Two producers greeted me warmly when I stepped off the plane in Los Angeles. I was there at their request to discuss two scripts of mine in which they were interested.
The glitz, the glamour, the pain, the agony; it was all present as we drove past SONY, CBS and through Universal Pictures. It was Hollywood, but all the same as we talked about my scripts, they said to get them produced was like winning the lottery.
Perhaps you have to live in the fast lane (whatever that means) to be successful (whatever that means) in Hollywood. There is one thing for sure, as the producers hammered into my brain, particularly on the way to a meeting with my agent, if you don’t write for the sheer joy of writing, you are not going to succeed in Hollywood.
They told me my scripts were on the fringe of being great (we know that good scripts have to be great scripts to have a chance, but then, what one perceives as great can be perceived by someone else as bad, and subjectivity rules Hollywood and all movie goers as far as that goes). But, they said I was going to go back into each script and identify with the journeys my protagonists were taking so that I can write the stories more simply and with more authority.
I asked, and by now we were waiting for a stretch limo (limos are cliche in Hollywood, but people still use them), to take us to pick up an investor of theirs so that we could go to dinner at a club and listen to soft jazz. How they knew I loved soft jazz was beyond me. Matilda, a short, a bit overweight, penetrating eyes and a soft heart (at least she looked like a Matilda to me even though that was not her real name) said, “Remember, Don, I read your scripts.” Ahh, I thought, just because one of my characters loved soft jazz in the story, that didn’t mean I loved soft jazz too, although I did and do. Not too hard to figure that one out, is it?
Matilda and Jerome (not his real name, but he looked like a Jerome to me, you know, Hollywood handsome with slicked back hair, sparkling blue eyes, and skin as smooth as marble with words that would’ve outdone a circus barker’s) explained that my protagonists’ voices in both scripts were not quite clear enough. “You’re going to have to reach down more deeply and make them multi-dimensional,” Jerome said. “You’ll know when you have them right.”
Then, perhaps, surprisingly, (we were in the limo driving through South-Central LA), Matilda, also a screenwriter with roots in a famous and successful Hollywood screenwriting family, asked me, “What do you want to achieve as a writer?”
I blinked curiously, “Well, uh, I…” I looked through a tinted window at an elderly woman in a wheelchair, clumped, with a sign scrawled on cardboard in black, “Hungry.” And my back was next to the limo driver’s back. “I have things I want to share with people,” I said. “I want to see my stories on the screen.”
Matilda studied me with the eyes of a statue. “Then you aren’t going to make it,” she said.
“Make it?” I asked.
Now, she was electrified. She jabbed at her heart. “Here!” she said, her voice cracking. “Here is where you write from and here is where you make it!”
The dinner and the show at the club were enjoyable, but somehow I couldn’t wait to get back to San Francisco where my wife was attending a conference. Raindrops on the window in the plane appeared like tears on my face reflecting back at me as I contemplated the rewrites on my scripts.
My wife and I purchased apples and oranges. We walked on Market Street in San Francisco until we had given away all of the fruit to homeless people. And then, as remarkable as it might sound, we came across the elderly lady in the wheelchair. I took her “Hungry” sign from her. I pushed her to a nearby restaurant where we bought her dinner and then my wife and I went home and fed the cats.