you wouldn't know i'm counter-phobic from these entries, would you?
Can chocolate lengthen your life?
-- Teaser for local news special. And it's not even sweeps month (yet). Running news:
Wednesday: 4.1 miles.
Thursday: nothing.
Today: the gym.
Quick! Get yours now! These domain names won't last long!
Today I told myself, You have to respond to all the critiques you've gotten of your script. So that's what I did: I responded to three critiques, I still have three or four more replies to go. It's draining.
I'd been avoiding it all week. I don't do well with criticisms, as I've said. One of my mail quotes is from Noel Coward: "I love criticism just so long as it's unqualified praise." That's all I want, that's all I can deal with. (This quite possibly is because that's all I got for the first x years of my life.)
My friend Pooks has no problem reading critiques. She reads them, she asks questions, she mentions new stuff, yadda yadda. She insists it's just that we have different ways of working. I take stuff away, percolate, then come back with a whole new thing. She likes to work stuff out a bit at a time.
Pooks also pointed out to me that I demonstrated some very contradictory behavior in the last week: I posted my script for my writing group last Friday, and on Saturday I moaned that no one was going to read it or say anything. By Tuesday, just about everyone had read it and made comments and I was moaning that I couldn't take all this criticism and wanted to go hide in a corner.
If I weren't a loon, I wouldn't be keeping an online journal, now would I?
(The critiques have actually been quite helpful--not only did everyone say something flattering about the script (I admit I have not always done this in my critiques, and I need to remember to do it), but most of the comments tended to mirror one another in terms of what people found wrong with the script. Everyone might not have had the same problem with the main character, but everyone had some problem with the main character that tended to hover around the same area, which gives me a clue that I have to go work on that a bit. And so on.
(And my friend Bill, who's sold spec scripts and is working on a couple of projects now, said, "No one reacts well to criticism on their spec scripts." Which made me feel better.)
Yesterday I met Aaron for coffee over in Los Feliz.
He talked about a meeting he had at Broder-Kurland, a big agency, in which the agent said he loved Aaron's script, but action films with a central woman character don't do well (this is a truism of Hollywood that no one ever thinks to question) and without a script that the agent can take out to sell--not merely as a writing sample, but an honest-to-goodness "let's shoot this now" script--there's nothing they can do.
Me? I got a parking ticket. And I went home to avoid answering my critiques.
In the evening, Darin went off to meet some buds (the Blizzard folks) for dinner and I stayed home to write 12 more pages on my novel. I realize that when I get going with my fiction writing I go too fast, I get into screenplay mode. I don't describe things as I rush from one piece of dialogue to the next. One of the nice things about fiction is that you have more time. Instead of saying:
INT. DIANE'S OFFICE - DAY
Messy.
Instead, you can describe the desk covered with scripts and Xeroxes of health insurance cards and cords from the computer and the Palm Pilot stand. The piles of Variety in the corner and the massing of books on the guest bed where no one will ever be able to sleep because there's nowhere to put the books. That kind of thing. You only have time for the important details in a screenplay--the parking ticket that peeks out of a giant pile of paper, which is why the HEROINE doesn't see it and doesn't pay it and that's why her car gets towed away--but you get to put lots more into a novel, to accustom the reader to the setting.
You also get to interpret the little tremble at the corner of the character's mouth; you don't have to wait to see if the actor gets it. And as everyone knows, if you have to wait for the actor, you might be waiting a very, very long time.
On Wednesday--this entry was originally scheduled to go out Wednesday; this may tell you how on top of the situation I am--I got up to go running, and as always I stopped in the kitchen to get a glass of ice water, which I down about half of before setting off on the streets.
I discovered there was no ice. This was because it had all melted in the night, due to the fact that the freezer drawer had been left half open.
Damnation.
I couldn't even remove the ice bucket because there was too much water in it and to get it out I'd have to tilt it, thereby spilling water everywhere. I had to use a glass to bail out the ice bucket before I could pick it up and dump out the rest of the water in the sink. Then I removed all of the food--including (sob!) two brand-new cartons of Phish Food; oh, the humanity--and tossed it. The only thing that wasn't half-thawed was the frozen pizza, which had been under a couple of other cold things and so still had frost on it.
All of this made me late for my run, so instead of doing the run I wanted to, I did 4.1 miles. I finished later than I expected--gotta keep an eye on that clock--and so got out of the house later than I meant to, which meant I got to Sony Studios in Culver City ten minutes late.
Sigh.
Arden, a guy from my USC class, works at Rastar and set up meetings for a couple of us with one of the development execs there, Michael, who wanted to meet some new writers and get a look at some of our stuff. Rastar is not going to participate in the big spec auctions, so they need to get their material elsewhere.
What's interesting about Arden doing this is that he was one of the Venal Six. You remember them. I was furious with them at the time and fairly furious with how USC dealt with it, but the next time I saw most of the Six (at one of Linda's parties) I had a perfectly fine time chatting with them--they were still guys, you know? I did like them. There are people I hold grudges with, but those tend to be more personal issues, like, "You killed my family and burned my house to the ground. No, I don't want to have coffee with you."
Not everyone from my USC class feels the way I do. Some have harbored serious grudges, and not everyone worked them out the way one did: at Jackie's party, Marc took one of the Six out to a courtyard in Linda's apartment and woke up everyone in the complex by getting into a horrible screaming match. Evidently this led them to some kind of understanding, if not a friendship. (That's admirable: being able to argue your way to some kind of closure. It's not something I'm able to do, but I'd like to.)
Others will never speak to any of the Six again, referring to them in epithets best left to, say, Karetic and Milosevic.
I doubt Arden set up any meetings for them. (Or for Karetic and Milosevic either.)
Anyhow, I got to Sony late--Sony: the one studio I hadn't been to before, of course; I had its location confused with Fox's--but thankfully there was a tram right by the garage that took me directly to the Hepburn building. I bounded in to the Rastar office and Arden called Michael, who immediately took me into his office. He'd been doing day trading or something.
We chatted. This was what one calls "a meet and greet." Or what David Hollander, my writing teacher the first year of USC, called the "I like your sweater" meeting. You get to know one another a little, make sure that neither of you is a complete psycho (this is more important to the Hollywood development process than you'd believe), and find out what they're looking for and what you're working on.
We chatted for an hour, about working in Silicon Valley and the USC program and what Michael did before he was an exec and how Sony is operating with their new policy of cutting major writers in for a piece of the gross pie. He asked me to have my manager send him a couple of things. It was a pretty good meeting.
I was bummed to see that Arden had taken off for lunch by the time I was done gabbing. I left a little sticky note with a "Thanks!" on it. Which isn't much in the appreciation biz, I guess.
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Copyright 1999 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com