talking about if you've seen it), I was hooked. Another filmgoer a few rows up must have felt differently as he started flailing his arms as though trying to wave off a runaway bus heading right for him. He finally gasped out a "No!", collected his coat and walked out. I watched him go, thought about it for a moment, and then settled further into my seat.

100 Reasons To Hate The Daygig: #36 - The Repetition

2006-05-18T02:00:00.000-04:00

Another overnight. This one was presented to me yesterday as the only solution to getting tonight's tasks done. I've been here as a manager for about eighteen months and figured I'd be the bottom head on the totem for a little while, and while people have left and new hires have occurred, the newer people have been hired at higher positions, knocking me back every three months or so.

I'd like to make one thing clear to you: I'm not the ideal guy for this job. The ideal guy for this job is 15-20 years younger, has no problem staying up really late, has worked in similar positions performing similar industry-related tasks (not 'The Industry', just the industry I'm currently in) and probably still lives at home. I'm too old, have too much going on in my personal life and have one too many sensible people at home who ask patiently whether the company thinks I sleep on a cot in the storage closet.

Did I know any of this when I got the job? To be fair, a lot of what this job is now wasn't a part of the scene back then. It should have been, but the fact is my boss back then, although capable, was not as ambitious as my current boss and things that are checked daily, even hourly now, were not considered vital back then. Now I'm expected to have a matrix of numbers at the ready from memory, an Excel spreadsheet fullscreen and constantly updated in my mind's eye. Yesterday I sat in a meeting and learned of new expectations and couldn't stop thinking how much I am not that guy.

Yes, I hear you, got it, say something. Great idea.

I did.

My boss told me I was taking things too personally and needed to take it easier.

Do something! Yeah! Outstanding idea!

I did.

Before my boss started here, he interviewed me for another job in the company, a newly-created position, one that I'd known was coming for a few months, something more in line with what I wanted to do and what my background has been. His first question for me was why did I want to switch from the management track I was on already? I explained that I'd known about this new position, inquired with my old boss, and she said I should take on the full-time management role to get a higher profile with the company and put myself in a better position to take this new position. He nodded and asked Question #2.

Question #3 was Question #1 with his head tilted.

Question #7 was #3 with his hand on his chin.

I was turned down for the job. Shortly thereafter, he was named my new boss and he revealed the five people he'd chosen for the new position. They were, in his terms, rock stars, the best of the applicants by far, exemplary and without a doubt the right choices.

Four out of the five were gone in six months. They had all quit with the caveat that if they had known what the atmosphere was like at my workplace, they wouldn't have taken the job. I'd been here and knew what it was like, wasn't offered the job.

I've got the job where I'm here at 2 am.

I just got word there's another overnight mandated by the company for one night next week. Guess who's scheduled that night?

So I will say something and I will do something. Again.

And what does this have to do with screenwriting?

I've just wrapped up the work I was doing tonight while some others on staff are still at it. I've got I.O.U. open on my desktop and I'm writing.

Puuuuush.

100 Reasons To Hate The Daygig: #35

2006-05-12T01:45:00.000-04:00

Ever show up late for work? Sure, everyone has at least once. Some people seem to do it habitually. I've known a few people that would treat their latenesses like a character trait, something that was their "thing."

I lost a job due to latenesses once. It wasn't a great job, I'd started out temping in an office mailroom and within a week the office manager told me he wanted to hire me outright, which was cool, and in a little less than a year I was promoted to a clerical position where if I wasn't sitting at my desk when my supervisor walked in at 8 sharp, I was marked late. I could be in the can, I could be talking to the office manager...Hell, once I was waiting at my supervisor's desk waiting for her and she walked in, regarded me with a minute shrug without recognition, looked at my empty seat, picked up her tardiness pad from her desk and started to write me up as I looked over her shoulder. My supervisor was a sweet lady, a good mother to her kids and when holidays rolled around, she would shuffle over to your desk and wish you the warmest with utmost sincerity, but she couldn't get her eyes connected to her brain and I found out too late.

I should tell you at this point that there were days when I was genuinely and stupidly late. I had it made when I started the job, I had a rickety Turismo that I'd blast Elfman's Batman theme out of as I flew down the Long Island Expressway, but the Turismo flat out quit one day without notice and left me to take two subway trains and a bus to work. The bus, the last leg of the commute, a four-mile stretch through Queens, was always late and on even a few occasions nonexistent, so notoriously so that gypsy cabs were plentiful and only charged the usual busfare to jet you up the stretch with four or five fellow passengers jammed in the back with you. Sometimes, even these madmen weren't fast enough and I'd walk in late, the rest of the 80 desk warriors in the huge main office watching me walk in, thinking of how they could get there on time, why the hell couldn't I? Two minutes, four minutes, didn't matter, it might as well have been fifteen minutes, it was the same difference. The next day I'd leave home a half-hour earlier and get to work forty-five minutes early, an hour early. Consistency was impossible without the car, believe me, I tried. I have no idea how many latenesses were genuine and how many were due to my supervisor's mental state, but I think in retrospect I got a fair shake either way.

One day the office manager told me my next lateness would result in dismissal. Four months later I was two minutes late. I'd like to say I was rescuing a sack full of kittens from drowning, but it was just a routine lateness, fifteen minutes sitting in a stopped subway car waiting for movement and praying for a swift death. I was at my desk for a total of thirty seconds when my phone rang. Ten minutes later I was out, and it would have been quicker if I didn't have to ride the elevator down to see the shop steward and then ride back up to my floor to grab my jacket. It was a union job, I'd been told what to expect, I was so comfortable with the decision that I went to the office manager's door and thanked him for the opportunity and told him I regretted failing the job. Had there been a shrine and a sword, I'd be typing this in samurai heaven.

This led me to improve my punctuality, you can guess, and although it was a hard uphill slough, I think I've improved greatly. If I'm late today, it's due to my tenacity and task-oriented tunnel-vision. I'll be pounding away at some task at home, leisure or not, and realize I've got minus-ten minutes to get ready to go to work. It's rare, and since I plan an hour-early departure for what's usually a thirty-minute trip, I'm covered. I can still lay an egg once in a while, like the time I showed up to a job interview 45 minutes late on my first trip way downtown (the receptionist's eyeroll when I asked if there was a chance I could still be seen looked painful) or my second date with the sweet, sweet woman I eventually married when I pulled up two hours late by not following her directions to her place, but for the most part I'm pretty responsible.

Why is this relevant, Tom?

Right now as I type this line, it's 1:15 am. I'm at work, a job that normally lasts until 10 pm if I'm on the closing shift. I'm here late since the corporate office finally approved an after-hours paint job for some of the high-traffic areas of my workplace. Someone's got to be here with the crew, there's a lot of valuable inventory, and out of six fellow managers, I drew the short stick again, or at least I assume I did since I was simply told I would be here closing tonight when these guys were approved for last week.

The contractor called yesterday to confirm with me that they'd be here at 8 pm to get started and they'd need about seven hours to get it done.

They got here at 11 pm.

Any of you out there have a job where you can show up three hours late without fear of reprisal? I sure as hell don't, and can't imagine that even if I land myself in a career as a writer that there would ever be a situation where I could show up three hours late and shrug at those expecting me and say, "Hey, I got hung up." This is like a Sharon Stone move, showing up that late and acting like it's three minutes instead of three hours, and I'm pretty sure these guys won't be mistaken for her any time soon. The contractor had called this afternoon to say they'd be here at nine, we're very sorry, but when they weren't here at ten without any word, I started calling them myself. I finally got someone at 10:30 who said the crew was ten minutes away.

I'll be here until at least 6 am. The Prince will be waking up between six and seven, and shortly thereafter my wife will leave for her infinitely-better-than-mine job and I will watch The Prince until the sitter arrives at ten-thirty, at which point I usually will get ready for work, perform some chore or probably just veg for ninety minutes until it's time to leave.

