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.

An Uphill Battle from the Very Beginning

This is my "trade announcement" from the July 7, 2003 edition of Variety
Industry secret: by the time a deal is announced is in Variety, it happened months ago.

One of the first studio rewrite jobs I got in 2003 was working for a man (not mentioned in the article above for reasons I can't claim to understand) named Charles Roven.

I'm using his name despite my no names policy because frankly the man is larger than life and definitely in the top three Hollywood characters I have ever met. I have nothing but respect for him. His career is so legendary that he is - like his company name Atlas Entertainment - a Titan of the industry.

(Also the story is funnier if you know that it involves one of the biggst producers in the history of movie making and not just some guy.)

I honestly loved the project. It was the kind of big silly comedy that I had come to Hollywood to be involved with, a big, sprawling high concept road movie in the vein of Dumb and Dumber with a gigantic set piece ending that involved the St. Louis arch and "the brown tone" in the third act. It was pretty funny stuff in a broad over the top way which is right in my wheelhouse.

For a guy who makes a ton of really big movies Roven was surprisingly involved in this rewrite of a script with no attachments or greenlight. He had copious notes and lots of smart input. I don't know how he had enough hours in the day, but he did mention at one point that he only slept four hours a night. If he told me he slept with his eyes open so he could watch rough cuts of his other films and give notes when he woke up I wouldn't have been surprised. My point is the guy was a tireless, hands-on film maker. And a fairly intimidating guy. I saw him just a few months ago for the first time in a decade and was surprised that he's pretty much the same size as me. In my memory of working with him he was a giant. But I think that's just his personality.


We had a notes meeting at his house one weekend. Just the two producers, Mr. Roven, and myself. I had the address and was told to buzz the gate to be let in. I had never spent any time in Beverly Hills (believe it or not) and didn't know gate-protocol so I parked on the street, got out and buzzed. When the gate opened I walked in, thinking the house would be, like any normal house, just around the corner.

The house was up an impossibly long driveway at the top of one of the "hills" mentioned in the name "Beverly Hills." It took me 15 minutes to walk the series of switchbacks. Every time I came around a turn I thought "it's right around this corner." Nope.

Imagine this but at a 15% gradient that keeps changing direction

And of course it was a ridiculously hot May day. I was sweating through my shirt within the first five minutes. I thought about turning back to get my car a couple of times but worried that would take even longer. I was holding up this very important man's time and making an ass of myself.

By the time I got to the compound I was exhausted and embarrassed. There was PLENTY of room to park of course. Only a rube like me would think I was expected to ditch my vehicle and drag my ass up the damn hill on foot.

"You walked?" He asked incredulously.

"Yeah. I thought I was supposed to park on the street. I've never been here before."

He just shook his head. "The fate of my movie is in this idiot's hands?" he had to be thinking.

The rest of the notes meeting was cordial but uncomfortable. I was trying not to sweat on his furniture or blurt out "Holy shit this is the biggest fucking house I've ever been in and it's the guest house?!"

The movie didn't go after a different movie with a similar vibe underperformed and the project was never discussed again. I'm sure he's long since forgotten the project but I'd like to think that if I said "I'm the goddamn idiot who walked your driveway" he might recall that if nothing else.

Anyway, I'm telling this story A: because it's kinda funny and B: it's very indicative of, almost a metaphor for, my career:

• Since day one it seems like I've gone on foot when everyone else knows to drive. 
• And even when I am fairly certain I'm doing it wrong I refuse to start over for fear of making it worse. 
• And when I've been given partial instructions, I've been too timid to ask for more specific direction. 

The one thing I've gotten better at is laughing about situations like this. Today if I did this I would play it off as a joke, (God knows I'd have had enough time to come up with something while trudging up that hill) "Why didn't you pay the ransom!" I could say, lifting from Richard Harris. Or "Sorry, I illegally parked at the Starbucks half way up and got towed." Or just, "Banditos!" I don't know, none of those jokes are all that funny, but it would have been better than standng there with a dumb "Hi, you're paying me six figures to write and I don't even understand what the word DRIVEway means" look on my face.

You live and learn.

So they tell me.

The First Three Feature Length Scripts I Finished

Dieter passes LA landmarks:  the Hollywood sign, Mann's
Chinese, and the LA COUNTY SCREENPLAY LANDFILL, where a
bulldozer pushes around a mountain of scripts.

- From the unmade SPROCKETS adaptation written by Mike Meyers, Jack Handy and Mike McCullers 

I think I read somewhere that the average writer will complete nine scripts before they sell one. I don't know exactly how many I actually finished before getting paid (and let's not even try to count the ones I started and didn't finish, that number may approach infinity) but here are the first three...

