- Read Part 1 of “Escape From L.A.” -
And so, with growing dread, I came to understand that this tedium I was experiencing was actually a booming Hollywood screenwriting career – getting your latest brilliant spec read, getting a meeting, hearing about [...] ]]>
website Twelvepoint.com, Jan. 2010)
- Read Part 1 of “Escape From L.A.” -
And so, with growing dread, I came to understand that this tedium I was experiencing was actually a booming Hollywood screenwriting career – getting your latest brilliant spec read, getting a meeting, hearing about their project, pitching them your take on their project, waiting, waiting, waiting for your agent to call – and repeat ad infinitum. Ad infinitum. And if you are very lucky, someone will accidentally pay you a great deal of money to pour your heart and soul into their project, everyone involved knowing but never saying that the project will almost certainly never be produced.
I was pitching a television series idea to the production company of a woman who has produced at least one of your favourite sci-fi movies and had an arsenal of good writing samples to show and not the worst track record, and I was no closer to actually getting a story in front of an audience than back when I was on the plane to LA at age 17. I realized my entire career – and the careers of many successful writers I know – had been a case of shaking an apple tree year after year, waiting for oranges to start dropping.
I hope I don’t seem complete ungrateful. I do like apples but I just don’t want to spend any more time eating apples, wishing they were oranges.
So I moved to London.
It wasn’t quite as simple as that but it was a complete and fairly dramatic relocation. My wife had an opportunity to work here and I was suddenly completely committed to giving up the apple tree shaking thing. We sold everything. We brought the cats with us.
By the way, I am a British subject – my mum was born in the shadow of Upton Park Football Stadium – so rest easy that I’m not just another foreigner come to steal employment from decent working folk.
After arriving, I began to have The Conversation again and again. I would say to someone, ‘I’m a screenwriter and I’ve permanently relocated to the UK.’ They would stare in baffled silence, then reply, almost with tears in their eyes, ‘Why??…’ There were no screenwriting jobs to be had here, there was no film industry here. Why was I moving away from success? I would press on, explaining that, you know, I am also eager to write comics and a wide variety of genre-based cross-media content. They would immediately call the police and inquire as to the name of my social worker.
It seems to be accepted universally – and I mean ‘throughout the known universe’ – that success as a media writer is directly proportional to one’s proximity to West Hollywood. If you crunch the numbers, you’ll probably find an element of truth in that. However, it is also universally accepted that your success in politics is directly proportional to your proximity to Washington DC. ‘Success’ has a broad spectrum of meaning and doesn’t necessarily mean ‘in your and everyone else’s best interest’. Just because McDonald’s has sold billions doesn’t mean that it’s the best thing going.
Within a year of arriving in the UK, I had more writing jobs than I’d had in the previous five years in Los Angeles. One of these was writing an historical thriller featuring swordplay, bullfighting, torture, and ‘contemporary political resonances’ – i.e. my dream project. I was paid literally peanuts for the work. Yes, literally peanuts. Okay, maybe not literally peanuts, but it was a South African based company paying the bills and I feel confident they could have paid me in peanuts if I’d asked.
Though the money was nothing like LA money, I was writing for enthusiastic indy people who were flying on a wing and a prayer and I was being paid to write. It was such a thrill to go through the whole process from beginning to end with producers who were rabid to make a movie. I wrote a short, too, that was made by the same producers and was able to practise, practise, practise the screenwriter’s real craft – making a good movie. However, I had to supplement the screenwriting income with journalism for some media trade magazines as well as temping at a firm that sold pipes and ducts.
It was encouraging – and enlightening and instructive – to see how, when I was willing to try something completely new, trusting like a fool that a solution would materialise, that something things worked out surprisingly well.
There wasn’t any logical connection between moving house and the surge in work but I’d like to think that on some metaphysical level or other, I’d suddenly become open to possibilities outside my previous, ultra-narrow assumptions. Having a dream, a vision, is vital to success, yes, but clinging desperately to a single narrow idea – at least this was the case with me – makes one’s whole life look like the view down a toilet roll. Many, many possibilities, things that might have leap-frogged you into another dimension, pass under your nose unnoticed. When I’m clinging so tightly to an idea of myself and my future, white-knuckled, the odds are good that somewhere deep down, I don’t have much real faith in the idea. When I’m absolutely clear about what I want or, more importantly, about who I am, then it’s easier to loosen my grip a bit and look around and be open to all the myriad possibilities, idiotic things like moving to London and expecting to be able to write movies.
