At the Movies with Governor Tom: Breach

Last night I attended a screening of Breach. Originally released in February of this year, Breach is based on the true story of FBI agent Robert Hanssen. He's the guy who spent 22 years at the Bureau passing secrets to Russia. Huge secrets, like our government's continuity plan for example (what the President, V.P, and Congress do in the event of a nuclear or terrorist attack on D.C.). He cost the lives of a bunch of American agents and who knows how many billions of dollars to the U.S. government. In fact, the FBI says they're still trying to crawl out from all the damage Hanssen did.

I saw Breach when it came out in February but was lured back to see it again by the prospect of seeing Chris Cooper, who plays Hanssen, and director/co-writer Billy Ray in person for a Q&A following the film. Chris is one of my favorite actors. He's one of those guys who seems to play a completely different character every time. A character actor, as they say. If you like Chris, you must give thanks to writer-director John Sayles. He gave Chris his very first movie role in Matewan about 20 years ago, the true story of the 1920 miners riots in Matewan, West Virginia. Mr. Sayles gave Chris roles in future flicks like City of Hope, Lone Star (one of my favorite movies ever), and Silver City, and meanwhile Chris's career has blasted off.

If you haven't seen Breach, you absolutely must. Instead of covering the entire 22-year span of Hanssen's traitorous adventures, it dramatizes the final two months leading up to his arrest and capture (December 2000 to February 2001). In fact, this really isn't Hanssen's story. It's the story of young Eric O'Neill (Ryan Phillippe), the FBI upstart trying to make agent. It's in December of 2000 when he's tasked to work with Hanssen. On the surface he's supposed to be Hanssen's assistant or what have you, but behind the scenes he logs Hanssen's every move and relays all that intel to the 500 agents on the Hanssen task force. The idea is that the Bureau will use that intel to catch him in the act of making a drop, which will give them the best chance of putting him away for a long time. I know this flick was easy to miss because it came out in the winter, traditionally a celluloid wasteland bordered on the north by Oscar bait and on the south by the summer popcorn fare. The powers that be at Universal really should have saved this for the fall because Chris's performance is easily one of the best of 2007. But you know the Oscars. If a movie comes out before Labor Day, it doesn't matter how awesome the acting, writing, or directing is. The esteemed Academy most likely won't remember it. Of course there've been exceptions, but I have an awful feeling this won't be one of 'em.

As for director/co-writer Billy Ray, he's a young buck. I'll bet you he isn't much more than half Chris's age. Breach is only his second film. His first was 2003's Shattered Glass. Like Breach, Shattered Glass is a true story set in Washington, D.C. about a pathological weirdo. In this case it's Stephen Glass, a young journalist who worked at The New Republic from 1995-98 and had a stellar career there. Unfortunately, 27 of his 41 articles were phony. Dude concocted sources, quotes, 'n whatnot, sometimes entire stories, all for the purposes of climbing as high as he could as fast as he could. And it was all working great, but that whole getting-caught thing got in the way. His fall was even faster. Playing Stephen Glass was that kid who played Anakin Skywalker in the second and third Star Wars prequels. It's hard to tell if he's a good actor based on those films because the writing wasn't very good, but Shattered Glass was very well made and proves beyond a doubt that the kid's got acting chops. Anyway, check it out.

The Q&A afterward was moderated by Kevin Thomas. He used to be a full-time movie critic at the Los Angeles Times but is sort of semi-retired now. He doesn't always moderate these Q&As, so it's always a special treat when he does. Kevin handled the Max von Sydow event three weeks ago. He got things started by noting not just how dominant Chris Cooper's performance was, but how authentic the movie as a whole felt. That got Billy Ray all revved up about how he did go to certain lengths to be as true to the events as he could. Granted, most of the film was shot in Toronto, not Washington, D.C. But for example, Billy did get to shoot certain scenes inside the J. Edgar Hoover Building (FBI headquarters) in D.C., which he said no other movie had ever been able to do. Even better, he filmed the arrest and capture sequence in the actual locations where Robert Hanssen was arrested and caught. For example, when you see Chris Cooper placing that package under the bridge in Foxstone Park in Vienna, Virginia, they really did shoot that scene in the real Foxstone Park, at the real bridge where the real Robert Hanssen made what would be his final drop. And then, when Chris Cooper is arrested back at his car, that's the actual location where the real Hanssen was arrested. We're not just talking about the same general neighborhood, but the actual spot where Hanssen was nabbed. Hanssen lived in Vienna and had parked his car about three blocks from his house. So that's where Billy Ray had Chris Cooper park in the film. And they even shot it during the same time of year. Robert Hanssen was arrested on February 18, 2001. Billy Ray filmed the capture scene on February 6, 2006. The weather was the same, the lighting was the same. Everything was just as it had been when the real Hanssen was caught. The arrest happened in front of this woman's house. Her name's Pinkie, apparently. Or at least that's her nickname. She lived there then, and she's still there. When the crew was filming, she was very hospitable. All decked out in a pink sweater that said something like "I live where Robert Hanssen was nabbed," Pinkie kept the cast and crew warm in her house between takes and served them cider 'n whatnot.

Robert Hanssen's wife Bonnie Hanssen (played in the film by Kathleen Quinlan) still lives in their house, three blocks from where the arrest happened. Billy Ray said she never spoke to anyone involved in the film. Did she know scenes dramatizing her hubby's downfall were being shot three blocks away? We don't know. Did she ever see the film? No one knows for sure. Billy Ray did mention that Bonnie Hanssen's brother is an elder in Opus Dei (that ultra-strict Catholic sect villified in The Da Vinci Code), and that Opus Dei tracked the making of the film. Apparently they approved. All they cared about was that Catholicism was treated respectfully, and it was. The Hanssens, as well as Eric O'Neill, are devout Catholics, and the movie conveyed well the perpetual struggle between their faith and their careers.

It wasn't all authentic, though. Billy Ray said that by far the biggest fudging of the facts was how the movie depicted Eric O'Neill as being lied to as far as why he was being tasked to Hanssen. His handler, played by the inimitable Laura Linney, says they want Eric to keep track of Hanssen's porn surfing or what have you. His sexual deviancy. It's not until Eric gets fed up with what he calls "sexual McCarthyism" that he confronts Laura, and she has to tell him what the real deal is. That's not how it went down. The real Eric O'Neill was told exactly why he was being tasked to Hanssen. Billy Ray said he changed it so that the Eric O'Neill character would have room to grow and change throughout the film. It's a story about lies and truth telling, and having Eric lied to off the bat was a good way to spur him on to becoming a different man by the end.

Also, at the peak of the investigation, the Bureau had 500 or so agents on the Hanssen case. I never got that sense at all during the film. Billy Ray said he had tons of those same agents asking him why they weren't represented in the film. But again, this is a film about how the Robert Hanssen case changes Eric O'Neill. It just isn't practical, right? To have so many peripheral characters in a two-hour flick.

One thing Kevin wondered was how Bonnie Hanssen never caught on to her husband's secret spy work. As it turns out, she sort of did. Back in '79 when Hanssen first started working for the Russians, he made $40K in cash from his first drop. Bonnie found the cash in the house and said what the hell. Chris said that Hanssen fed his wife a white lie or something, telling her that secretly he was really spying for the U.S. against Russia and that he was going to donate all the money to Mother Theresa. No, really. According to Chris, that's exactly what Hanssen told the wife, and apparently she bought it because it never came up after that.

When Kevin opened up the floor to questions, the first question came from a guy up front wanting to know if the real Eric O'Neill was involved in the film's making. Billy Ray said that Eric was not only involved, but that he was on the set quite a bit as a sort of technical consultant. Again, this ties into Billy's passion for being authentic. For example, when shooting the scene with all those guns in Hanssen's trunk, Eric told Billy the exact kinds of guns they should get. Eric was in Toronto the whole time making sure the details were spot on. Billy Ray also pointed out that the movie does not exaggerate how much Eric O'Neill was shadowing Hanssen, nor how much danger he was in. "His peril was real," he said. Eric was Hanssen's body man practically 24/7 and therefore knew everything and anything about the minutiae of Hanssen's life.

Someone told Chris Cooper their favorite film of his was Interstate 60, and wondered how he went about picking his roles. Christ admitted that he was a hard guy to please, but otherwise there was no trick to it. He reads each and every script as it crosses his desk and picks whichever one catches his fancy. No deeper analysis than that.

When asked if he watches his dailies, Chris said that it depends on the film. He used to all the time, but he's gotten to a point where he can feel in his gut if it's going to be necessary to watch his dailies to track how well he's handling a particular role. For Breach, he said he didn't really need to. He'd done tons of research on the role and felt he could get a handle on it and that if he went astray, Billy would tell him. For Adaptation (for which he scored an Oscar), Chris said he looked at his dailies all the time because that character was about as big a stretch for him as he'd ever had. So he wanted to make sure he wasn't getting too lazy with it. Billy Ray, for his part, said he never ever watches dailies. He did after the first day of filming Shattered Glass, and then after that decided he would never do it again because it was too terrifying. All he wanted to do after seeing them was go back to his hotel room and puke. Now he felt he didn't need to care about dailies at all so long as Jeff Ford was always his editor. Billy went out of his way to give props to Jeff, who also worked with him on Shattered Glass. "Jeff's the most movie literate guy I know," Billy said.

Someone asked Chris how he prepares for a role. As with the dailies thing, it depends on the film. In general he wants to get his hands on the script as soon as he can. In the case of Breach, he was able to get the shooting script by June of 2005, five full months before shooting kicked off. Once he's got the script in his hands, what he'll do is stay up late at night after the family's gone to bed and spend a few hours reading the script repeatedly. He'll spend weeks doing this so that by the time cameras start rolling he's probably read the sucker like a hundred times. With Breach being based on a true story 'n all, he also had to do some historical research. Something like four books on Hanssen came out in 2001 and 2002, within a year of his arrest. So Chris of course scooped them up and read them backward and forward.

