March 13, 1998

Cold Calling

I understand the whole phone headset thing now.

Tracing finally wrote me and said, You are a bad girl, tsk, tsk. I haven't been posting enough for the Often webring, so I'm on probation right now. I'm going to do better, honest. I just have to get out of the house once in a while.

Today's method for getting out of the house was to call restaurants all over Los Angeles to find out what their terms were for a private party--Feature Night, which I've mentioned here before. I called 20 or 30 places, and boy, do prices stretch over a wide range. I wrote up a little spiel that I gave each restaurant manager:

Hi, I'm looking for a place for a private party. This would be more like a cocktail party than a sit-down dinner. What capacity can you handle?

Cold calling is what I will be doing when I query production companies with my scripts. Call, get the assistant's name (very important--assistants and secretaries run this town; if they're important to you, you become important to them, and your message doesn't get lost), do the pitch.

I've decided I have to put a mirror over my desk, to remind me to KEEP SMILING as though I love this.

(I lost my temper with one guy who

had a very thick accent;
kept trying to tell me what goes into making a private party;
wanted to know how much I wanted to spend--instead of telling me the price ranges for the parameters I'd already given him.

I could not get this guy to give me a figure or, barring that, get off the damn phone. It made me crazy. "I'm not that interested in your place, okay?")

Since my ear is sore and I just don't like the phone that much anyhow, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to grow up to be a cold calling stock trader.

Yesterday's method for getting out of the house was to go to USC and get several copies of my script made. One for Len, one for Linda (who said she wanted to read it), one for the pile of script drafts, and one for me to start marking up when I start getting feedback.

Finding Len's house in Hollywood was a neat trick--not the best laid-out part of town, let me tell you. He does have the coolest house next door to his: it looks like the castle from Disneyland--though why anyone would want to live there I have no idea. Linda wasn't home and I had to drop off the scripts (I returned a number of things she'd given me) at her front door.

Also yesterday I took a walk in my neighborhood and stopped at a coffee place I'd seen before but had never gone into--Pane Dolce, on Ventura. This place has GREAT coffee and it's way closer than Starbucks. There was a guy sitting in there with his Mac Powerbook plugged in, which immediately made me feel at home. So now I have two local coffee places to hang out in.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Yesterday: 2 mile walk (okay, punctuated by stopping for coffee).

Today: I made it back to the weight room!