The first actual feature length script I completed was a character driven dramedy about a New York yuppie who goes insane and thinks he's a trench coat-clad vigillante in the vein of The Shadow. Mind you I had only a passing awareness of The Shadow (my version predated the Alec Baldwin movie that I never saw either) but I name checked the character frequently whenever I would pitch the story. I would also say that it had the same tone as Vampire's Kiss  a 1989 Nic Cage movie about a New York yuppie who goes insane and thinks he's a vampire. Because it was basically a lift of that entire film. This began a pattern of mine, name checking characters and stories I knew almost nothing about  to sound smart and referencing poorly received films in the context of my work. A winning combination.

Anyway, the script was called THE CIMMERIAN, a word I randomly found that meant 'dark or gloomy.' I can't find the script anymore which is odd because I am usually pretty obsessive about backing up and keeping track of old files. Not that I would subject anyone to it at this point, but I don't think it was bad per se, just probably a bit unstructured and predictable. I can't remember any big scenes, there was a sequence where the protagonist swims across the Hudson river but I can't remember why. And of course eventually he dies trying to fight crime. The whole story was about guilt. The lead character felt guilty about what a horrible, empty person he was so he created this character in his mind to absolve himself. American Psycho is another story I like a lot. Apparently I dig stories about young men going insane with guilt and lonliness. I'm a pip at parties. 

My contribution to the "OMG so many scripts!" picture collection.
This stack is in my office. I didn't write these
but in 20 years I've written that many and more.

The second script I wrote was so meta and so 90's and so "indie" I should have to apologize to the makers of Living in Oblivion for bogarting their vibe. BELOW THE LINE was a black comedy about a young, idealistic guy who falls for kooky female production assistant he meets on the set of an indie film. Then he discovers that she's going around killing actors in the independent films she works on. Fun for the whole family! The whole thing was heavily influenced by Heathers and if you're into that sort of thing was actually pretty fun. I made a lot of Post-Tarantino self-indulgent 90's mistakes like a three page scene where some stoners argue on the phone with a diner owner who won't deliver six side orders of bacon and nothing else because it's not a meal. (Hilarious and way ahead of the bacon-craze curve). In my mind I'm sure the script was supposed to be about the pretense of being an artist in a world where so many people are just scraping by or something pretentious like that. Also two scripts in a row about crazy people! A theme emerges!

My third script was a doozy. My first attempt at a big budget Hollywood family "4 quad" movie. VERTICAL LEAP: ADVENTURES IN REAL TIME was set in the not too distant future and was about a holographic AI video game character that exists in the real world and is framed for murder. He goes on the run with a young boy (his biggest fan, natch) to clear his good name.  The comparison to Who Framed Roger Rabbit is of course inevitable and deserved. The script is an unstructured mess that takes forever to get going and has gigantic plot holes in it. In other words WHY DIDN'T HOLLYWOOD BUY IT!? The real fun I had with the script other than the world building was developing the video game character Vertical Leap. I wrote him as a brash, loud mouthed, egotistical action hero by day, lounge singer by night.  I spent way more time on his character than the story or the plot, such that there was one. Thinking about it now I wonder how I handled "the rules" of the universe I was trying to create. It's awfully hard to make a story about a hologram have any real stakes.  I'm guessing that a lot of seasoned pros would have a hard time with that one so I'm sure I didn't do a very good job of it.

Anyway, those were my first three. I think in total 10 people read those scripts.  Not 10 people read all three, but like 3 read one, 5 read another 2 read one. I sent out some snail mail queries on each of them, but not many, and only got a couple of read requests. Those read requests resulted in polite form letter passes except for one lengthy, helpful critique I got about Vertical Leap. I owe the guy who wrote it a debt of gratitude because that kind, thoughtful letter of his was the first affirmation I had gotten from a stranger that my writing, while flawed, showed promise.

BUT I kept going because I really enjoyed the work and I was getting to know what few strengths and many weaknesses I had as a writer and it became as much a problem solving process as a creative one.

So while I would never claim to have any actual advice or wisdom to pass on to screenwriters trying to "break in" I will say that in my case I had to write a bunch of stuff before I was even ready to be read. These three scripts just scratch the surface. And I was doing all this between having a full time office job and crippling drinking problem!

What I wouldn't give for that much energy and time management today!

My First Big Sale

My First Big Sale seems as good a place to start as any even though I don't consider it the start of my writing career.