There have been a few surprises in the relocation. One was hearing it would take a London-based company several months to read a writing sample. I felt like I was living in the 19th century. Kind of quaint actually, if it weren’t so irritating. The biggest surprise has been the stunning amount of talent I see in the UK. If I may be very American for a moment: This country has talent and ability coming out its ass (also “arse”). Unfortunately all this talent seems too often paired with a not-at-all-amusing self-deprecation and abdication of responsibility. Over and over again I see people looking to the US as the source of all the best ideas, as the only place to be taken seriously, certainly as the only place a vision could ever become reality. I want to shake them – hard.
There has been a great deal of moaning and groaning about the economy and the decline of this or that vital industry. But when I hear news of yet another formerly unshakeable media enterprise tottering, I feel encouraged and grateful that I left the US at the right time – perhaps not a moment too soon. 20th century business models are collapsing and although we try to shore them up and repair them in the same way a doctor tries to prolong the life of a heart patient who refuses to give up smoking and eating bacon, they are not going to last. If they do, it will be in some kind of zombie-fied, tax-payer subsidised condition far removed from a dynamic, real world economy.
A producer I know got the green light on a Friday for a movie directed by Steven Soderbergh starring Brad Pitt. On Monday, the studio head called back to say that the deal was off. It was too great a commercial risk in this climate. Newspapers and book publishers are merging or closing everywhere and LA-centric media production is going down with them.
This is all good news. For me. For you, too.
Where some people see collapse and destruction, many of us see exciting change and the promise of real renewal. Something entirely new is going to rise from the ashes of the 20th century media industries, something marvelous and global. In fact, it’s already here and a many of us are jumping on at the ground floor.
Of course, LA will continue to be a hub of media production; just not the hub. I love LA very much but it is isolated in a distinctly American way from most of the world. Cities that are truly interconnected – sometimes to their own chagrin – with the rest of the world have a head start on cities and countries that are protectionist and attached to 20th century, pre-global thinking.
I do wish the best of luck to all my friends still playing the studio screenplay game in Hollywood but I am very grateful to have jumped into the lifeboat when I did. While they are still shaking apple trees, hoping for oranges, I plan to be making and writing pictures of all descriptions and formats, and sharing them with my audience and my partners all around the globe.
On “Lean Lane” at Shepperton Studios
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- “Withnail & I” (1987), Bruce Robinson
(this article originally [...] ]]>
‘(Los Angeles) is a country coming down from its trip. We are 91 days from the end of this decade, and there’s gonna be a lot of refugees. They’ll be goin’ round this town shoutin’, ‘Bring out your dead.’”
- “Withnail & I” (1987), Bruce Robinson
(this article originally appeared at screenwriting
website Twelvepoint.com, Jan. 2010)
When I was 17 years old, I set off for Los Angeles to attend the Cinema-TV Production School at the University of Southern California. On the plane I read William Goldman’s ”Adventures In The Screen Trade” and planned my future.
I knew – everyone knew – that if you wanted to make movies, you had to go to LA. You also had to have a degree from a top-rate film school. A writerly alcohol and drug habit was a good idea too.
I know today – having learned through experience – that I was starting my life’s journey based on a complete pack of lies. But I was 17 years old and it was the 1980s. When you’re 17, starting a life’s journey based on a pack of lies is…well, it’s what you do, isn’t it?
I graduated from film school with a host of brilliant classmates. Some went to Portland and Seattle and actually made movies; some went back home to Texas or Connecticut. The rest of us went out into LA to seek our fortunes. Post-film school life in LA was exactly halfway between “Sunset Boulevard” (1950) and ”The Big Picture” (1989), a fantasy veering crazily from cynical gloom to sweet comedy and back.
95% of my USC classmates began their course determined to win at least one Best Directing Oscar but the attrition rate of Cherished Film School Dreams looks a bit like a casualty roster of WWI pilots. By the time of our graduation, many of my friends had traded in their ideal visions for something more bite-sized and realistic. Why? A good film school’s job should be to impress upon its students that filmmaking is a bizarre and tedious process that sane people ought to avoid. And USC has one of the best film schools in the world. Also, students began to learn that there was a massive array of supporting crafts that go into a film production and discovered that one of these fired their hearts and imaginations in a way the vague, grandiose vision of ‘Oscar-Winning Director’ could not.
