Hollywood or Bust

Going out in the rain with a backpack full of scripts, and having a feature-film project in the lost & found

In 2009, I decided to take my talents to the big screen. I was 32 years old, a few months away from proposing to my wife. I may have even begun to think about the future.

At the time, I was scratching out an OK living as an editor for a small financial publication. It was a remote job with congenial hours, occasional travel and the leeway to hire my friends. I knew enough to know it was too good to last.

That wasn’t the only pressure. My latest novel - to me the greatest and truest thing I’d ever written - had failed to get so much as a sniff from agents. And I was getting a little desperate. I made a short movie trailer for the book, and even got the unpublished book reviewed in a few places. But I’d hit an end so dead as a novelist that it would take me another two years to find my way out.

The plan to write for films and television was my idea of being practical. I’d tried being practical six years before this decision, when as a poet, I’d decided to cash in by writing a novel. I was thinking I’d meet the world halfway. There was another guy, named Zeno, who tried to get somewhere by going half the distance over and over again. He famously never got where he was going.

Lemon squeezey

The plan was simple. I’d write an awesome screenplay, get Hollywood interested, sell the script for a bundle and then work as a script doctor, and go on sleeping late. Easy peasy. It seemed like a pleasant and practical way to do and say what I wished and make a nice living.

I selected a few books on screenwriting from the suspiciously large genre. Then I shelled out for the word-processing program for scripts. I did a bunch of research and started typing away.

Intrigue, car chases, gun battles

After a few months and a few drafts, I had something. The movie was the story of Coca-Cola buying a large security contractor to settle a civil war in Mexico in return for naming rights to the whole country. It had gun battles, cartels, royal hostages, marketing campaigns, feral trust-fund kids, boardroom betrayals and a Pepsi-funded insurgency.

It was called Refreshment, and you can watch it on Netflix.

Just kidding.

Award-almost-winning

Right out of the gate, Refreshment was named a semi-finalist in the American Zoetrope Script contest. I sent emails to a few top talent agencies to let them know I’d accept their flattery and expensive lunches.

After a few days, I checked in to make sure they’d gotten my emails. I sent more emails to more agencies. Then I paid for a database of agents and managers and so forth, doing research, honing my sales pitch and sending more and personalized emails.

Query fever

You can lose your mind this way. You can get bitter. There’s one guy named Gerard Jones who documented every single attempt he made to have his novel agented, published or made into a film - around 20,000 attempts. You sense him changing over time. His site is worth reading, mostly as a warning.

Like Gerard, I also didn’t get have any success. The one agent who spent any time responding did so with angry emails about the cost of his kids’ private schools, my own laughable naivete, and how he couldn’t even imagine representing anything except a four-quadrant crowd pleaser. In fairness to him, I had to look up what a four-quadrant crowd pleaser was.

Like in the movies

A movie is a multi-million-dollar message from a multi-billion-dollar industry to tell a million lone individuals sitting quietly in the dark that they each, individually, have a chance to succeed where everyone else has failed. A successful movie tells it to people of all ages, genders, nationalities, religions and creeds - at least a four-quadrant crowd pleaser does.

That’s the spirit of the thing. So I kept on. One warm, rainy spring day, I printed a dozen copies of my script and a dozen synopses, loaded my backpack and went out into the streets of New York.

The seven-dollar no

The first stop on my list was in my neighborhood. I think it was Darren Aronofsky’s place - a low, two-story building with an attractive tiled exterior in Brooklyn. It had a mailbox outside, but its door was also ajar. Moments like this give me real respect for salespeople. It’s not so easy to walk into a place uninvited.

But I went inside and up the stairs to a big open office that took up the whole floor. I was wet from rain and sweat. I stopped in the middle of the floor and announced a hello. People looked up from their desks and laptops. A dog ran up and started licking my hand. I explained to the room who I was and what I’d come there to do. They got very quiet. Eventually the oldest, tallest man in the room came out from the back. He said they couldn’t accept the script. I said what about a synopsis? He said Okay. I gave him one, said thanks and left for Manhattan.

I started on 57th Street at Martin Scorsese’s office, dropping a script and synopsis with his receptionist, and worked my way down through another dozen places to Robert DeNiro’s office in Tribeca. Only Richard Gere’s assistant stopped me in my tracks, refusing either a script or a synopsis.

One of the offices, maybe Scorsese’s, spent seven bucks on postage to send me back my script with a personalized letter saying that they’d taken special precautions to avoid reading even a little of it.

La la lost and found

Around then, I had a business trip to Los Angeles. I tried to set up meetings with the many Californian agents, managers and producers who’d ignored my emails. The culmination of my charm offensive was leaving my script in the bathroom of a hip coffee shop in Santa Monica. A kindly barista called me later that day to say they’d keep it in the Lost & Found.

While I was there, I had lunch and drinks with some old friends I knew from growing up and from college who worked writing for TV. They said, in their own ways, that my best bet for breaking into screenwriting was probably to stay in New York and keep writing novels.

Refreshment lingered on for a few months after it graced the Lost & Found. There were other contests, other schemes. I don’t know when I gave up on it, but at some point, I felt I’d done everything I could. Like in a cop show when the detectives have to show they tried everything else in order to get a wiretap - I’d proven exhaustion.

Postscript

Since my not-so-grand tour of Hollywood, I’ve made a few short, small films. They were ambitious in their own ways. But mostly, they were fun. They were a chance to collaborate with my best friend, and to work with a bunch of people I really like. One of the films won some small awards. Another screenplay did too.

And the experience did pay off financially, even if not the way I thought. I’ve made some money writing scripts for commercials, marketing videos, podcasts and so on.

But I’m not chasing down agents anymore. I’m older. I don’t have all the time in the world. Everything costs more than expected, in both energy and time. Everything requires compromises. Especially selling. And I have to be careful about adding more compromises to the already-teetering pile.

The Hollywood of my imagination may have been misguided in 2009. And since then it seems to have drifted even farther from those quaint notions. At the time, I was looking for a satisfying and sensible place for myself in our society. I still am.

Selected bibliography

A cautionary tale about trying to find an agent

My filmography

Danny Jock, who did the cool cover sheet for Refreshment, and who is taking commissions