the last day of things, except for me.
If you write a line and your partner laughs, there's a good chance at least one person will find it funny.
I discovered I had a cough in the morning--and, just to gross you out, I'll mention it was a productive cough. Which I blamed on the continual exposure to cigarette smoke. Another reason to prefer California's way of doing things.
Got up, had breakfast with Toni, Pooks, and Holly Wonder, a woman we'd met around the conference. Then we headed upstairs to You're Not 18 Anymore, a panel discussing whether there's ageism in Hollywood. It seemed to me that the upshot was: a writer can reinvent him- or herself at any time, because it's what on the page that counts.
But an important thing to keep in mind is: an Adam Sandler movie makes $40m. in one weekend. A movie geared toward "mature" viewers cannot compete with those numbers. Which kind of movie is Hollywood going to make more of?
As always...don't force yourself to write a certain type of movie because it's "hot." Write what you want to write.
Then the final panel was Last Call with Larry Karaszewski and Scott Frank, only Scott Frank was late because he'd overslept. This was basically a panel for the audience to ask whatever questions they hadn't asked so far, or hadn't been in the right panels to ask earlier. This was a panel for getting good quotes, not for sterling bits of wisdom. Which is okay, as panels go:
I'll throw out a line of dialogue and he won't like it, then he'll throw out a line of dialogue and I won't like it, then I'll throw out a line of dialogue and he'll be mad at me because I didn't like his line. -- Larry Karaszewski, on working with a partner.
You mean, go to the crappy mood scene that day? -- LK, on a question on how to write when you're in a crappy mood.
I've wroten some good scripts. -- LK, totally messing up his ability to speak English.
If it bores you, it's going to bore the fuck out of me. -- Scott Frank, on a question about what to do when you find what you're writing is boring.
If there's something interesting being shot, I'll go. If I'm hungry, I'll go for the free food. -- SF, on visiting the set.
It's like you're a studio executive and I'm going to pretend that answers your question. -- LK, having gone totally off the question that was asked.
I finally thought of a good question to ask...at the end. Oh well. The moderator never looked our direction anyway, so she wouldn't have called on me.
I did go up to Scott Frank--who probably does think I'm stalking him, since I've seen him here, at USC's Guest Speaker series, and at the Writer's Bloc session with him and Elmore Leonard--and thank him not only for being wonderful but for being such a strong advocate of rewriting. (If you've followed nobody knows anything for a while, you know how I feel about rewriting.)
Then Toni, Pooks, Ruth, Greg Beal, Jette, Holly, newcomer Christian, and I went out to lunch. We finally agreed on Paradise on Sixth Street. Neither Toni nor I was very hungry, so we split an appetizer quesadilla.
The group was breaking up at that point--Toni had to catch her SuperShuttle, and Pooks and Ruth were milling about, getting ready to split a cab to the airport. Jette, exhausted, took off for her apartment.
Greg Beal and I headed off to find dessert somewhere. Everywhere we checked was closed. Evidently Sixth Street shuts down for siesta on Sunday afternoons or something. There was a sign in some window about a private party for the Austin Screenwriters Conference; as a panellist, Greg wanted to know what that was about and was he missing it? (I opined it was probably for the volunteers.)
We eventually took a taxi to Katz's Deli, where we each got brownie sundaes and chatted about the Nicholl Competition, which he runs, and writing in general. We walked back to the hotel, and Greg explained to me about the weird zoning in Austin. Back at the hotel he said, "You don't have to hang around until I leave for my flight." A few minutes later he said it again, so I took the hint and left. (See my analysis of my conversational skills, yesterday.)
I went up to my room, where I send e-mail to Andrew and Jackie, friends of Darin's and mine, about getting together for dinner. I would have called, except I couldn't find their number in the book. I would have found their number had I been spelling their last name correctly, but I wasn't. Thank God there was Ethernet in the rooms.
They called me and said, Sure, let's have dinner! They came by to get me, with Jackie's daughter Lauren, and we went to County Line BBQ. Darin and I used to go on dive trips with Andrew and Jackie (pre-USC and pre-baby); now Lauren has learned to dive and is an enthusiastic dive buddy. I caught them up with what's going on with us--for instance, we're having a baby--and thoroughly enjoyed the beef ribs. Well, all of them I could eat, at any rate.
After dinner I called Darin, thinking that it was early enough to be calling Eastern time. He was already asleep though--after the wedding festivities and all the work he's been doing, he had just totally crashed.
So I decided to follow suit and fell asleep pretty darn quickly, despite the fact that I was congested and had even more of a cough than I noticed before.
At about 12:30 in the morning I was woken up by the sounds of a party in the room next door--to which everyone except me had apparently been invited. After about 10 minutes of this, I called down to the front desk and asked them to do something about it. Then, somehow, I fell asleep. I remember noticing that my Eustachian tubes were throbbing, which did not make me thrilled.
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Copyright 1999 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com