There were a few emotionally-immature, mental defectives – I among them – who refused to surrender the dream (while increasingly suspecting that they were utterly unemployable in any normal work). We graduated and began to write spec screenplays – lots of them – and gave them to anyone and everyone who pretended to want to read them.
Screenwriting is hard, thankless work. Though not like digging ditches or mining coal, obviously. Digging ditches is something useful and beneficial to society. 1000 hours spent fretting over an urban melodrama about vampires hasn’t been on the Nobel Committee’s application form for some years. But because it is hard work, rather than churning out new material, a few of the devoted dreamers became obsessed with rewriting the same screenplay over and over again – infusing it with a Great New Idea with each pass – until the thing read like a transcript for the blind of a David Lynch movie written by a teenage girl on ecstasy. Thankfully, most of them gave it all up before they went mad.
In a very few years there were only a handful of us left, writing one spec screenplay after another, each waiting for his or her particular stars to align.
My stars aligned early on. One of my first sci-fi screenplays was optioned by Mario Kassar – the Old Hollywood-style movie gangster who brought us “Rambo”, “Total Recall”, “LA Story”, “Basic Instinct”, “Terminator” and ”Stargate”. It was in the twilight years of the era of script mega-sales, those days when coke-addled producers would shell out $3 million for an idea written by Joe Eszterhas on the back of a McDonald’s napkin.
I had the obligatory ‘tyro screenwriter’s mega-deal’ article in ”Daily Variety” and every major director whose career started in television advertising was on the verge of saying ‘Yes’ to the film. Then, just as quickly, it all petered out and I was left in the tragic position of living in a big house in the Hollywood Hills, with a view of Catalina on a clear day, transported into the world of an A-List screenwriter.
I pitched ideas to every company of note in LA. I joined the long queues of writers brought in to give a fresh perspective on whatever proposed sci-fi/action/fantasy property Company X was developing. A few of those projects, after years in development purgatory, finally did escape and audiences seemed to like them. They usually ended up with a single writer’s name on them but I’m sure all of us who sat there saying to execs “The villain in “Blade” must under no circumstances be Count Dracula” feel a certain attachment to those projects, like when you receive news that someone you had a fling with has become married to a jerk not nearly as attractive and talented as you.
With growing dread, I came to understand that the tedium I was experiencing is the bulk of the work in a booming Hollywood career. Get your latest brilliant spec read, get a meeting, hear about their project, pitch them your take on their project, wait by the phone for your agent to call, repeat ad infinitum. Ad infinitum. If you are very lucky, someone will accidentally pay you a great deal of money to pour your heart and soul into their project when everyone involved knows but never mentions that the project will almost certainly never be produced.
I was pitching a television series idea to the production company of a woman who has made at least one of your favourite sci-fi movies, had an arsenal of good writing samples to show and not the worst track record, and I felt like I was no closer to making movies than when I was on the plane to LA at age 17.
Then it occurred to me that movies are made by people who are making movies. You know what I mean? Marathons are run by people who are running marathons, cakes are baked by people who are baking cakes. Am I making sense? It’s the simple and obvious that has always eluded me. The Hollywood studio system is about not losing money first and making movies second. That is how many successful businesses operate. It’s how NASA operates. NASA’s primary purpose is not to send stuff into space, it’s to allocate resources and personnel in such a way that everyone at NASA still has a job next year. Imagine my surprise when I realised my entire career – and the careers of many successful writers I know – had been a case of shaking an apple tree year after year, waiting for oranges to start dropping.
I hope I don’t seem a complete ingrate – I do like apples – but I just didn’t want to spend any more time eating apples, wishing they were oranges.
So I moved to London…
(end of part 1)
- Read Part 2 of “Escape From L.A.” -
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]]>I remember Hollywood Blvd.
It snowed in Los Angeles this week. Here in London, at 51 degrees north latitude, there’s not been a single flake.
Share this post:Related posts:Code Kumquat L.A. Dreams Goodbyes Escape From L.A., [...] ]]>
I remember Hollywood Blvd.
It snowed in Los Angeles this week. Here in London, at 51 degrees north latitude, there’s not been a single flake.