When someone from the audience expressed surprise that Billy Ray had a hard time convincing Universal to cast Chris Cooper, all Chris could say to that was: "We've said it a thousand times. It's business. It's show business." Even after the film was greenlighted, Universal looked like they were going to pull the plug on the whole project anyway. In fact, they sort of did. Billy called up Chris's wife Marianne and apologized to her for screwing it all up. But then Marianne said Chris told her it was his fault because he wasn't a big enough box office draw. And so Billy and Marianne spent an hour on the phone apologizing to each other. It was all rendered moot in the end, of course, when Universal decided to back the film after all.

Another question to Chris had to do with the most important lesson he's learned as an actor. The best way he could put it was that he's learned how not to know what the other actor in a scene is going to say to him. "I've taught myself to reach a state of unself-consciousness, so that no matter if there's 15 takes or 30 takes, with each and every take I'll not know what the other actor's going to say to me." Billy Ray chimed in with an example of Chris's talent. There's a scene in Breach where Chris Cooper is at a confessional. Instead of confessing, he sort of breaks down in tears. Co-writing the script as he did, Billy said that all he wrote was something like "Robert is kneeling at a confessional, and we a see a tear rolling down his cheek." That's it. That's all Chris had to go on. Yet watching it, he really made that scene his own. He does much more than shed a tear. By that point in the film Hanssen's really having a crisis of faith. Chris, having read the script oodles of times, understood that well enough to take the meager stage direction and run with it.

The film never addressed why Robert Hanssen spied for the Russians. Did Billy and Chris have any insight into that, someone asked? Of course no one really knows, which is why Billy didn't even bother trying to spell it out in the film. It would've been too obviously phony. There is a scene right after he's caught where Chris as Hanssen offers up three possibilities as to why he may have done it. They're all plausible. Perhaps it was a combination thereof. This is another similarity to Shattered Glass. In that film, Billy makes no effort to spell out why Stephen Glass felt it was okay to lie his way to the top. Stephen Glass and Robert Hanssen each had a very weird pathology that they themselves sort of had to wrestle with.

Someone at the very front who volunteers for the theater pointed out to Billy that both Shattered Glass and Breach demonstrated how expert he was in very meticulously building up the drama and amping up the suspense and working toward the climax. Because of that, did Billy ever consider doing a movie that was purely fiction? Billy said that to be honest, no he didn't. He said he felt silly making up completely fictional characters and fictional conflicts. In order for him to invest all the time necessary in making a feature, it just feels better if the drama he's depicting is taken from a real-life drama in which real people had issues at stake.

And finally, someone asked if the real Robert Hanssen had anything to do with the film. Billy Ray said no, the dude's under pretty heavy lock and key in the Supermax slammer in Colorado. However, the FBI did give him permission to mail 15 questions to Robert, so long as the Bureau could vet them. So Billy came up with 15 questions, the Bureau deleted one, and mailed the remaining 14 to Robert. Our country's most notorious double agent, however, was not interested in answering them. Which question did the FBI omit, you ask? "If you could run the FBI, how would you do things differently?"

Screenwriting Expo - Day 4

October 28 – Sick and Hungover…and Kind of Sad

It was approaching three in the morning when I finally hit the sack, and I had promised myself to attend one of the 9 a.m. seminars Sunday morning. All those blasted pitches the day before had taken me away from the seminar action, and I wanted to take full advantage of whatever empty space in the day I had, especially considering this was the last day of the Expo. Somehow, someway, I couldn’t tell ya, but I managed to drag myself, hungover on Coronas, out of bed sometime between seven and eight. Making matters a bit more complicated was that my throat was killing me, always the sure sign of an impending cold. It was Sunday, though, so no rush hour to deal with. I got down to the Marriott in good time and was only ten or fifteen minutes late for the first seminar.

I wanted to try something that didn’t relate to any of my scripts, so I picked a seminar on horror films. Mind you, I was the biggest horror buff on the planet when I was a youngster. Seriously. My best pal growing up, guy named Dave, would make a point of coming over to my house for sleepovers ‘cause mine was the only joint in town with a dad who didn’t mind if his kiddies enjoyed a spot of Freddy or Jason. Still, we’re talking a couple of decades ago. And yeah, the first novel I ever wrote, when I was a high school freshman, could definitely be catalogued as horror, but that novel’s crap. When I tell you I’ve written four novels, I am most definitely not counting that one. Also, it was in the back of my mind that I might find inspiration through this seminar to give horror a screenwriting shot. Why not? That Presidential script was my first foray into comedy, and had gotten great feedback. Maybe I could do the same with some blood splatter and put all those sleepovers to good use.

The seminar I picked was called The Suspense is Killing Me! Writing Horror Action Sequences. It was taught by a petit lil’ blonde thing by the name of Sara Caldwell. When I walked in at 9:15 a.m. or so, glass of ice water in hand to sooth my throbbing throat, the lights were dim and Sara was delivering her lecture with the aid of a slide show on a huge screen to her left. Sara herself remained standing at a podium for the whole lecture with a voice that was very measured and clipped, practically clinical. She had half-moon specs to read her notes but more often peered over them both at us and the slides on the screen. While most seminars simply had rows of chairs, this room seemed to be a sort of ballroom with about a score of round tables for six to eight people each. Most of them were full. Sara later said that when they moved her seminar to this room at the last minute, she was afraid a good chunk of chairs would be empty. Apparently our gal Sara underestimated how much horror is fit to burst out of so many screenwriting brains.

When I walked in, Sara was on a slide entitled Pacing: “You wanna take the reader for a ride – make it fun!” Apparently I hadn’t missed too much seeing as she was just getting to character introductions. “Action introduces characters,” one slide said. “Introductions are powerful!” Of the many things she listed about getting to know characters was to see how they behaved in their environment…alone. But don’t introduce everything about a character at once. Not too little, but “don’t throw in the kitchen sink.” The gist of the bit on character development was to let the action and conflict develop the character. All of this may sound obvious, but it’s amazing how lots of films, horror and otherwise, don’t do it all that well. For horror in particular, Sara cited several examples of how films use the act turning points for character development, when the protagonist uses an existing character trait when it’s most needed. One example was the end of act two in A Nightmare on Elm Street, when Nancy figures out how to pull Freddy out of her dream and into reality. Character behavior in horror films, as in all genres, can expose not only the strengths but also the weaknesses of that person. Behavior can add depth to personality which, most important of all, should make the audience care. All too often in horror films you have the audience actually cheering on the homicidal maniac with the chainsaw, eagerly anticipating the methodology of the next kill. Sara couldn’t emphasize enough how the best horror films have you cringing, not cheering, when the protagonist is in danger. You take Descent, for example. Sara did. By the time those characters encounter those subterranean cannibals, you actual fear for them. It kills you seeing them get killed one by one. And speaking of cringing, Sara said that the best way to build suspense is to tease. As with characters, don’t give it all away at once. Set up a hook and tease out the hook over ninety minutes. And for horror films, the hook should engender an escape rather than a pursuit. Descent, anybody?

Sara’s lecture also included tips for writing horror that were not only aesthetic but practical. Horror films, per Victoria Wisdom’s two lectures on Thursday, are among the most lucrative genres. One of the best ways to make your script as sellable as possible (especially important for first-timers) is to use settings that wouldn’t be too expensive to create. Luckily, horror lends itself to such settings. Again, like Descent, a good low-budget setting is an isolated one, whether it be a maze or labyrinth (literal or implied), a house or cabin, an expanse, or what have you. And then find a way to make that simple space seem distorted, as in The Haunting, for example, or Hellraiser. In general, ways to distort space or logic are to make the normal abnormal, make the known suddenly not so known, make surroundings familiar to the protagonist suddenly dangerous, or utilize the unlimited potential of hallucinations, as in A Tale of Two Sisters.

The importance of foreshadowing and heightened themes also came up, which can be conveyed via symbols and motifs. One example is The Sixth Sense. The jewelry box from the dead girl represents danger, and mirrors become a motif, representing Bruce Willis’s separation from the real world. And speaking of foreshadowing, don’t be afraid to use the double whammy. For example, the initial shock can be the foreshadow. The crisis seems over, but it’s only just begun.

Two things inseparable from horror flicks are sex and violence, and good ol’ Sara saved those two topics for last. As with character development, horror films oftentimes give sex and violence short shrift. It’s either too cheesy and over the top or too clinical and unemotional. As with all things related to storytelling in general, sex and violence are always at their best when tied to an emotion. If you don’t get the audience involved emotionally, they won’t care, and the thrill of the sex or violence will be cheap. Just like when Freddy’s chasing that coed, you don’t want the audience cheering him on with “How will…?” You want 'em thinking “What happens if he actually…?” When Sara discussed the sex part in particular, she discussed films with sex scenes that were actually tied to a romance between two characters. One example is the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Matt wants to destroy as many of the pods as possible. He does so, but loses the love of his life. When that happens, you, the audience, feel awful about it. You’re not rooting for the dissolution of their relationship. In Hellraiser Julia and Frank really do fall for each other, and their affair is beyond passionate. When Frank needs Julia’s help to get new skin, you have no problem believing the lengths to which she goes to help him, including murder. By the way, Sara showed a page from the Hellraiser script, written by Clive Barker (also the director), and the way he described their love-making scene in one of the flashbacks was very vivid, and also metaphorical (they make love on top of the wedding dress Julia wore when she married Frank's brother). You can tell Clive’s primary passion is prose. And you can also tell just how lost in each other Frank and Julia become as well as, unfortunately for everyone else in the tale, how much the young couple becomes severed from reality.

As with sex, of course, violence also needs to be tied to emotion and motivation. Obvious examples: Zombies require human flesh to survive; that Great White’s gotta eat, etc. Or take Hellraiser again. Frank needs Julia to lure as many people as she can to that attic where he’s hiding out, because the more innocent saps he can get his hands on, the more his body becomes whole. We, like Julia, don’t know at first that this is Frank’s purpose in asking her for help. Sara couldn’t emphasize enough that if you can expose a character’s emotion and purpose behind a violent act, it can be really potent.

