your new word for the day.
(Don't send me your answers. This is just a little way to expand your horizons. Honest.)
Darin and I watched some of The Madness of King George tonight. We were not enthralled. The story I love to tell about this movie is that the title was original The Madness of George III, but on these shores the studio execs thought American audiences would wonder what had happened to Parts I and II. (I usually think this is an apocryphal story; after all, the movie would be playing in art houses, and the art house crowd usually has to know something about the movie before checking it out.)
The bane of George's existence in the first part of the movie (possibly in the whole thing; didn't get that far) was those damned Colonists, the ones who split off and formed the United States. As I watched George glower at a globe (which had an almost perfect rendition of the land mass), I had a sudden realization. I turned to Darin.
"The United States is really a weird name for a country, isn't it?"
He nodded.
Most countries have names. Ours has a description. I know most people refer to it as America, but that's not quite the same thing. (I had some Belgian friends who thought Americans were so ignorant for calling the country "America" when that clearly referred to the continent; I thought they were just 200+ years late in trying to get that perception to stick.) The entire name just struck me as so odd there for a moment that I couldn't believe I'd never realized it before.
That's today's Cognitive Dissonance Moment.
My Real Astrology horoscope for this week reads:
I'd always looked down on people who play the lottery. You have as much chance of winning, I figured, as you do of snagging a Nobel Prize. Why not direct that wasted energy towards pragmatic money-making schemes? Recently, though, I came to a different view. Jupiter and the sun both made auspicious transits to my own chart, and I decided there was a realistic chance I'd get a windfall. Suddenly I was fantasizing about all the educational fun I'd have with so much extra cash. This in turn led to the disturbing realization that I'd let my imagination grow lazy; I'd so thoroughly accepted my financial limitations that I'd ceased to dream about daring futures. Moral of the story: Jumpstart your own sluggish fantasies, Leo. Meditate on what you'd do with $6 million.
I quote this not to sabotage my attempts to tell you that I don't believe in astrology but to show this as an example of pareidolia -- a wonderful word that means "seeing a vague, formless stimulus but perceiving something very distinct within it." I learned of this word in the absolutely marvelous How to Think About Weird Things by Schick, Jr. and Vaughn. Pareidolia is why we see or hear patterns in things where there are none, like the face of Jesus in a tortilla. Or being sure that a horoscope meant to apply to one-twelfth of the population is absolutely meant for you. (Or me, for that matter.)
The reason I was so amused by this horoscope is that it pushed one of my closely-held buttons. When I hear the word lottery, it brings up several associations:
- the increasing societal desire to get rich quick via lotteries or other forms of gambling;
- my increasing disgust with state governments on relying on lotteries and other forms of gambling in order to raise state revenues, thereby taxing the people least able to afford it the most; and
- "the middle-class lottery": a term I heard many years ago that refers to the boom in screenwriting.
I first read "middle-class lottery" in an article in, I believe, The San Jose Mercury News Magazine one Sunday morning. The new spec script boom was underway, and everyone wanted to crank out 120 pages and get paid $2m, just like that. But since writing is slightly skilled labor (I'm not going to give myself airs; I've read stuff out of the slushpile), it's considered to be a slightly more educated pursuit than, say, buying a Lotto ticket. Hence the term "middle-class."
Of course, succeeding in screenwriting isn't like winning a lottery at all. You might read that 40,000 scripts are registered every year with the Writers Guild of America and that (maybe) 20 scripts are bought every year from complete unknowns. So you think, Okay, I have a 1 out of 2000 chance of having my script bought. Well, no, not really.
As Terry Rossio says, it's more like 100% or 0%. (An interesting thread about this very topic was on Wordplay earlier this year; go read it.) Most scripts are crap. Most people don't know how to tell a story. Those who can tell a story don't always know how to tell a commercial story, or, more importantly, to tell a story commercially.
But still, when faced with making it in Hollywood--or with continuing to advance in the Nicholl competition--it's hard not to think of "the odds." As though there were some way to beat the odds other than write a really great script.
I look at the horoscope mentioning "lottery" and wonder how it applies to screenwriting. You may look at it and think of Indian casinos. (But I'm still wondering how I'm going to get $6m. out of screenwriting.)
I read Real Astrology every week a)out of habit and b)see how it applies to me this week. Because something said in the horoscope always makes me think it applies to me, and it's funny to see what comes up.
I probably read it for the nostalgia factor too: There was a time when I worked at Apple Computer when my friends Marq and Eric and I would dash for the San Jose Metro on Thursday to see what Real Astrology had to say. And it appeared to be so dead on every week that each of us always said to ourselves, "One of the other two is writing this." Oh, I barely remember being young and stupid, but there it is.
Evidently there will be an alignment of journallers from Southern California. If you're interested in attending, helping plan, covering the event for the media, or which weekend you should be as far away as possible, email Meg (of Blue and Green).
 |
 |
 |
 |
Copyright 1999 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com