Things to Do:
1. Make sure I am getting the top tier Christmas gift from CAA, and not the crappy third tier robe they sent me last year.
2. Figure out how to end a drinks with a dorky agent without having to make out with him, but still getting his clients' material sent to my office the next day.
3. Send an email to the girl at the Hollywood Reporter who spies on my tracking website about my recent accomplishments so she can put my name in print and cement my return to Development Hell.
For the first time since moving back to Los Angeles from NYC, I feel like a real Development Girl again. With Lorna McSlutchen breathing down my neck, I suddenly feel tremendous pressure to be successful. This week I scheduled drinks with agents and writers, tracked spec scripts and read until my eyes bled. And with my freakish ability to whip through a script in twenty minutes or less, I feel I’m finally caught up on the time I missed when I was checking into Mental Hospitals and gallivanting around New York with the gorgeous but broken East Coast Sarah. My boss the quirky Director is not as impressed with my recent efforts though, and calls me into his office during one of his rare visits to our bungalow, and wants to have a talk.
He’s strumming a guitar as he talks to me, which is mildly aggravating. “You have two sides to your personality,” he says, “the outgoing life-of-the-party who knows everyone in town, and the serious intellectual who writes amazing notes.” He pauses for effect and I’m feeling less chastised than complimented. “I don’t like the party girl side,” he says bluntly, and our meeting is over. I’m not going to clear my calendar, my boss clearly doesn’t know how this town works; it’s not just my ability to recognize good material, its obtaining the material before anyone else, and that only comes from lots and lots of scheduled drinks.
Back in my office, my d-girl friend Cynthia has sent me over some book coverage via messenger. She works at Paramount, is a tiny, Asian wisp of a thing, and she’s having an affair with a married Book Agent from New York. Paramount has its own New York Book Office, which is a luxury I haven’t had at my disposal since the Big Action Company, hence her limitless access to old book coverage, and she was more than willing to help when I told her I was looking for new projects for my boss. I notice in the middle of the stack there’s some “consider” coverage for a book that’s about five years old. Just from the log line I can tell it would be something my boss would be interested in: there’s a dog involved in the plot and he loves dogs. My boss hates the Hollywood machine and spec system and has been telling me for weeks that book adaptations make the best movies, so I decide to find a copy of the book and read it. It can’t hurt my job to bring a project in after only a month of working here. I call Cynthia to thank her, and tell her about the book, and she’s surprised there was such good coverage in the midst of a stack of unsold projects. She says she’s going to get the book and read it as well, as she works for a big producer who’s looking for her next project to set up at Paramount.
It takes me a while to find the book, as it’s out of print, but I finally locate it at a Venice Beach library and I send an intern over to pick it up. In the meantime I call the New York agent to make sure the film rights are still available and he says they are. He says the writer never sold the rights because he was waiting for the right company to come along, and the agent seems excited about the prospect of working with my boss, who has made a few really excellent films. When the intern arrives with the dog-eared copy of the book, I put my Good Will Hunting speed-reading skills to use and read the book in an hour.
I love the book, and call Cynthia excited about the find. She’s in the middle of it, and loves it too, and mentions bringing it to her boss as well. I include the book with my boss’ stack of nighttime reading, with the glowing coverage attached to the cover. Cynthia has had a rough road in Hollywood, she worked in the mailroom at one of the Big Agencies, and got involved with the big book agent thinking it would help further her career. The agent is old, and has kids, and comes to her house in the middle of the night when he is in town from New York to have sex with her, the whole thing is a recipe for disaster. She has long, bone-straight dark hair, and a tiny figure, and being Asian and smart, she’s pretty much every man’s sexual fantasy. Her Paramount job is her second junior executive job, its tricky being as sexy as she is out here and trying to be taken seriously. I’m glad I don’t have that problem.
I’m having drinks with a book agent to further my new quest to find my boss a book to make into a movie. He is short, and balding, but he mentions within ten minutes of my arriving that he went to Harvard, and he lives in some fancy house on upper Doheny. He is divorced, and he tells me his ex-wife is a writer and wrote a sitcom about how she had left him for her room-service waiter when she was taking a break from him at a Beverly Hills Hotel. I should feel sorry for him, as it must be hard having your marital woes paraded on network television like that, but he is condescending and calls me “scrappy” during our drinks. He walks me back to my car, and tries to shove his tongue down my throat, and I’m prompted to ask him just what about these drinks made him think I wanted to make out with him. He is oblivious to my disinterest and says he would like to hang out again.
When I get home, I have an email from my boss. He loves the book and wants to make an offer on it tomorrow. He is sending it to one of the best writers in Hollywood to see if he will attach himself to adapt the book for the screen. My boss has already told the Huge A-List Writer about the book, and the writer is excited to read it. I call Cynthia to tell her the news about the A-List Writer, and she’s disappointed because that is one of her favorite writers as well, and her boss has already passed on it. But she seems excited for me, and I can’t wait to go to work in the morning and see the look on transcriber-Lorna’s face when she hears I have brought in my first project.
I have a breakfast in the morning with an agent, and somehow I oversleep. I make up a story about running my car over a curb and into a porta-potty, and send her flowers to apologize. I arrive at my boss’ house with his morning coffee, and he seems upset with me. Curiously enough, when he made the offer on the five year old book this morning, a producer on the Paramount lot matched his offer. He seems confused as to how there is suddenly activity on such an old book, and I confess my friend had slipped me the old coverage as a favor. His eyebrows arch with disapproval, but my boss calms down when the agent calls him back and says the book author has accepted our offer because he wants my boss to make the movie. Its official: I am the best assistant in Hollywood.
I’m just as surprised as my boss that there’s an offer on the book, and I call Cynthia on my way to the office to ask her to explain. Apparently when she had told her boss about the A-List Writer’s interest, her boss reconsidered her pass and they made an offer early this morning. I am a little upset that Cynthia didn’t give me a warning about her boss’ change of heart so I could have prepared my boss for the competition, but from her defeated tone of voice, it sounds like Cynthia is the one who feels betrayed in the situation. “You should have given me more time to convince my boss,” she says, “it was my coverage. You stole this project from me.” I’m not sure how this is the case, and I don’t have time to talk about it further because my office is breaking out the sparking cider to celebrate our new project.
Cynthia doesn’t return my calls or emails, and after a whirlwind day of receiving countless text and email congratulations and fielding well-wishers, I cancel my drinks and head home for the night. I know this feeling, the aching in the empty pit of my stomach as I realize I just lost another friend. The desperate wail of my abandonment-issues demon is deafening as I listen to her voicemail for the fiftieth time. I’m almost inconsolable until my friend the hot blonde reporter from the Hollywood Reporter calls and tells me she is printing a blurb tomorrow with my name in it about my newly acquired project. It’s hard to be depressed when I know my name in print will be the first thing on Lorna’s desk in the morning.
I decide to call my ex-boyfriend, the one with the girlfriend-turned-wife, and tell him the news because he is one of the few people who will appreciate what a steep climb this was for me. We talk well into the night, a dangerous transgression from my decision not to talk to him anymore, and its comfortable and comforting to know that not everyone who ever loved me now hates me. I lost a friend today but brought in my first project since deciding to re-enter the world of Development in Hollywood. What better way to celebrate than ending my day with a horribly bad decision? I fall asleep dreaming of the headline for tomorrow’s article: “Stolen Project Catapults D-Girl to Top,” and the accompanying picture is Cynthia, tears streaming down her face. It’s official, I work in Hollywood again, and I have the new ex-friend to prove it.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Thursday, December 10, 2009
December 10, 2009
Things to Do:
1. Spread rumors that Lorna McSlutchen and the Alien have a secret development-baby.
2. Consider becoming a lesbian just for my London trip, will make it more exciting.
3. Attach my new script to all Development Christmas emails. Nobody will steal the idea, it’s not original enough.
The worst thing about moving back to L.A. from N.Y.C is running into old nemeses at the Coffee Bean. I was anonymous in New York, and now today I’m standing three people behind Lorna McSlutchen, whose boobs are so big she's taking up more than her allotted room in this crowded coffee shop. At first she doesn’t recognize me, I’m disguised by my Sarah Palin black glasses and faux-snakeskin Uggs that take up half my little legs, but then she catches my eye and hollers out a phony “Hey there! I know YOU…” and I’m instantly transported back to the day she asked me to lunch on the studio lot just to tell me she was dating my two-night stand. Her hair is darker, but I would know those humungous boobs anywhere, and she wants to know where I’m working, and where I went for a few years, and it takes her 3.5 seconds to bring up the guy who looks like an Alien who she thinks she stole from me. They aren’t dating anymore, apparently they dated for two years but he dumped her after she made the trek to Alaska to meet his family. I never met his family, I barely met him, I slept with him twice and he met Lorna at a party we went to and I never heard from him again. Her voice is too loud for this early morning coffee run and its giving me a headache. I express fake concern over her breakup and drop the Famous Actress’ name in her lap where it lands with a thump – “So that’s what I’ve been doing… just kind of hanging with her…” It’s half true and I think it conveys to her that I have not, contrary to her belief, spent the last two years pining over her short Alien-looking boyfriend who I slept with twice. I have become far too cool for that.
“I know someone who used to work for her…” she says, and my heart drops thinking of the stories she will soon hear when she calls to find out about my stormy departure from the Actress’ company. Of course she knows someone who worked for the Famous Actress, she’s Lorna McSlutchen, Queen of the D-Girls, Lorna knows everyone. Her lips are shaped like a perfect heart, and I hate her. Turns out, however, that the guy she knows was the Famous Actress’ producing partner before I started working there. I didn’t even know him. He and his wife became good friends with the Actress, but he started using his office to cheat on his wife with a girl from a popular gossip website. The Famous Actress found out and came into the office personally to fire him. She hasn’t spoken to her own brother in years for cheating on his wife, the Famous Actress does not take kindly to cheaters.