To sum up, Sara reiterated some general tips. Action sequences in horror should be vivid yet sparse and succinct. Don’t reveal everything about a character at once. Tease it out, just as you do the hook. Instead of dialogue, let the actions, especially violent actions, illuminate a character’s interior. Read as many good horror scripts as you can to see how it’s been done, but don’t be afraid to break the mold a bit. That whole breaking the mold thing is always easier said than done, but you can see her point. So many horror flicks seem derivative. Among the oodles of flicks she recommended we read (and of course watch): Hellraiser, Jacob’s Ladder, Descent, The Sixth Sense, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, A Tale of Two Sisters, The Haunting, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and Don’t Look Now. She also recommended a pair of websites: dailyscript.com and a new one called constructinghorror.com, which only just launched November 15. Suffice it to say that after the lecture, I was most definitely jacked to try my hand at horror.

I only had two pitches today, both with management firms. At 11:35 a.m. I pitched to Headlong Entertainment, and at 3:35 p.m. came Paradigm. Coincidentally, the head honcho at Headlong used to be one of the managers at Paradigm. Anyway, there isn’t much to relate here. Both were represented by very nice, professional young lasses who listened well, seemed very amenable to my story, and collected information. Yup, you guessed it. They never got back to me. The most interesting bit about these pitches is what happened in the holding pen. I can’t remember for which pitch I was waiting, but when my time slot was waiting in that last room, sitting in our numbered chairs, a woman with long jet-black hair walked over to the woman with long blonde hair sitting next to me, whose face was concealed behind her bangs, and said to her in a low voice: “Thank you so much for being rude and nasty. That was very writerly and human of you.” She walked away while the blonde didn’t say a thing. She only made this sort of goofy “shoo, fly, shoo!” motion with her hand. And then, just for good measure, although well after the other gal had left the room, the blonde patted her chest twice in quick succession before holding her hand palm out, as if waving good-bye. As a writer, I have to say I love it when I find myself in the middle of a drama because I can speculate endlessly about how it all began. I won’t speculate here, though.

I did have a more positive encounter during the pitches. While in the various waiting stages for one of them, I met a young man in his twenties from Ohio, a bit shorter than me and with perfectly combed black hair. The guy was pitching an action script that he described as North by Northwest meets Die Hard. With paintball. I don’t remember the gist of the actual plot, but suffice it to say that it was a very commercial action picture that made me think of Victoria Wisdom’s statistics from Thursday. Action is the most lucrative genre, and the 16-24-year-old males are the most lucrative bracket. Whether this guy knew it or not, he’d angled for the fattest sale. What’s more, that night, after the Expo wrapped, he was off to meet a producer in the Pacific Palisades to talk about his script, the lucky bastard. This producer was apparently a friend of the family’s from Ohio. If you needed any more proof that networking is the skeleton key to get past any and all gatekeepers in this business, there you have it.

Instead of eating my free boxed lunch out on the patio as usual, I decided I was too sick and tired (literally) to let the sun beat down on my head. So I stayed down on the lower level of the Marriott and sat in one of the oodles of chairs scattered around the corridors outside the seminar rooms. And there I struck up a conversation with a guy named Edward. In his early sixties and a local like me (in his case from Santa Monica), I had actually met Edward very briefly the day before while waiting for one of my plethora of pitches. We spoke extensively, mainly about his project, which is a documentary he’d already begun shooting. I won’t spill the details of it, as Edward had been reluctant to tell me everything, seeing as it had to do with his wife’s family and was still in the works. It led to us talking about stuff outside our respective movie aspirations. For a long time now Edward’s been making a healthy buck on the stock market. I work for Yahoo! and have exercised Yahoo! stock options plenty of times, yet Edward ran laps around me in telling me the health of Yahoo!'s stock, where it’s been, going back several years, and where he believed it was heading. He was cautiously optimistic about it, which was good to hear seeing as how Yahoo!’s been every financial journalist’s favorite dartboard for a good while now. Still, Edward told me this about two weeks before Yahoo! had its name dragged through the mud over the China affair. That’s okay, Edward. None of us saw that coming.

After lunch Edward headed over to the Renaissance for some more pitching while I stayed at the Marriott for the early afternoon guest speaker. From 1:30-2:30 p.m. in the main ballroom I was excited to see they had Scott Frank. Never heard of him? I guarantee you’ve seen at least one of the movies he’s written. Check it out: Dead Again, Little Man Tate, Malice, Get Shorty, Heaven's Prisoners, Out of Sight, Minority Report, Flight of the Phoenix, and The Interpreter. In early 2007 he made his directorial debut with The Lookout, which he also wrote. It’s possible you missed The Lookout because it came out in the winter-spring season, that cinematic dead zone between all the Oscar stuff and the summer tent poles. But don’t worry. That’s why we have Netflix, right? Although he’s pushing 50, Scott looks good for his age. I’d guess he even lifts a little bit. And he’s got a full head of black hair.

He talked about going to UC Santa Barbara in the late seventies and early eighties. One of his professors nudged him to take a stab at screenwriting and became his mentor. Similar to the CS Open contest, he first gave Scott a four- or five-page scene to write. Scott did it, turned it in, and got it back marked up and down with red ink. There was also a comment at the top that said something like, “Not bad” or “Keep going” or something really succinct that provided Scott with enough fuel to keep at it. After graduating, he moved to Hollywood and lived the cliché of the struggling screenwriter who tended bar. He made his first big sale, Dead Again, thanks to someone he met during one of his bar tending gigs who knew an agent. That agent eventually led to the sale. Say it with me now: Networking!

His M.O. as a writer involves renting office space and working there Monday through Friday from nine to five. He instills that traditional work structure on himself to be as productive as possible, although he admits he can easily kill the first three to four hours of the day surfing the web, surfing his coffee, not writing a single line. Poor guy. If he hadn’t already wracked up that pretty impressive oeuvre, I might actually feel for him. Continuing with that theme of networking, he said he was amazed that events like the Screenwriting Expo exist, and sort of wishes events like this had been around when he was a young buck. He knows that he could very well not have met that person at the bar who knew the agent, and that he could’ve remained a starving screenwriter considerably longer. So he encouraged us to take advantage of the Expo to network as much as possible. “There’s a dearth of good scripts in Hollywood,” he said. “So if you’ve got just one good script, and you knock on enough doors, your chances of success are good.” I’m paraphrasing, but I specifically remember him mentioning the “dearth of good scripts.”

When the moderator asked him about his most positive experience in the film industry thus far, Scott said it was directing The Lookout, hands down. Although the film is set in St. Louis, he shot it in Winnipeg. In the winter. When you see it, he said, it’s important to know that the snow is real honest-to-God snow. It doesn’t just look like it’s cold, it was really goddam cold. One of his predominant memories of the shoot is how unbelievably freezing it was and how he was always counting the minutes to when he’d be able to get back inside. Still, he said, it was by far the most rewarding experience of his career.

After my 3:35 p.m. pitch to Paradigm, I met Edward in the corridor right outside the pitching ballroom. He’d just finished his last pitch of the day as well. He had nothing else to do at the Expo. My plans were to meet up with Julie, the Scotswoman I’d met the night before, but that wasn’t for another three hours. There was one more event that we did have the option of going to. At around 5 p.m. or so, back at the Marriott ballroom where I’d seen Scott Frank, they were having the Screenwriting Expo closing ceremonies. Included would be the top three finalists from the CS Open tournament. The program said that all three scenes would be read in front of the crowd, and that the crowd would get to vote for the winner. Neither of us had any interest in going. Still, we decided to stroll back to the Marriott, where he was parked and where I could park myself for the last time at that outdoor patio. With any conversation about our respective movie projects long since exhausted, Edward talked to me about his two kids. His son, around ten or so, was having great difficulty in math. In particular, his most recent assignment had something to do with averages, means, medians, and the like, and his son had really wrestled with it. This worried Edward greatly, and as his son got closer to high school, the concerned father was still vacillating between public school versus private. While I got settled on the patio, Edward was heading down to the seminar rooms to see if anything else was going on. There was no need to exchange cards as we’d already done so at lunch that day. We promised to keep in touch.

While sitting out on the patio, the lack of sleep from the night before finally catching up with me and the fire in my throat showing no signs of cooling down, I watched with a pang in the chest as various Expo-ers had already checked out of their rooms and were catching cabs and shuttles back to LAX. Of course the vast majority of them I had never met, yet we had all spent all day every day at this event for the past four and half days. We’d put our lives on hold to do so. Many of them traveled from great distances, which speaks volumes about their dreams and determination. I don’t know, but something about all that made me feel like we were a ginormous family. For my part, I’d never been around so many writers in my life. Most people I know on a day to day basis have no interest in writing, and so there’s no one in my life who really gets where I’m coming from. It’s no one’s fault. As Bruce Hornsby said in another age, that’s just the way it is. I know I risk sounding really sentimental here, but I think one reason I’d had no trouble at all connecting with so many people at this event was that I knew in an instant where they were coming from, and vice versa. It didn’t matter where they lived or how much older or younger they were, we were all united by a passion to create. One of the people who walked out was that slick-haired kid from Ohio with the North-by-Northwest-meets-Die-Hard script. With his big black backpack strapped on, he turned and spotted me sitting there. We made eye contact as he continued walking. We nodded and smiled at each other. And then he was gone, off to the Pacific Palisades to pitch his action adventure. I’ll probably never see him again, but I’ll always wonder if he made the sale.

Another thing about watching all these people that made it extra throat choking was that it was late in the afternoon. The sun was setting behind LAX a couple miles away. So there you go. Any writer could appreciate the obvious symbolism here. Not just the setting sun, but the fact that the sun was setting behind the very airport where many of these Expo-ers were now heading for the journey home. If you find a scene that more blatantly captures an ending, please do let me know.

I had a notebook in which I’d been jotting down notes from seminars as well as from my own observations, all of which became fodder for these blog posts. I was just starting to jot down stuff for this day when Namiko showed up. She was also done for the day. Instead of the closing ceremonies, she was killing time before another Expo-er, a fellow Japanese gal who was now living in the northeast and wasn’t heading home until tomorrow, was going to take her out to dinner. She sat out on the patio with me for a spell. We talked about our day and the Expo as a whole. Both of us had nothing but positive experiences to recount and were both happy we’d gone to the time and trouble to attend this sucker. I’m really glad Namiko was satisfied. The poor gal’d flown all the way from frickin’ Tokyo.

