The First Taste of "Success"

In the late 90's when I was still working in advertising I was sent every year, all expenses paid, to Los Angeles to attend the E3 Expo. For the uninitiated (or those who didn't click that link) E3 is a big video game convention that they hold at the convention center in downtown LA. I was working on Hasbro's interactive business at the time and it was essential that I participate in this annual boondoggle.

My company would fly me out, put me up for a few nights in a nice hotel and I would gamely go to the showroom floor and see the exhibits and talk to the clients as much as necessary....

But I was really in LA to take meetings.

By this point my writing partner John Reynolds and I had procured our first agent, a hard working woman in Oneonta, New York who had responded to our snail mail query/request to read our specs of Simpsons, King of the Hill and Pinky and the Brain that we had managed to write between bouts of binge drinking and disappointing our girlfriends.


SIDEBAR (Feel free to skip)

This is my "sidebar" image.
It is a WB cartoon representation of Ray Milland
in Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend
hocking his typewiter for booze.
In a BAR. (Get it?) This is funny - to me - on various levels.
Okay, I'll let you go now.

That Simpsons spec was solid AF! The concept: Frink creates a fen-phen like medication that makes fat people skinny. Homer, Wiggum, Barney and Comic Book Guy all participate in the test and become skinny. But soon terrible side effects manifest. They become comically weak (and impotent) and the former fatties have to decide if being skinny is worth ruining their lives. The show's been on the air for 543 years, you think they would have accidentally done that plot by now.




END SIDEBAR

Glamorous Glendale

I had asked our new agent to co-ordinate some meetings for us around E3. I took some vacation time after the convention ended and stayed in LA at my own expense (at the Rodeway Inn on Colorado Blvd in Glendale, $48 a night and worth every penny).

When John arrived in LA we still hadn't gotten our marching orders from our agent. Honestly I don't remember the specifics of this. I think she said "Yeah, go out to LA and spend your money I'll get you your meetings, you dopes."

The point is this. At some point John and I were in LA with a motel and a rental car and no plan and our agent sent us a fax to the front office of the fucking $48 a night Rodeway Inn. The fax was several pages long and it was like 20 meetings! She had booked us more meetings than either one of us had ever imagined possible. Animation, movies, TV. It was all there.

As far as we were concerend, this fax was going to change our lives (how many people can say THAT about a fax?).

The meetings didn't start for a day or two. So I suggested - as one does - that we go to Las Vegas to celebrate.

To celebrate a fax.

Like most 20 something guys,
 this is what I thought our trip would be like.

This was the first, of many, many times I would drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Full disclosure: I love Las Vegas. Everyone who knows me knows that. I think it's a silly, ridiculous place to go and park your car and forget your troubles and just be an idiot for 48 hours before heading back home to the routine and grind of life. I understand why people don't like it, it's hot, phony, expensive, crass, ugly, dumb, loud and just wants your money. And honestly I don't enjoy it the way I did when I was younger. But when I can't get away to a "real" vacation destination Las Vegas picks up a lot of slack.

Anyway. We made it to Las Vegas without too much trouble. I'm sure we hit traffic or something but we got there at a reasonable hour. We hit the strip in nighttime traffic and swam upstream as far as we were willing to go and wound up in New York, New York.

The details of the night are, naturally, hazy. All that mattered was that we were there to celebrate that fax, goddamn it. We drank copiously. We gambled a bit (me more than John, a pattern I would repeat again and again with my friends). At one point John fell off of one of the stools at a blackjack table and we were asked to leave the casino floor for our drunkeness.

Imagine that. Being asked to leave Las Vegas due to drunkeness.

We went to the front desk to get a room for the night. How much could it possibly cost? Well cost didn't matter because the hotel was booked. So was every hotel on the strip.

I was outraged the way only a drunken rube can be. Convinced I was being sold a bill of goods to get me to fall for some short con. "Oh you know what? Now that you mention a hundred dollar bribe I DO have a room!"

"You mean to tell me that every goddamn building in this entire CITY is full of people PAYING to stay here?" I shouted, indignant, "That's impossible. There's no way that many people just HAPPENED to be in Las Vegas at the same time."

The guy - who in retrospect was just trying to help - told us that we could get a room at the Lady Luck (mind you, we were still paying for the Rodeway Inn we had uncerimoniously left vacant that night). Okay, whatever. We said we'd take it. He reserved the room and we went out to get a cab, not knowing that The Lady Luck was on Freemont street several miles away.

Glamorous Las Vegas
Note: No longer exists

We got in the cab and he got on I-15 and at some point I asked the driver if he knew where to score some weed. He asked if I was a cop and then asked to see my driver's license, which I handed him and he read without slowing the car.

"Sixty an eighth," he said. I handed him sixty and he rifled through his glove box and produced an eighth without slowing the car. It was probably 2 am at this point.

I remember NOTHING about the Lady Luck. I've been back in the years since in an attempt to refresh my memory, but it's gone. Of course we got high. And we (I) may have gambled some more.

And we laughed.

A lot.

There was some sleep and the next day we drove back to LA so sleep deprived and hungover that I remember pulling off to the side to nap but being woken by the semis shaking the car. I remember screaming at the top of my lungs and punching the roof of the rental car to stay awake in the Cajon pass.

I remember being young and invincible and feeling like we were about to turn that fax into everything we had ever wanted.

The trip was a success. We scored some work writing for an animated series at Disney called Teacher's Pet. We met some other great people who hired us on various projects over the years including Dic's version of Inspector Gadget. I would say that we way more than made up for our trip's expenses with the work we procured.

Did that fax launch our careers into the stratosphere?

Of course not.

But at the time it felt like it could have.

And when you're doing something as preposterous as trying to start a career in entertainment you have to allow yourself to feel like anything is possible and act accordingly.