I tell Lorna I’m in a hurry to bring coffee to my hip new director boss, who lives down the street and makes me bring him coffee at home before going to the office in the morning. I mumble something about getting drinks sometime, and we exchange numbers. It’s a compulsion I have to be extra nice to people I don’t like.
At the office, I’m booking my trip to London today, for the Holidays. I’m going to visit my little brother who works in finance there. He’s my half brother, although he feels more like a whole, and he clearly didn’t get the underachiever part of my DNA because he actually has a real job. Last time I was in Europe was when I went to France to visit the Famous Actress’ stalker. I met her because I had just started working there and the office assistant missed a call coming in. I picked it up by accident and this tiny, quivering French voice asked if this was the office of the Famous Actress. I said yes, and she said she had a made a film she wanted to show the actress, would I mind if she dropped it by. Everyone who has ever worked for anybody famous knows the answer to this question is an unequivocal “No.” Or a more polite, we don’t accept unsolicited submissions, but I was feeling generous of spirit and her voice sounded harmless so I gave her our address, and she was there in a half hour. The receptionist showed her in, and she was shaking, a really pretty young French girl of about 20, clutching her little film in her hands. She stared around my office in amazement. “Does she really come in here?” Actually the Famous Actress came into the office quite often, she lived just a few blocks away. But the minute I saw how badly this girl was trembling and the tears pouring out of her eyes, I knew I shouldn’t have given her the address to the office.
The girl had flown in from Paris for one day just to try and deliver her film to the Actress. It was a short film about the girl trying to get her movie to the Famous Actress, and it was well done and cute. But there are legal reasons as to why I wasn’t supposed to be accepting her film, and I was glad to hear she was catching the next flight back to go home so I could figure out how to try and show this handmade little film to my new boss and recent Academy Award winner. She had also written a sort of journal to give to the Actress, all about how the Actress' movies had changed her life. It was all so heart-wrenching, there was no way I could turn her away. It took me six months to get up the courage to tell the Famous Actress about the French Girl and her film, after the six months it took the Famous Actress to learn my name, and finally one day I had it queued up when the Actress arrived, and in the end, she said she thought it was charming.
Of course I didn’t tell the Famous Actress how I had gotten the film, that I had let a potential stalker into our office, and the French Girl would call periodically to say hello, she ended up being smart and funny, and I visited her in Paris a few years later. With the exodus of the Sarah’s I figured I was not in any position to turn down friends. It was a crude Hollywood wake-up call though when the French Girl ended up forming her own P.R. firm and interviewing the Famous Actress and asking her about me, and about her film, and the Actress pretended not to know who I am, and said she didn’t remember the movie. The circumstances surrounding my leaving the company were so scandalous I guess it was better just not to talk about me. Or, she really didn’t remember who I am. Even in the midst of scandal I’m not that memorable, it turns out.
I think the French Girl is starting to forgive me for letting her embarrass herself in front of the Famous Actress, so I tell her I’m coming over the pond, and I also tell my lesbian friend from college who now works for a Big Television Actress who lives in London. She is the only girl with whom I have had full on sex, not in a threesome, just us, although my ex- boyfriend was in the other room watching TV. I’m excited to see her, and I doubt there will be any London hanky panky between us because there’s nothing true lesbians hate more than straight girls who have realized they were just experimenting. She’s a true Asian beauty though, if I was going to become a lesbian, it would have been with her.
I finish booking my London ticket, and my boss comes into the office talking about filing, and expense reports and my head is already on vacation. I’m in a bad mood because I swear Lorna’s boobs grew in the past two years, and she had a weird air of superiority, I thought she would be impressed with my proximity to the cutting edge Director, but maybe my new job is not that cool after all. Casually my boss mentions that he's adding a new member to our staff, someone to transcribe the notes he dictates into a tape recorder. I’m thankful because this was one of my job responsibilities, and I’m a slow typist and he rambles. He then says I know the girl, Lorna McSlutchen, they interviewed this morning at the Coffee Bean next to his house.
Suddenly there’s not enough air in this room, and Lorna’s peculiar confident swagger makes more sense. I run into a lot of people nowadays who are searching for jobs, and this morning Lorna didn’t have that desperate way about her. My boss tells me he hadn’t made it official until a few minutes ago, so he apologizes for Lorna's cloud of secrecy this morning at the Coffee Bean, I guess they are buddies now and tell each other everything. I finally find a job out of the middle of Development Hell, and the Development Queen gets a job here too? It’s my own private little nightmare. I may just stay in London and become a lesbian. Girls are pretty and we could share clothes.
After leaving the office, I get a text message from my new co-worker and former nemesis. She’s sorry she didn’t tell me but it wasn’t official when she ran into me, and she hopes things won’t be awkward, and she is also hoping that there are no residual bad feelings over her stealing the Alien from me. Ugh. The next call I get is from Little Boy Blue of the famous song, he hasn’t left his girlfriend yet but he’s thinking of me, and he has changed his Facebook status from “in a relationship” to “its complicated”, so that’s a start. I just want to crawl under the covers and never come out tonight, but its my friend’s birthday, she lived across the hall from me last time I lived in LA and doesn’t work in Hollywood so it will be a welcome respite from the claustrophobic arena that has become my life again. I put on a fake smile and some lip gloss and head to downtown L.A., where nobody from Hollywood hangs out.
My phone is already clogged with text messages from sympathetic development people who heard about Lorna's new job, it showed up on tracking websites, and I gather from the tone of the messages that she doesn't have many fans in this town, not for someone who has tried so hard to be in the thick of things. I guess I got what I wanted, moving back here, a job in Hollywood, but I'd forgotten what comes with that. My past, in the form of a hyper-vigilant, well-endowed D-Girl, will be sitting in the office next to mine. The movie of my life just went from a sexy romp to a dry tale of irony and cosmic retribution. This is not the way I wanted to make my grand re-entrance into tracking website fodder, on the coat-tails of Lorna McSlutchen, but comebacks in this town can be messy, the important thing is I am back, and I can't wait to get on that plane to London.
1. Spread rumors that Lorna McSlutchen and the Alien have a secret development-baby.
2. Consider becoming a lesbian just for my London trip, will make it more exciting.
3. Attach my new script to all Development Christmas emails. Nobody will steal the idea, it’s not original enough.
The worst thing about moving back to L.A. from N.Y.C is running into old nemeses at the Coffee Bean. I was anonymous in New York, and now today I’m standing three people behind Lorna McSlutchen, whose boobs are so big she's taking up more than her allotted room in this crowded coffee shop. At first she doesn’t recognize me, I’m disguised by my Sarah Palin black glasses and faux-snakeskin Uggs that take up half my little legs, but then she catches my eye and hollers out a phony “Hey there! I know YOU…” and I’m instantly transported back to the day she asked me to lunch on the studio lot just to tell me she was dating my two-night stand. Her hair is darker, but I would know those humungous boobs anywhere, and she wants to know where I’m working, and where I went for a few years, and it takes her 3.5 seconds to bring up the guy who looks like an Alien who she thinks she stole from me. They aren’t dating anymore, apparently they dated for two years but he dumped her after she made the trek to Alaska to meet his family. I never met his family, I barely met him, I slept with him twice and he met Lorna at a party we went to and I never heard from him again. Her voice is too loud for this early morning coffee run and its giving me a headache. I express fake concern over her breakup and drop the Famous Actress’ name in her lap where it lands with a thump – “So that’s what I’ve been doing… just kind of hanging with her…” It’s half true and I think it conveys to her that I have not, contrary to her belief, spent the last two years pining over her short Alien-looking boyfriend who I slept with twice. I have become far too cool for that.
“I know someone who used to work for her…” she says, and my heart drops thinking of the stories she will soon hear when she calls to find out about my stormy departure from the Actress’ company. Of course she knows someone who worked for the Famous Actress, she’s Lorna McSlutchen, Queen of the D-Girls, Lorna knows everyone. Her lips are shaped like a perfect heart, and I hate her. Turns out, however, that the guy she knows was the Famous Actress’ producing partner before I started working there. I didn’t even know him. He and his wife became good friends with the Actress, but he started using his office to cheat on his wife with a girl from a popular gossip website. The Famous Actress found out and came into the office personally to fire him. She hasn’t spoken to her own brother in years for cheating on his wife, the Famous Actress does not take kindly to cheaters.
I tell Lorna I’m in a hurry to bring coffee to my hip new director boss, who lives down the street and makes me bring him coffee at home before going to the office in the morning. I mumble something about getting drinks sometime, and we exchange numbers. It’s a compulsion I have to be extra nice to people I don’t like.
At the office, I’m booking my trip to London today, for the Holidays. I’m going to visit my little brother who works in finance there. He’s my half brother, although he feels more like a whole, and he clearly didn’t get the underachiever part of my DNA because he actually has a real job. Last time I was in Europe was when I went to France to visit the Famous Actress’ stalker. I met her because I had just started working there and the office assistant missed a call coming in. I picked it up by accident and this tiny, quivering French voice asked if this was the office of the Famous Actress. I said yes, and she said she had a made a film she wanted to show the actress, would I mind if she dropped it by. Everyone who has ever worked for anybody famous knows the answer to this question is an unequivocal “No.” Or a more polite, we don’t accept unsolicited submissions, but I was feeling generous of spirit and her voice sounded harmless so I gave her our address, and she was there in a half hour. The receptionist showed her in, and she was shaking, a really pretty young French girl of about 20, clutching her little film in her hands. She stared around my office in amazement. “Does she really come in here?” Actually the Famous Actress came into the office quite often, she lived just a few blocks away. But the minute I saw how badly this girl was trembling and the tears pouring out of her eyes, I knew I shouldn’t have given her the address to the office.