Eventually we decided to adjourn to Champions, the sports bar where she, Florencia, and I had had drinks that very first night after the pre-Expo pool party. As with Edward, Namiko and I had long since exhausted any conversation about our writing aspirations, and so we started sharing bits of our personal lives. As it turns out, we had quite a bit in common in terms of musical tastes. She likes U2, and U2 practically got me through high school. She likes Suzanne Vega, and I was heading to a Suzanne Vega concert in two weeks. Beck and Weezer are two more of her faves. I saw Beck at the Universal Amphiteatre a couple years ago. And so on. We also talked about our frustrations with relationships. If there’s one true universal language, it’s not mathematics, it’s dating. I sort of ventilated onto her the various issues I had with the L.A. dating scene, how the lack of community in this mutant sprawl translated into lots of seemingly aloof people with whom it was hard to connect. Sure, there’s always the possibility of meeting someone at work, but most everyone I know at Yahoo! is pretty involved with someone else. Namiko, in her late thirties and also single, said that in Japan, the workplace was definitely one of the prime spots to meet a potential mate. As she described it, their version of speed dating was when a collection of companies put out the call to all singletons under their respective roofs about a singles event after work on a certain weeknight. In Namiko’s case, she and other singles from Sega would head to a bar after work where there’d be a commensurate number of singles from other companies.

To make the most of her visit to the States, she wasn’t heading back to the grind just yet. First thing tomorrow morning she was checking out and then heading over to a hotel in Beverly Hills called Lux. Her plan was to spend all of Monday and Tuesday visiting various spots around L.A. Her plane back to Tokyo was departing that Wednesday. When she e-mailed me after getting back, she told me that she got the chance to take the VIP tour of Warner Brothers, which I’d recommended to her based on my own experiences with the tour over the summer. When I first met her at the pre-Expo pool party, she’d told me her favorite show was ER, and I remembered that the ER set was one of the stops on the Warners tour. And so I was not surprised in the slightest when in her e-mail she said that the best part of her whole visit to the States was seeing the ER set.

At 6:30 p.m. I met good ol’ Julie out on the patio where she and I had met and talked into the wee hours the night before. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was depressing that all this was about to end, but why not stretch it out a bit further? And what better way than to get away from the hotel for a spell? I huffed it back to my car at Lot C, drove back to the Marriott to pick up Jules, and drove us north about 10 miles to the Westside. We wound up at the Napa Valley Grille in Westwood Village, just a few blocks south of UCLA, a few blocks from where my mother grew up, and by utter coincidence all of one block from the apartment where Julie lived the previous February while attending a UCLA extension course in screenwriting. I’d been to the Napa Valley Grille once before, back in early August with a gal I’d met at, you guessed it, one of those speed dating ‘mabobs. It didn’t work out with her, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a great little place. The menu isn’t exactly Cheesecake Factory affordable, but the food’s definitely worth it. No, really. If you’re in the area, make it a point to go there. As Alan Coulter says on The Late Show, you’ll be glad ya did!

On this night I decided to forgo beer—the Grille’s got Blue Moon on tap, by the by—and let Julie order us a bottle of white. She’s to wine what I am to the sudsy stuff. For the appetizer I ordered their pizzettes, which are basically little tiny baby pieces of pizza. In addition to the tomato sauce, the pizzettes contain—you ready for this?-- duck confit, creamy blue cheese, black mission fig, celery root, wild mushrooms and truffle essence. I told you you better be ready! I don't even know what half that stuff is, let alone how they get it all on those little infant slices. Jules skipped the appetizer and dove straight into the main course, which for her was jumbo lump crab ravioli, stuffed not only with crab meat but also with butternut squash and lobster mushrooms. My main course was the roasted free range chicken breast. You know what? I just realized what a monster goof it was to describe my dinner on an empty stomach. You have no idea how famished I am right now. No joke.

I got to know Julie by far more than anyone else at the Expo, between the previous night’s chat-a-thon as well as our dinner at the Napa Valley Grille. I’m not kidding. I know I told her a lot about my life, and she practically gave me the lowdown on herself from the moment she popped out of Mum’s belly to this night. And what a life she’s had. After scoring a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Psychology, she worked as a drug counselor to addicts and their families. This was in the Sheffield area in Yorkshire, North of England. It’s the same neck o’ the woods where that flick The Full Monty took place. Ever see The Full Monty? That’s where. There were the awesome, rewarding times as well as the tragic. She made sure to emphasize the awesome. Yeah, these kids—and they were mostly kids—were into heavy shite. Yeah it could be maddening sometimes, but the reward of seeing them get better made it all worth it. It wasn’t all work and no play. They’d go to the movies. No, really. With a smile on her face like a proud mother hen, she regaled me with tales of how she’d pack the kids into some raggedy ol’ bus and chauffeur them into town to catch a matinee at the local cinema. As for the tragic times, remember we are talking about hardcore addicts here. I think you can guess.

We’re both children of divorce, only hers came much later than mine, as she was approaching twenty. Branded into her brain forever is the image of her, her brother, and their parents at the dinner table when their parents broke the news. Branded forever is the clatter of her brother’s fork falling to the plate in reaction. Also like me, though, and just to stay positive here, she’s remained close to both parents. They both have vastly different careers, so she needs to carry two different mental lexicons when talking to them, but she’s plenty whip-smart to do that. Whenever her mother visits her, wherever she happens to be living (Jules has gotten around), her mother always falls in love with the place and says she could easily see herself living there. As I pointed out to Jules, of course her mom’s going to say that. The hen just wants to be near the chicky to make sure all’s well.

As with Namiko, we also commiserated about being perpetually single. Jules has a gig that requires her to travel during the week. ‘Course the awesome thing about that is that she almost never spends any of her own dough. Everything’s expensed. On the flip side, she’s living alone out of her suitcase Monday through Friday, and she’s usually at work twelve to fourteen hours a day. As a singleton, she said more than once, it can really suck not to have that last call of the day.

When dinner was over, we took a stroll around Westwood Village, where she pointed out to me where her screenwriting extension class was held the previous February. This was when we discovered that the apartment she lived in during the class was all of a block away from the Grille. For my part, I showed her the Geffen Playhouse, where I go a handful of times a year and where I’d just seen the Wendy Wasserstein play Third, starring Christine Lahti, the month before. And we walked by the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf that I always read at prior to curtain time whenever I go to the Geffen.

There was no delaying the end now. It was after ten at night. We hopped back into my Focus, and I took her back to the Marriott. We hugged and said happy trails. I drove the thirty or so light years up the 405, back into the Valley, back into my life. As I came up over the hill and down toward the innumerable amber lights dotting the black Valley floor like a sheet of marbles over an abyss, I thought about how paradoxical the Expo had felt in terms of time passage. It went fast because I was always on the go, yet it seemed I’d lived a small lifetime because of all the people I’d met, gotten to know, and said good-bye to. When I got back to work the next day, I just knew I’d have that familiar feeling of having never left, yet at the same time of having been through so much in the five days I’d been away. And since I was horrifically underslept and my throat was kicking my ass up and down the L.A. basin, I also knew I’d show up grumpy. There was no denying it. I’d be sucking down the Starbucks Breakfast Blend like it was the last Breakfast Blend in the Milky frickin’ Way. No joke.

Screenwriting Expo - Day 3

October 27 – Hot Werewolf Chicks

Pitch mania!

Of the 12 companies I pitched to, eight of them were today. They weren’t exactly one right after the other, but they were sufficiently close together that I had no time to attend any seminars except for the guest speakers much later in the afternoon. So except for sitting out on the Marriott patio with my boxed lunch, I pretty much spent the meat of Saturday at the Renaissance. Here are the companies I pitched to as well as the times I pitched to them. Unless otherwise noted, the people representing these companies were only slightly north of legal drinking age.

William Morris (literary agency) – 10:15 a.m.
United Artists (movie studio) – 10:50 a.m.
Kennedy Marshall (production company) – 11:25 a.m.
Barnes Moris (entertainment law firm) – 1:10 p.m.
Brillstein (management agency) – 2:40 p.m.
Varsity (production company) – 3:25 p.m.
APA (literary agency) – 3:45 p.m.
Creative Artists Agency (literary agency) – 4:10 p.m.

Notice how I didn’t note anyone being older than 22? That’s because there weren’t any fitting that description. I kid you not. Everyone from the above companies was a good decade or so younger than me. Every. Single. One. In hindsight I should have expected it really. It’s got to be such a thankless job, giving up your Saturday to come listen to innumerable hopefuls bombard you with their story ideas. I sympathize with them. For the most part. A few of them could have been nicer. You have to remember that we Expo-ers were paying healthy coin to be there, and that doesn’t count the pitch tickets. Those go for $25 each. So if I’m paying you $25 for not one second more than five minutes of your time, the least you could be is nice.

It sort of got off to a weird start with William Morris. Ever heard of the William Morris agency? It’s easily one of the biggest, most prestigious agencies, like, ever. And I do believe it’s the—not one of the, but the—oldest agency on Earth. Seriously. Look ‘em up. The guy representing them was a young, blond, smooth-faced chap named Brooks. He was nice ‘n all. When I say pitching to him was weird, I don’t mean he was mean, he was just sort of not all there, if you know what I’m saying. Off to Alpha Centauri on a one-way ticket. I pitched the kid two of my scripts, and he nodded and gave me stock compliments like, “Good story ideas, Thomas.” And then when the five minutes were up, he was like, “Well thank you, Thomas. Those were good ideas.” And that was that. No “Do you have a card?” or “No thanks, I’ll pass.” or anything in between. You have good ideas, now off with you. So I thanked Brooks for his time and walked away with the weirdest feeling because the pitch was left open ended.

The young gal from United Artists was much more receptive, even if I never did hear back from her. I pitched her my comedy script about the President, and she told me one of her favorite movies was Dave. She loves flicks that poke fun at the Executive. With a script like mine, a response like that was perfect. She took my card and wrote down my name and the title and all that…and I never heard a peep. While pitching to her, I caught a cute blondie giving me the eye from a table to the right and behind my United Artists stand-me-up. I noted blondie’s table number, looked it up on the wall chart out by Bob Hoskins, and saw that she was from a company called Varsity. I hadn’t bought a ticket for them online, but the Expo was selling all leftover pitch tickets right there at the Renaissance. I saw Varsity specialized in comedies and scooped up a ticket for the 3:25 p.m. slot, the silly bastard I was.

