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How I Ruined Maria’s Life

I made friends with this girl, Maria, when it turned out I was in every single one of her classes in the spring semester. Bear in mind that she was only in half of my classes, since I was taking twice the credit hours, but at any rate we got to know each other pretty well and became decent friends. Then, I left for three months with no word and came back as if nothing happened.

Unlike most of my friends, all of whom I was consciously avoiding all summer, I felt bad about ignoring Maria. Not bad enough to call her, mind you, but bad enough that she was one of the first three I got ahold of when I came home.

Turns out, Maria was in two of my five classes this semester. That was a reasonably hopeful sign, albeit not a surprising one, since the two screenwriting classes we’re taking is full of familiar faces. It was nice to have somebody to bitch with, though, when things get rough. I like everybody else, but I don’t know that I can trust them to keep the secret bitchings to themselves. Whether I like it or not (mostly “or not”), I’m apparently hilarious. People enjoy quoting the hilarious things I say. I hate it when they do that, because it inevitably gets me into some kind of trouble.

That said, I was looking forward to having some classes with Maria again. That is, until she didn’t show up to our Tuesday class, screenwriting practicum. Turns out she dropped it, since it’s not a class we really need to take, and she’s already taking 15 credit hours; she didn’t need the other three. My take on it is that, unless it was a financial thing (it wasn’t), she should’ve stayed in it, because it’s a really simple class, and the end result is a possible film credit.

Here’s the idea of the class: you’re handed a short story. You adapt it into a 5-8 page script so that it can end up being a 7-10 minute film. You work with Producing IV students to hone the script into the best compromise of your writerly vision and their producerly vision. In the spring, the producers go on to the producing practicum, where they team up with all the other practicums (practica?) — directing, cinematography, editing, sound — and assemble a cast and crew to shoot the film.

Unlike most Columbia films, they really deck the halls out on these guys. Everything’s 35mm, color, with legitimately decent sound and lighting. The practicum classes use the best equipment Columbia has (which is pretty fucking good — it’s just that we don’t usually get access to it without paying to rent it and having a thesis film to make), and the film department apparently pulls a lot of budgetary/legal strings that they normally wouldn’t.

Why? Because, arguably, this is the best undergrad work we’ll do. This is the stuff that will be submitted to festivals and actually get accepted.

And why is that important? Because, believe it or not, influential people go to festivals, watch shorts (especially student shorts), and rub their chins thoughtfully as they read the credits. If a short is well-made (and not many are — just watch IFC and Sundance Channel), it’ll generate a buzz, and that buzz will lead to opportunity.

So, say my name is on the “Written by…” credit of a short film that generates a lot of buzz. People suddenly know who I am. They think, “Goddamn, if this guy can create fully developed characters, put them into an interesting story, and really make me sit and ponder life for a few minutes, imagine what he can do in a feature-length screenplay!” Boy, are they going to be surprised and disappointed!

That’s why I’m taking this class — it’s purely for the glory and potential career enhancement it may give me. It’s not a required course for anybody, so I assume it’s why everyone else is taking it. On Thursday, Maria told me she decided to drop it, because less stress is, to her, more important than a career that she doesn’t seem all that interested in at the moment (more on that later).

So on Thursday night, we do have a class together. This one is a portfolio review. I actually like the way it’s structured — each week, we get a “canon” of one peer’s work, we read it, we give coverage, and the following week we come back and have an open discussion about the various scripts’ strengths and weaknesses. I think it’s great, because we rarely get opportunities to read one another’s work — partly because we don’t have time, partly because we loser writers are very guarded about our work, mostly because we all know it’s shit. Or maybe that’s just me.

You might have noticed the word “canon” in the last paragraph, in sarcastic quotation marks. “Why the sarcasm?” you’re asking, apparently after losing familiarity with the usual tone of my writing because I haven’t blogged much lately.

Here’s why: the professor is a jackass. I’ve heard so many scary things about him, from his hyper-criticism of trivial shit to his arrogance to his jaded pep-talks to the fact that he grades arbitrarily to the fact that he demands you either call him “professor” or “doctor” or, if you’re feeling informal, “doc.” I’ve managed to consciously avoid his classes as I’ve gone through the screenwriting program, but this class is the big hurdle. See, he’s the only professor who teaches this class. It’s the only session. There’s not enough demand for another session to open up, and even if there were, he’d probably teach that one, too.

So, as of right now, I’m screwed.

One other thing about this prof: remember Owen from last semester? Of course, you do. Well, take this as the biggest horror of all: this man is Owen’s favorite professor. And, after having met him, I know why: they are the exact same person.