The girl had flown in from Paris for one day just to try and deliver her film to the Actress. It was a short film about the girl trying to get her movie to the Famous Actress, and it was well done and cute. But there are legal reasons as to why I wasn’t supposed to be accepting her film, and I was glad to hear she was catching the next flight back to go home so I could figure out how to try and show this handmade little film to my new boss and recent Academy Award winner. She had also written a sort of journal to give to the Actress, all about how the Actress' movies had changed her life. It was all so heart-wrenching, there was no way I could turn her away. It took me six months to get up the courage to tell the Famous Actress about the French Girl and her film, after the six months it took the Famous Actress to learn my name, and finally one day I had it queued up when the Actress arrived, and in the end, she said she thought it was charming.
Of course I didn’t tell the Famous Actress how I had gotten the film, that I had let a potential stalker into our office, and the French Girl would call periodically to say hello, she ended up being smart and funny, and I visited her in Paris a few years later. With the exodus of the Sarah’s I figured I was not in any position to turn down friends. It was a crude Hollywood wake-up call though when the French Girl ended up forming her own P.R. firm and interviewing the Famous Actress and asking her about me, and about her film, and the Actress pretended not to know who I am, and said she didn’t remember the movie. The circumstances surrounding my leaving the company were so scandalous I guess it was better just not to talk about me. Or, she really didn’t remember who I am. Even in the midst of scandal I’m not that memorable, it turns out.
I think the French Girl is starting to forgive me for letting her embarrass herself in front of the Famous Actress, so I tell her I’m coming over the pond, and I also tell my lesbian friend from college who now works for a Big Television Actress who lives in London. She is the only girl with whom I have had full on sex, not in a threesome, just us, although my ex- boyfriend was in the other room watching TV. I’m excited to see her, and I doubt there will be any London hanky panky between us because there’s nothing true lesbians hate more than straight girls who have realized they were just experimenting. She’s a true Asian beauty though, if I was going to become a lesbian, it would have been with her.
I finish booking my London ticket, and my boss comes into the office talking about filing, and expense reports and my head is already on vacation. I’m in a bad mood because I swear Lorna’s boobs grew in the past two years, and she had a weird air of superiority, I thought she would be impressed with my proximity to the cutting edge Director, but maybe my new job is not that cool after all. Casually my boss mentions that he's adding a new member to our staff, someone to transcribe the notes he dictates into a tape recorder. I’m thankful because this was one of my job responsibilities, and I’m a slow typist and he rambles. He then says I know the girl, Lorna McSlutchen, they interviewed this morning at the Coffee Bean next to his house.
Suddenly there’s not enough air in this room, and Lorna’s peculiar confident swagger makes more sense. I run into a lot of people nowadays who are searching for jobs, and this morning Lorna didn’t have that desperate way about her. My boss tells me he hadn’t made it official until a few minutes ago, so he apologizes for Lorna's cloud of secrecy this morning at the Coffee Bean, I guess they are buddies now and tell each other everything. I finally find a job out of the middle of Development Hell, and the Development Queen gets a job here too? It’s my own private little nightmare. I may just stay in London and become a lesbian. Girls are pretty and we could share clothes.
After leaving the office, I get a text message from my new co-worker and former nemesis. She’s sorry she didn’t tell me but it wasn’t official when she ran into me, and she hopes things won’t be awkward, and she is also hoping that there are no residual bad feelings over her stealing the Alien from me. Ugh. The next call I get is from Little Boy Blue of the famous song, he hasn’t left his girlfriend yet but he’s thinking of me, and he has changed his Facebook status from “in a relationship” to “its complicated”, so that’s a start. I just want to crawl under the covers and never come out tonight, but its my friend’s birthday, she lived across the hall from me last time I lived in LA and doesn’t work in Hollywood so it will be a welcome respite from the claustrophobic arena that has become my life again. I put on a fake smile and some lip gloss and head to downtown L.A., where nobody from Hollywood hangs out.
My phone is already clogged with text messages from sympathetic development people who heard about Lorna's new job, it showed up on tracking websites, and I gather from the tone of the messages that she doesn't have many fans in this town, not for someone who has tried so hard to be in the thick of things. I guess I got what I wanted, moving back here, a job in Hollywood, but I'd forgotten what comes with that. My past, in the form of a hyper-vigilant, well-endowed D-Girl, will be sitting in the office next to mine. The movie of my life just went from a sexy romp to a dry tale of irony and cosmic retribution. This is not the way I wanted to make my grand re-entrance into tracking website fodder, on the coat-tails of Lorna McSlutchen, but comebacks in this town can be messy, the important thing is I am back, and I can't wait to get on that plane to London.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
December 3, 2009
Things to Do:
1. Hold more grudges.
2. Be the dumper, not the dumped for a change.
3. Book my ticket to London for Christmas Break. Make it a one way ticket, nobody hates me in London yet.
I should’ve sold those pictures of the Famous Actress and her new boyfriend, she made me go to the photo shop and take them off the machine herself because the guy was married, and after a very public breakup, the tabloids were dying to see who she would date next. If I had sold them, I wouldn’t have to work and could just sit home all day contemplating life and pinning butterflies to cardboard. And since I ended up leaving her company under duress anyway, it wouldn’t have made a difference. But I didn’t sell them, so I sit in my little office on the Universal Lot, listening to the Studio Tour tram go by my window. At least this tour is in English, when I worked for the Comedy Director the tour that passed by my window was in Spanish so I had to listen to “Es la Cabesa de Mary Tyler Moore” every fifteen minutes because apparently my office was in Mary’s old dressing room.
This time I can hear the tour guide talking about Will Smith, whose company is next door, and it’s distractingly soothing. We’re actually busy right now because my boss is prepping a new movie to direct, and he has assigned me the illustrious task of researching the main character, a chef. I know a little bit about chefs because my best friend the East Coast Sarah used to date a very famous and very hot chef; she was a waitress in his restaurant in NYC and they had an illicit and seedy affair, which culminated in East Coast Sarah getting drunk one night, dressing up like a schoolgirl for him, and passing out on Third Avenue in crotchless panties, much to the dismay of her family who had to pick her up from the Emergency Room that way. I only met the guy once, he was alarmingly attractive but it's hard for a girl to get excited about a guy when he has to use a pseudonym to call your best friend.
East Coast Sarah eventually ended up working for a big Food Magazine, and the poor girl had to stare at a huge picture of her paramour holding a big fish on her wall the whole time she worked there. They dated for a few years, and he left his wife finally, but for some reason he still kept my friend a secret. Occasionally he would call her at work during the day and tell her to meet him at the St. Regis to have a threesome with a prostitute; he was a real stand-up guy that “Lou”. Today I try to pass these stories off as research, but my Boss is not buying it, he wants to make a true-to-life and gritty chef movie, not something that might air on Cinemax after midnight. So I guess I’ll really have to do some work today, but now I’m thinking about East Coast Sarah and wondering how she’s doing. She lives in L.A. now, and is a journalist of some kind, I Googled her and she used to write for L.A. Weekly. I’m pulling for her, even though she dumped me unceremoniously. I just can’t seem to hold a grudge.
East Coast Sarah was around long before West Coast Sarah, we met working at a restaurant in NYC, she was only 21, and I was a few years older. I remember thinking she has a great way of wearing her clothes. She was tall and chest-less in a way that makes your clothes hang off you gracefully. I heard a rumor she got a boob job after moving to L.A. but I’m hoping she didn’t fall into that cliché. We were inseparable in New York, much like Sarah and I were in L.A., I guess I have a penchant for co-dependency. East Coast Sarah was funny and beautiful, but she also had an evil side. One time my little sister and I went to go visit a guy I went to High School with at Harvard, I was planning on cheating on my boyfriend with him but I got too drunk, and East Coast Sarah also got drunk and laid in the hotel room closet with just her feet poking out like the Wicked Witch of the West, and let out a barrage of inane insults. As my sister and I lay in bed, we listened to her rampage with great fascination. I know why I stayed friends with her so long though, she always made me laugh.
Until one day after I moved to Los Angeles, and East Coast Sarah said she wanted to visit. She had met most of my friends out here on various trips, and had been sleeping with the goofy redhead from Project Greenlight, who was a good friend of Streets. I was waiting for her call to pick her up from the airport, didn’t hear from her that day and never heard from her again. Apparently she made it out here, and hung out with Streets and the redhead and stayed with a different friend. I got an email from her after the weekend saying she didn’t want to be my friend anymore. Her explanation was similar to West Coast Sarah’s, which happened just a few years later. I take up a lot of energy, that sort of thing. I don’t know what it is with all these Sarah’s dumping me, I need to find a friend with a different name.
My boss needs me to go to Sundance with him this year. I haven’t been for a few years, the last time I went I took my good friend Jeannie from NY, and she made out in a hot tub with one of my dorkier Development Boy friends. Jeannie was my boss when we worked for Seinfeld, we got all the New York exterior shots for the show, but we were a renegade crew because they were supposed to use union members, so we had to tell everyone we were shooting a student film. We had a lot of fun, Jeannie had a knack for only hiring gorgeous male crewmembers and since the show was saving so much money not having to hire teamsters, we got to eat in fabulous restaurants and ogle the hot AD’s. It was a great job except for the times we would ask someone to shoot outside their bakery, for example, and then the episode would be about Jerry finding a hair in his pastry. That upset the eighty year-old owners a little. We also shot The Single Guy, and that caused me a little discomfort too when I asked my good friend if we could use her house in Queens for the shoot, and she got all excited about her house being on TV and had a viewing party. The night the show aired, they showed her house, which was a row house, and the Single Guy walks in and says “What a Dump.” I felt awful.