Both Kennedy Marshall and Barnes Morris had more young bucks like Brooks. Unlike Brooks, though, they couldn’t even fake a "Good ideas, Thomas." I pitched them my comedy script, they asked me for my card, and that was that. Whether my script sounded good or not would be up to their bosses. Even worse, they didn’t even write anything down, like what the title of my script was or what it was about, just so they could remember me. They added my card to their pile and left it at that. Like they were going to look at my card the next day or the day after or the week after—whenever they met with their bosses—and remember my pitch among the zillions of other pitches they’d heard already and were yet to hear? I suppose they thought taking my card was a diplomatic way of telling me to scram. But no. In fact, it would’ve been better if they had actually done just that.

Davita, the cute young black gal representing Brillstein, was pretty much the same as the gal from United Artists. She absolutely loved my Presidential comedy. Since she was black, I made it a point to pitch her a paranormal drama I have wherein most of the characters are either of African descent or birth, but she wasn’t really into it. She absolutely loved my Presidential comedy, though, which she made a point of telling me more than once. Again, like the UA gal, she took my card and wrote down all my information…and I never heard from her again.

And now we get to good ol’ Varsity Productions, the ticket for which I bought on the spot earlier that day because the blondie representing them had been giving me the eye during my UA pitch. And I don’t delude myself in saying she gave me the eye. There’d been no one at her table while I’d been at the UA table, and she was staring at me hard. When I saw that her company was specifically looking for comedies, how could I pass up the chance to pitch to her? Wouldn’t you know it, though, that I found out first-hand why the long-legged princess had had no one at her table when she and I clapped eyes at each other. I’m guessing there had, in fact, been someone at her table during my UA pitch, but that she’d sent them packing well before the five minutes were up because she shot down their idea. Why would I suppose that, you ask? Because the bitch shot down my idea. I barely got the premise out of my mouth before she was like, “Okay wait! Wait! I can already tell you that my company won’t accept your idea. We’ve already got a sort of political comedy in the works. But if you want to practice your pitch on me, that’s fine.” I tried to explain to her that even though my protagonist was the President, the film itself wasn’t political at all. I wasn’t taking a stand on either side of the aisle. She would hear none of it. I’m sure she thought she was being clever when she tried poking holes in my story, but unfortunately she hadn’t given me a chance to tell her the whole story. She paused, thought about that, and reiterated what she’d said at the beginning, that her bosses wouldn’t go for it because they were already developing a political comedy. Really, a political comedy? What in Judas Priest does that even mean? Is her company’s film parodying Rush Limbaugh or something? I tried throwing Dave at her, but she told me Dave wasn’t any good. Oops. So much for the UA gal. I personally think Dave’s a classic, and lots of other people think so too. It’s one of director Ivan Reitman’s most precious gems. Considering her youth, I was tempted to ask her if she even existed when Dave came out. Way back in 1993. I resisted. Well, I suppose the movie biz is like the novel biz: One person’s terrific is another person’s terrible. Or as William Goldman puts it: In Hollywood no one knows anything. I know I’m going on about this, but I don’t think I was at goldie’s table for more than two minutes or so. She wished me luck on the rest of my pitches, but I just ignored her, got up, and walked away. Yeah, I know I was sulking. Yeah, I know she doesn’t have to like my idea. But she could’ve been a wee bit more courteous. I was paying $25 for the privilege of her ear, after all.

The APA Agency didn’t work out much better. Representing them was a carrot top with a cap pulled low over her eyes. I pitched her my Presidential comedy, but she didn’t get the logic. Mind you, I’ve pitched this idea to a lot of people by now, both formally at the Expo and informally to writers, friends, and family. Even if not everyone’s liked it, most everyone’s been able to understand it. Not the APA gal. Toward the end she shook her head quickly from side to side, as if she'd been slapped in the temple, and was like ,”Whoa! What just happened? I didn’t get that logic at all.” She thanked me for my time and my pitch, but she reiterated that she didn’t get my logic.

And finally we have Creative Artists Agency, or CAA as we call them. Ever hear of them? They don’t only handle writers. CAA reps everyone who’s anyone. They’re just as big as William Morris. Look ‘em up when you get a chance. As with William Morris, I probably should’ve known better than to pitch to these guys. But really, why shouldn’t I? If you’re going to take aim, why not aim for the moon, right? Representing CAA was a nerdy-looking kid named Matt. He wore big black-rimmed glasses and wasn’t afraid to smile. No sooner did I get the premise of my script out of my mouth than he started laughing. A great sign! And then he sat fully engaged in my pitch. When I was through, he asked various questions that showed he was interested. He took my card and wrote down my information and added it to the already huge stack in front of him. Besides other business cards and various treatments and synopses, I saw that people had given him CDs. What in tarnation were people putting on CDs that had to do with their pitch? At any rate, it was after 4 p.m. at this point, so I really sympathized with Matt and thought it was really nice of him to give me the full five minutes and take all my information and feed me false hopes that his supervisors would have the slightest interest in my idea. So like the Dave fan from United Artists and Davita from Brillstein, Matt really dug my idea but never got back to me.

Before I conclude talking about today’s pitches, there’s one more little gem I’d like to share. While waiting out in the lounge for Bob Hoskins to call my time slot, just leaning against the wall and spinning my most recent pitch around in my noodle to analyze it to death, I couldn’t help overhearing two fellow Expo-ers having a conversation a few feet away. They were both sitting down on the floor against the wall. One was a young stud clad in a black tee, black jeans, and black boots. His black hair was slicked back, and his biceps bulged with tattoos. He started chatting with this other guy, who could not have looked more different. He was a little older and dressed much more conservatively. The black-clad dude started talking to the other guy about his script. The genre, you won’t be surprised to hear, was horror. Oh, but wait. It was more than that. It was horror porn! The story concerned a gang of hot women who turn into werewolves. The one and only way to stop them from going all lupine was, as the black-clad chap put it so eloquently, “to fuck ‘em.” “Are you serious?” the other guy said. Of course the dark dude said he was serious. Yeah, you had to have sex with these hotties to keep them from turning. Accordingly his script had scenes where the hero would bang one of the she-wolves while she’s in the midst of turning. So there he’d be, rolling in the hay with a dame who’s perhaps already sprouted the hair all over her body but hadn’t quite grown the snout yet or what have you. Actually I thought it sounded kinda creative and is bound to have an audience. Shit, I’d watch it. Wouldn’t you? And the fact that he talked about his script with a perfectly straight face made me laugh for some reason. No, really. I had to turn away and hide the fact that I was chuckling. I’m not sure what tickled me. Maybe it was the fact this guy’s script highlights so starkly the vast variety of writers you had at the Expo. That’s why I don’t quite agree with what Cynthia said the night before. We’re not all competitors. I’m not competing with the werewolf guy. He’s writing for a completely different audience and was pitching to production companies who would look for stuff like his, not mine.

I had no time for seminars all day, but I could still make the guest speaker event. From 5-6:30 p.m. in the ballroom back at the Marriott, tonight’s speakers were writers Ted Elliott and Terry Russo. Never heard of them? They’re the two guys who wrote all three Pirates of the Caribbean flicks, among other things. While I loved the first Pirates, I was only mildly thrilled by the second and third ones. They were a bit overwrought to my liking. Still, at the very least these two were no doubt the wealthiest lads at the Expo, so I figured why not go see what they had to say.

Both Ted and Terry are at least in their forties. Terry, the one with hair, might even be in his fifties. Both have a little meat on the sides, especially Terry. My general impressions of them were that Terry was the touchy-feely guy. He was very soft spoken and eloquent and likes to connect with people. Ted, glossy bald on top and wearing Revenge of the Nerds specs, was pretty much the opposite. He liked to laugh, but his humor seemed mostly cynical. As with all the guest speaker events, this one was moderated by one of the writers from Creative Screenwriting. The first question he asked Ted and Terry was something like how they worked together, what their process was like. Ted was immediately like, “Aw man. I swear, if I had a nickel for every time we were asked that…” In other words he complained about the question but didn’t really answer it. Terry, though, gave a very thoughtful response. It makes me wonder if they play good cop bad cop on purpose or if it just worked out that way. Maybe the whole opposites-attract rule applies to writing partners as well. At any rate, Terry talked about how much they outline. They’re huge into outlining with cards on a cork board and can sometimes spend months noodling the outline before they actually type FADE IN.

They broke into the biz back in the eighties with this one script they had called Little Monsters. Ever see that? Actually I haven’t. Maybe I should toss it on the queue. Anyway, it was produced by the same studio that did Dirty Dancing, which was a huge hit for the company. But then came a string of no less than nine consecutive flops which led to them going belly up. Little Monsters, as it turned out, was the ninth of those flops, the proverbial nail in the company’s financial coffin.

Because their oeuvre includes both live action and animation, Terry made it a point to say that writing for one is no different from writing for the other. It’s always about the story. Ted, meanwhile, made it a point to say he hated the three-act structure because, as he sees it, it’s an extension of the auteur theory. And if you’re familiar with the auteur theory, you’ll know that it pretty much renders the screenwriter immaterial to the authoring of a film.

One thing they talked about, which demonstrates they might have more gold than you and I might imagine, was how descriptive they were when writing the Pirates films. For example, when they first introduce the Black Pearl in the first script, Ted and Terry were very particular in describing every part of it, and then they did the same thing when describing the Dead Man’s Chest in the second film. Then, when the little toy Dead Man’s Chests and toy Black Pearls sell like hot cakes, Ted and Terry actually get a piece of that action. They have the copyright on those images. See what I mean? Think about that. This trilogy earned some of the tallest piles of coin, like, ever. And as was the case with a certain other trilogy from the late seventies and early eighties, this always translates into lots of little kiddies going to Kay-Bee or wherever and buying the action figures. Just like this one nerdy kid (raising my hand) did back in the late seventies and early eighties.

I have to say I was a little disappointed the moderator didn’t ask them about the critical responses received by the second and third Pirates. The second one received lukewarm praise at best, but the third one was critically bodyslammed. Of course, it’s the money that matters in the end, right? But still, if they’re like most writers, their egos are fragile. When you spend so much time putting together a script or a novel, it’s a very precious object to you. You feel protective toward it in a sort of parental way. Brisk sales certainly help, but you also want the powers that be to like your piece. Unfortunately there was no discussion about that. Amazingly they said it was possible there’d be even more Pirates films. Personally I think they should move on, but I’m not the top dog at Disney with dead Presidents raining on my head courtesy of the Pirates flicks.

