Katzenberg and Crew

I have a friend in town for the Oscars who is staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel.  I went there last night to say hello before he had to run to a bunch of pre-game parties.  When I arrived the place was an absolute zoo.  There was so much security there I thought Obama might have been in town.  

Turns out Katzenberg was hosting his Night Before Oscar Party somewhere in the hotel.  So there I was; an aspiring screenwriter looking for some kind of big break in my professional life, front and center in a hailstorm of Hollywood power. 

My first indication that this was no ordinary party was when I was waiting for my friend in the lobby and "ran into" Arianna Huffington.  I was like, is that...  Turns out the list of attendees at the party was pretty much bananas, it might be easier to identify which famous celebrities and power producers didn't go.  While I stood there at the front desk watching the limos arrive and the fame pour through the door,  I paid my $12 valet bill and hoped my last remaining credit card with any life on it wouldn't get declined. Then the Desk Clerk told me that a ticket to the party cost $15,000. 

It was one of these moments where as a hungry screenwriter I thought, man, if you had any balls at all you would pull Steven Spielberg aside and charm his Star Wars boxer briefs off.  It's one of those things.  I don't think it's ever hard to get in front of guys like that, but it is hard to do something pro-career that won't get you banned for life.  

Living in LA I frequently find myself in front of people who could change my writing life in a single phone call, and in almost every case I do nothing to help them help me.  I even rationalize the whole thing by saying that I'm still working on my craft and that I don't really have that one script that I know will totally blow people away.  Just this week I learned a new trick that will forever influence my writing, and I have convinced myself that without that trick my work will never sell.  

The thing is, I don't think I'm wrong about that - the I'm not ready thing.  At least in respect to approaching someone like a Spielberg on a cold LA Saturday at a $15,000 a plate benefit party.  I think at one point in my career I worried about getting in front of people. But like I said, that's never been the hard part for me.  

The hard part for me is having the confidence in my craft to step up and say, hey, I have what you need.  Because if there's one truth of Hollywood, it's that everyone is hungry for a great script.  It's the beginning of a lot of dreams.

Screenplay Origins

I have this little theory about the origins of ideas, it goes like this: imagine a conscious life is like a layer cake.  On the surface (the frosting, let's say) you have speech.  We communicate with each other primarily with words, either spoken or written.  This is the visible layer, the layer of the 110 pages. Below that layer, you have a layer of thought. This layer begins the layers we believe to be private. Below the thought layer you have emotions.  Below emotions you have felling.  Once below feelings, a region we cannot access with our minds begins, a region where (I believe) all of our consciousness is shared. My belief is that ideas are generated from this unknown space. Like bubbles in a boiling pot of water.  They come up first as a feeling, then emotion, a thought and finally out as words where they can be communicated. But the word is only the final step in the process.  The real gold is the pre-translated impulse and the purity of that impulse. So what I'm thinking is, the best way to get compelling, authentic stories is to start in the depths and let those impulses and emotions define the words, not the other way around.

My first post

So I started a blog about screenwriting and this is it. There's a lot of good ones out there already, but if there's one thing I've learned about the film business, it's that there's as many roads in as people in it.  I figure one more documented journey won't hurt, and maybe even someone will learn a thing or two from my travels as I have from so many gracious and open others.  I think if there's one theme that I'd like to stick to in this blog it would probably be no bullshit. I feel like a lot of the film business suffers from enough bullshit already.  Or is it that people wanting to get into the business love the smell of bullshit more than they do hard work and persistence?  From my perspective, what might feel like progress can actually be straight masturbation, and if there's one thing I don't want to become, it's a professional masturbator.  So I try to see things clearly, for what they are, and I hope this blog will reflect that.  Ultimately, I believe the quality of my screenwriting depends on my ability to do just that.