Sarah and I went to Sundance for our first time a few years ago with Streets and some other Development friends. It was a crazy few days, I was one of the only people who actually went to see movies, everyone else just sat around doing drugs. That was the first time I ever hooked up with Streets. It happened in the middle of the night, it was very sudden and brief, and the only thing I remember about it was looking over and seeing Sarah hooking up with the cute Rap Star-turned Actor’s producing partner against the refrigerator. I was glad I wasn’t the only dirty whore that weekend. Streets went on to work for a huge comedy star, and stopped speaking to me after I outed his three balls in a magazine. I had a big crush on him for a while, probably because he introduced me to ecstasy, and also because he used to call me at midnight every night. He wasn’t even that cute, it was the regularity of his phone call that got me. I think because I moved so much as a child, I like things that don't change.
This time in Sundance should be different for me, though, because I’ll actually be working. My boss wants me to scope out new directors; he has the idea of maybe taking one under his wing. He’s too big for Sundance now, but wants to be a mentor, and I’m going to try not to select a director based on how good-looking he is, I went to grad school, I actually know a little about film. I also have stopped doing drugs, for the most part, and I’ve since learned to snowboard, I’m thinking this year I’ll be the sporty girl at Sundance who checks out a few films but spends her days on the slopes getting rosy cheeks and flirting with like-minded athletic film-buffs. If I run into West Coast Sarah, which is likely as she has her own production company now, I already have my speech memorized. When she dumped me three years ago, she said her therapist suggested she take a two year break from me. I’m going to remind her that break time is over.
I spend the day reading up on chefs, but it all feels kind of inauthentic, as most big chefs are as sleazy and egomaniacal as East Coast Sarah’s secret boyfriend “Lou”. When I was a bartender in New York, the girl I bartended with every night was dating a guy who worked for a chef who ended up being a great novelist, and has his own show on the travel channel. The two of them used to come to our bar almost every night, whacked out of their minds on coke and tell us stories about doing lines off the refrigerator and bending waitresses over the beer cooler. I’m pretty sure that the food industry is rampant with substance abuse and wonton sex and I think my boss is making a mistake if he doesn’t show that in his movie. Anyway it makes the movie more interesting. When my boss calls to ask me how the research is going, I tell him I’m having a hard time because my experience with chefs is a bit different from the online articles I’ve been reading. He asks me to tell him what I know, and I do, untangling some of my own involvement lest he reconsider his decision to send me to Sundance, Hollywood’s weekend party winter getaway.
It’s been a long day, but I have more reading to do so I go home and crawl into bed with a stack of scripts. I’m reading a good script set in a future that is run by women in which men are sold on car lots like used cars, and I fall asleep thinking about the Sarah’s and Sundance, and the Spanish Tram on my old studio lot. Studio tours should be more realistic, I think as I drift off, and tour guides should tell the real stories about things that happen in production offices on the Lots, like “Es la Cabesa where Mary Tyler Moore hooked up with Lou Grant…” Just like my boss' movie about chefs, I think all things in life should be more honest. It would make the rest of us not feel so badly about ourselves. I'm thinking of starting a tour of my own, go by all my ex-friends' houses and announce all the famous people they have slept with on a bullhorn. Every third bus will be in Spanish, and then all the Sarah's will have a real reason to hate me. Don't worry, Sarah, I'm just dreaming, your secrets are safe with me.
1. Hold more grudges.
2. Be the dumper, not the dumped for a change.
3. Book my ticket to London for Christmas Break. Make it a one way ticket, nobody hates me in London yet.
I should’ve sold those pictures of the Famous Actress and her new boyfriend, she made me go to the photo shop and take them off the machine herself because the guy was married, and after a very public breakup, the tabloids were dying to see who she would date next. If I had sold them, I wouldn’t have to work and could just sit home all day contemplating life and pinning butterflies to cardboard. And since I ended up leaving her company under duress anyway, it wouldn’t have made a difference. But I didn’t sell them, so I sit in my little office on the Universal Lot, listening to the Studio Tour tram go by my window. At least this tour is in English, when I worked for the Comedy Director the tour that passed by my window was in Spanish so I had to listen to “Es la Cabesa de Mary Tyler Moore” every fifteen minutes because apparently my office was in Mary’s old dressing room.
This time I can hear the tour guide talking about Will Smith, whose company is next door, and it’s distractingly soothing. We’re actually busy right now because my boss is prepping a new movie to direct, and he has assigned me the illustrious task of researching the main character, a chef. I know a little bit about chefs because my best friend the East Coast Sarah used to date a very famous and very hot chef; she was a waitress in his restaurant in NYC and they had an illicit and seedy affair, which culminated in East Coast Sarah getting drunk one night, dressing up like a schoolgirl for him, and passing out on Third Avenue in crotchless panties, much to the dismay of her family who had to pick her up from the Emergency Room that way. I only met the guy once, he was alarmingly attractive but it's hard for a girl to get excited about a guy when he has to use a pseudonym to call your best friend.
East Coast Sarah eventually ended up working for a big Food Magazine, and the poor girl had to stare at a huge picture of her paramour holding a big fish on her wall the whole time she worked there. They dated for a few years, and he left his wife finally, but for some reason he still kept my friend a secret. Occasionally he would call her at work during the day and tell her to meet him at the St. Regis to have a threesome with a prostitute; he was a real stand-up guy that “Lou”. Today I try to pass these stories off as research, but my Boss is not buying it, he wants to make a true-to-life and gritty chef movie, not something that might air on Cinemax after midnight. So I guess I’ll really have to do some work today, but now I’m thinking about East Coast Sarah and wondering how she’s doing. She lives in L.A. now, and is a journalist of some kind, I Googled her and she used to write for L.A. Weekly. I’m pulling for her, even though she dumped me unceremoniously. I just can’t seem to hold a grudge.
East Coast Sarah was around long before West Coast Sarah, we met working at a restaurant in NYC, she was only 21, and I was a few years older. I remember thinking she has a great way of wearing her clothes. She was tall and chest-less in a way that makes your clothes hang off you gracefully. I heard a rumor she got a boob job after moving to L.A. but I’m hoping she didn’t fall into that cliché. We were inseparable in New York, much like Sarah and I were in L.A., I guess I have a penchant for co-dependency. East Coast Sarah was funny and beautiful, but she also had an evil side. One time my little sister and I went to go visit a guy I went to High School with at Harvard, I was planning on cheating on my boyfriend with him but I got too drunk, and East Coast Sarah also got drunk and laid in the hotel room closet with just her feet poking out like the Wicked Witch of the West, and let out a barrage of inane insults. As my sister and I lay in bed, we listened to her rampage with great fascination. I know why I stayed friends with her so long though, she always made me laugh.
Until one day after I moved to Los Angeles, and East Coast Sarah said she wanted to visit. She had met most of my friends out here on various trips, and had been sleeping with the goofy redhead from Project Greenlight, who was a good friend of Streets. I was waiting for her call to pick her up from the airport, didn’t hear from her that day and never heard from her again. Apparently she made it out here, and hung out with Streets and the redhead and stayed with a different friend. I got an email from her after the weekend saying she didn’t want to be my friend anymore. Her explanation was similar to West Coast Sarah’s, which happened just a few years later. I take up a lot of energy, that sort of thing. I don’t know what it is with all these Sarah’s dumping me, I need to find a friend with a different name.
My boss needs me to go to Sundance with him this year. I haven’t been for a few years, the last time I went I took my good friend Jeannie from NY, and she made out in a hot tub with one of my dorkier Development Boy friends. Jeannie was my boss when we worked for Seinfeld, we got all the New York exterior shots for the show, but we were a renegade crew because they were supposed to use union members, so we had to tell everyone we were shooting a student film. We had a lot of fun, Jeannie had a knack for only hiring gorgeous male crewmembers and since the show was saving so much money not having to hire teamsters, we got to eat in fabulous restaurants and ogle the hot AD’s. It was a great job except for the times we would ask someone to shoot outside their bakery, for example, and then the episode would be about Jerry finding a hair in his pastry. That upset the eighty year-old owners a little. We also shot The Single Guy, and that caused me a little discomfort too when I asked my good friend if we could use her house in Queens for the shoot, and she got all excited about her house being on TV and had a viewing party. The night the show aired, they showed her house, which was a row house, and the Single Guy walks in and says “What a Dump.” I felt awful.
Sarah and I went to Sundance for our first time a few years ago with Streets and some other Development friends. It was a crazy few days, I was one of the only people who actually went to see movies, everyone else just sat around doing drugs. That was the first time I ever hooked up with Streets. It happened in the middle of the night, it was very sudden and brief, and the only thing I remember about it was looking over and seeing Sarah hooking up with the cute Rap Star-turned Actor’s producing partner against the refrigerator. I was glad I wasn’t the only dirty whore that weekend. Streets went on to work for a huge comedy star, and stopped speaking to me after I outed his three balls in a magazine. I had a big crush on him for a while, probably because he introduced me to ecstasy, and also because he used to call me at midnight every night. He wasn’t even that cute, it was the regularity of his phone call that got me. I think because I moved so much as a child, I like things that don't change.