For now, though, Ted and Terry are moving on. Their next piece is going to be The Lone Ranger. Terry explained the premise this way. Yeah, we all know the Ranger rides a white horse, wears a white hat and a mask, and uses only silver bullets. But have you ever wondered why? He didn’t spill it all but said it had to do with the death of the Ranger’s brother. The backstory is that the brother was killed with two bullets in the chest. Apparently the Ranger’s mask was made from part of the shirt his bro was wearing when he was murdered. Those two eye holes are actually the bullet holes.

And now it was time for another decompression for tonight’s networking party. Before heading out to the patio, I went to that same gift shop off the lobby and, instead of getting a Diet Dr. Pepper like the previous two nights, got myself a can of Amstel Light. When I went out to the patio, I sat myself next to a woman who was sitting out for a smoke, a fellow Expo-er named Julie. Originally from Scotland, Julie now lives in Midtown Manhattan. That is, on the weekends. Her job requires her to travel most weeks. She was already with another Expo-er, a middle-aged gal named Montana, who came from Arizona. We ended up talking at length, they nursing glasses of white wine, me finishing off my Amstel before starting on a trail of Coronas. We had nothing else to talk about so of course we told each other about our scripts. Montana vented about her writing partner, a dude in Tennessee named Gammon whom she hadn’t actually met yet. They were having disagreements over their current project, which Montana was there to pitch even though she and Gammon had only just finished the first thirty pages or so. Julie’s script, meanwhile, was a romantic comedy set in Britain.

Montana eventually went off to the networking party, but Julie and I stayed out and talked until, I shit you not, one in the frickin’ morning. We probably started talking around seven or so. The six hours went so fast they practically didn’t exist. You know how it is when you hit it off with someone and start telling them your biography, and then they tell you theirs. And then you start telling them all kinds of shit you probably couldn’t confide in one of your other friends whom you’ve known for years. Amazingly, we were never the only ones out there, even after midnight. A lot of the Expo-ers stayed at the Marriott, and I suppose a lot of them had nonsmoking rooms. Anyway, it was always a happening scene out on that patio. Lora walked by at one point. She’d taken my advice and enrolled in the CS Open writing tournament and actually advanced to the second round. She was outside waiting to meet a guy she’d met earlier, a local Expo-er who was going to take her to Venice Beach. This was the Saturday night before Halloween, so I’m sure Venice was a happening place.

Julie and I finally parted ways sometime after one in the a.m. and promised to meet up one more time the following night. Tomorrow was the Expo’s last day.

Screenwriting Expo - Day 2

October 26 – Really? A Stripper-gram?

Friday morning’s commute wasn’t quite as bad as Thursday’s, maybe an hour and ten minutes instead of a solid hour and a half. I parked at the same $10.50 garage next door, but was wondering if tomorrow I shouldn’t try LAX Lot C, like I’d done the night of the pre-Expo pool party. Besides the stiff parking rate, this garage required visitors like me to go at least four stories below ground, especially creepy when you live in earthquake country.

I got there with maybe 15 minutes to spare before the screenwriting tournament started. For an additional eight bucks, Expo attendees could sign up for a tournament called the CS Open. You were allotted 90 minutes to write a three- to five-page scene per the specifications given upon arrival. The first round was spread out into eight sessions all day Friday and the first half of Saturday. The top ten percent would advance to round two, which took place Saturday night. And then finally, the top three scorers of round two would have their scenes read on Sunday afternoon at the Expo’s closing ceremonies, where the crowd would vote for the winner, who’d pocket what I think was a $5,000 check.

I signed up online a couple weeks earlier and, of the eight sessions to choose from, opted into the first session, 9:30 a.m. Friday morning. I had to go to the Renaissance Montura, ‘bout two blocks or so north of the Marriott, and report to a huge room at the back of the first level. When you walked in, you were entering from the back of the room. Dead ahead about forty or fifty feet was the podium and some tables where the moderator and contest judges would be. I’m not sure if it was a ballroom or what. I don’t think so. But no exaggeration, the room was sprawling about a hundred or so feet to either side. So the entire length of this sucker from left to right wasn’t all that shorter than a frickin’ football field. I don’t think this room was a ballroom. Ballrooms usually have high ceilings. What it lacked in height, though, was more than made up for in sprawl. Long tables spanned the entire length with a gap in the center where you come in so you can get up to the front. Even with a microphone, the poor moderator had to raise his voice to reach all of us. In the back two corners of the room were water coolers next to tables with innumerable glasses standing on their heads. When I walked in, I turned right and sat at the far side to be near the cooler. Before driving down that morning, I’d had raisin bran cereal, which always leaves me parched.

We were each given blank sheets of scrap paper, a little screenplay booklet on which to write our scenes by hand, and freshly sharpened number two pencils. And I do mean freshly sharpened. While watching my watch creep past the 9:30 start time, the poor Expo workers were sharpening pencils like madmen at the front of the room. These screenplay booklets were called such because, more than just being lined paper, they featured vertical lines to help you see where the dialogue should be written in relation to the action. If you’re at all familiar with screenplay formatting, you know what I’m saying.

Finally, just shy of 10 a.m., the moderator gave us the go-ahead. The specifications for our session were as follows. We were to write a scene that featured a wimpy protagonist who has the most boring job on Earth. He or she has just uncovered an insidious plot. Our task was to craft a scene wherein s/he tries to rally two of his/her equally boring and wimpy coworkers to help foil said plot. Ready! Set! Insecure! Write!

I’ll spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say that my efforts equaled a bloody disaster. You’d think, right? That with ninety God damned frickin’ minutes, writing a measly three- to five-page scene would be a no brainer. Nah, when is anything a no brainer with me? What I tried to do was combine story elements from my Jellwagger serial with elements of one of my novels. In other words, I tried to be all cutesy ‘n clever ‘n shit. Compounding that was my curse of verbosity. I’m too fucking wordy! Always, always, always! It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about a script, a novel, an essay, or my God damned grocery list. I always, always, always overwrite my first drafts. I mean, shit. Look at this blog. Every post on this pup is a first draft. You knew that, right? Look at it! So what happened was that, with five minutes left, I was scribbling shit like a madman, skipping over dialogue and action that I’d already mapped out on that precious fucking scrap paper and trying to wrap this thing up. I continued writing a minute or so past when the moderator told us to put our pencils down, but do you think I—or they, for that matter—gave a shit? Hell to the no. The scene was an insult to all scenes everywhere.

To his credit, the CS moderator dude did preface the whole thing by saying that if we weren’t happy with our scenes, we were welcome to cough up another eight bucks and take a shot at one of the remaining seven sessions. Hell, if it floated our boat, we were welcome to take a stab at all eight sessions of round one. It was more money for them, right? It wouldn’t really help us at all, though, because each of the first-round sessions was given a different scene premise to work with. I think I was about halfway through my session when I figured fuck it. One session was painful enough.

What made me grind my teeth even more was that I was late for the next seminars. The second round of the morning seminars started at 11 a.m. This contest had started late and accordingly ended late. It was already pushing 11:30 a.m. when I marched to the tables up front and, in a huff, slapped down my unintentional tragedy.

So rather than walk into a seminar that would already be half over, I walked down to the Marriott, grabbed a large (sorry, venti) Americano from the Starbucks in the lobby right by Latitude 33, and sat out on the patio to polish my pitch. Of the ten tickets I bought, one of them was today. It was a bit of a wait. It was somewhere between 11:30 a.m. and noon when I got settled with my Americano, and my pitch wasn’t until 1:25 p.m. In other words, just as I was wired courtesy of Starbucks and was just getting on a roll with my pitch, it was 12:30 p.m. The second seminars of the day were coming to an end, and the Expo and Marriott employees were bringing out those blessed boxed lunches down on the Marriott’s ground level. I fetched a box (for each lunch I always picked one of the meat selections, either beef, turkey, or chicken) and headed right back up to the outdoor patio. The thing about the patio, right? Was that, around the middle of the day, you were sitting right in the path of the sun. The weather was gorgeous, and the patio, truth be told, did have plenty of shade, what with the façade of the hotel right behind you and the roof of the outdoor valet/taxi stand just in front of you. But midday was when the sun’s rays got right between those barriers and warmed you a bit too much. It wasn't so bad for me, though. I got my lunch and Diet Coke and plopped myself down on a loveseat.

Within five minutes of sitting down, a fellow Expo-er came out for a smoke and sat down next to me. She was an Asian American a few years my junior named Lora. Born and raised in New England, she’d moved out to Phoenix a few years ago to attend Arizona State and graduated in ’06 with a degree in Philosophy. Now working at Cox Communications, she was already weary of that gig and was seriously considering a move out to L.A. Ideally she wanted to line up an entry-level industry gig before moving so she could land on our tremor-ridden ground with her feet running. She had something like three or so screenplays already finished. Even though I never found out what they were about, I encouraged her to partake in the CS Open contest after telling her how much I’d bombed it that morning. Something about her told me she’d do much better at improvising a scene. Soon enough it was 1:00 p.m. My first pitch was in less than thirty minutes and I was already feeling more anxious than a hooker in church. Lora and I exchanged cards and wished each other luck.

The pitches took place back at the Renaissance Montura. And unlike the CS Open contest, the pitches really did take place in an honest-to-God ballroom, complete with a two-story-high ceiling, kinder lighting, and softer carpeting. Since each pitch was only to last five minutes, the pitch tickets were sold by time slot. So if you missed out on buying the ticket to pitch to the William Morris Agency at 3:10, the 3:15 might still be available. Or that may conflict with a pitch you’ve already bought, so maybe go for the 3:50 slot just to make sure you won’t be late. See what I mean? Pitch tickets went for $25 a pop. Yes, you read that right: $25 for five minutes. I bought all of mine online a week before the Expo. I decided to bite the bullet and get 10. Five were for literary agents, two for production companies, one for a movie studio, one for a manager, and the last for an entertainment lawyer.

