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Moment of Clarity

A few weeks ago, on one particularly bad day of work, one of my coworkers approached my cubicle and said, “Hey, you covered Monster Truck Madness, right?”

My traditional dopey grin dissolved into a sneer as I remembered the pain — the sheer torture — of reading Monster Truck Madness. I looked up and growled, “Yeah, I did.”

“How was it?” this coworker asked, taking a bite into a green apple.

“It’s about the worst fucking thing I’ve ever read,” I responded, without hyperbole, even bearing mind that I had on several occasions read material concocted by the great Owen.

“Okay,” my coworker responded, drawing out each syllable to express either confusion or disdain, “but will it make money?”

This was the crossroads moment. It was the first time, at any point since my coming to Hollywood, that anybody had asked me about commercial viability of a project. Some people didn’t ask because they knew I didn’t care; some didn’t ask because they didn’t care what I thought. But this was a moment that I knew would come, and when it did, I had to decide whether or not I had some form of artistic integrity, or whether or not I could fully compromise my beliefs to make The Company a quick buck.

I gave the best non-answer I could: “Do people like shitty movies?” I wasn’t being rhetorical, though anybody who follows box-office receipts knows the answer is a resounding “yes.”

My coworker gave me a bitter glare, knowing I had engaged in evasive maneuvering, and elaborated. “Look, this NASCAR thing is really popular, so do you think if we shot it on a $4 million budget, it’d gross at least $40 million?”

“I really, really don’t know,” I replied, a bit too snide for my own good. “I come from a school of thought where you start out trying to make the best movie possible. Using this script is not a good start.”

“You’re being difficult,” my coworker said.

“The script isn’t even about fucking NASCAR,” I said. “It’s about a guy who shits in a NASCAR trophy and is relegated to being a monster-truck driver. It’s unfocused, it meanders, and it spends more time in redneck bars than it does on race sequences. Who the fuck would want to see this movie?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but there’s an audience. Look at Dukes of Hazzard.”

“Good call,” I said. “I’ll look at the success of a movie that hasn’t come out to predict the success of this crappy script.”

Another cold stare.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” I concluded. “It’s the only script I’ve outright passed on since I’ve been here, because it’s one of the worst things I’ve ever read. Ever.”

“I respect your story sense,” the coworker said. This phrase is the “check is in the mail” of development people. “However, I think you’re only taking into account the story elements, and you aren’t looking at the bigger picture.”

“I can only look at it from my perspective,” I said. “If I saw a trailer for a movie like this, I would not pay money to see it.” In fact, I should have added, I would have set fire to any nearby theatres that were exhibiting it to prevent anyone from suffering such a cruel fate. “I can’t think about whether or not it’ll make money, because who knows? I just know, I’m not going to be the one who recommends it in any way. It’s shit.” Literally — there were at least three scatological jokes on every page, excluding the main character’s nickname (“B.M.,” for reasons that are never explained).

“Fine,” my coworker said and wandered away.

A few minutes later, I heard her muttering to one of the other assistants to put it on our boss’s “weekend reading” pile.

It was around this time that I started paying close attention to my four bosses. I had, in descending order of power:

1. A lawyer, all slimy and embittered by his decision to found a company that exists solely to repackage old shit into Shit for the Modern Audience™, who runs around all day being condescending and getting into shouting matches with his assistant.
2. An “up-and-coming” producer with four ulcers and a speed habit who can’t sleep at night because he doesn’t know whether or not the least important cast member in Lords of Dogtown wants to star in his remake of a horror flick that sucked the first time (and, based on the latest draft, will suck even harder this time around).
3. A vapid blonde “producer” who seems to think that her entire existence — particularly the part of her existence around her breasts — was far more important than anything else in the universe.
4. A manic-depressive surfer dude who had plenty of opinions but no real leverage when it comes to “getting things done.”

And I realized, as I worked my way up the hierarchy, I would become one of these Hollywood archetypes. I didn’t know which one, and frankly, I didn’t want to know. As the weeks drew on, I started to get disillusioned, and then I started to crack.

And then, one scary evening, I flipped out. I started packing everything I owned, most likely ranting bizarre things that I can’t even clearly remember as I did, and I packed up the car and hauled myself as quickly as possible, driving through the night and into the day to get as far away from California as we possibly could before I collapsed into a depressed heap onto a hotel bed.

Was it a bad decision? No, not at all. Better to realize how much I hated my life now, rather than a decade from now, with the cold, oily barrel of a shotgun in my mouth.

Could I have handled it better? Sure I could have. I could have given notice. I could have had my car checked out so I didn’t have to keep almost destroying it on America’s beautiful Interstate system. But when I flip out, I flip out. This is something that’s hard for me to rationalize, and hard for me to escape. It happens rarely, but when it does, it reminds me of just how little control I actually have over my mind and myself.

That’s right: Stan does, indeed, have issues.

I’m back, ladies and gentlemen. I’m back!

Posted by Stan on June 30, 2005 8:13 PM  | Permalink | “I’m a living joke!” - Horror Stories from the Workplace | Digg It