This time in Sundance should be different for me, though, because I’ll actually be working. My boss wants me to scope out new directors; he has the idea of maybe taking one under his wing. He’s too big for Sundance now, but wants to be a mentor, and I’m going to try not to select a director based on how good-looking he is, I went to grad school, I actually know a little about film. I also have stopped doing drugs, for the most part, and I’ve since learned to snowboard, I’m thinking this year I’ll be the sporty girl at Sundance who checks out a few films but spends her days on the slopes getting rosy cheeks and flirting with like-minded athletic film-buffs. If I run into West Coast Sarah, which is likely as she has her own production company now, I already have my speech memorized. When she dumped me three years ago, she said her therapist suggested she take a two year break from me. I’m going to remind her that break time is over.
I spend the day reading up on chefs, but it all feels kind of inauthentic, as most big chefs are as sleazy and egomaniacal as East Coast Sarah’s secret boyfriend “Lou”. When I was a bartender in New York, the girl I bartended with every night was dating a guy who worked for a chef who ended up being a great novelist, and has his own show on the travel channel. The two of them used to come to our bar almost every night, whacked out of their minds on coke and tell us stories about doing lines off the refrigerator and bending waitresses over the beer cooler. I’m pretty sure that the food industry is rampant with substance abuse and wonton sex and I think my boss is making a mistake if he doesn’t show that in his movie. Anyway it makes the movie more interesting. When my boss calls to ask me how the research is going, I tell him I’m having a hard time because my experience with chefs is a bit different from the online articles I’ve been reading. He asks me to tell him what I know, and I do, untangling some of my own involvement lest he reconsider his decision to send me to Sundance, Hollywood’s weekend party winter getaway.
It’s been a long day, but I have more reading to do so I go home and crawl into bed with a stack of scripts. I’m reading a good script set in a future that is run by women in which men are sold on car lots like used cars, and I fall asleep thinking about the Sarah’s and Sundance, and the Spanish Tram on my old studio lot. Studio tours should be more realistic, I think as I drift off, and tour guides should tell the real stories about things that happen in production offices on the Lots, like “Es la Cabesa where Mary Tyler Moore hooked up with Lou Grant…” Just like my boss' movie about chefs, I think all things in life should be more honest. It would make the rest of us not feel so badly about ourselves. I'm thinking of starting a tour of my own, go by all my ex-friends' houses and announce all the famous people they have slept with on a bullhorn. Every third bus will be in Spanish, and then all the Sarah's will have a real reason to hate me. Don't worry, Sarah, I'm just dreaming, your secrets are safe with me.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
November 26, 2009
Things to Do:
1. Strive for something North of Mediocrity for a change.
2. Write notes on script about my life, work on making the lead character more likeable.
3. Work on my own life, make myself more likeable.
When I was a Creative Executive for the Big Comedy Director, two writers scammed their way into my office. They said they were writers for The Simpsons, and since they were going to be on the Fox Lot anyway, would it be okay if they stopped in to introduce themselves? When they arrived they told me in fact they had never really written anything at all. They had a bunch of treatments, ideas for movies, but hadn’t gotten around to writing any of them out. They seemed like nice fellows, and they were funny, so I chatted with them for a while. As is often the case, the conversation turned to me, and I told them stories from my childhood: how I had grown up on a farm in Massachusetts with no heat in our house and seven brothers and sisters, and how I was sure Henry the Black Sheep was out to get me, as he had opened the front door to our big farmhouse one day and was making his way up the stairs to where I was cowering on the top bed of the bunk beds I shared with my little sister. They agreed with me that it would have been hard to imagine my inauspicious beginnings could have led to a job in Hollywood, by way of New York City, and when they left the meeting they promised to send me a finished script so I could try and help them become real writers.
A few weeks later, I got a script from the two guys in the mail. They had been faxing me treatments non-stop, and some of their ideas were hysterical – I liked Jack Astronaut the best, but I had been insisting they write a full script – there’s a big difference between good ideas and proper execution. When I opened the script and started reading, it all felt eerily familiar. It was a story about a screwed-up little farm girl who went to New York City to become a theater director and ended up in Hollywood pushing paper around for Big Wigs. They had written a screenplay about my life. I have to say, although it had its moments, it needed a lot of work. I didn’t have the heart to pass on my own story, so I called the guys and told them we can work on it together. I’m still working on their notes, it has been a long-term project, and I’m thinking maybe my new boss the quirky Director can attach himself and turn the story of my life into something deserving of a letterbox, or maybe subtitles to tell the viewer what the main character is really thinking – something arty like that.
Its Thanksgiving today, and 85 degrees, which for an East Coast girl is bizarre, and there’s no big parade out here for Development people, no movie characters made out of balloons, as a matter of fact most people in Hollywood have gone home for the Holidays and won’t be seen again until January. My boss is a workaholic though, and he left me a list of things to do on email at 3 AM last night, so I stop by the office to get some things done before going over to Fifi’s for an orphan’s Thanksgiving Dinner. Its weird being at the office all alone and I take some time to rifle through his movie memorabilia before locking the doors for the weekend. There’s a robe which was a promo item from his last movie just lying around, and I decide nobody will notice if I take it, my little brother might like it as a Christmas gift, it’s one of his favorite movies.
My stalker has called twice already today to wish me a Happy Holiday and I’m tempted to invite him to our orphan’s feast, but then think better of ruining the mystery. I haven’t heard from Little Boy Blue, but I told him not to call me until he broke up with his girlfriend, so I don’t expect a call. It’s going to be a romantically lonely Thanksgiving for me this year, which is okay, and anyway I’ve invited a cute but slightly boring boy for our feast today, Mike Honey, that’s his real name, and he’s a friend of Adam, my moral compass. He doesn’t work in Development, but he’s an assistant to a director of television commercials, and he used to work at an agency, so we have a little in common. He is not the most scintillating of conversationalists, but I’m trying to get away from those Center of Attention-type guys anyway.
Fifi is a caterer to the stars, so Thanksgiving at her house will be lavish, although half the stuff she makes for big celebrities is frozen from Trader Joe’s or made from a box mix. She’s a good natural cook, her family is from Nantucket and they have a restaurant there, but she cuts lots of corners and I expect nothing less for this Holiday. One of the biggest male stars in Hollywood is addicted to her lemon bars which are really Betty Crocker’s lemon bars, and when I arrive at her house I see the lemon bars already set out for the guests. I have contributed by making my famous Lasagna and a tray of Pecan Rolls, and I’m certain when Mike Honey arrives he’ll be bowled over by my domestic skills. People start trickling in, and I’m amazed how many people out here have nowhere to go today. After a few hours I realize Mike hasn’t shown up, and I call him. He is hanging out with his brother and doesn’t seem to be in a hurry, which annoys me. He finally comes over when we’ve all finished eating, and I’m just South of enthusiastic. He is boring, and now he’s late. I have an uncanny knack of choosing men with wholly apparent flaws and I’m convinced it’s because I’m a perennial underachiever in all areas of life.
My mom lives in Napa Valley now, she runs a bed and breakfast with her German third husband, and I’d decided not to go see her this year because she’s convinced I made the gnocchi for our family growing up, and whenever she invites me she insists I make gnocchi for everyone. I’ve never made gnocchi, I was the one who made the homemade bread every day after school, and churned the fresh butter, and I make a mean spanikopitika, but no gnocchi. It’s the myth of the gnocchi that keeps me away, that and her far-right-winged politics. My mom was a State Senator in New Hampshire, and we could not agree less on anything to do with politics. So I stay in LA with my real fake Hollywood friends who won’t read a newspaper unless there is a good idea for a movie in there.
After dinner I ditch Mike Honey who’s droning on about his mother the Hoarder, and go to meet my semi-boss Don and his friends Bill and Amanda. Amanda starred in Brad Pitt’s first movie and is Australian and stunningly beautiful but Bill is a pig and treats her like a dog. It’s stressful hanging around with them, and not helping my job any to keep hanging out with Don, so I go meet my friend Kirsten who is just sitting in her apartment alone drinking. She’s British so Thanksgiving isn’t her Holiday, and she’s sleeping with her Uncle so she is shunned from her American relatives’ gathering today, so I keep her company awhile until I can’t keep my eyes open anymore. I’m glad I’m not sleeping with a blood relative, and that I’m not married to an abusive asshole like Bill, so I have stuff to be thankful for, I think as I drive my ailing old car home to Koreatown at the end of a long day.
Back at my apartment I put the finishing touches on my notes to my writer friends on the final draft of the script about my life. We’ve been working on it for a while now, and it’s almost ready. The main character is not me, really, anymore, and we’ve made her story much more interesting than mine, but there’s something missing in the script and I don’t know what it is. My old boss the Comedy Director used to tell me he only directs movies with heart, and movies that are about something, he doesn’t just make funny movies like the Farrelly Brothers, his movies have a theme. I realize as I’m reading the D-Girl script that as scintillating and tawdry as we’ve made this girl’s life, and although there are laugh-out-loud moments, we haven’t given it a theme. There are lots of mini-themes throughout our story; like the rise of the bottom-feeder, the triumph of the downtrodden, the loose moral code giving way to an Ubercode that encompasses all moral codes, good and bad, and measures them against one Giant Moral code by which no human could abide, and that’s our heroine’s moral bible which is, of course, a set-up for failure.
Perhaps The D-Girl Movie is an avant-garde film and we trash the ideas of codes, and the theme is more of an anti-theme: this film rebels against structure and theme much like Samuel Beckett, and D-Girl and Sarah can just sit around the whole movie waiting for the Big Spec to come in.