These freaking guys are trying to buddy up to me now, and I'm such a sap that I'm joking along with them instead of asking them these questions I'm asking myself and you right now. That's how professional I am at this point in my life, I can't even bring myself to lash out when it's warranted.

I think in the end I'm just mad at myself, leading my career only so far in my life to where I'm sitting at work at 1:30 in the morning waiting on a couple of easy-going guys who after all is said and done are undoubtedly making more money painting walls than I am in a position of authority watching them.

Push, push, push.

Rumination/Illumination

2006-05-09T11:15:00.000-04:00

I feel like I've spent the last week in post-Nicholl recovery, after diving into the two submissions I needed to tweak with as much energy as I could bring them. Work, well, it's what it has been. Does anybody really like their job when they're itching like mad to do something else? I could probably be in a great job and still be feeling like I've got to tunnel under the wall, evade the Germans and jump a motorcycle over barbed wire to get to what I've wanted to be doing for twenty years.

Why haven't I done so before now, then? What's been the hold-up?

I know I've got some amount of talent for this and I've worked on my technique. I'm still weak on breaking a story in an expedient fashion, having most of the ideas I start pounding out into screenplays germinate in my head for years before typing FADE IN:. I've never taken a class in screenwriting per se, the closest being a class in my last year of college on writing for TV, radio and film. That course did inspire me to continue writing, but it didn't give me any real-world instruction into breaking into the market. In retrospect, I'm not sorry I didn't try breaking in then; my writing was weaker than now and although I was mostly unencumbered personally (yes, mostly...That's another story that might not make these pages), taking a run at it by moving to L.A. and pounding the pavement would not have been the right move. After all, Goldman had always said you can write the first one (that sells) anywhere.

The funny thing is, the one advantage I could have had and used is my good friend that I'll call Produced Screenwriter (oh yes, I'm imaginative). I've referred to P.S. before, he connected me with the disappearing producer a month or so ago, and he's been at this for fifteen years now. He's had stumbles and successes that I have learned from and he's invited me repeatedly to make the trip out and bunk up at his place if I need. Again, what's the holdup? I wanted to have the right ammo before heading out to battle, and until now, I flat out haven't committed myself to get it together. I just hope by the time I'm done, the invite still stands.

So where am I in my sample stable? I've got those two scripts I've submitted for the Nicholl, horror-comedy Underground and thriller Brother's Keeper. I'm about 20 pages into I.O.U., a romantic action-comedy set in NYC, and I think my next project will be either the Western titled Bow's End I've been percolating or a new comedy project titled Los Cubanos. I think I'm in pretty good shape there.

The hitch for me remains the daygig, which due to its odd hours and subject-to-change schedule is difficult to plot a routine around, especially for a poor personal planner like me. I'm a laissez-faire type of guy when it comes to hocking the boss, plus I've got four other people at my level who potentially would hock the boss for their own scheduling needs, so a remedy for this seems far off.

In the end, however, I can see from the perspective these two months has given me that the moderate amount of dedication I've given this path has made it so much clearer to proceed. I'm excited to see what just another month will bring and feel renewed passion for seeing what I can put down on the page.

And The Most Linked-To Webpage of the Day Will Be...

2006-05-02T22:23:00.000-04:00

...this one.

Wow.

I'll Give You A Nicholl For Another Bad Pun To Title This Post

2006-05-01T22:51:00.000-04:00

If you're anything like me, or at least if you were anything like me for just today, you were on line at the post office at 5 pm hoping to get the May 1st postmark that will make the whole enterprise of getting your two Nicholl submissions ready through a long busy weekend of work worthwhile. Should I have had them ready and mailed last week, or the week before? Yes, Mom, I should have.

I'm not worried about the fact that I was there on line at 4:50, trying to hear what the older gentleman ahead of me was doing that was taking so long. I'm not worried because these last few days gave me the opportunity to read through two scripts I hadn't read start to finish in months, and I really like what I read. I wanted four specs to start shopping around and I'm halfway there.

I'm inspired to keep pushing. Two months in and I feel my progress is very good.

Plugged Nicholl

2006-04-29T10:38:00.000-04:00

It figures that the weekend I was hoping to read through my Nicholl submissions one last time is turning out to be one of the busier weekends I've spent at my daygig. I'm leading a training session Sunday night and had to come in early today (and possibly stay late) to cover a sick colleague. Hot fun.

Wish me luck, sleep and time.

And a bag of money, as long as you're wishing.

Nicholl For Your Thoughts

2006-04-25T11:04:00.000-04:00

Like everyone else in the Scribosphere, I'm readying a script for the Nicholl Fellowship, and as I've noted here before, my work so far has been less An American Tragedy than An American Werewolf In London. I want to send in the best thing I've written so far and I'm gauging whether that is Brother's Keeper or Underground, both of them genre pieces. I've read a little bit about the past winners and a friend of a friend was a finalist some time back. This time of year for the past few years, every screenwriter I've web-encountered has been fixated on prepping for their Nicholl submission.

I guess what I'm asking all of you now is, What do you hope to get out of this? I'm not being cynical, I'm curious. I think it's been great for a good many writers based on the pedigree they've had thus far, but with four or five Fellows a year and a handful more finalists, that leaves about five thousand writers waiting for next year. Do you have to snag the brass ring for this to do you any good, or do the also-rans get some industry love too?

Let me hear it.

P.S.

2006-04-25T10:41:00.000-04:00

Not a lot of posting from me the past week, I know. While I hate whiners, I've had a few things going on. The biggest issue you've already seen a glimpse of from the Open Letter I posted last week. Simply put, I was trying to make a move at the daygig and was spun around and put back in place rather quickly. I've had my share of job interviews, some good, some bad. This one I could actually detect the interviewer's disconnect from the idea that I could be a good candidate for the job, a widening of the eyes and then a turning away as though waking from a daydream.

Much of the problem was bad pre-interview intel; the info I'd received on the job was incomplete. Some of it was the hour of the day, it was an eight a.m. interview and my interviewer kept springing up to open the office door or pass on some info to a new arrival. In the end, there was a nice clean break and some encouragement (after all, I still work for the company), but there was also the sense in my head, building from the moment of that disconnect onward, that the whole thing was an empty exercise, an attempt to do something different without risking too much, trying to open the parachute without jumping out of the plane.

I've also had the foot thing going on, I've been unsure whether there's more broken than the little toe since some days I have difficulty walking, but that seems to be improving now that I've found in my closet the right pair of shoes to wear.

Finally, this past rainy Sunday morning, I drove down to the market to get the family a few bagels and the paper. As I turned the car around to return home, an SUV pulled away from the curb and drove straight into my car. As soon as I got out to assess the damage, the SUV's driver called out, "I'm so sorry, I was looking the other way the whole time." Uhm, can I get that in writing, lady? The damage is minor as far as I can tell, and it's not like I'm driving a Lamborghini, it's a nine year old second-hand commuter car, I can't see myself putting dough into this car.

Yet, I need the car and a viable pair of feet to get to and perform at my daygig, the one I was trying hard to escape from.

Open Letter to a Daygig

2006-04-19T23:52:00.000-04:00

You pay me. You do not enrich me. You do not feed me. You do not own me.

I will lend you my hands, my head, my legs, but not forever.

I will not give you my heart, despite your entreaties.

I will not give you my heart, not today, not any day.

I will not give you my heart.

You don't know what to do with it.

Weekend Update

2006-04-15T16:15:00.000-04:00

So, here we are in the middle of April and I thought I should update y'all on progress.

Underground - Minor rewrite - I thought I'd been tweaking the vampire genre --- and yes, I can hear you all clicking off another vampire script in your fledgling screenwriter odometer --- by changing some of the Rules of Vampirism, but all I was doing was confusing the reader. So, I'm going back in and making some changes, but it does involve moving events around to match the time of day, so I've got to rethink some stuff.

