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.
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.