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]]>I was beginning my college days, attending a university with the most respected cinema program in the world. I had a couple scholarships to help defer the hefty tuition, including a National Merit Scholarship. I wanted to be a famous film director – [...] ]]>
I was beginning my college days, attending a university with the most respected cinema program in the world. I had a couple scholarships to help defer the hefty tuition, including a National Merit Scholarship. I wanted to be a famous film director – or a poet, if the film director thing didn’t pay off. Self-esteem had never been a strong suit of mine, and despite people telling me the contrary, I always felt dumb as post. Still, since I was in 6th grade, I had a firm conviction that not only did film directors actually exist somewhere in the world, but that I could very easily be one of them. The more I studied, the more I learned, the more I began to see that undertaking such an occupation was a very real option. When film school professors whispered praises in my ears, my certain success was confirmed.
It is years later. I have been a paid screenwriter. I have made heaps of cash in the Spec Sale 1990′s. I have had a house in the Hollywood Hills. I have been arrested on Sunset Boulevard for drunk driving.
Somewhere along the way, the one thing that I came here for, the directing part, has escaped me.
Or, to be more honest, I have escaped it.
Yes, try as the gods might to hand me opportunities, I have evaded them at every turn.
One of my favorites was when a notable production company began talks with me about directing The Common Vampire – my low-budge, Scorsese-esque vampire script (I know, you also have your own low-budge, Scorsese-esque vampire script – tough luck, I got in first). I did everything I could, short of shitting on the producer’s desk, to avoid following through with that offer.
As John Cassavetes said to Martin Scorsese: “In order to catch the ball, you have to want to catch the ball.”
I have had so much blind faith – or stupidity, one might call it (and a healthy dose of stupidity is an asset for long-term success in any artistic enterprise) – during my time here in L.A. It is galling to see how much utter dread and fear have been lurking beneath it, taking a secret step back for every step I appear to take forward. When I have visited friends from my Ohio high school years, they always remark: “Wow. You always said you were going to go to L.A. and get into movies. And then you really did it! Wow.” And I stare back at them, a little baffled, and think: “Of course, I did it. Did you think I was kidding?” and I feel my heart sag a little when I realize that when they were articulating their big dreams back in the 1980′s, they were only kidding.
I have made films with the Alpha 60 collective, done the video podcasts here on the blog, experimented with moving images on my own. But this is still sketching, training, exercising. It is not what I came here to do. Asked a couple decades ago what the status of my motion picture career would be in 2006, the projected future would not have been a question of whether or not I had directed a film, but whether I had received Academy Awards for Directing AND Writing yet (having become most familiar with our beloved Academy over the past few years, and having attended a number of the shows, the prospect of winning an Oscar has become increasingly less interesting to me however)(I don’t think that’s sour grapes)(or is it?).
So, I’d better get on it, huh? Better roll up my sleeves and get on that sucker?
The irritating thing I’ve noticed – and to my chagrin, continue to notice – is that my life here in Los Angeles seems to have had some kind of subtle guiding principle behind it – that is, I seem to have been led and guided in spite of my ambitions. And I believe more and more – and this too is irritating – that my ambitions are sometimes a road to misery and chaos and death – a roadmap for taking me directly to the places I’d rather not go. So I’ve learned then to soften my grip on the reins, to trust that the horse has traveled this path more often than I and that he may not need second-by-second guidance to get me to the destination. In fact, my constant commands will probably end with him bucking me into the ditch and spoiling what might have been an enjoyable ride.
On Saturday, my wife and I will be moving to London – which is in England.
For years and years I have said that I would like to live in London – home of my foremothers and grandsires – but couldn’t tell you exactly how that would come about. Now, here we are, about to leave this L.A. that I’ve become very cozy-comfy with over the past 20 years, and I couldn’t really tell you exactly how it happened. It just…happened. Step by step, revelation by revelation. This thing that seems to always be taking care of the big picture – cagey bastard that it is – is subtle and quiet, and not to be denied.
I am very, very, very blessed. And I am very, very, very ordinary.
So the future? My future? Our future? On Saturday, we will get on the plane at LAX. When we land at Heathrow, we will get off the plane. That’s about as far as I’m willing to plan ahead these days.
Still, as I leave Los Angeles, in Sept. 2006, I have hopes and dreams.
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click to listen; right click to download
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“Put the ship on Code Orange, lieutenant!”
“Holy Toledo, skipper! Is it that bad?”
“It’s bad enough. And I don’t want you men getting caught with your britches down. If we have to go to Code Red, I want you guys to be good-to-go!”
“We won’t let you down, cap’n! Initiating the Code Orange!”
Klaxons sound throughout the ship. Men pull on helmets and flak jackets as they dash to their posts, hearts pounding.
