sign the petition to bar harry knowles from future conferences.
I never vote for Spielberg--he never sends out cassettes.
(Don't send me your answers. This is just a little way to expand your horizons. Honest.)
I woke up early, having decided to have breakfast sent to my room. I sat down with my nice piping hot oatmeal and opened the schedule to determine what it was I was going to see that morning.
Note to self: check the schedule before going to bed.
There was nothing I wanted to see, dammit. I had gotten up ridiculously early and had nowhere to go. So I went across the hall and went with Pooks and Toni down to the restaurant as they got a perfectly leisurely breakfast.
We all went to the panel on Rewriting with Nick Kazan. (He was teaching the panel. We didn't go to it with him.) He didn't have anything earth-shattering to say, other than you have to rewrite and you have to listen to your gut. Use feedback as diagnostic evidence, not as a prescription for what to do. I liked his rule of thumb that odd drafts are good and even drafts tend to be terrible, because those are the ones you incorporate everyone's notes into, creating this big mish-mash that's neither fish nor fowl.
The best part came when he was responding to one of the crowd members. I've noted this before about people at conferences and conventions: they suddenly seem to get the idea that they're the only people in the room and can babble on and on incessantly, as if there isn't another person in the room who wants to ask a question. This one woman got up and made some rambling statement about one of her scripts that her agent alternately loves and hates and which she doesn't know what to do with.
Kazan tried his damnedest to figure out what her question was--it turned out to be (I think), Should I rewrite it again? He tried to answer and she kept interrupting him with some contradiction of what she had just said. Finally Kazan said, "You're not listening to what I'm saying," and I felt like throwing myself at his feet and saying, "Thank you!" He gave his advice one more time and then moved on to another audience member. So few speakers will do that when they really need to.
Pooks went off to lunch with some nice young man (don't ask, don't tell), so Toni and Ruth and I headed over to Schlotsky's for lunch. I can't remember what we had--Toni had pizza, Ruth and I had sandwiches, but beyond that I have no idea--and I can't remember what we talked about. So this isn't the most scintillating description of a lunch I've ever come up with.
Reportedly Toni and I were supposed to go to the Roundtable on Pitching, but I knew I wasn't up for any session that involved audience participation. (And it was after lunch, so everyone involved was going to be logy.) So instead we went to the panel on the Development Process, with Nick Kazan, Robin Swicord (his wife), and Steve Franks, who wrote the script that became Big Daddy. I see Toni has already gushed mightily about Mr. Franks. All true: he was like this big--very big; about 6 foot 7--kid who'd managed to luck into one of the greatest jobs in the world and was still loving every second of it.
Steve Franks had the best attitude toward notes I've ever heard: "You guys have ideas too? Cool!"
All three panellists stressed once again that notes are a diagnostic tool, not a prescriptive one: they reflect something, but the problem indicated might not be what the note-giver thinks it is. You can't blindly change your script to suit what someone tossed off in a meeting once--when the script goes out, it has your name on it, and it had better reflect your best work. "But I incorporated your notes!" won't cut it if all you get is a lousy script.
I liked Robin Swicord's advice that it's a good idea to get fired. You shouldn't change something just to avoid getting fired; if that's the kind of incentive they're holding over your head, they're probably going to fire you anyhow. And, as Nick said, "When the pain starts coming, it doesn't stop."
Next was a panel on 3-D Villains, which promised to be really interesting: Shane Black, Scott Frank, and Guillermo del Toro. It turned into sheer hell, partially because Scott Frank and Guillermo del Toro didn't show, and partially because Harry Knowles did show.
I ran into one guy I knew as I was walking in, and he said, "Harry's here, I'm leaving." I should have taken the hint.
I found out later that Harry barged onto the panel. He went up to the moderator and said, "I think I'm on this panel." The moderator said no, you're not. Then, as time went on and the panel was getting started late because panellists hadn't shown up, Harry just walked up the chairs and sat his ass in one.
Once again he did all the talking, despite the fact that Shane Black and Alan Trustman (author of 17 produced movies) were there.
I don't think anything interesting came out of this panel, most probably because a guy who shouldn't have been there had taken over. I eventually got up and left, a minute or so after Toni got up and walked out. What a waste of my time. It's this kind of nonsense that kills the conference.
Toni, Pooks, Ruth, Jette, Greg Beal, and I went over to the Wrap Party, a get-together with a cash bar and free hors d'oeuvres at Maggie May's. We took one look at the assembly and said, "Okay, we've seen enough," before leaving to find somewhere else to eat, preferably with a TV so Pooks could see some football or another.
We ended up at the Waterloo Brew Pub, which was mediocre. And since none of us was drinking, pointless.
We walked back to the hotel and I ended up talking with Toni for hours and hours. At one point Ruth came in and lay down on the bed I was reclining on. She lay across the bed, face-down, and fell asleep. She hadn't been drinking, she was just such a tired pup that she could fall asleep in practically any position. Periodically she'd lift her head up, look around, snuffle a bit--and then mid-snuffle crash back to sleep.
I have no idea what Toni and I talked about. Scripts, I think. The business, definitely. Moving to LA. She mentioned in her journal that she did most of the talking and that's true, but that's usually true with me. I have a mental image of myself as a lousy conversationalist, and I dislike talking about myself. For the most part this is because I usually think I have nothing to say, and then when I do have something to say I generally get interrupted by someone else talking about some completely different subject, so I figure I must be the world's most boring talker and I keep quiet. And I always remember the old rule: Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool, then open your mouth and remove all doubt.
I knew it was time to go to bed when I could not focus on what Toni was saying for the entire time it took her to say a sentence. She would finish saying something and I'd have to parse what it was she had just said.
I got back to my room and discovered that Darin had left 3 phone calls from Tampa, where he'd gone for Dave Feldman's wedding. I called him and we talked for a while. I'd forgotten that Tampa was later than Austin--we'd been having it so easy, with Los Angeles earlier than Austin. C'est la vie.
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Copyright 1999 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com