But before I get to that, let me tell you about the first "spec script" I ever wrote! It was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation I pecked out while I was in college (and the show was still on the air, you do the math if you care to figure out how old I am). After that I didn't write a script for 5 years.

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.

Thinking about it now for the first time in many years, I recall the STTNG script was pretty solid in concept if not execution. The Enterprise was tasked with transporting the most valuable work of art in the galaxy (too delicate to be transported, natch). Mid journey they get a distress signal from a damaged ship that is under the command of Riker's best pal from the Academy. They allow the crew on board and things go swell until it turns out that Riker's pal is actually the leader of a band of space pirates and they steal the sculpture and the Enterprise has to get it back. There was a big set piece in the third act where Worf has to make some incredible sacrifice (I don't remember the details) to save the sculpture even though Klingons have no time for that artsy shit. Riker feels like an idiot for trusting his pal, but Picard says something wise about the nature of friendship that I don't recall to make him feel better. The B-Story involved Data frying his circuits trying to understand why art was meaningful to humans. I have never written anything even remotely Sci-fi since then but it was fun

END SIDE BAR

After college (University of Texas at Austin, yee-haw) I moved to New York City (get a rope) and got a job as an advertising copywriter. I liked being an ad man. It was great fun, going to loft parties with photographers and directors and producers who pretended to like me in the hopes of getting me to convince my agency to give them work.

In my 20's I was a heavy drinker. I have never been a day-drinker and while the older guys at the firm would catch a drink or two during lunch, I prided myself on keeping my inebriation out of the office. The hangovers I brought with work to me 4 out of 5 days a week are another story for a post of their own. Mistakes were made.

But I digress.

While I was working in advertising, the spec boom of the early/mid 90's was REALLY taking off. It seemed very do-able. I got a copy of final draft 2.04 (I think this was the last necessary update of the software by the way) bought a couple of books on the subject and started writing. At first I was just farting around, but by 96 or so I got pretty serious about it. I was working on the craft and following the industry. When I would read about sales I would feel physically unwell. Why that guy and not me? Who thought that was a good idea for a movie? That antipathy fuelled me to keep writing.

(I don't feel that way about sales and writers these days. I chalk that weird anger up to youth and immaturity. But it motivated me to stick with it and get better.)

I'll talk about the first few specs I wrote in a later post and I will go into great depth about the few years I worked with a great writing partner doing live sketch comedy and making a nice go of it in animation in a separate post(s). For now I'm trying to get to this first sale very quickly. (Too late!)

In 1999 I wrote a spec script called KINGDOM COME UNDONE. Another project I will talk about at length at a later date. That script found its way through my agent to Steve, a young development exec/producer at Alcon entertainment and I got a general meeting (At LA Farm, one of the most meeting-y places in the thirty mile zone) and began a relationship with him.

Kingdom Come Undone didn't sell, but Steve liked my writing and after I quit my job in advertising to move to LA he gave me a job reading and doing coverage on scripts for Alcon. Another subject that deserves its own post. Also Steve is one of the best people I've ever met, in the industry or otherwise. A true friend to this day and a genuniely stand up guy.

While I was covering scripts for Steve I was writing specs and decided that instead of writing a script to sell, I'd write a script I could just go out and shoot myself. It would star people I knew, be set in a couple of locations. The entire goal was to be cheap and easy to shoot because I thought NO ONE would want to buy this little thing.

The concept for the film came from a single dialogue exchange I had typed while writing a sketch.

A: I'm on to you!

B: No you're not. 

Doesn't seem like much, but out of that tiny antagonistic moment I spun what became THE WHOLE PEMBERTON THING (TWPT). Pembs is the story about a formerly successful dude who takes an entry level job in an office and gets terrorized by his new cubemate. It was by design very much a character driven film, not what's known as "high concept." I wrote Pemberton to be a wholly memorable antagonist, a bad guy you love to hate. A mad genius in a sweater vest. Someone you can dress up for on Halloween. An unrepentant dilletante. So while the "log line" of the film may not sound like much the characters and relationships were doing all the heavy lifting.

I showed the script to Steve asking for input and he flipped for it. We developed it a bit and after several months he was able to convince his bosses to buy it for a decent price. 

Based on that sale, I got representation at one of the big agencies and my script became the hot one for that season. Everyone read it. This predated The Black List but I'm confident that had that list existed then I would have been near the top. That all went down right before the Christmas break in 02 and beginning the first week of January 2003 I had 12 general meetings a week lined up with some of the biggest names in the biz. 