Or, most likely, the movie about the story of my life is just about a girl who goes to Hollywood to work in the movies and while working in one of the most soul-sapping industries that exists, and while making mistakes and alienating friends, she finds herself lovable and loved, and successful on more than just paper, on the movie screen, despite years of fearing love and avoiding real success. Perhaps the final scene in D-Girl the Movie should be D-Girl herself, and Sarah, watching the movie at the Premiere in Westwood, just the final scene of the movie and they can see themselves on screen, friends again and with a big movie finally gotten made. D-Girl: the Movie has brought together me and my best friend who had a fight a few years ago and I can’t even tell you why we fought, but I do know the premiere of my movie wouldn’t be the same without Sarah, who made me the writer I am today.
Fade Out.
(for now)
1. Strive for something North of Mediocrity for a change.
2. Write notes on script about my life, work on making the lead character more likeable.
3. Work on my own life, make myself more likeable.
When I was a Creative Executive for the Big Comedy Director, two writers scammed their way into my office. They said they were writers for The Simpsons, and since they were going to be on the Fox Lot anyway, would it be okay if they stopped in to introduce themselves? When they arrived they told me in fact they had never really written anything at all. They had a bunch of treatments, ideas for movies, but hadn’t gotten around to writing any of them out. They seemed like nice fellows, and they were funny, so I chatted with them for a while. As is often the case, the conversation turned to me, and I told them stories from my childhood: how I had grown up on a farm in Massachusetts with no heat in our house and seven brothers and sisters, and how I was sure Henry the Black Sheep was out to get me, as he had opened the front door to our big farmhouse one day and was making his way up the stairs to where I was cowering on the top bed of the bunk beds I shared with my little sister. They agreed with me that it would have been hard to imagine my inauspicious beginnings could have led to a job in Hollywood, by way of New York City, and when they left the meeting they promised to send me a finished script so I could try and help them become real writers.
A few weeks later, I got a script from the two guys in the mail. They had been faxing me treatments non-stop, and some of their ideas were hysterical – I liked Jack Astronaut the best, but I had been insisting they write a full script – there’s a big difference between good ideas and proper execution. When I opened the script and started reading, it all felt eerily familiar. It was a story about a screwed-up little farm girl who went to New York City to become a theater director and ended up in Hollywood pushing paper around for Big Wigs. They had written a screenplay about my life. I have to say, although it had its moments, it needed a lot of work. I didn’t have the heart to pass on my own story, so I called the guys and told them we can work on it together. I’m still working on their notes, it has been a long-term project, and I’m thinking maybe my new boss the quirky Director can attach himself and turn the story of my life into something deserving of a letterbox, or maybe subtitles to tell the viewer what the main character is really thinking – something arty like that.
Its Thanksgiving today, and 85 degrees, which for an East Coast girl is bizarre, and there’s no big parade out here for Development people, no movie characters made out of balloons, as a matter of fact most people in Hollywood have gone home for the Holidays and won’t be seen again until January. My boss is a workaholic though, and he left me a list of things to do on email at 3 AM last night, so I stop by the office to get some things done before going over to Fifi’s for an orphan’s Thanksgiving Dinner. Its weird being at the office all alone and I take some time to rifle through his movie memorabilia before locking the doors for the weekend. There’s a robe which was a promo item from his last movie just lying around, and I decide nobody will notice if I take it, my little brother might like it as a Christmas gift, it’s one of his favorite movies.
My stalker has called twice already today to wish me a Happy Holiday and I’m tempted to invite him to our orphan’s feast, but then think better of ruining the mystery. I haven’t heard from Little Boy Blue, but I told him not to call me until he broke up with his girlfriend, so I don’t expect a call. It’s going to be a romantically lonely Thanksgiving for me this year, which is okay, and anyway I’ve invited a cute but slightly boring boy for our feast today, Mike Honey, that’s his real name, and he’s a friend of Adam, my moral compass. He doesn’t work in Development, but he’s an assistant to a director of television commercials, and he used to work at an agency, so we have a little in common. He is not the most scintillating of conversationalists, but I’m trying to get away from those Center of Attention-type guys anyway.
Fifi is a caterer to the stars, so Thanksgiving at her house will be lavish, although half the stuff she makes for big celebrities is frozen from Trader Joe’s or made from a box mix. She’s a good natural cook, her family is from Nantucket and they have a restaurant there, but she cuts lots of corners and I expect nothing less for this Holiday. One of the biggest male stars in Hollywood is addicted to her lemon bars which are really Betty Crocker’s lemon bars, and when I arrive at her house I see the lemon bars already set out for the guests. I have contributed by making my famous Lasagna and a tray of Pecan Rolls, and I’m certain when Mike Honey arrives he’ll be bowled over by my domestic skills. People start trickling in, and I’m amazed how many people out here have nowhere to go today. After a few hours I realize Mike hasn’t shown up, and I call him. He is hanging out with his brother and doesn’t seem to be in a hurry, which annoys me. He finally comes over when we’ve all finished eating, and I’m just South of enthusiastic. He is boring, and now he’s late. I have an uncanny knack of choosing men with wholly apparent flaws and I’m convinced it’s because I’m a perennial underachiever in all areas of life.
My mom lives in Napa Valley now, she runs a bed and breakfast with her German third husband, and I’d decided not to go see her this year because she’s convinced I made the gnocchi for our family growing up, and whenever she invites me she insists I make gnocchi for everyone. I’ve never made gnocchi, I was the one who made the homemade bread every day after school, and churned the fresh butter, and I make a mean spanikopitika, but no gnocchi. It’s the myth of the gnocchi that keeps me away, that and her far-right-winged politics. My mom was a State Senator in New Hampshire, and we could not agree less on anything to do with politics. So I stay in LA with my real fake Hollywood friends who won’t read a newspaper unless there is a good idea for a movie in there.
After dinner I ditch Mike Honey who’s droning on about his mother the Hoarder, and go to meet my semi-boss Don and his friends Bill and Amanda. Amanda starred in Brad Pitt’s first movie and is Australian and stunningly beautiful but Bill is a pig and treats her like a dog. It’s stressful hanging around with them, and not helping my job any to keep hanging out with Don, so I go meet my friend Kirsten who is just sitting in her apartment alone drinking. She’s British so Thanksgiving isn’t her Holiday, and she’s sleeping with her Uncle so she is shunned from her American relatives’ gathering today, so I keep her company awhile until I can’t keep my eyes open anymore. I’m glad I’m not sleeping with a blood relative, and that I’m not married to an abusive asshole like Bill, so I have stuff to be thankful for, I think as I drive my ailing old car home to Koreatown at the end of a long day.
Back at my apartment I put the finishing touches on my notes to my writer friends on the final draft of the script about my life. We’ve been working on it for a while now, and it’s almost ready. The main character is not me, really, anymore, and we’ve made her story much more interesting than mine, but there’s something missing in the script and I don’t know what it is. My old boss the Comedy Director used to tell me he only directs movies with heart, and movies that are about something, he doesn’t just make funny movies like the Farrelly Brothers, his movies have a theme. I realize as I’m reading the D-Girl script that as scintillating and tawdry as we’ve made this girl’s life, and although there are laugh-out-loud moments, we haven’t given it a theme. There are lots of mini-themes throughout our story; like the rise of the bottom-feeder, the triumph of the downtrodden, the loose moral code giving way to an Ubercode that encompasses all moral codes, good and bad, and measures them against one Giant Moral code by which no human could abide, and that’s our heroine’s moral bible which is, of course, a set-up for failure.
Perhaps The D-Girl Movie is an avant-garde film and we trash the ideas of codes, and the theme is more of an anti-theme: this film rebels against structure and theme much like Samuel Beckett, and D-Girl and Sarah can just sit around the whole movie waiting for the Big Spec to come in.
Or, most likely, the movie about the story of my life is just about a girl who goes to Hollywood to work in the movies and while working in one of the most soul-sapping industries that exists, and while making mistakes and alienating friends, she finds herself lovable and loved, and successful on more than just paper, on the movie screen, despite years of fearing love and avoiding real success. Perhaps the final scene in D-Girl the Movie should be D-Girl herself, and Sarah, watching the movie at the Premiere in Westwood, just the final scene of the movie and they can see themselves on screen, friends again and with a big movie finally gotten made. D-Girl: the Movie has brought together me and my best friend who had a fight a few years ago and I can’t even tell you why we fought, but I do know the premiere of my movie wouldn’t be the same without Sarah, who made me the writer I am today.
Fade Out.
(for now)
Thursday, November 19, 2009
November 19, 2009
Things to Do:
1. Take dead friends off my Facebook friends list, or petition for a new category within “friends”.
2. Stop sleeping with Semi-Boss who just ignores me at work and then calls me at all hours.
3. Get intern to dictate scripts into tape recorder to listen to while driving.
When I used to work at Houlihan’s in Times Square, every year during the Rockefeller Center Christmas Spectacular all the Little People from the show would frequent my bar. We had a bouncer named Bruno and at the end of the night he would shout up and down the bar, “Suck Em Up, Yamos,” and he would put the drunk little folks under his arms and carry them to their hotel next door with their feet poking out and their eyes blurry from the colossal amounts of alcohol they would consume. One of the little guys was in a few movies, and he’s the first famous person I ever met. Well, half a famous person I guess. It was exciting to be around people with stature, and so I moved to Hollywood to work in the movies.
My first job was as a part-time receptionist at a very posh management company and I worked with a girl who is the hostess for Dancing With the Stars now. She seemed okay with just answering phones, but I quickly wrangled myself a promotion. I was hired as second assistant to the President of the Company, and the first assistant was a high maintenance girl named Lenny with the most annoying voice. My boss’ clients were hugely famous – most of the Saturday Night Live Alumni, and a big Action Star -- and we spent most of our days buying them things like can openers. One day I came into work and there was a death threat on the voicemail. Lenny was sure it was meant for her, but my boss was pretty sure it was for the Action Star who was a bad actor, because he was our most famous client. I kept quiet because I was new, but there is a slight possibility the death threat was for me as I kept company with lots of seedy, nefarious types at that time in my life.