IOU - First draft (finally) - I've been kicking this around for a long time based on a conversation I had with an old girlfriend. I've been writing it in my head for (OMG) 15 years, so it's about time it hit the page.

Mouse - First draft - Stuck. I'll be honest, I'm stuck on this. I'm going to break free by writing a simple prose version of the story and then adapt it.

Brother's Keeper - Done and awaiting social activation.

Bow's End - Preparing for 1st draft - This is the script I suddenly sprang awake with the ending in my head a few weeks back. To avoid The Wall on this one like I've got with Mouse, I want to have at least the base of the story on paper before attempting a draft.

Geekz - I think I'll just treatment this one out and save writing it until...haha...I can pitch it and get paid to write it.

This project - No contact since the original conversation. I'm not bitter about it, but it would have been polite for the producer to have contacted me to say she was going to pass. I already know I'm rejected, I don't need to waste time getting confirmation of a rejection.

and this from just yesterday - I'm still up in the air on this. I know there are plenty of agent-fish in the sea, but my main reason for not having used this connection in the past was this insanely stupid need I have to do things as politely as possible. I was waiting for confirmation from Bruce when I really should have just asked him to make the contact. An agent is going to be looking for good stuff no matter where it comes from, that's their stock in trade. I don't know what would make me feel worse; not having taken advantage of this or taking advantage and making myself feel complicit to the situation with Bruce and his girlfriend by association. If I could somehow do this with minimal contact with Bruce, this might work. I wish my friend David were around, I'd ask his opinion, but I think even he might have told me to use Bruce for what I can get.

In other news, I think I've broken my foot, or at least a toe. Since we don't want The Prince to be able to get into the kitchen on his own during his present 'I'll turn all knobs and push all buttons' phase, we have a gate in the kitchen doorway. Instead of opening the gate and walking through, I usually step over the gate. Yesterday I stepped over the gate and brought my right foot down onto the gate with a nice THWACK. I had a small black mark on my foot afterward as I put on my shoes to go to the daygig, then my toe was partially black when I got home. This morning it looked pretty much the same as last night, so I figured I just had a bad bruise, but now the next two toes have black marks where they connect to the foot and the black spots on the bottom of the affected toe appears to be spreading as well. Since there's no pain associated with this at present (unless I squeeze the base of the toe), I'm thinking of just propping it up today and getting to the doctor on Monday.

What Price Hollywood?

2006-04-14T11:00:00.000-04:00

So I'm at this party the other night, a going-away party for a mentor/friend/boss at my daygig. She's moving on to a higher position within the company at another location, a big step and a well-deserved one. A few folks at the daygig organized the party, getting a few staffers to put together a band for the night, loading in food and drink, etc.. It was a great time.

Except...

This one guy showed up, a guy who used to work with us. I'll call him Bruce. I was friendly with Bruce while we worked together, he's a smart guy if a bit naive and immature. He brought his girlfriend, someone I'd hoped I'd never have to meet. I'd figured if I met her, I'd feel compelled to say something confrontational, even though she's the sister of a friend, whom I'll call David. Last year, when David and his wife got married, they invited Bruce to the wedding in another state. Bruce met and hit it off with David's sister, who happened to be the married mother of two kids under six. By the end of the weekend, Bruce and the married mother of two kids under six were writing poetry to each other. Since then, the married mother of two kids under six left her husband and her two kids under six and moved to New York to live with Bruce.

I don't know further details, whether the divorce is final, whatever. I get that people get divorced, I can read the papers, I've known people who've been divorced, I've heard the horror stories and witnessed some first-hand. It's my firm belief that with some marriages, you should have the big party when it's over. What I don't get about this situation is how this mother could leave her kids behind to live in a tiny apartment with a guy who---and since I know him and you don't, you'll have to take my word on this---is a goofball. Love is blind, yessir, and sometimes it's deaf and reeeeally dumb.

I can't imagine leaving The Prince behind in any circumstance. I had to sit awake just last night because I had a vivid nightmare about the two of us sliding down a hill and I couldn't hold onto him. Just when I was ready to go back to sleep, The Prince woke up and was crying because of a molar he's had emerging for a week. Since he was inconsolable, I laid down with him on the couch and we slept there instead. Most of the time, he's striving for his independence, but when he needs one of us, how could we be somewhere else, some other state, without any thought of returning? It makes me sad, and it's a good thing I haven't met these kids, because I'd feel more like the parental avenger I can hear knocking around in my heart and my head, screaming out in rage. It's heartening to know these kids have their father, they have their grandparents, my friend their uncle. They are not alone and they will move on with love and support from their family. If this were going to happen, if this woman was going to leave, there isn't a better or worse time to go. Just get out and don't bother them again. Live your life and don't weigh them down with the burden of you, because these kids will feel obliged to love you and you do not deserve their love.

I didn't confront her. I'm still too polite a person to speak badly to someone I don't know. Hell, I would have at the very least felt we should be introduced before I spoke word one to her. I'm rusty that way. But I did speak to Bruce, and here's where all this has something to do with The Push.

Bruce has a neighbor, a woman he's struck up a friendship with and who has brought him to dinner parties and such where he's met people he realizes are noteworthy in the arts, but he doesn't know how and he would run their names by me afterward to see who they were. His friend is a literary agent, apparently well-established. She reps screenwriters. She knows producers. There are details I haven't asked Bruce about her career, whether she works for herself or at a firm, whether she's looking for writers, etc.. When we saw each other more often, we spoke about him passing on a sample or two to her.

Bruce walked up to greet me at the party and mentioned that he's working on a treatment with another of our friends to give to the agent. He thought I'd be interested to know this because of our past conversations. I didn't respond, I just stared at him blankly. I'm positive that if I said at that moment that I wanted him to pass on a sample that he'd say yes, he would. I'm even somewhat positive that he was looking for me to ask.

And I couldn't do it. Not then, not with the married mother of two cavorting a few feet away.

My question is, could I ever?

I'm still wondering.

This Pixar Squirrel Is Killing Us

2006-04-08T23:30:00.000-04:00

I like Jane Espenson's blog. She's got a lot of great advice and a friendly tone. Plus, she seems to enjoy lunch, an idea I can get behind.

Since Jane's been involved with series television, she's spent some entries discussing writing a spec script and getting on board a series staff as a writer. I've never given this avenue of writing much play in my plans since I live in New York and there's no such work if your name isn't Dick Wolf, but a suggestion Jane just made gave me pause. Typically, a writer will spec an existing series as a sample, and she's got a friend who's sampling out an Entourage spec.

Entourage is perhaps the greatest television series ever.

Therefore, I paused.

Why do I love Entourage so much? The writing is sharp, as sharp as any of my favorite Gilmore Girls episodes. I dig the dynamic between the five central characters, that Everyman and his Everydudes thing where even the most far-out circumstance at its base has something you can relate to through your own experiences with your ordinary, non-movie star buds. The acting is pitch-perfect, and I'm even including Debi Mazar whom I previously thought was a chronic victim of miscasting, she's never been better. The fact that it reminds me (and didn't I think I was so novel when I first thought this, only to be shocked when I read the same idea everywhere I'd read about Entourage) of a male Sex & The City, except not the entire series, only when S&TC reached its fullest potential, the seasons with Aidan and Big and Carrie and Samantha and Smith and stop me before I really get hormonal.

"Carrie likes a jazzman." Okay, that's it for the S&TC, I promise.

The biggest reason I love Entourage is how much my wife loves it. If she ever left me, the first door I'm knocking on to find her is Kevin Connolly's. The guy behind the guy IS the guy as far as she's concerned, and she's right, of course. The show is more about Eric than anyone else, he is the protagonist, and he's a great character. More or less dropped from a plane into this alien environment, he acts with honor and humility. Vince is fate personified, Turtle is determination and heart and Drama is the moron we can all be. They complete each other. Writing these four guys as four parts of the same character would be the (oversimplified) key, in my opinion.