I should mention here that the first week of January 2003 was also when my son was born. Having a new child and new career at the exact same time is a source of a great many stories for future posts. This one is about as long as I want these things to run, so I'll leave it at that. 

Quick summary of how I sold my first big spec script: 

1. Wrote spec scripts in between work and drinking
2. Got agent
3. Agent got spec script to young, hungry producer
4. Established relationship with producer
5. Worked for producer
6. Showed him a different script
7. Developed it with him
8. Bought by his company

I'd probably been writing specs in earnest for 5 years at that point. I'd picked up work in animation along the way which gave me the momentum to continue pursuing it. 

Ta-da. 

Welcome

Based on my wildly imprecise estimates, there are approximately 72,000 books available on how to write a screenplay. There are another 637,000 on how to sell one. There are exactly zero that touch on what happens after that. Why? Because so few people actually ever make the mythical "Spec Sale" there would be no market for it.

Well I sold a screenplay. I sold a few of them in fact. I sold pitches and had material optioned and did rewrites and adaptations at the studio level for several years. I made a lot of money and had a glove box full of drive-ons and got to tell people I was a screenwriter - no, a REAL screenwriter, who gets paid and everything. I took a lot of meetings and expensive lunches and thought - for a while - that I had the whole system figured out.

I had HEAT.

And then, all of a sudden, I didn't.

See, while I'd been doing all that writing and taking all those meetings and thinking I was terribly clever for having walked away from a steady "real job" for this Hollywood lark, the one thing I wasn't doing was getting movies made. Year after year I would hand in a hundred and ten pages of courier 12 point and they would hand me a check and we'd never speak of it again. My patented line was "I have scripts collecting dust on some of the finest shelves in town!"

I should probably mention at this point that I'm a comedy writer.

But if you don't get movies made you're not making anyone any money and it becomes increasingly difficult for the powers that be to meet your ever increasing quote. Pretty soon instead of hiring you they're hiring the New You for a price The Real You would gladly accept if it meant another at-bat.

But it doesn't work that way.

Why wasn't I getting movies made? Bunch of reasons. Most scripts the studios develop don't get made, so frequently it was the law of averages just not shaking out in my favor. Some of the projects I worked on were doomed before I got to them. Some fell out of favor for market reasons. Some I simply didn't do a very good job on. And some were ridiculously bad ideas to begin with. In the balance I think that enough of my scripts are genuinely good to support my belief that I am not terrible at this.

Over the course of this blog I'm going to go through each the projects I sold and or worked on. I probably won't talk about them chronologicially. There's no reason I shouldn't, I just don't have that sort of executive function. I hope to tell stories about each of these projects that are funny and frustrating because that's what this industry is.

I'll also do stories just about screenwritery stuff. I don't know what that entails just yet. Also I hope to get some of my friends to contribute. Finally, I'll write about me. Because this is a blog and what are blogs for if not industrial strength navel gazing. I am a deeply flawed human being with a history of deep self loathing and depression. That oughta make for some hilarious entries, huh?

I don't plan on "naming names." I'm just not that kind of guy. This isn't about me shinning a light on individuals, just the process.  I don't want to piss anyone off who doesn't deserve it. Most show-folk are decent people. And frankly the few assholes who I'd like to call out by name are such nasty fucks that if this blog were to come up the next time they're (inevitably) Googling themselves I'd really rather not even think about what that might look like for me.

But the one thing I don't do is whine. Let me make that perfectly clear up front. I know I am incredibly fortunate to have had ANY career as a screenwriter. It's a job that untold thousands of people are trying out for every single day and many would gladly swap places with me for a chance to play in the majors even for a year. Just getting paid as a writer in any medium is quite a feat. So please understand, I ain't complainin', just retelling my story for some laughs and to shed some light on the (relatively) unglamourous side of being an unproduced-but-working screenwriter that they never talk about in books and finally, to refresh my memory about a wonderful decade or so of weirdness before it's lost to a haze of IPA and casual marijuana usage.

Of course I haven't given up on screenwriting. I still have projects in development and keep my fingers perpetually crossed that the stars will align in my favor for a change. I keep writing and hoping I catch the "lightning in a bottle" (that's an expression, right? I'm not even gonna check) required to get a bunch of people interested in spending a ton of money and time to turn a pile of paper (or these days, a PDF) into a movie. It can happen. I mean, of course I'm still looking for work outside of Hollywood to pay the bills, but it could happen.

So read on if you want to. I am not trying to talk anyone out of writing screenplays and hoping for the "big sale." Just know that for every one David Koepp, there's a hundred schmucks like me who you've never heard of.