My best friend at the time was named Hennessy, that was her real name but she has since then changed it to something more normal, and, apropos to her name, she was a stripper. We went to college together in New York City, and she wasn’t a stripper when we met. She looked alarmingly like Marilyn Monroe, and fell into stripping fairly easily as her Dad was in the CIA and wasn’t around much as a child. Hennessy moved out here before I did, worked out near the airport, and was one of the only friends I had when I arrived fresh out of the mental hospital and barely a hundred pounds. Right before I got my job at the posh management company, Hennessy answered an ad in LA Weekly that said “500 Dollars a Day – No Sex.” She worked for a woman named Ozo who was obsessed with Howard Stern and they gave hand jobs all day long. Hennessy only lasted there a few weeks, and I used to go visit her at the Bel Air house that Ozo rented out.
I wasn’t the type for the sex trade, honestly, I’m Italian and I have a big nose and I’ve never been comfortable with the largess of my boobs, but I was poor and jobless and Ozo convinced me that with a small makeover I might be able to make some sex-less cash. She took me to Hollywood Boulevard to shop for trashy clothes, and when we were pulling up to the house to embark upon my new career, we were surrounded by police officers, busting the place. Apparently they too had seen the ad for 500 dollars a day -- no sex, and they took Ozo to jail where she stayed for two days until Lester her houseboy pawned one of her fur coats to get her out on bail.
Ozo fled to New York where she was convinced the authorities were easier on Madams, and ran a high-priced call girl ring for a year before she was busted there too. I stayed in LA and worked for a different soul-sapping industry. I didn’t get my current job through a classified in LA Weekly, but the ad for a Hollywood Assistant job could be quite similar. No sex required, but it will surely test your morality and exists similarly in the dark crevasses of the professional world. Hennessy ended up doing private bachelor parties for money and soft-core porn, which pays surprisingly little. We stayed good friends for years, until I took her to Vegas with a bunch of development people and she didn’t exactly live up to her billing as my sexy stripper friend. Years of a diminished self-esteem had made her prudish and impossibly attention-starved. I left her in front of the Hard Rock and haven’t spoken to her since.
I guess I should be happy the police didn’t come a few hours later that day, and it was soon after that I started buying can openers for celebrities. It’s a different kind of whoring, but more socially acceptable. I worked for the President of the Company for six months and then got fired for missing a phone call. By then I had met and fallen madly in love with the Guy with the Girlfriend though, and he worked in Development, and I just thought that his career sounded fascinating. Reading scripts, tracking, socializing, making movies… it was much better than fielding death threats for bad actors. I got a job as assistant to the Big Action Producer because I wrote my thank-you note in calligraphy and closed the letter with a wax seal, and I was on my way. Turns out we didn’t actually make any movies at the Big Action Company, but there were lots of movie posters on the walls.
My first gold star at the Big Action Company came courtesy of Sarah, who was my new Hollywood Best Friend. Her boss was going out with a spec and she gave it to me early. It was a live action black comedy set on an alligator farm in Florida, in the vein of Animal Farm. I thought it was hilarious, and tailored my coverage to spark the attention of our boss the Big Huge Academy Award Winning Producer – mentioned throwing wet white tee shirts on the female characters etc. -- and he ignored all of the V.P.’s at our company who had literally thrown the script in the trash and bought the script for the bare minimum Guild allowance. I had been at the company six months and this was quite an accomplishment for an assistant. At this point I was trying to take my career seriously and excise all the soft-core porn stars and midgets from my life, but there was still an Asian guy who had paid my bills for a while who sent me flowers all the time; it was hard to leave my past behind.
I worked at the Big Action Company for a year, and it was like Development Boot Camp, we had a 30 million dollar deal with our studio, so we saw every piece of material released in Hollywood. I made friends at that company who will be my friends for life, it’s hard not to bond when you are in the trenches like we were, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that of the 7 or so assistants that worked there, four of us were stricken with tragedy. Two of us got M.S. and two other assistants died, one suddenly of spinal meningitis, -- that was Lee the Asian kid who used to always bring brilliant ideas into our creative meetings only to get ignored and then we would inevitably hear about the ideas getting made by other companies in the ensuing weeks -- and of course there was my good friend Jane who died in a car accident. It was a cursed company, to be sure, and I’m lucky I escaped with only a debilitating disease. I went back to visit years later and the other girl with M.S. hadn’t fared as well as I, she was barely mobile and they had her working only a few hours a day.
After the Big Action Company I got my job as Creative Executive at the Big Comedy Director’s company, and there was nothing really that Creative about my job, and nobody really under me but my assistant so I am not sure where the executive part of the title came in either. It was mostly just filtering material to my boss and the studio, but it was still a great job, and I’ll never forget sending my first project to the Comedy Director and having him call me and say, “I wrote some of the funniest movies ever made. They were funny. This isn’t funny.” It was hard to make an icon like that laugh, but I did sometimes, and that made his anemic Producing Partner easier to tolerate. Then one day my legs started falling asleep walking across the Fox Lot from my car to my office, and the running back to New York and my ex-boyfriend who I had dated for 8 years before I moved out here. An inexplicable medical issue will scare the Hollywood out of even the sturdiest of D-Girls. The job with the Famous Actress followed, and five more years with the Big Ex before we finally gave up, and now I’m back in LA, much to the chagrin of Sarah my ex-best friend I’m sure.
So that’s the backstory, most of it won’t be used in the movie, but it’s good to know where your character came from. This week my new boss has me picking out flatware for him at Crate and Barrel so you might say I’ve come full circle. He hasn’t realized yet that where I am lacking in administrative skills, I make up for in sheer will and determination, the Guy with the Girlfriend used to call me Rocky Marciano because you can pound me into the ground and I’ll just get back up again, dazed and bruised but still fighting.
I remember once in New York a ticket scalper sold me and my East Coast Sarah fake tickets to the Smashing Pumpkins. When we were escorted out of the concert, I saw the scalper right in front of Madison Square Garden. My East Coast Sarah and my gorgeous cousin stood under an umbrella in the pouring rain while I literally jumped on top of the guy. I ended up with only his sweatshirt in my hand as he easily escaped my less-than-menacing grasp, but the experience reminds me of my possibly futile quest to salvage something of my once-illustrious career out here. I realize that characters in movies need to grow and learn, but this is a True Story and maybe like the midgets at Houlihan’s I’ll never grow, and I’ll certainly never learn to let things go, so I fight un-winnable fights against things bigger than myself like unwieldy relationships and co-dependant friendships and when they end, I get up again and pick out a lovely set of glasses for my new boss, hair slightly askew but soul miraculously intact. Suck Em Up Yamos, that's just the backstory, this story is just beginning...
1. Take dead friends off my Facebook friends list, or petition for a new category within “friends”.
2. Stop sleeping with Semi-Boss who just ignores me at work and then calls me at all hours.
3. Get intern to dictate scripts into tape recorder to listen to while driving.
When I used to work at Houlihan’s in Times Square, every year during the Rockefeller Center Christmas Spectacular all the Little People from the show would frequent my bar. We had a bouncer named Bruno and at the end of the night he would shout up and down the bar, “Suck Em Up, Yamos,” and he would put the drunk little folks under his arms and carry them to their hotel next door with their feet poking out and their eyes blurry from the colossal amounts of alcohol they would consume. One of the little guys was in a few movies, and he’s the first famous person I ever met. Well, half a famous person I guess. It was exciting to be around people with stature, and so I moved to Hollywood to work in the movies.
My first job was as a part-time receptionist at a very posh management company and I worked with a girl who is the hostess for Dancing With the Stars now. She seemed okay with just answering phones, but I quickly wrangled myself a promotion. I was hired as second assistant to the President of the Company, and the first assistant was a high maintenance girl named Lenny with the most annoying voice. My boss’ clients were hugely famous – most of the Saturday Night Live Alumni, and a big Action Star -- and we spent most of our days buying them things like can openers. One day I came into work and there was a death threat on the voicemail. Lenny was sure it was meant for her, but my boss was pretty sure it was for the Action Star who was a bad actor, because he was our most famous client. I kept quiet because I was new, but there is a slight possibility the death threat was for me as I kept company with lots of seedy, nefarious types at that time in my life.
My best friend at the time was named Hennessy, that was her real name but she has since then changed it to something more normal, and, apropos to her name, she was a stripper. We went to college together in New York City, and she wasn’t a stripper when we met. She looked alarmingly like Marilyn Monroe, and fell into stripping fairly easily as her Dad was in the CIA and wasn’t around much as a child. Hennessy moved out here before I did, worked out near the airport, and was one of the only friends I had when I arrived fresh out of the mental hospital and barely a hundred pounds. Right before I got my job at the posh management company, Hennessy answered an ad in LA Weekly that said “500 Dollars a Day – No Sex.” She worked for a woman named Ozo who was obsessed with Howard Stern and they gave hand jobs all day long. Hennessy only lasted there a few weeks, and I used to go visit her at the Bel Air house that Ozo rented out.
I wasn’t the type for the sex trade, honestly, I’m Italian and I have a big nose and I’ve never been comfortable with the largess of my boobs, but I was poor and jobless and Ozo convinced me that with a small makeover I might be able to make some sex-less cash. She took me to Hollywood Boulevard to shop for trashy clothes, and when we were pulling up to the house to embark upon my new career, we were surrounded by police officers, busting the place. Apparently they too had seen the ad for 500 dollars a day -- no sex, and they took Ozo to jail where she stayed for two days until Lester her houseboy pawned one of her fur coats to get her out on bail.
