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Flotsam and Jetsam

Let me start by getting the pretentious bit out of the way:

I don’t consider myself an “artist.” I have no interest in creating art; I just want to entertain. If it happens I get some art in my entertainment, I’ll roll with it, but it’s never a primary goal. With that in mind, it might come as a bit of a shock when I tell you about a character I’ve created who I can’t shake. To me, it seems like a weirdo-artist thing to create a fictional character for a story and have him take on a life of his own, to the point where I can almost feel him living his life as I live my own — little more than an endless stream of fresh ideas.

What can I do with that? Well, it started with a screenplay, which turned out to be the best thing I’ve ever written (in the opinion of myself and, more importantly, everyone who’s read it except one person), but that wasn’t enough. When I came up with a harebrained scheme to get “published,” the screenplay I adapted into a novel was this one. But this was no mere novelization — this was a full-on, THE BOOK IS NOW THE MOVIE adaptation of a living, breathing work of fiction. It allowed me to add depth both to the moment — gasp! directing on the page! — and the past, really digging deep to understand this character, his friends and family, and the world that surrounds him.

But that wasn’t enough. I wrote a first draft, set it aside while I worked on some scripts, came back to it for a rewrite, but suddenly this story was in the character’s past. What kept entering my mind was what happened after — where did he go from there?

I came up with a solution: a fictitious blog chronicling the character’s misadventures, which I worked on as I rewrote the novel. When I got too busy, the blog fell by the wayside, and I’ve been meaning to get back to it.

I finished the rewrite a few months ago, which coincided with my friend Amelia finally reading a different, unrelated script. To my surprise, she loved it, and talk of shopping the script around to a group of disparate people transformed into talk of targeting one single person, Mitch Micheals, who I didn’t think would get back to me. As luck would have it, he did, and he told me he’d take a look at the script.

All of this happened in sort of a friendly way, I guess. I e-mailed Mitch as if I was seeking advice, not trying to sell him on the project. He asked to read it, I sent the PDF, and that was that.

Almost like clockwork, I got a response a month later: Mitch loved the script but can’t do a thing with it. What else did I have?

Here’s where things get tricky. It’s a difference between my perception of how the industry should work versus the way it actually does. How it should work: “Wow, this script is great, but it’s not right for our company. You know who’s looking for something like this? [Name of company.] Let me introduce you to [name of executive].” Admittedly, these companies all compete for various things, but in many cases they have to work together, and everyone always knows what’s going on everywhere in town, so why not just pass me off to somebody who wants something along the lines of the script I’ve written? I think the short answer is, if I have talent has a writer, eventually I’ll come up with something they want, and that something won’t land in the lap of their competition.

The other part of my perceptual problem goes like this: they say, “We loved this script, but it’s not right for us. What else you got?” Shouldn’t they just say, “We’re looking for [insert genre] for an [insert actor name] type”? But I guess that’d be like an encyclopedia salesman asking an uninterested customer, “What do you want me to sell you?” It just doesn’t work that way.

The script Mitch read is not my best script (the one featuring the character I can’t shake). So, naturally, I pitched that one to him. Everyone says it’s my best, so why not? Conventional wisdom might say that I should build up to the best, but what if I don’t get another chance? He said it sounded good, so I sent that over to him, too.

But I couldn’t play the waiting game. Mitch wants two things: comedy or action. The first script I sent him was a action-comedy, the next one a straight comedy, but I didn’t have much left in my arsenal in terms of commercial properties.

Prior to the “best script,” much of what I’d written is what’s largely considered funny but a little too weird for mainstream. I had this notion, thanks to movies like Being John Malkovich and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, that weird, dark, vaguely creepy comedies could get made fairly easily and turn into smash hits. Eventually, Hollywood beat that out of me, but I have a grand total of five screenplays that one might consider commercial. Mitch was in possession of two. The third is an action script — not his genre. And the fourth and fifth, while commercial, are in bad shape.

So what would happen if he came back at me in another month wondering what else I had?

While I rewrote the novel and worked on the goofy blog, I kept coming up with screenplay ideas. By this point, all of them were pretty much fully formed outlines. I have a habit of knocking out mediocre to bad first drafts in about 10-12 days, then setting them aside for rewrites. I thought, I could either work on rewrites of the two commercial scripts, or I could get to work on the new scripts. With decent first drafts, I could pitch them and then say, “Oh, this script needs some work. Can I have a few weeks to polish it?” And then I’d gut it.

That was the route I took, but as I started to write, something occurred to me. This character who had stuck with me did not consume me for any real artistic reasons. Remember the part where I wrote a bunch of weird, offbeat comedies with no commercial prospects? The script featuring this unshakeable character was basically my Annie Hall: it had a lot of the weirdness, mostly in the form of this larger-than-life, ridiculous character, but overall it tells a commercial story in a commercial way.

From then on, I’d worked on scripts that were fully “commercial,” intentionally devoid of the usual weirdness. Not uniqueness — I hope, at least, that I’ve retained that in spades. I just got rid of the stuff where I knew, even while writing it, “Nobody’s ever going to read this script. It’s too fucking out there.” It occurred to me, finally, that this character kept nagging at me to work on the blog, work on rewrites of the novel, etc., because I need an outlet for the weird.