“All stations are standing ready at Orange Alert, cap’n.”
“Good work. Now all we do is wait.”
“And pray, cap’n?”
“Amen to that, lieutenant. Amen to that.”
Yesterday, in response to subway and bus bombings in London, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff raised the national threat level to orange, or “high risk of terrorist attacks” with regard to the mass transit sector, specifically buses and trains.
If someone were to say to me, “Today there is a high risk at your workplace of being bitten by asps,” I would call in sick (assuming the someone were a credible source–a herpetologist, or zoo official hunting down a missing asp family), or I might call the police and say “There is a crazy person frightening me with threats of asps. Please come and arrest him at once.” In the event of confirmed high asp risk, I would want the building shut down and searched carefully room by room and I would not expect to have to go back to work until the possibity of asps had been ruled out, or until every errant asp had been accounted for.
I use Los Angeles public transport daily. Yesterday, our “second” in the Duel With Terror had been attacked. I was naturally curious, eager even, to see what an Orange Alert on public transport looked like. I realize that there were a few Orange Alerts thrown around in the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, but those weren’t real Orange Alerts. Those were more for dramatic effect–or maybe the result of pantswetting overeagerness at the Dept. of Homeland Security (I mean, what an irresistible temptation it must be to know you can alter the adrenaline levels of millions of people from the comfort of your desk; there’s no way I could resist it). So I took notes on the way home–on my bus ride east on Wilshire Blvd. and then subway trip from Wilshire & Western to Vermont & Sunset.
Here is what a Code Orange looks like on L.A. public transportation:
Carrying a heavy shoulder bag filled with mysteriously bulky items, I board a “Rapid” bus at Wilshire Blvd. & La Cienega Ave. Subdued atmosphere on bus. More seats available than usual. I keep eyes peeled for any signs of Orange Alert–police activity, anything unusual.Traffic begins to slow as the bus approaches Wilshire & Fairfax Ave.
Reason for traffic slowing is revealed: Across the street from the L.A. County Museum of Art, a motorcycle cop is giving a ticket to a twenty-something man seated in his red economy car.
I observe that no one seems to mind my looking this way and that way, scribbling frantic notes in my little book.
On Wilshire, just west of Highland Ave., a policeman w/police cruiser, is giving a ticket to a twenty-something woman seated in her white economy car.
I transfer from the bus to catch the Union Station-bound train at Vermont & Western subway station:
A police cruiser is parked on the sidewalk plaza near the station entrance. 2 female police officers loiter. Another police cruiser can be seen driving south on Western.
(NOTE: L.A. has an “honor system” with regard to subway ticketing. If you ride the subway, you are expected to have purchased a ticket. Periodically, pairs of deputies or police officers will stop passengers at exits or board train cars and ask to see tickets. If you can’t produce one you are hit with a very heavy fine. Given the circumstances, I prepare to have my ticket checked.)
2 female sherriff’s deputies stand together on the Wilshire & Western platform. I do not see them check any passenger for tickets. I board the train without having to show my own ticket.
From my viewpoint through a window, there is no sign of law enforcement at the next stop, Wilshire & Normandie.
At Wilshire & Vermont Ave. I switch trains. No sign of law enforcement on either of the stations two platforms.
I pass through 2 stations–Vermont & Beverly and Vermont & Santa Monica (no law enforcement officers sighted on the platforms of either of these stations)–before reaching my destination.
I disembark at the Vermont & Sunset station. No law enforcement officers inside the station. I spot one Transport Authority employee in ORANGE vest talking on a station phone.
Outside the station, a cruiser is parked at the curb on Vermont Ave. 2 male police officers stand talking near the station entrance. 1 male, 1 female police officer stand near a hotdog stand.
Walked several blocks to my home–no law enforcement presence spotted.
Los Angeles is a great big ol’ giant flat screen tv of a city, and policing it is like sending a shoebox full of plastic army men to monitor a football field. However, the public transport system is still–famously–in a “growth period”, with nothing like the thousands of miles of subway track and bus route in other megalopolises. My trip home yesterday did not feel orange–it felt blue.
The lowest possible level of the Dept. of Homeland Security’s 5-color threat scale is Code Green which indicates a “low risk of terrorist attacks”. There is no color designation to indicate “no risk of terrorist attacks”. Prominent sources repeatedly tell me that we will win the War On Terror. When we do, how will I know it?
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