They Pulled Me In

I moved back to Los Angeles three years ago, determined to live outside the margins of the entertainment industry. I assumed that six years of graduate school in the Midwest taught me the value of careful career planning and the security of steady health insurance. In Minnesota, I meticulously researched and planned my future. I met my wife. We planned a wedding. We bought a house. There was a game show.

In 2002, secure in our marriage and bungalow in the bad side of Minneapolis, she threw out the bombshell. We’re getting out of this place. She wanted to go to school, in Santa Monica, California. She wanted me back in my old stomping grounds, the place that housed my biggest mistakes and the willowy ghosts of regrettable people. An hour’s drive from where my family lived. It was easier for her, born and raised in Minnesota. Time to get away from that. Of course we couldn’t really afford to move, the game show notwithstanding. And I wasn’t even close to completing my dissertation. The timing was all wrong. So we packed up and left, with our cats, in a caravan of Camry and Penske rental truck heading west in summer. Nebraska sunsets are pretty.

The first time here it was easy to ignore the pull of the movie industry. I didn’t live on the West Side. I saw myself as a poet, an academic. Job and school and girlfriends pulled me to the far-away borders of the greater Los Angeles area. But this time, we were in Santa Monica, part of the core, where movie stars live (as do gangstas and dentists and landlords and guidance counselors, it should be noted). And so when Meg Ryan sits two seats from you at a movie theater sharing Runts with her tow-headed son and when two nineties TV stars (from different shows, different genres – who knew they were friends?) pitch concepts over coffee on a terrace as you read about the Lakers and worry about the ticking clock of your unemployment benefits, you start to think “...I should write a screenplay.”

Easier said than done. You need an idea, first. And apparently you need talent – not necessarily the type of talent that gets your short fiction published in online literary journals. You need to know structure. And format. And marketing. But above all you need to write a story that can translate to the screen, a story that lends itself to collaboration because yes, there will be collaborators, more than you’d ever imagine.

Structure, format, marketing, industry conventions, terminology, font – these are all learnable. Figuring out the function of the “sweet spot” in the third act is easier than understanding the impact of specifying fixed effects in a 3-level hierarchical linear model (grad school, I’ll explain later). But that last skill I listed – writing a story that translates to the screen and invites collaboration – that’s the big one. And it’s not easy.

So, we have this idea, Laurel (my wife) and I. And we have a friend, a screenwriter/director with energy and talent and (though I hate the word that follows the right parenthesis) connections. The three of us set forth on writing a screenplay that we’re certain will be turned into a 50 million dollar movie with A-list talent. We will all make enough money for our own personal pet (collaborative) projects – my conversational indie film script about prisoners and poetry, my wife’s Enneagram vehicle, and the other guy’s character pieces (no names, no specifics for him – he doesn’t trust the internet; let’s call him Blaine). I will quit my day job, the one that finds me in a cubicle in the smallest of downtown L.A.'s skyscrapers. I will be pulled all the way in.

And what’s this about, the big movie that will catapult us into a life of work in film? I can’t tell you. But let’s just say that it involves humanity. And though the original idea was partly mine, the script we’re actually writing is nothing I ever thought I would be involved with. I love it of course.

Why are we so supremely confident? Because you have to be. And how close are we to getting it done? Not even close. It’s only been six days. But I’m in for good now. I’m part of the industry (I won’t uppercase it, don’t worry). I crave the finished product of film on the big screen. I long to be a nominee.

And finally, who is this imaginary reader asking me questions? You’ll have to answer that one.