Before I get to my pitches, let me tell you how the whole process worked. If you’ve ever done this, you’ll react with painful empathy. If you have nothing to do with this business, you’re gonna get a real kick out of it. So here’s what happens when you pitch at the Expo. When your time slot is approaching, you walk through the Renaissance lobby to the back of the first floor where they have the ballroom as well as various smaller meeting rooms which the Expo was using for seminars. But you can’t actually get into the lounge onto which the various rooms open up. You stand packed into a crowd of fellow pitchers in the corridor between the lobby and these various rooms. Then when the time slot ahead of you has gone in, your time slot is called and allowed past the barrier into this little lounge. Okay, there really isn’t a barrier. It’s a guy, whom I call a herder, who basically calls out your time slot when it’s time to get on deck. And this guy, this herder, I swear to God. He looked….EXACTLY…like Bob Hoskins. I shit you not. I don’t just mean a spitting image. Dude could’ve been his long lost clone or something. Not the Bob Hoskins of today so much as the Bob Hoskins of 15 or 20 years ago, when he was already balding but his hair and stubble were still more black than gray. The Bob Hoskins from Hook, for instance. I mean it was as if, maybe 15 or 20 years ago, on some night when the real Bob Hoskins was sleeping, someone snuck into his suite and plucked one of the few remaining hairs from the top of his head and used it for the DNA to make a clone. The one and only (and I stress only) difference between this Bob Hoskins and the real one was that this guy was American. But that’s it. Everything else was the same.

So this guy—let’s call him Bob Hoskins, why not?—was basically responsible for making sure the next group of people went in and that the people on deck were allowed past him to mill around that lounge for five minutes, and so on. And then when the people who’d gone in had actually entered that ballroom to pitch, those of us on deck would go into not one, but two, additional waiting rooms while the timeslot ahead of us moved on out to pitch their stories. That last waiting room, the one right adjacent to the ballroom, had several rows of numbered chairs. Each of us was to sit in the chair with the number corresponding to the number of the table where we were going to pitch. How were we to know ahead of time which numbered table to go to, you might ask? Back in the lounge area, where we waited on deck, there was a schematic of the ballroom that showed which company would be at which table. So with all our wait time, we had ample opportunity to see which number corresponded to our pitchee.

Now let’s review. When pitching at the Expo, you head to the Renaissance Montura. Past the lobby, you head to the back of the first level and add yourself to the bottleneck of fellow pitchers waiting to be freed by Bob Hoskins. About fifteen minutes before your time, Bob Hoskins lets you into the lounge. You take a few seconds to use the ballroom schematic to find the number of the company you’re pitching to. Then you’re let into waiting room one, where you hand your ticket to one of the Expo employees and wait for a minute or two. Then you’re let into the second waiting room, the one with the numbered chairs. And then after a couple minutes of that, it’s time to get back up and head into the ballroom. From the moment they let you into the ballroom, you have five minutes to get to your table, pitch to the company rep, and get out. Upon finishing, you exit through one of several sets of doors along the ballroom’s flank that open up onto a corridor that leads you back to the on-deck lounge and, past that, the corridor leading back to the hotel’s lobby. You squeeze yourself past the next batch of pitchers, many of whom watch your face like a hawk in an effort to gauge your emotional state. Because don’t you know they know you just got done pitching and want to see if their competition had any luck.

And with that, let’s get to my pitches. First up, at 1:25 p.m., was Paul S. Levine Literary Agency. And representing the agency was none other than Paul himself. So right off the bat we have an anomaly here. Most of the companies were represented by very young entry-level folk. I’ll get to this soon enough, but suffice it to say that a middle-aged guy like Paul really stood out in this ballroom. Even before I sat down at the table, I could already see that Paul was worn out. Hilarious. This was the first day of pitches, and they'd only just started twenty-five minutes earlier. I was the fifth or sixth person the man was seeing, and he looked exhausted. As I approached the table, he was resting his chin in his hand and sort of just staring off into space with glum eyes. And the bags under his eyes were more like Hefty Cinch Sacks. Did I mention he looked kinda pooped? When I sat down, I asked if his agency represented novelists as well as screenwriters. I sort of already knew he did, having queried him in years past for my novels. He said yep, they sure did, and he handed me one of his business cards. Under his name it read “Representation of Books.” “Here’s a visual aid,” he said. Ever eager to promote myself, I told him that I had four novels as well as four screenplays. Boy, did I regret that! I only came prepared to pitch my scripts, but wouldn’t you know it? He asked me to pitch one of my novels. Even worse, he told me to pitch my most “commercial” novel. Jesus Christ! So I picked the most recent one I’d finished, not so much because of its commercial viability but because it was freshest in my noodle. Nonetheless I flubbed it. I sounded like a stammering moron. And then during the final minute (I knew I had one minute left because the Expo always had a guy up at the front of the ballroom at a podium with a mic who announced the one minute warning), I pitched him one of my scripts. Just as I finished, he gave me yet another one of his cards and told me to get in touch with him about my projects. When I asked him the manner of contact he preferred—snail mail or e-mail—he was like, “You can use snail mail, e-mail, stripper-gram. I don’t care.” Thanks a bunch, Paul. You're gorgeous.

Here’s the coda. I eventually did get in touch with him—via e-mail, thank you very much—about my projects. I basically gave him one-sentence loglines for two of my scripts and two of my novels. I also mentioned that I was a graduate of USC’s masters of creative writing program and that these pieces had been workshopped accordingly (he’d asked me if I’d been in workshops during my pitch). Didn’t matter. A few days later, over the following weekend, I got a one-sentence, all-lower-case reply: “not for me, but thanks anyway.”

My second and last pitch for Friday happened by accident, and it turned out to be for a company who showed some of the strongest interest in my material. Here’s why it was an accident. Before I pitched to Paul Levine, when I was waiting out in the corridor for Bob Hoskins Circa 1990 to call us in, a young female Expo attendee was looking to unload one of her pitch tickets. It was for a company mainly looking for comedies, which she didn’t have. Her writing partner purchased the ticket without knowing that this company’s focus was comedies. Conveniently, the time slot was only fifteen minutes after my Paul Levine pitch. She was giving it away for free. Well, my newest script was a comedy, and I was figuring to pitch it more than my other three scripts because I think it’s the strongest. So I gladly unburdened the young woman of her ticket. It was a production company in Hollywood called Suntaur Entertainment. Representing them was a guy named Zac. He looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties, dark hair and beard. Like most of the pitchees here, Zac was a junior level assistant. I think his official title was Story Editor. So in other words, his job is to be on the prowl for material. And if he finds something he likes, he has to take it to his boss. No matter how much Zac likes something, if his boss doesn’t take to it, then the writer’s shit out of luck. Anyway, though, Zac was very friendly. Wasn’t afraid to smile. Never mentioned strippers. In other words, he was a complete 180 from the esteemed Paul S. Levine. I pitched my comedy script, and Zac loved it. He had a little spiral notebook in which he wrote my name and the title of my script. I also gave him my card (thank GOD I had those made! Thank you, Staples.com). He said he’d get in touch with me by the following Friday. That gave him one week exactly. I couldn’t help feeling a little skeptical. But sure enough, he shot me an e-mail the following Thursday saying he wanted to read my script. I sent it to him…and then the Writers Guild of America went on strike. Because Suntaur is a Guild signatory, that means they can’t read any scripts at all. Period. And that’s just as well. If they bought or optioned my script while the Guild was on strike, they’d be considered a scab company. And I’d be considered a scab writer, forever barred from Guild membership. When the strike is over, Zac will read my script. And hopefully like it. And hopefully convince his boss that I’m the real deal.

With no pitches until tomorrow, I decided to attend some afternoon stuff. From 3-4:30 p.m. I attended a seminar back at the Marriott called What’s the Scoop on Screenplay Contests. Teaching it was a very nice gal named Heather Hale. She was a produced screenwriter herself, but the bulk of her bread and butter came from analyzing other people’s scripts and sitting on judging panels for various contests.

Right off the bat she ticked off the names of various contests that would be worth our while: Nicholls, Chesterfield, ABC/Disney Fellowship, Warner Brothers, Final Draft, Sundance Lab, IFP, and American Screenwriters Association. She also mentioned Scriptapalooza, which I had always thought was one of the major ones. However, Heather mentioned it with some reticence because she had a bad experience with it. She submitted a script of her own to them a few years ago and never heard anything back. Heather stressed that since you’re paying stiff entry fees for these contests, it’s the least they can do to send an e-mail announcing the winners. But she never got anything. Zippo. And since then, she hasn’t submitted to them. I was a bit disappointed to hear this less-than-glowing review of Scriptapalooza, as I’d sent all of my scripts to them for their most recent contest.

In general, when trying to evaluate a contest’s value and validity, one thing to check for is affiliation with a magazine. If it has that, and your script places, they’ll publish your name and promote you. Examples of this include Writer’s Digest, Fade In, and Creative Screenwriting.

Another good idea is to check to see who is on the judging panel for a contest. Do the judges have any credentials? Even if you don’t win, but a judge likes your script, he or she may get in touch with you. If the contest for some reason does not make the names of its judges available, that is a big red flag.

Certain cities, like Philadelphia, have what are called “set in” contests, catering to any and all screenplays that are set in that city. Some hopefuls, Heather said, go so far as to change the settings of their scripts just to get them into as many “set in” contests as possible.

I’ll mention a contest here that doesn’t help me because I don’t hold citizenship in a country besides the United States, but Heather recommended it highly for anyone who does. It’s called Hartley-Merrill, and it’s a contest for citizens outside the U.S. looking to get their foot in La La Land’s door. The contest was founded in Russia by actress/philanthropist Dina Merrill and her husband Ted Hartley, both of whom are the money behind RKO. They founded this contest in the early 1960s. Since then, it’s expanded to include about 30 countries or so. Most remarkable is that out of the 45 years this thing’s been going, 39 of the first-place winners have seen their scripts make it to the silver screen, an unheard of percentage for a screenplay contest. A few of those 39 even went on to be Best Foreign Film Oscar nominees.