I'd love to write a spec for Entourage, but I don't intend (repeat: intend...I'd surely not turn down the gig) to try writing for TV. So, if I did it, it would be an exercise. But I'd have fun, oh yes.

When Vince, the movie star in Entourage, finally gets his first big premiere, his movie opens against a children's movie. Ari, his agent, at one point while reviewing the East Coast matinee numbers cracks, "This Pixar squirrel is killing us." Last weekend, "Ice Age: The Meltdown" crushed---CRUSHED---all competition at the box office. For a movie to hit $70 million in three days in a time when nothing else seems able to crack $30 million is amazing. Blue Sky, the company that created "Ice Age", is based near my daygig and I frequently see their logo on the hats and shirts of the people I'm dealing with at work. One night, about six months ago, I met at work one of the bigger names there, a real animation veteran. We talked a bit and I mentioned I'd applied there a few years back for a Final Cut editing gig, and he told me the company was growing like kudzu; "Ice Age" had made a billion, "Robots" stood to make $700 million or so, "Ice Age 2" was poised to make a billion and a half. He gave me a name and a number to call. I called. I e-mailed as directed. I saw the bigwig again a week later, he said the HR guy he'd given my name to had told him that day he meant to call me back. One more call, one more e-mail and I put it behind me. Whatever. I'm not a software engineer and I'm not an animator, but I have skills and thought they could be of use. I've been on the other side of that coin, no one wants to make a call and tell some applicant they're not good enough.

I'm not bitter, but I can hold a grudge like nobody's business. I saw the numbers on television Monday morning and grunted. The Prince was sitting next to me and he grunted too.

Nuts to that freakin' squirrel. I'll do it on my own.

Tonight: Crazy With Signs Of Progress; Tomorrow: Sunny & Promising

2006-04-02T23:45:00.000-04:00

I used to belong to a fraternal organization where sometimes I attended a monthly meeting with my fellow members. The secretary would call out the names of committees and the heads of those committees would speak for a moment on their current status. Occasionally, and I suspect it was when they would be caught short that month, a committee head would stand up when called and simply say, "Progress." The roll call would go on, more than once accompanied by titters from other members.

So when I note the beginning of my second month on this blog, I have this to say:

Progress.

Okay, I'll give you more than that.

I've always had an organic manner of writing, starting with a premise and some scenes and the most general of outlines and progressing from there. It's my downfall, I know. When I've hit The Wall and can't figure out what's next, an outline would have helped me, but it's not always there. Right now, since I've stopped laying Mouse down on paper until I work out an issue where I can't decide which of a pair of characters to kill (it makes so much more sense to follow the rest of the story with the character I'd intended to kill), I'm in a state of mental progress with nothing to show for it.

Yes, I believe it's all writing, the ideas, the process of laying it down, the reading and re-reading and rewriting, but I want to get to that place where I write out a draft and see how it all hangs, beginning to end, and I'm not there yet.

Since I started this blog, I've reviewed my past projects to find which of them show promise enough to continue. One of them is a Western set in a Gold Rush boomtown some years after the last nugget has been mined, and in my loose mental outline I knew how I wanted to end the story, just not how to get to that ending. Last night as I was about to fall asleep, the 'how' popped into my head, although I hadn't been thinking of that script at all. It just happened. I'm almost angry with myself that I can't afford myself more time to germinate and foster those 'Eureka' moments, but such is life.

Tonight I went to see a screening of The Crazies, the 1973 horror film by George Romero. One of the stars, Lynn Lowry, introduced the film and then George Romero and she answered questions after the film. This being Romero, the Q&A was lively and informative. Romero is candid but discreet and was a good sport in the face of some dumb questions (including one where an audience member thought the film had been made in the 80's and later being berated by one of the moderators for daring to choose the next question himself from a guy in the front row instead of the kid in the back the moderator had handed a mike to---and whose question was "In the movie, what's the blood made out of?"). He answered a range of questions, including one on why Night of the Living Dead was in the public domain (he'd originally titled it Night of the Flesh-Eaters, but when Walter Reade decided to distribute the film, they changed the title, removing the one copyright notice on the print Romero had supplied) and some on what comes next (Universal is hoping for a Land of the Dead continuation, but he just finished a draft of his adaptation of King's From a Buick 8), but the one answer I found most prescient was on his writing process. An earnest audience member looked to be hoping to get some vaildation for his political views by asking Romero about the post-Vietnam timeframe of The Crazies by pointing out the military in the film is not prepared for the scope of the disaster they're facing, and was Romero trying to comment on the inadequacies of the military machine at that time?

Romero's answer: "Hey man, I wasn't making a comment. I was in the shower and came up with the idea that it would be cool to have them not be prepared. Sometimes ideas just come to you in the shower."

If one of our most allegorical filmmakers can admit that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, I can breathe easier about finding the meaning and just let the story flow.

One more Romero anecdote: An audience member asked what films had inspired him, and Romero replied that The Tales of Hoffmann, the 1951 Powell/Pressburger opera fantasy film, struck him in his youth and he'd take the train from his Bronx home to Janus Films in Manhattan to rent their print of the film in order to see it, sometimes finding it had been rented already by some kid in Brooklyn, and on several occasions when that Brooklyn kid went to Janus to rent it, he found Romero had already rented the print himself. Eventually, Romero found out the kid from Brooklyn's name was Marty Scorsese.

Press Your Luck

2006-03-31T10:08:00.000-05:00

One thing I've always wanted to do is to be a contestant on a game show. Most people would probably consider any show to be as good as another, but I've been partial to Millionaire for its abundance of pop culture questions. I've taken the in-person test for the syndicated Millionaire twice. The first time I passed and was interviewed by a guy I could tell was not interested in another doughy white guy landing in the Hot Seat. The second time I thought I'd done well but didn't make the cut, which has made me wonder since whether I have the right stuff. Remember how we all thought multiple choice was the easiest type of test there was?

Last week I received two mass-mailing e-mails about game shows, one from Jeopardy announcing their first web test, the next from VH1 looking for contestants for a new pop culture tournament. I ran both tests this week, Jeopardy on Monday, VH1 on Tuesday. Let's just say if I get a call from Jeopardy, I'll be very surprised, as surprised as I was when I pulled Sinclair Lewis' name as the author of "Babbitt" out of a fusty corner of my brain. After taking the VH1 test, I'm really hoping to get a call from them. I took their test twice. The first time through, I goofed and thought there were six questions in six categories and almost neglected to answer four questions in the first category. Yes, I'll work on my reading comprehension. I think I got 54 or 55 out of sixty correct. The second time, after having broken the ice, I aced five of six categories and went either eight or nine for ten on the sixth. They'll average the scores, they say, and drop all the top fifth percentile entries in a pool, pull 50 names at random and select three contestants from that bunch. Considering the tournament will be held at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York, a spot I bear a lot of sentiment for, I'm counting off the ten-day period they'll make their selections during.

I'm glad this distraction came at the right time for me as I'm still awaiting word back from the producer I mentioned last week on whether I'll get the nod to write her feature project. I've been on a lot of job interviews and learned from them not to hang my hopes on the timeframe interviewers give on when they'll contact you. I've had offers and denials both come fast and slow, so when the producer told me she'd read my samples over last weekend and get back to me, I wasn't sitting by the phone Monday. Now it's Friday and as each day passes, I'm thinking the differences between what I've written and what she's referencing as films similar to what she's looking to do will be too great to hand this project off to me to write.

I'd been thinking it would be funny to land a gig within a month of starting this blog. Looks like I've still got eleven months to go =).

Money, Meet Mouth

2006-03-28T20:43:00.000-05:00

It's only right that I ring in on my own question: Four Films I'd Like To Rewrite For Whatever Reason. Coming up with the question was easy, answering it not so much.

