Wow. I haven't written in a while. I can feel it too. Have I really done something if I haven't written about it?
Hopefully I'll have a minute or two to catch up over this weekend, which is being spent at home with Darin. Home-home, as in our house in Northern California. Despite all the work I have to do for USC, despite my internship, despite everything else...I am so glad to be here. I'm always glad to be with Darin, obviously, but it was great seeing all our friends again, and even better not having that cabal of fierce killers following me around, trying to kill me as I drive on the freeways.
My excuse for not writing yesterday, Thursday, was that I dashed out of class and got on an airplane to fly up north and be with Darin for our 3rd Anniversary. We always remember it and say, What are we going to do for our anniversary? (The first year we did the obvious: "We're going to Disney World!" and did.) But I don't feel like our anniversary is that big of a deal. I always think of our relationship as dating from when we first started living together, which was about 3 hours and a couple of seconds after our first date. (Actually, we moved in together 6 weeks after we started dating.) So, while it was neat getting married and I like having an anniversary and all, it's not a big emotional day for me.
Of course, yesterday was also the first new episode of Babylon 5 in a while, which WAS a big deal. We hosted at our house, and most of the usual suspects showed up: Rob and Laura, Sho, Mitch, Michael, and Gordon. It was an okay episode, nothing exciting, but I'm glad new eps have started.
Rob told me that he wants to start a Journal Rebuttal page -- not an online journal exactly...more of a companion piece setting the record straight on entries in my journal and in Ceej's.
I started my internship on Wednesday, which explains why I was too zonked to write an entry Wednesday. I'm obviously going to have to learn to harness my energies more effectively.
Like I've said before, what the intern does is office work and script coverage. And anything else someone wants done. I do mean, anything. I was introduced to the President of the company as the new intern and she said, "Maybe the intern would like to visit the commissary and get me a double espresso?" It's not an idle question. I got the double espresso, although I went to Starbucks to get it.
I spent most of the afternoon photocopying and collating and doing basic secretarial work. I realized I've never done office work before. Never. Maybe in high school I stuffed some envelopes. But I've never worked as a secretary and I've never waitressed. I've missed out on so much.
I got copies of quite a few scripts for my troubles, which I'm very excited about. These are considered good quality scripts, in development either at this company or another one on the WB lot. So I can start building a script library at home.
Rob asked me last night what coverage is. Coverage, simply, is what writers everywhere dread and everybody else in the industry relies on. Readers read a script (or a book, or whatever) and write up
The execs read the coverage (or, more likely, scan the marks in the recommend/consider/pass chart) and make decisions based on that.
Yes, coverage can screw up a writer's life. If the reader passes, the company or agency isn't going to look at the screenplay. And the check box info gets entered into a computer database, so if the script comes back, all the company has to do is look in the database and say, Nope, we already passed on that one.
I am sure that when I am sending my script out, I will curse the name of every reader who passes on my screenplay.
But. (And it's a big one.) About 50,000 screenplays are registered every year with the WGA. I can read a 120-page screenplay in about an hour; it would only take me 50,000 hours/2083 days straight to read all those screenplays. Let alone remember them. I couldn't do it, obviously; no one could.
Beyond that, most of those screenplays are unreadable. They're bad. It's clear 5 pages in that they're bad. I don't mean, "Gee, this isn't my cup of tea," or "This is too much like The Mighty Ducks movies." I mean awful horrible throw-it-across-the-room bad. If we use Sturgeon's Law, which states that 94% of everything is crap, we can eliminate 47,000 of those 50,000 screenplays as possible contenders. (Which is probably generous, from the stories I've heard.)
But every time one of those screenplays passes someone's desk, it's got to be read. And commented on. Yes, I'm sure the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater once in a while -- the reader had a bad day, or the reader is an idiot, or the reader didn't actually read the whole thing the way s/he is supposed to and while the beginning was bad the screenplay was actually pretty good.
There aren't many babies in Hollywood. Everyone truly is looking for good scripts.
Brooke, in Monday's class, talked about a recent sale she made for one of her clients -- who, it turns out, is a GSPer from the Class of '94. (There's hope!) She said that there were a couple of things about this script that made it obvious that it was a sure thing, spec-wise:
There were a couple of other points she made as well, but since my notes are 400 miles away, they'll have to wait. But they were good things to keep in mind about what constitutes a "sellable" script.