Heather recommended the website Movie Bytes because of how it organizes contests for you, both in terms of the kinds of scripts each contest is looking for as well as a calendar of contest deadlines. An example of a contest for particular kinds of scripts would be Moondance, which seeks female-driven stories with violent plots that are resolved in a non-violent way.

In general, Heather advised us to follow all contest application guidelines to the T. As someone who’s worked as a judge for contests, she told us point blank that if you’ve left so much as one line blank on an application, the contest will keep your check and recycle your script. End of story (no pun intended).

Scriptwriters Network was a group that Heather plugged repeatedly. It’s a nonprofit made by writers for writers. They offer all kinds of programs. And to get your script in tip top shape, they do coverage for relatively little, like $30-$60 for covering three to five scripts. They also have a readers program. A member herself, Heather tried a program where three people swap their scripts over the Web. I’ve looked at the site myself. Check it out: Scriptwritersnetwork.org.

If you don’t win a contest but still place as a quarter- or semi-finalist, it’s worth mentioning that when pitching or querying your script. If you want to get your script analyzed before you submit it, Heather had a bunch of analysts to recommend, besides herself of course: Michael Hauge, Pamela Jaye Smith, Linda Seger, Dara Marks, and Devorah Cutler-Rubenstein. Analysts and coverage services can be pretty pricey, Scriptwriters Network notwithstanding. If you have a whole bunch of scripts, Heather suggested submitting one or two. Once you’ve gone through that ringer a couple of times, it’s very possible that you can look at your remaining scripts and figure out what revisions they may need based on the feedback you’ve gotten on your other material.

For the last seminar of the day (5-6:30 p.m.), I decided to sit in on another distinguished speaker event. This turned out to be one of the coolest events of the whole Expo. You remember that flick Superbad? It came out in August. The two chaps who wrote it, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, were this afternoon’s guest speakers. Pretty neat, huh? If you haven’t seen Superbad, please do yourself a favor and toss it on the ol’ queue. You’ll be glad you did, even if your sides do split irreparably. If you’ve seen any of Judd Apatow’s stuff, such as the series Freaks and Geeks or Undeclared, or the films Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, then you already know Seth Rogen. Evan Goldberg, however, has never acted to my knowledge. He’s strictly a screenwriter. It seems a bit ironic that he doesn’t act because he’s better looking than Seth. Evan’s leaner and has dark hair and a dark beard and a handsome smile. He also seemed better spoken. Not to take anything at all from Seth, by the way. He was the most charming, unassuming, self-deprecating guy ever. However you might imagine him being, based on the characters he’s played, that’s how he is.

They’re both from Canada. Vancouver, to be exact. Seth’s Canadian accent—the way he pronounces words like “about”—is much more noticeable than it is on the screen. They met at a bar mitzvah when they were youngsters. I’m not sure, but it may have been one of their own bar mitzvahs. Whatever age you have to be for a bar mitzvah, that’s how young they were when they met.

A couple years later, as high schoolers, they came up with an idea for a movie, the very movie that evolved into Superbad. They had no idea how to format a screenplay or what their movie was even going to be called. Instead of caring about technicalities like that, they just dove in. Of course, at the time they couldn’t have imagined it would ever be made. They just did it as a lark. Eventually they went their separate ways and forgot about it for a while.

Seth forewent college for acting. He was one of a ton of peeps who auditioned for the roll of Ken on Freaks and Geeks. Evan, meanwhile, stayed up in the Great White North and went to college. Seth would call him from the Freaks and Geeks set and brag about all the free food he was getting courtesy of craft services. The longest they went without contact was the year that Evan was traveling in China. Eventually they reunited when Evan moved down to L.A., and they resumed work on what was to become Superbad.

When discussing how their parents reacted to their aspirations, Seth said his parents were pretty laid back. Whatever career their son wanted to pursue, that was fine with them. Evan’s folks, meanwhile, didn’t take his writing aspirations seriously. “But when are you going to get a real job?” they used to ask. Undaunted, Evan pressed on with Seth and their writing projects.

If you’ve seen Superbad, you already know that the two main characters are named Seth and Evan. They said they really did try to come up with different names but eventually decided to hell with it. Same goes for the title. They wouldn’t tell us some of the innumerable titles they’d given it over the years. As for the title it did end up with, they have no idea why they chose Superbad. They have no idea what it’s supposed to mean or what or whom it’s supposed to refer to in the flick. If you’ve seen this flick, somehow that all makes sense. Seth actually wanted to play the Seth character, but by the time cameras finally started rolling, he was too old. It’s funny, though, ‘cause Jonah Hill, the actor who does play Seth, is only a year or two younger than Seth Rogen. Nonetheless Seth and Evan were obviously thrilled that their little lark of a project actually got made. I remember Seth saying several times that as the start of principal photography approached, he kept pinching himself to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. “Even a week before we started shooting, I was still saying to myself, ‘I cannot believe they’re making this,’” he said. One sort of hilarious side note about the making of Superbad was that they filmed a bunch of scenes in the same Northridge neighborhood they used for Knocked Up. For you non-L.A. folk, Northridge is a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. There’s nothing wrong with it really, but it’s funny because it seems such a random choice. Seth said Judd Apatow’s doing for Northridge what Peter Jackson did for New Zealand.

Seth and Evan are now hot, in-demand writers. They’ve got another flick coming out next year called Pineapple Express, and they’ve been tapped to bring The Green Lantern to the screen. Their methodology for writing scripts together seems as pretty laid back as their personalities. They get together at one or the other’s place and just take turns typing and throwing out ideas. Here’s the best part: When they get writer’s block, they play video games. Lucky bastards!

While nursing a Diet Dr. Pepper and decompressing out on the front patio for an hour or so before the networking party, I sat next to a heavyset blonde gal about my age named Cynthia. I had actually met her briefly the night before and then ran into her at the screenplay contest seminar with Heather Hale earlier that day. Like me, she was a local. In fact, she lived in the heart of Hollywood. At one time she was a personal assistant to Faye Dunaway. Cynthia’s whole big thing was that she couldn’t help looking at the other three thousand attendees as nothing but competition. When I told her my two pitches that day went well, she didn’t say anything, and her countenance was one of concern mixed with disgust. Perhaps I misread her, though. It was hard to tell exactly what kind of face she was making because she didn’t look me in the eye for that one fleeting moment. No matter. I sort of see where she’s coming from, even if I don’t agree. If all three thousand of us were writing romantic comedies, then yeah, we’re all competing for the same audience, the same agents, the same production companies, and so on. But we’re not. I spoke to enough people at this thing to see plain as day that just about every genre under the sun was represented. Since I was mainly plugging my comedy script, I wasn’t competing at all with those writing action, horror, dramas, and so forth. The production company focusing on dramas usually only focuses on dramas, and vice versa for those companies specializing in comedies. As with Lora, I recommended Cynthia take a stab at the CS Open screenwriting tournament. The reason she refused was that if she didn’t advance to the second round, her ego would have such a tough time digesting such a rejection as to give her a sort of mental heartburn. And with that, it was time to brave another networking party. When Cynthia and I got down to the ballroom, we went our separate ways to go meet new people.

The highlight--or lowlight, I should say--of this shindig was the trio of absolutely horrific comedians that were brought in for entertainment in the same manner that the magicians were brought in the night before. Here’s the difference, though. If the magicians were just a mild distraction whom most of us ignored, the comedians were like a thorn twisting in our hip trying desperately to locate that elusive funny bone. They went up one at a time for maybe twenty or so minutes each and bombed. Just picture it. You’re in this humungous ballroom getting drinks and free food and chatting people up or wandering around on your own and working up the courage to chat people up while establishing a Sam Adams buzz. Meanwhile, on the far end of the ballroom, there’s a stage with some young buck throwing out jokes that no one in the several-hundred strong crowd is laughing at, assuming they're paying attention at all. Sounds kind of weird, right? Kind of hilarious in a painful way? That’s the paradox for ya. These comedians tried so God damned hard to stab our funny bone that, not content with subtlety, they took innumerable thorns in the form of their grating voices and blunt-force vulgar humor and just rammed them through every muscle and tendon of our bodies until they found the part that made us laugh. So yeah, in the end I did get a laugh, but it was only inspired by the pain of watching them. Since I was already a wallflower toward the start of this party, not having braved the whole being-social bit, I could conveniently lean against the wall while laughing myself to tears. I’m not kidding. I was in tears and my sides were killing me, watching those poor souls up there under hot lights trying so hard to connect to a crowd as indifferent to them as a boulder is to a tennis ball.

Eventually I did meet up with Rich and Namiko and we gave each other sort of progress reports on our Expo experience so far, how our pitches were going, which seminars we were taking. I did talk at length with one new writer. In fact, he was a published novelist looking to option the rights to his new, still in-progress novel. Chap’s name was Blum, Victor Blum. His pen name, if you want to look him up on Amazon, is V.O. Blum. He’s in his fifties or so, based in Portland, although he’d recently just gotten back from a several-month stint in the South Pacific teaching or something. He was a tall, lanky guy with round specs. His legs were sort of jittery whenever he talked about his new novel. Honestly, I don’t blame him. If I had thought of that idea, I’d be excited too. I won’t say too much out of respect for him, but I will say this is one WWII premise that, when you hear it, you're like, “Why hasn’t anyone thought of that before?” I picked his brain about finding an agent, but at the moment he was agentless. Amazingly, the agent who helped him with his most recent novel had had no luck trying to sell his current project. And so poor Vic was now on his own, hence his presence at the Expo. He had landed his first agent in his twenties. He really couldn’t help me with finding an agent except to say what they all say: Knock on as many doors as you can. When I told him I worked for Yahoo!, his legs started jittering like never before. He immediately started raving about Yahoo! Mail. Vic’s tried everything: Google Mail, AOL, Hotmail. All crap. Yahoo! was the way to go, he said. His only concern, before he abolished all those old e-mail accounts, was to set them up to auto-forward any incoming messages to his new Yahoo! address so he didn’t have four e-mail boxes to check. And he wanted to set up this forwarding service at no charge. Did Yahoo! offer such a thing? I told Vic I’d look into that for him.

At this point, pushing ten o’clock and a full day’s pitches looming over me tomorrow, I told Vic I had to go home and crash. As before, I got back to Van Nuys just in time to catch the first part of Letterman from the comfort of my quilt before conking out.