Sometimes They Come Back: The first feature-length script I completed was meant to be an academic exercise. I'd hit a wall with my own stories, finding part of the way through that my second act had problems or whatever. I decided to take a story I knew worked---"Sometimes They Come Back" by Stephen King--- and adapt it, teaching myself the process without having to worry about plot. I found out that the task wasn't as easy as I'd thought; where King made the reader fill in the gaps in narrative with their imagination, I needed to extrapolate. I even found what I thought was a great way to introduce a voice of reason into the end of the second act. In the original story, King had left one of the street hoods out of the action, the one hood that hadn't died years before in a car crash. I brought the character back in a minor role to kick the hero back into action against the ghosts after they'd killed his wife. After finishing the draft, I liked it so much that I thought of looking into the dollar-option deal King reportedly makes with up-and-comers. I finished a few days before Christmas that year and found out just after Christmas that a TV-movie was being shot. I've never watched it, but could tell from what I read about it that Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal had the same idea about the fourth hood.

Clockers: Inside Man reminded me of what a great director Spike Lee can be. I just don't always like his writing. Richard Price's novel was mindblowing to me, a lesson in building a sense of thick, oppressive inevitability. His precise detailing of the setting and the life one leads there in surrender to whatever path fate leads you down when you feel you can't pave your own path left me shaking my head in wonder at the power of the written word. The simplistic treatment of his story as rewritten by Spike had me shaking my head in wonder at how good material could go so wrong.

Enemy Mine: Oh, Tom, why are you talking about rewriting Enemy Mine. one of the funniest unintentional comedies ever? It just seems that with two strong actors like Quaid and Gossett, the film could be better as a character study with action than a loud stab at message sci-fi. As it is, I often can't stop giggling when I think of the adolescent alien wishing he had "bive bingers."

Subway: The first Luc Besson film I ever saw. I'd wanted to see Le Dernier Combat but didn't get to (and still haven't), but I saw that Besson did this film afterward and I was intrigued. It's flaky and totally French, but due to its setting in the Paris Metro, I think it could make that rare French-to-American remake that would work well.

Screaming Meme

2006-03-27T17:09:00.001-05:00

Ismo tagged me, and I've never backed down to a meme tag. Actually, it's my first meme tag. I'm not even sure I'm pronouncing it correctly in my head as I type. Since I'm new to the Scribosphere, I'm not tagging anyone in response. Why risk making the new neighbors mad? Maybe next time. Instead, I'll rip a page from Scott the Reader's book and throw one out to all of you to respond to.

Four Jobs I’ve Had

Gas station booth attendant

Barcode label-placer at a library

Video store clerk

Benefits clerk for a union

Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over Again

Jaws

The Great Escape

The Empire Strikes Back

The Godfather

Four Places I’ve Lived
Nothing thrilling here...

Long Island

Astoria

Upstate NY

Bronx

Four TV Shows I Love

Gilmore Girls

Lost

The Amazing Race

Four Places I’ve Vacationed
I haven't taken many vacations, but did spend two weeks once shooting a 3000-mile bicycle race. Four places I remember vividly on that trip:

Steamboat, CO

Portland, OR

Pensacola, FL

Guyman, OK

Four of My Favorite Dishes

Baked Ziti with Eggplant

Sesame Chicken

The chicken pot pie from Dishes in Grand Central

This pasta dish with sun-dried tomatoes, olive oil and olives that my wife whips up

Four Blogs I Visit Every Day

Alligators in a Helicopter

Ken Levine

John August

Jane Espenson

Four Places I’d Rather Be Right Now

Considering I'm sitting in my home with my family, nowhere else.

And here's the question for all of you:
Four Films I'd Like To Rewrite For Whatever Reason

Write What You Don't Know

2006-03-26T23:45:00.000-05:00

I'm in the midst of clearing my hard drive of clutter, choosing five or ten minutes of downtime to move out duplicate files and random items I'd saved thinking I'd need them. One of the folders I came across was marked 'PGL reads'.

PGL. Project Greenlight.

Now, everyone out there in the Scribosphere must have their own PGL story. I had heard of PGL in a magazine before looking at the website, and by the time I did, the deadline had passed. I was close to submitting the second time, but the script I was tailoring for it had problems and I buried it. Why write a script specifically for the contest? Well, I must have been one of the few that read the damn guidelines. They were looking for a flick they could budget at a million, and the work I had ready to go would be out of that budget range. I was being realistic.

The third contest, I was ready. Brother's Keeper could be done for a million, easy. Half a mil even. Non-specific location. Most of the story takes place in a hospital, so existing sets for another production could be used (one of the great sadnesses marking my past as a lazy screenwriter was not sending this script to a producer I'd been tipped was outright looking for a script set in a hospital to defray costs from another production the sets were being built for). Some SFX, but enough gore, action and sex to offset budget woes. I submitted to PGL and downloaded the required reads.

I don't know what I would have thought of the winning script, although after having watched the show, I'd love to see the movie, even after having to wait a year for Bob and Harvey to release it. I would have selected it to read had it popped up for me, but I must not have been quick enough on the draw. You only got to choose from the scripts that had the lowest number of readers, and judging by the loglines, I wasn't surprised. There were a lot of loglines that started off with "A young screenwriter...", a bunch that concerned groups of high-school or college friends and a more than a few that claimed to be inspired by a true story.

In other words, people who took the adage "Write what you know" too damn literally.

I tried my best to avoid these when they popped up, but one day I had "A college writing instructor..." and two stinkers in all caps to choose from, so I clicked on the obvious autobiographical logline. Boy, do I hope I'm wrong when I think this is some guy's story. The logline termed the story as a thriller, but the thriller portion is limited to a few pages toward the end where someone suddenly has a gun and someone else pretending all along to be good turns out to be bad. The rest is about a college professor who has been taking advantage of his female students who inexplicably gets assigned to teach a high-school class. His first order of business is to check out the girls in class. Just when he thinks he'll be able to control himself:

"...in walks, quite simply, the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.

He is stunned. He is flummoxed. This is, as the Sicilians say, the thunderbolt. He attempts to maintain his cool against all hope."

Shortly after reading this page, I couldn't keep myself from Googling the title of the script. I got a hit. The writer is---you guessed it---a college writing instructor.

I finished this clunker, reviewed it and moved on, but I still have it saved on my drive as a reminder to myself not to think too literally about writing what I know (and also because I keep thinking I could offer it as evidence when this moron gets sued for harassment).

I find myself tonight thinking again about the project I'm being considered for. The producer gave me some info on the story, the characters, the milieu, and the thing that kept striking me was how much I don't know about the specifics of the protagonist and her life. I won't get into details here, but to get the details of setting and story right, I'll have to do some good amount of research.

But during our conversation, the producer asked me about my background, what has led me to this point in my life, and I spoke to her about where I am in my writing career, the desire to break out of my eggshell and get started. She paused and said that's what this story is about, breaking the shell.

So, if I get it, I guess I'll write what I know after all.

No Dull Boy Here

2006-03-25T22:57:00.000-05:00

With the daygig giving me a surprise mini-vacation of five consecutive days off and the wife opting to use two vacation days to give us four days together with The Prince as a family, I've been putting the feet up and relaxing most of the weekend. The wife and I even lined up her mother as a sitter last night and we ran over to see Inside Man, the first movie together in months (which makes me soooo glad it was good).

I got a call yesterday while I was making dinner from that producer I'd mentioned. She told me more about the project, I probably gushed a little more than necessary about how interested I was to work on it, and in the end I sent off two of my projected four sample specs for her to read to get a feel for what I'm capable of. I sent the latest complete draft of Underground, without the recent changes I haven't ironed through as yet, and my final (as in "I'm not revisiting this thing until it pays my rent") draft of Brother's Keeper, a thriller initially inspired by The Student of Prague, an arcane reference even Dennis Miller would have to Google.

Later this week, I'll be indulging in trying to fulfill another lifelong ambition I've had: Getting on a game show. I'll let you know what comes to pass.

and a little thing about screenwriting.