It’s the law of conservation of creative energy: it can neither be created nor destroyed, simply changed. Instead of putting the weird into screenplays I want to remain commercial, I used the blog and novel as outlets for it. So I have pristine screenplays and fucked up, bizarre, creepy, funny-in-a-way-that-makes-you-feel-guilty-for-laughing blog posts contained elsewhere. Like pasteurization.

I still needed an outlet for the flotsam and jetsam, but my dealings with Mitch — who is much more professional and generous than the Big-Shot Producer, despite not being nearly as big-shot — led me to start feeling like a real, genu-wine writer. Why post stuff on a blog, for free for all to read, when I can capture lightning in the bottle in the form of…

Teleplays! That’s right… It’s not commercial enough for the silver screen, but Mitch’s company has a deal with a particular fringe cable network that has shown a singular interest in my brand of offbeat humor. The pie-in-the-sky dream was that maybe he’d ask for something else, I’d show him these teleplays, and he’d get the ball rolling on a pilot. The reality would be more mundane — they’d serve as writing samples that might — might! — get me hired on whatever TV project… As a writer’s assistant.

And it just so happened that I felt like this character, and the supporting players in his absurd world, would work well in a weekly format. It stands to reason, with a serialized blog of their adventures, that it has potential. In fact, I outlined a six-episode season — thinking that would be the bare minimum episode order — and used a few blog posts as models for plots. The teleplays are still uniquely television, but the story ideas from the blog have proven useful.

I also thought, “I don’t need to do any major work — I’ll write a pilot script and a show bible outlining the characters, the world, and how it’ll work as a weekly series, which will include lengthy treatments of the six-episode arc.” I know it’s coloring a bit outside the lines, but I hoped it’d show, more than a generic House spec, that I get TV and am just as willing to get involved in that arena as features. Of course, I also told myself I’d never bring it up unless Mitch rejected all my script pitches and/or if I could work the conversation to get him to ask if I had any interest in TV writing.

Deep down, though, the reality was this: the germ of the idea came from Mitch’s TV deal, but it’s a pipe-dream project that’ll never go anywhere, nor should it. The scripts exist for me to shake the flotsam and jetsam out of my head so I can make my “legitimate” writing a bit more mainstream. Unlike the blog, I stare at the ceiling, daydreaming like a kid about the day I have enough power to get my retarded TV show on the air.

Back to the story: weeks passed, during which time I wrote diligently during my limited spare time. Then, Mitch called. Didn’t e-mail — called. Usually that’s a good sign, and what he told me knocked me flat on my ass.

“This script is great,” he said. “I love the main character, but the story might be a little too much of a downer for the masses.”

Oops? I won’t deny that it gets a little heavy in the third act, but it ends on mildly optimistic notes. I didn’t want to argue with him, but of all the comments I’ve heard about this script (and some of them have been pretty odd), nobody ever implied that it’d be too depressing to be commercially viable.

Where did that leave us? I’ll let Mitch answer:

“By the end, I wanted to see this character in a different story,” he said. “He has this separate life that we never learn about, and that’s okay, but you’ve surrounded him with all these depressing people. I want to see him in his element, with more larger-than-life characters like him.”

I could have argued.

I can’t beat around the bush anymore: the “larger-than-life” character is a washed-up L.A. rock star (largely modeled on Axl Rose, but pretty much a composite of all the goofy heavy-metal icons I grew up with) who returns to his hometown in rural Iowa after finding out his high school sweetheart is getting married. The “depressing people” are the rock star’s old friends, who feel like they’re wasting their lives, especially in the presence of somebody who had some success (even if he’s floundering now). Obviously, the separate life is his L.A. life.

So why could I argue? The script is more a coming-of-age story about immature adults, using a familiar structure to tell an unfamiliar story. It’s not really a goofy movie about rock stars, music, or anything else. He doesn’t even have to be a rock star — that’s just where my interests lie. He could have been an athlete, a captain of industry, a politician, an actor… Anyone who has a little bit of fame and a little bit of success by leaving his dump of a hometown.

Although I’ve written reams of blog posts and chapters putting him “in his element,” it wouldn’t make the script better. It insulted me a little bit that Mitch thought it would, so yeah, I wanted to defend what I’d written…

…but I had that horrible TV project. It was probably a mistake, but I pitched it to him. I made it clear how it would work as a weekly series, who the characters — most of whom don’t appear in the feature script — were, the intent of the satire, the style of comedy, etc., etc.

I figured he’d say, “That’s a disaster. What else you got?”

Instead, Mitch said, with a dubious tone to his voice, “Why don’t you send it over?”

Which doesn’t really mean anything. Him loving two scripts means little more than I have a contact who thinks I know what I’m doing — maybe, assuming he’s not just verbally glad-handing. Him asking to read a pilot and a show bible written by an unrepped writer with no television experience… Like I said, probably the best-case real-world scenario is a job as an assistant to a TV writer. The worst-case scenario is that he decides I’m nuts and keeps his distance.

This just happened a few days ago, so I won’t know for awhile.

But here’s hoping the pipe-dream turns into a pipe-reality…

Tags: Amelia, Axl Rose, Being John Malkovich, characters, comedy, commercial, flotsam, jetsam, mainstream, Mitch Michaels, novel, pilot, producer, satire, screenplays, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, The Big-Shot Producer, TV, unique, weird, writing

Posted by Stan on April 23, 2009 3:23 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | How Not to Write a Screenplay | Digg It