Okay, not the exact same person. This professor does have a bit more of the all-important social skills; he has a bit more of a self-deprecating wit, rather than a wit that relies solely on insulting or alienating everyone else in the room. He also shaves regularly and isn’t gargantuan by any means.

But man, when they get talking, they’re exactly the same. In all senses. They talk and talk and talk about nothing, rambling in desperate search of a point, and when they run out of things to talk about, they just stop, whether they’ve found that point or not (usually or not). And, even with the professor’s occasional bonus of self-deprecating humor, he will still smugly insult every person in the room, as well as many people out of the room, for no particular reason. Meanwhile, he has absolutely no objection singing his own praises.

I don’t mind people who are confident in their skills. I wish I could be confident in my skills; it’d make me a lot less manic, I think. But there’s a big difference between being confident, like my other screenwriting pals Mike and Gray, and being unrelentingly arrogant, like Owen and the professor.

At any rate, the professor insists that we refer to our “collected works” by their proper name — “the canon.” I have a hard time doing that, because my particular “canon,” and the “canon” of everyone else in the class, defies the actual definition of that word. These aren’t works, completed and collected to be perused by scholars and producers (two very separate categories) — they’re works-in-progress, all of them, even the stuff that’s “done” still needs at least another draft or five before they’ll be ready to show to anyone without any embarrassment.

But anyway, “canonical” or not, here’s the bare minimum of what he was expecting: a wide sampling of our writing, limited to finished screenplays or treatments. No outlines, no step outlines, no works of fiction, no teleplays, and NO unfinished work. He made a couple of exceptions for stageplays, but that was only to examine the adaptation process, since those students had adapted their stageplays into screenplays.

From those rough guidelines, we were to assemble the “canon” in any way we desired: it could be all treatments, or all short scripts, or a mingling of treatments and short scripts, or a feature script and some short scripts, or a feature script and some treatments, or multiple feature scripts. And so on. We weren’t given a minimum or maximum page requirement, because theoretically we’re advanced enough to choose with few to no guidelines.

I went through most of my stuff and chose three scripts: one is the feature I wrote in screenwriting 2, another is a 31-page short script I wrote for my adaptation class, and the final one is an 18-page short script I wrote in my Screenwriting I class. In thinking about it now, I feel like a jackass for not including possibly the greatest screenplay ever written, The Effects of Gun Control and Wartime Situations as it Relates to Livestock and Rural Communities, or: How Bessie Got Her Groove Back. I feel like I should print that out right now and shove it into the professor’s mailbox so it can be included in my “canon.”

In choosing my “canon,” though, I was embarrassed about my feature, but without it, I wouldn’t have enough material to sufficiently call it a “canon.” The remainder of what I have is either worse than the feature, or it’s incomplete. The bulk of my “canon” is actually unfinished screenplays. So I had an option: rewrite a script where everything’s laid out (but really poorly), or finish one of my incomplete scripts, guaranteeing that it’d be either equally bad or worse than what I already had.

And my feature wasn’t really that bad, in the sense of terrible writing. My sister’s boyfriend Jack insisted that I read Angels & Demons, Dan Brown’s “prequel” to The Da Vinci Code; I gotta tell you, the premise is great, but it’s some of the worst goddamn writing I’ve ever seen. And he’s published. So I can say unequivocally that, whatever piss-poor shape my screenplay may be in, it’s still better than this book. And though it may be in the form of a cheap shot, that’s confidence talking (not arrogance).

So shitty writing wasn’t the (whole) problem. My issue was that I know a whole lot of the problems with my script in advance. What’s the point of handing it out for criticism when they’re just going to tell me things I already know?

While I know the only real way to fix the major problems in my script is to do a page-one rewrite, I didn’t have the time to do that in the week I had to prepare my “canon,” so I just went through, chopping scenes that didn’t work at all (or were repetitive) and reworking scenes that weren’t quite there yet but could be with some work. I think it’s in reasonable shape now, though it’s not nearly where I want it. As I said, time constraints preclude actual quality.

Hey, remember when this story was about me ruining Maria’s life? Believe it or not, that digression actually is related to the main idea of this entry (a first, I think).

See, Maria assembled her “canon,” too, and it made her drop the class.

She called me on Monday, when I was still mulling over whether or not it was worth the effort to rewrite my feature. I missed the call, and she left a rather succinct message: “Stan, Maria, call me back.”

I called her back as soon as I got out of class; she didn’t answer. I decided to cut senior seminar, because good God what a waste of time, and I went home. Maria got back to me shortly after I walked in the door, and she told me, “I dropped the portfolio review. I just wanted you to know, because I feel bad that now we have no classes together.”