2006-03-23T23:25:00.000-05:00

I mentioned the other day that I'd received some kind words regarding the blog from an old friend who happens to be a working screenwriter. Our history (briefly) is that he's always been encouraging and I've always been stupid not to wallow in said encouragement, there was always a new job or a job search or whatever and I never let myself take his word that I have something to offer.

At the end of his e-mail, he mentioned a professional acquaintance of his is looking for a NY-based writer for a project she's looking to get rolling. Very little money, so someone with a larger standing would most likely disregard the prospect, but he thought I might want to talk to her. Since my completed scripts are somewhat genre-based (one more so than the other) and the project is a character-driven drama, I took a chance and sent her the first twenty pages of Mouse to look over as a sample. Since it's a sample and I thought it's pretty tight, I have no problem sending incomplete work. I hope to talk with her soon to see what she's looking for and if I fit the bill.

Yeah, I think it's pretty cool, no matter the outcome.

Obligatory Faux-Controversial Current Movie Review

2006-03-23T23:00:00.000-05:00

V for Vendetta.

V for Vacuous.

Okay, before I get a hundred responses (who am I kidding, it's still me and Scott) telling me I'm an unfeeling clueless bastard, let me just tell you the lessons I learned from V for Vendetta.

1. Fascist governments are bad.
2. If you're being oppressed by a fascist government, it's okay to fight back. In fact, it's morally inescapable.

In other words, lessons I'd already learned from The Great Escape, Casablanca and one of those Star Trek episodes where Spock wore a knit cap over his ears. Yes, V is labelled a terrorist by the almost comically villainous government, but of course he's not out for political gain by terrorizing the people (that's the villainous government's job), he's trying to spur them into action. That makes him a resistor, not a terrorist. He's not averse to spilling some blood, but since the Norsefire government is the real source of terror in the film, you're not exactly asking the audience to cheer on Bin Laden. This film is about as edgy as it would be had Joe Camp produced it. Throw in the bonus that Warners promoted the film by showing off the ending in every commercial and therefore removed any suspense you might have felt and we've got the year's first big-budget yawn.

Tales from the Back of the House

2006-03-22T10:02:00.000-05:00

So I was poking around Scott the Reader's blog and saw that he's got some great stories about his time as a movie theater manager here in New York. I'd worked for the same company for a while with Scott and have a few stories of my own. It's amusing to me now when I talk to new friends and find out just how many of them were movie theater managers in the past, it's like I've started a collection. Oddly enough, I haven't run into any former concession stand staff since back then, but what good stories could they have? Scott already covered the Great Real Butter Debacle of 1988, what else is there?

One of my colleagues (let's call him Bob) campaigned like mad to get his own theater. Every chance he had, he'd push and push for news of new theaters in our area, and since we were expanding like the spendthrift company we were, Bob soon got his wish, opening a new theater with three screens. They weren't very busy, but the place was his to run and he was in heaven. When Bob's brother got engaged, Bob requested the weekend of the wedding off. Since he only had one assistant manager, someone else had to come in to cover. As time ran out, the district manager hired a new assistant and rushed his training into two days to get him up to speed, ordering Bob to teach the new guy how we prepared nightly deposits. Since new hires weren't supposed to count cash until after a two-week probation period, Bob was skeptical but followed orders. He arrived back at his theater on Monday to a ringing phone. It was the bank, calling to notify him that the two weekend deposits were each short $2000. Bob called the new assistant to find out what went wrong. "This number is not in service." The district office called the police. The address on the new assistant's application was false. Bob, bound by protocol, was fired, but the regional vice president called in a favor with another theater chain to get him a job. Bob started in a multiplex on Christmas Day. He walked into an opening-night showing of The Godfather Part III just in time to hear two patrons shooting at each other.

Cineplex spent a lot of dough buying small local chains and individually owned theaters, so a chain of three family-owned theaters on Long Island was right up their alley. The existing employees were kept on, despite any idiosyncracies some of them might have. I met Clancy, one of the new CO managers, at a regional meeting and found him certifiable. He rambled on at the meeting as the region's film buyer listed the summer's major releases, shouting out in reaction to the stars and films he approved of and razzing the ones he didn't. Cold cuts were supplied, and he turned to me with a huge sandwich he'd built for himself. I joked that he should at least cut it in half before attacking it. Clancy replied that he'd have to use his sword to do so, but since it was outside in his van, it wouldn't be a problem. That Halloween, his theater continued their tradition of having the staff dress in costume. Clancy wore a sheriff's outfit and patrolled the aisles. To this day, I'm surprised he was not arrested that night after he broke up a necking teenaged couple by aiming his double-barrel shotgun at them and yelling, "Knock it off!"

One of the theaters I worked in was running Born on the Fourth of July. Say what you will about Oliver Stone, but I've never seen a film more capable of changing the atmosphere in a theater. The Vietnam sequence set each audience on edge from the first close-up of Cruise on patrol in the hot sun. Not everyone could take it. It wasn't unusual to see strong, able-bodied men stumbling out of the theater in a cold sweat. One night as I watched from the back of the theater, I noticed one row of patrons jumping in surprise one-by-one. Oh great, I thought, we've got a mouse, but as I was about to take a closer look, I saw the reason for their surprise wasn't a mouse at all, but a woman crawling on her belly through the row, her husband hunched over behind her calling to her. I rushed down the aisle in time to hear her rasping, "I gotta get out of the shit! Charlie's everywhere!" Her husband and I managed to get her to the lobby and into a chair, but she continued to think she was in the midst of combat. I ran off to call an ambulance, but when I came back, they were ducking out the front door, embarrassed.

Kick in the Pants

2006-03-20T19:36:00.000-05:00

Spent the weekend working the daygig with lower back pain, leading stupidly to hip pain since I wound up limping from the back pain. Better now after resting on my day off and playing with The Prince, even if he did wake from his nap and slap me in the face. Twice. Seems he chose to slap his mother in the same manner this morning, so I guess all is fair, at least until one of us goes off to work with a cartoon-caliber throbbing red handprint on our cheek some morning.

Since I had the day off, we spent some of today discussing whether I could stand to ditch the daygig. Ever heard the one about the devil you know being better than the devil you don't? Guess which devil is looking most attractive? Like it or not, I'm realistic about bringing home at least some of the bacon, and the research I'm doing into jumping into freelance work isn't looking rosy. I used to be a fulltime video editor in the event industry and made a good name for myself, but that was some years ago and when I tried freelancing there a year or so ago, my old contacts had run dry. I've given some thought to a video-related business that I can pull off with minimal investment, that may pan out for some dough even without giving up the daygig. In the end, that damn Financial Security alarm keeps threatening to wake me up, or at least drown out all other thought.

As I was running through all this today, I got an e-mail from my old friend, a reply to my e-mail alerting him to this blog. To say it was encouraging would be an understatement. I've received a lot of great feedback here so far and every day makes me feel more positive, but in the back of my head I was waiting to hear from this friend since he was there at the very beginning, accepting the idea that I could be a professional screenwriter as a matter of course. Now, he is one, and he's been an inspiration professionally and personally, always positive where I can be negative, always hustling where I'd be wondering where to get a cup of coffee and sit down for a minute, or a month.

I feel like I can see more of the road every day and it's thrilling to lace up and start running.

Progress: Underground may undergo some minor surgery, but I want to give priority to continue working through the first draft of Mouse, conceived as a low-budget thriller. When I get short time to work during the daygig, I'll hammer out treatments for my road comedy about sci-fi geeks and the drama about the end of an Old West town.

The Wearing of the Green

2006-03-17T11:35:00.000-05:00

A happy and safe Saint Patrick's Day to you all.

All of my grandparents were Irish; my father's father was Irish-German, the rest full-on Irish. I'm proud of my heritage, but there's a lot about their lives that I don't know. My father and his own father were not close and had much left to reconcile when my father died before his own, my father's mother was long dead when I was born. I knew my mother's parents while growing up, trundling into Manhattan to visit their apartment, which in memory seems windowless and dim. Somewhere in my mother's house, there's a Polaroid of some of us kids at Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in the late 60's, hauled out one Thanksgiving day years later as proof that I had indeed been brought to see the parade so could I please get over myself and help set the table.

My mother's father died when I was young, and my memory of his death isn't so much about him as it is my first memory of a wake, dark wooden rooms and leather couches, sitting with my sister as my mother moved around the room. My mother's mother came to live with us in the late 70's, bringing with her my first recollections of stories from her homeland, her brother Paddy, my mother's cousins, some of them my age. Photos of faces with familiar features, distant and impossibly green landscapes, thick grass you'd lie down into and sink out of sight.

My own celebration of St. Patrick's Day will have to be brief today as I'll be working. I plan on scouting out at least a corned-beef Reuben to get my fix (hey, sauerkraut counts as cabbage) at lunch, I'll toast my predecessors with a bottle of ale when I get home late tonight. Maybe I'll bring my DVD of The Quiet Man with me to work, grab a few minutes of Barry Fitzgerald to tide me over.

Last night was spent thinking about my ancestry, this blog and a script I was reviewing for Zoetrope. Now that it is out of its experimental phase, I showed this blog to my wife for the first time, and thankfully, she likes it. What I spent a good portion of the evening on was the Zoetrope script, and the writer had tackled a pretty big subject: the ethical corruption of TV journalism. Not the most original of topics, we've had 15 Minutes lately dealing with tabloid TV head-on, sleazy TV journos have been stereotypical tertiary characters for a while, and we all remember and admire Network for its prophetic warnings about the power of television. While the author of the Zoetrope script had the basics of an interesting premise, the story was threadbare, the characters two-dimensional and unoriginal and the dialogue painfully on-the-nose.

But the formatting was perfect.

So I'm wondering about the reaction other Zoetrope readers have had to the script, considering the climate there as outlined by Scott the Reader a couple of weeks ago. The writer's name was one I recognized from a few posts in a private office I belong to, so I thought I was getting a script from one of the more experienced writers, but this just reads like a first-ever-completed script. No one could fault the look of the pages, the sluglines are fine, the descriptions four lines or less...But it reads badly, so badly that I feel I couldn't encourage the writer too much to keep trying because I can't be sure this is something he should be trying. Self-recognition is part of what this blog is about, the exploration of whether being a professional screenwriter (both fiscally and in the recent John August speech sense) is something I can achieve. I'd no sooner assume I could be a writer as I would assume I could be an Olympic snowboarder without having at least some talent for it to start with before training myself, yet as has been explored elsewhere, one can assume they can write a screenplay if they have the right tools and obey the format, but maybe can't be honest with themselves about their level of talent for it. It's a shame, I feel I'd be justified in telling the writers of some scripts I've read at Zoetrope that they need to explore their talent privately a few years or hang it up, yet if you present that opinion there, you are vilified. Apparently to some folk, a workshop environment means never having to say, "You stink."

The very first script I read there was a monstrosity titled "Casablanca On The Moon", was mostly prose without dialogue and even had parenthetical passages describing how the writer would eventually flesh out portions of the script based on feedback to the ideas he presented in said passages. In between all that were some of the most sadistic descriptions of violence on characters that weren't even involved in the rest of the script. And yes, there was a character named Rick, rebels came to his bar on the moon, but the writer was careful to point out the differences between his script and the film Casablanca by saying things like, "Here's where I'm going in a different direction---HERE WE GO!" and the script veered off into depictions of mass crucifixion, beatings and fascism. I can't tell you how it ends, not because I didn't finish, but because the writer didn't finish, choosing instead to explain he planned on collecting suggestions from reviewers on how to proceed from there. Amazing.

I have to admit, I'm not the most frequent visitor to Zoetrope. I tend to visit a few months every two years. The atmosphere there now is the worst I've seen, even worse than the early years when some of the most vocal participants were thinking they could sell their first script through the site itself to Coppola directly. I'd revisited to review the one more script I needed to submit one of my own for review, but my heart isn't in it. The last two submissions got some helpful reviews and good numbers, but to get those reviews I was song-and-dancing my script all over the main board. The newbie reviews I got were four lines about the first ten pages and then one of them even packed out the rest of his review with a cut-and-paste quote from Dave Trottier on proper formatting to show appreciation to me on having formatted correctly. Until this point I'd thought I could find good reviewers by building a name for myself through networking, but now that a name I trusted as being a sensible member has laid an egg, I'm unsure I can even get the limited amount of good feedback I'd been hoping for among the requisite newbie reviews.

I'll give it some time, but I think I just gave up on Zoetrope. I'm proud to be Irish, but I've had enough of the green.

...Or I Could Just Rehearse The Phrase, "Welcome, Do You Need A Cart?"

2006-03-10T12:30:00.000-05:00

I know no one's reading this just yet, it's probably me, maybe Scott the Reader every couple of days, maybe someone from Blogger scanning through recently-started blogs to make sure I haven't torn up the carpet, but in case you read yesterday's puzzling post and are thinking, "A year? This guy won't last the month," I hear you. The last few days have been a bit of an eye-opener for me with what could be a huge impact to my screenwriting efforts.

Long story short, I have a daygig, an actual career, that I sort of fell into. My nature in the past has been following this same tack, trying to cross a river and getting swept off into another direction. While I enjoy the company I work for, I wasn't aiming for the job I have now, and I've been getting progressively more uncomfortable with myself as I perform each day.

A few days ago, after crunching some numbers, the wife and I found that maybe with the cost of the commute and the babysitter, it might be more logical to find some way to work from home, something that would pick up about 40% of what I'm making now. My wife, to my surprise, is not only open to the idea, but encouraging me to find out how to do it.

You might as well have told me to set my workplace on fire. I went to work yesterday and was fighting the urge to be a jerk all day, to speak out when I didn't agree with something I'd normally be a professional about and compromise, to take out my frustration on people who wouldn't deserve such treatment. It was a week before summer vacation and I wanted to pull the fire alarm and skip class to get some pizza and catch a matinee.

There are things about this job that thwart my concentration and tire me out mentally daily, yet there are good things about it as well, but my family comes first. I would just have to line up the mystical stay-at-home tasks that will make that 40 percent.

All of this means I'd be home with The Prince and able to have writing time where I used to have commuting time. I could make dinner for the family, be home on weekends, get to know my wife again.

So what's my problem?

My old man. My father left school in the eighth grade to go to work. Most of the time our lives crossed, he had more than one job. When he was a firefighter in Harlem, he would work three days on and three days off. The days off he'd work as a furniture mover. Those jobs put clothes on our backs, literally: All five kids at some point wore one of the Compass Van t-shirts Dad had brought home, dark blue with yellow screenprinting across the back. When I was twelve, a wall collapsed during a fire and he came home with a broken wrist and a disability check.

He was miserable. He didn't know what to do with himself, or with us. We puzzled him, these five personalities he'd known as much as he could, but seemingly not at all now that he saw us almost every hour of every day. All he knew for sure was that he was not like us at our age and wanted to fix the problem if he could.

Eventually he bought a business, did all right for a few years, then became a fire safety consultant for companies in the city. He was on his way to work for a big construction firm in Manhattan, happy with his work* and having been talking to me about getting a job there on a crew during the summer home from school, when he had chest pains. My mother got him to the doctor just in time for him to go into arrest in the exam room. A successful bypass surgery followed, but a loose clot from his leg hit his heart in the middle of the night a few days later and he was gone.

I just think about him whenever I think about work, and I've never had much in common with him in the types of work I've done, but his unspoken ethic of always working as well as you can, as much as you can, always sticks with me. Sure, I've faltered, but when I'm at my best, it's in line with how he'd behave.

My concern is whether he'd approve of this move, should it happen. I suppose the way to beat down that concern is to succeed.