“Motherfucker,” I thought, but I asked, “Why?”

She explained to me that she “just wasn’t ready.” Everything she’s written in college has been worthless jerk-off material, and she hasn’t had the spare time to write anything legitimately fulfilling to her. For my money, this always seemed like a bad move to me; I understand sometimes you don’t have the time to work with the best ideas, but at least it should be something you’re reasonably passionate about so you can re-work it later, when you either have more time or more experience.

Maria’s philosophy is almost the opposite; she’s just coasting through college, churning out shitty work she cares nothing about, and she’ll throw it all away as soon as she gets a diploma. And then what? Well, she hasn’t thought that far ahead. And I thought I lacked foresight.

But enough about me — were there any other reasons Maria dropped the portfolio review class? Yes:

“Plus,” she added, “you told me it was a blow-off class and they’d just waive the requirement, so I can still go to L.A. in the spring.”

Wait, what?

Oh, shit.

Did I tell her those things? Yup. But — and here’s why my professor, Callie, would slap me upside the head and remind me that she told me not to tell anyone about the string-pulling that was going on for me — there were completely different circumstances when I was supposed to be going. For one thing, I already had the credits in other areas of the film department to graduate with a general studies degree; for another, they thought that I really wanted to go to L.A. this fall. Most importantly, everybody in the screenwriting department knows and/or loves me.

This is problematic for Maria, who currently knows very few people in the screenwriting department, despite it being her concentration. I can’t fault her for that, since I didn’t even really start getting to know any of these people until last fall. You get the right string of bad teachers, and you’ll wind up graduating knowing nothing about anything. Plus, I’m fairly opportunistic, so as soon as Callie described her responsibilities in the department, I made it a goal to get her to know and like me.

So that was my story: they approved my semester in LA application without even looking at it. They didn’t even realize I’m not prepared to graduate and hadn’t taken all of the prerequisites for screenwriting 3 (which I’d be taking in L.A.), which is when they offered to waive them. Partly for my benefit (because they thought I really wanted/needed to go out there), but also to ensure they still had enough people for the screenwriting program to run in L.A. this fall.

Maria’s story is much less glamorous; when she walks into their office, they don’t even know her by name. I hate to get all down on her because she’s a good friend, but if somebody doesn’t know you, how likely are you to stick out your neck for them? Everybody in the screenwriting department is nice, but all they’ll give is the “nothing I can do” routine if they don’t know they can trust you.

I told her as much, and she said she’d try talking to the head of the department anyway. I told her it sounded like a bad idea to me, because she’d basically be walking into the office and saying, “Hey, man, I dropped this portfolio review class because I’m really just not ready for it. However, I’m ready to go to L.A. in the spring if you just waive this class requirement.” For somebody he doesn’t even know, this message will be read loud and clear, because it’ll be printed in red, 64-point, boldface type.

Maria was regretting her decision, too, because she didn’t realize add/drop had ended; sure, you can still drop for a few weeks, but you can’t add after the first week is over. I felt terrible, because I was partially responsible; sure, she was kind of a dumbass for not talking to anybody before she just went and dropped the class, but she did it because of things I said and apparenty didn’t clarify.

So I did what any friend would do: I talked to the head of the department before she could get to him, and I told him I had a friend who dropped the class and asked what could be done to get her back into it.

He told me that she made a “tremendous error in judgment” in not coming to him before dropping the class. Essentially, his only option to get her back into the class is to go to the records department, get down on his hands and knees, and beg for them to correct the mistake. I thanked him for his time and ran away, crying.

But that gave me two ideas. In my four years (and counting…) as an undergrad, if there’s one skill I’ve learned, it’s the fine art of lying your way out of situations. Hmm, I keep thinking I should make some kind of joke about the President, but it just seems too cheap…

At any rate, here were my two solutions to Maria’s problem:

1. Go to the records department, kicking and screaming, and insinuate there was some kind of glitch in the computer system (which is extremely likely, anyway) and say that, since she hasn’t missed any classes, they should just stick her back into it, since it’s their goddamn fault anyway. Mwahaha.
2. If she really didn’t want to take the class (which seems to be the case), she should NOT talk to the head of the department AT ALL. When the time comes later in the semester, she should fill out a semester in L.A. application, which they will most likely approve, and then say, “Golly, I didn’t know I was supposed to take that portfolio review class.”

I pitched the options to her, and she seemed to like number two (heh heh) the best, so I guess that’s the way she’ll go.

Posted by Stan on October 10, 2004 11:03 AM  | Permalink | Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em | Digg It