* - I remember I'd once asked him at the dinner table if he liked his new job with the construction firm. He looked at me as though trying to see through my forehead and into the unused goo behind it. What could I mean, like his job? The very idea that such a thing would matter was almost insulting to him.

Midlife Crisis for the Early Adopter

2006-03-09T18:21:00.000-05:00

Short post today. I just wanted to note the day. I may revisit this, maybe not, but this is a date I want to remember.

Crash-lash

2006-03-07T09:31:00.000-05:00

Seems like everyone's buzzing online about the L.A. Times article by Kenneth Turan blasting the AMPAS for awarding the Best Picture Oscar to Crash over Brokeback Mountain (plus three movies he's conveniently forgotten about). Now, as noted earlier, I haven't seen any of the nominees this year yet (yes, what's available has been added to my Netflix queue), and I'm beginning to think from what I've seen and read that my initial reaction to Crash (that I'd already seen Grand Canyon) might be on-the-money, but I still have to wonder whether Turan's success and whatever amount of carte-blanche he's got at the Times might prove to hurt him. His column is as reactionary as any, well, blog entry I've read, and it also strikes me as hateful and childish. So your favorite didn't win. Get over it. Even your paper's reaction poll for online readers makes fun of the 'controversy' with its last option: "Forget 'Crash' — how could the academy snub 'Star Wars'?"

The one thing I haven't seen noted so far this year (and it may be that I just haven't found it yet) is the idea that the Oscars show is a four-hour commercial for the movie industry, and I'm wondering how many tickets that show was supposed to help gain over last year's slump. For every fun moment in Stewart's monologue, there was a montage that seemed pointless. For each laugh Stewart got, it seemed like there were two gags that resulted in sour acknowledgement from the nominees. Come on, guys, lighten up. No one's going to tear up your voter registration card if you laugh about Gore and Kerry not getting elected. If you look like you're having a little fun, maybe you can wipe off that smear that you're out of touch with the rest of the country.

Getting a nosebleed up on this soapbox. Stepping down.

Call Western Union

2006-03-05T11:47:00.000-05:00

The anecdote usually attributed to Samuel Goldwyn about calling Western Union if you want to send a message will more than likely be forgotten tonight as the Academy hands out their Oscars. Even a simple love story (just because it's two cowboys doesn't make it complex, does it?) can wind up feeling like a message movie in today's political climate.

It's in this light that I'm looking at my current crop of specs and I've realized that so far, I'm pretty much a popcorn screenwriter.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

There is one project I've outlined that once written would have some political overtones, but the concept for that project came to me years ago and whatever 'message' it would be delivering as it plays would be turned on its ear in the last five minutes (my inner Shyamalan can't wait to lay that down).

The self-doubt ogre is poking his head up to tell me I need to write a message movie, but the rest of me rears back in defense to claim I am not a placard-bearer, I'm just trying to write movies I'd like to see.

By the way, Western Union sent its last telegram ever on January 27th. So much for timeless anecdotes.

By the way by the way, I've got a lot of catching up to do with the nominees. I haven't seen any of them. I'd like to blame my job, my toddler son's sleep schedule and, most importantly, my low tolerance of my fellow moviegoers antics.

And thank you, Academy!

Tired, but reading

2006-03-03T23:34:00.000-05:00

Picking through Underground when I could get moments all day and a little tonight. I'm tired, but the determination is crawling back.

By the way, I read this great speech from John August tonight. I can tell I'll be mining his site and the blog over at JaneEspenson.com for cogent, real tips and refreshers. I love the culture now that gives this info an immediacy I wouldn't have had if I'd tried this 15 years ago.

The first month: Taking Inventory

2006-03-02T13:53:00.000-05:00

This first month, I'm checking through what I have to see what I want to start showing around. The majority of this time will be spent finishing a low-budget thriller called Mouse, but I'll also be visiting Underground, a horror-comedy I've always thought was a great writing sample. The problem with Underground is I've rethought some choices I'd made and need to rewrite, and at this stage I can't trust myself not to gut it up too much. I also have on my mind IOU, a romantic comedy involving the Mob, sitting in my own development hell, a series of scenes that I know will flow out into a clean draft once I give it time. These three, along with a possible fourth in Brother's Keeper, an already-finished thriller involving cloning, should wind up being the ones I begin shopping.

This, of course, doesn't mean I won't be working my regular job, so I'll be trying to write during lunches and after work. Luckily I have a couple of days during the week where I can grab an hour or so when my son's sitter is here before I head out to work. I just have to use the time and focus.

Mission Statement

2006-03-01T12:00:00.000-05:00

When I was in junior high school, I started to do a lot more reading than I had been doing, and I had been reading quite a bit.

Yes, I was a nerd. Whoopdie hoo.

My teachers noticed through high school that although I might cut class or walk in late or be lazy with one assignment or another, I always did more with the writing assignments than directed. I wrote stories at home, I hooked up with friends with similar interests and we tried writing together, we talked about becoming professional writers, we dreamt and wrote and dreamt some more. I majored in theater in college, hoping to learn more about dramatic structure to inform my work, and I did learn that much, plus working with actors, directing, production. I learned about failure there too, and how I didn't like it and couldn't bear to live with it. In the middle of college, my father died. Since we weren't wealthy, this threw my family into a good amount of turmoil, and I began to question whether I had the right to go to school at all, especially as the son of an eighth-grade dropout.

In my last year of school, after finding I had almost all the courses required for a Communications major the university was trying to get approved, I focused on what else I needed for the major. The school added a writing class unlike the perfunctory Creative Writing I and II or Drama Theory they'd been offering. This new course was Writing for Radio, Television and Film. I'd tried reading screenplays by then, bound editions of production drafts with scene numbers, they seemed antithetic to any creativity to me then, but this course opened my eyes to what I could do, albeit amateurish and simple, within the form. I spent that semester immersed in my writing, thinking about the future I'd thought I could achieve through a career creating dramatic pieces.

But at the end of that semester, knowing I had still another semester's worth of credits to go before a degree, I left with the plan to finish later.

I started working right out of school, and since I hadn't finished college yet, I wasn't exactly raking in the dough (a lesson I've learned over and over and will preach to the high heavens: Finish school. No discussion.). Making more meant working more, and the first thing to go was the writing, and it wasn't all at once, it was never a decision to stop, it was a postponement, a promise to myself to go back to it and make up the difference. Over the years, I have dedicated swatches of time to writing and rewriting, but never pushed, despite the urging of a great friend, an actual working screenwriter who could offer advice at the sound of a telephone ring; despite the urging of the woman who'd become my wife, a magazine writer/editor who could read what I wrote and give cogent feedback.

So, why now?

Because I've recognized the need in myself to set a deadline and map things out before proceeding, plus the need to let others know what I want to do, since then I will be making myself accountable.

Because while I'm doing all right professionally, I've never envisioned myself in that line of work, especially now that I've seen people who have. I'm not them.

Because I'm tired of thinking I failed when I haven't even tried.

Because I'm now a father, too, and I want to do for my son what I know my father would have done if he could have.

Most importantly, because I now feel the 'want to' again, the feeling that this is something I'm good at that I can make a contribution with. I've worked for others and been that go-to guy to the advantage of big companies and small companies. I've pushed for the good of employers.

Now I want to push for me, for my family.

Why am I doing it out in the open like this?

Because I'd like you to keep me honest. Just by knowing people might read this makes it necessary for me to follow through. I'll post what happens, what interest I get, what I'm working on. I plan to be candid, but you'll forgive me if I hold back names. It may get ugly. I hope it will be beautiful. I'm looking forward to looking back a year and seeing what I was able to do.

Time to get to work.

Start...

2006-02-28T21:46:00.000-05:00

Start writing.
Start working.
Start taking it more seriously.
Start fighting The Wall.
Start networking.
Start relaxing.
Start getting through the Second Act Blues faster.
Start working smarter.
Start being a writer instead of hoping to be a writer.
Start starting.
Start finishing.

One year starts tomorrow.