Ozo fled to New York where she was convinced the authorities were easier on Madams, and ran a high-priced call girl ring for a year before she was busted there too. I stayed in LA and worked for a different soul-sapping industry. I didn’t get my current job through a classified in LA Weekly, but the ad for a Hollywood Assistant job could be quite similar. No sex required, but it will surely test your morality and exists similarly in the dark crevasses of the professional world. Hennessy ended up doing private bachelor parties for money and soft-core porn, which pays surprisingly little. We stayed good friends for years, until I took her to Vegas with a bunch of development people and she didn’t exactly live up to her billing as my sexy stripper friend. Years of a diminished self-esteem had made her prudish and impossibly attention-starved. I left her in front of the Hard Rock and haven’t spoken to her since.
I guess I should be happy the police didn’t come a few hours later that day, and it was soon after that I started buying can openers for celebrities. It’s a different kind of whoring, but more socially acceptable. I worked for the President of the Company for six months and then got fired for missing a phone call. By then I had met and fallen madly in love with the Guy with the Girlfriend though, and he worked in Development, and I just thought that his career sounded fascinating. Reading scripts, tracking, socializing, making movies… it was much better than fielding death threats for bad actors. I got a job as assistant to the Big Action Producer because I wrote my thank-you note in calligraphy and closed the letter with a wax seal, and I was on my way. Turns out we didn’t actually make any movies at the Big Action Company, but there were lots of movie posters on the walls.
My first gold star at the Big Action Company came courtesy of Sarah, who was my new Hollywood Best Friend. Her boss was going out with a spec and she gave it to me early. It was a live action black comedy set on an alligator farm in Florida, in the vein of Animal Farm. I thought it was hilarious, and tailored my coverage to spark the attention of our boss the Big Huge Academy Award Winning Producer – mentioned throwing wet white tee shirts on the female characters etc. -- and he ignored all of the V.P.’s at our company who had literally thrown the script in the trash and bought the script for the bare minimum Guild allowance. I had been at the company six months and this was quite an accomplishment for an assistant. At this point I was trying to take my career seriously and excise all the soft-core porn stars and midgets from my life, but there was still an Asian guy who had paid my bills for a while who sent me flowers all the time; it was hard to leave my past behind.
I worked at the Big Action Company for a year, and it was like Development Boot Camp, we had a 30 million dollar deal with our studio, so we saw every piece of material released in Hollywood. I made friends at that company who will be my friends for life, it’s hard not to bond when you are in the trenches like we were, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that of the 7 or so assistants that worked there, four of us were stricken with tragedy. Two of us got M.S. and two other assistants died, one suddenly of spinal meningitis, -- that was Lee the Asian kid who used to always bring brilliant ideas into our creative meetings only to get ignored and then we would inevitably hear about the ideas getting made by other companies in the ensuing weeks -- and of course there was my good friend Jane who died in a car accident. It was a cursed company, to be sure, and I’m lucky I escaped with only a debilitating disease. I went back to visit years later and the other girl with M.S. hadn’t fared as well as I, she was barely mobile and they had her working only a few hours a day.
After the Big Action Company I got my job as Creative Executive at the Big Comedy Director’s company, and there was nothing really that Creative about my job, and nobody really under me but my assistant so I am not sure where the executive part of the title came in either. It was mostly just filtering material to my boss and the studio, but it was still a great job, and I’ll never forget sending my first project to the Comedy Director and having him call me and say, “I wrote some of the funniest movies ever made. They were funny. This isn’t funny.” It was hard to make an icon like that laugh, but I did sometimes, and that made his anemic Producing Partner easier to tolerate. Then one day my legs started falling asleep walking across the Fox Lot from my car to my office, and the running back to New York and my ex-boyfriend who I had dated for 8 years before I moved out here. An inexplicable medical issue will scare the Hollywood out of even the sturdiest of D-Girls. The job with the Famous Actress followed, and five more years with the Big Ex before we finally gave up, and now I’m back in LA, much to the chagrin of Sarah my ex-best friend I’m sure.
So that’s the backstory, most of it won’t be used in the movie, but it’s good to know where your character came from. This week my new boss has me picking out flatware for him at Crate and Barrel so you might say I’ve come full circle. He hasn’t realized yet that where I am lacking in administrative skills, I make up for in sheer will and determination, the Guy with the Girlfriend used to call me Rocky Marciano because you can pound me into the ground and I’ll just get back up again, dazed and bruised but still fighting.
I remember once in New York a ticket scalper sold me and my East Coast Sarah fake tickets to the Smashing Pumpkins. When we were escorted out of the concert, I saw the scalper right in front of Madison Square Garden. My East Coast Sarah and my gorgeous cousin stood under an umbrella in the pouring rain while I literally jumped on top of the guy. I ended up with only his sweatshirt in my hand as he easily escaped my less-than-menacing grasp, but the experience reminds me of my possibly futile quest to salvage something of my once-illustrious career out here. I realize that characters in movies need to grow and learn, but this is a True Story and maybe like the midgets at Houlihan’s I’ll never grow, and I’ll certainly never learn to let things go, so I fight un-winnable fights against things bigger than myself like unwieldy relationships and co-dependant friendships and when they end, I get up again and pick out a lovely set of glasses for my new boss, hair slightly askew but soul miraculously intact. Suck Em Up Yamos, that's just the backstory, this story is just beginning...
Thursday, November 12, 2009
November 11, 2009
Things to Do:
1. Buy a GPS so I stop getting lost..
2. Download all 70’s folk songs to brush up on new semi-boyfriend’s past.
3. Look into joining a Religion – possibly a trendy Hollywood one.
This is the first time I’ve been out of my pajamas before noon in two years. I’ve been at my new job for a week now, and I haven’t alienated any of my new co-workers, which is a small accomplishment. Because I have to drive my new boss around, however, I’ve gotten lost about a hundred and fifty times. I’ll never get used to the sprawling nature of the streets of Los Angeles and I miss the smelly, crowded subways of NYC chauffeuring me around, although after 9/11 the Famous Actress didn’t make us take the subway, mostly due to the Famous Actor/Conspiracy Theorist who had a production deal with us. He brought in personalized gas masks after the Big Day and assured us that the bridges and tunnels into Manhattan were rigged to blow up. I was lost a long time before 9/11 though. I was born without an internal compass and no innate sense of direction, and come to think of it, I lack direction in my life, and I’m missing a moral compass. I feel like I deserve a Handicapped sign for my windshield for these maladies, and maybe if I had one of those I wouldn’t have gotten three parking tickets in a week. So far this job has cost me more money than I’ve made.
I find comfort in the way I’ve worked my way down the proverbial corporate ladder in Hollywood, this way nobody expects anything from me, I went from temp to assistant to executive to assistant and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m starting to pad my social calendar again, now that I have something to talk about, so I had dinner with my friend Ellie last night who is a real D-Girl on the up and up, serious and bookishly pretty and I wonder how a girl this lovely can be so shy, until she tells me she followed a boy to a party in the seventh grade and had a Grand Mal seizure. She may be the only epileptic D-Girl I know. I met her in New York when she was job hunting, and when I got diagnosed with M.S. she sent me a plant. Not flowers: a whole living, breathing plant. Friends for life.
My new boss hates the term d-girl so I’m going to have to think of a way to keep my development girl ways on the down low, he really just wants an assistant, not a future V.P. and I’m trying to remember that as the emails and texts start trickling in as people hear about my new job. He has a small staff around him, a cushy deal with Universal, and everyone is very friendly because it’s my first week. It’s a miracle I have not made any major mistakes, except sleeping with my Boss’ producing partner the day I got hired, but that’s only a mistake if anyone finds out. Don has been perfectly cordial; to be honest I’m not even sure he remembers sleeping with me. Forgettable sex, that’s me. On my desk at work I have a Word-A-Day calendar, and its all development terms – “Spec” is today’s word, and underneath it says “Available Script.” – and my boss has already told me he’s annoyed by it. I’ve worked for anti-development people before, my Big Comedy Director Boss’ producing partner hated Hollywood, but I’m pretty sure he’s barely in the business anymore. Everyone hates it until they can’t get a job out here and may have to go back to waiting tables for a living.
The girl I replaced at this job knew she was leaving here for months, and there are stacks and stacks of papers to file – I think she stopped doing her job about three months ago based on the dates on some of these papers. I hate filing and cheekily tell my boss I think he is obsessed with notebooks as every other paper has “make a notebook” written on it. Is he really going to be making a movie about airplanes, I think as I make a shoddy looking airplane notebook and I haven’t counted the minutes before my work day was over in years. I’m bored so I check my ex-boyfriend’s voicemail, and it’s the usual flirty messages from random girls, I wish Jane the d-girl who died in a car accident hadn’t taught me the addictive lure of voicemail checking, there is way too much information here and we have been broken up for years, it’s possible I should move on.
It’s surprisingly easy to tell my boss I have a dentist appointment on my seventh day of having a real job in over two years, and I rush over to Fifi’s house because she’s hysterical. She’s been dumped by a 60 Minutes anchor with whom she was having an illicit affair, mostly in elevators. I’m not sure elevator sex even counts as a relationship and I tell her this but it doesn’t seem to help. So I throw some cute clothes on her and drag her to the Roosevelt where my friend whose brother is famous is having a drinks gathering. The Roosevelt is yesterday’s news but there’s still a small group of passé actors who frequent it, and I recognize one of the actors from Sarah’s first big movie, a huge teen comedy that put her first boss on the map out here. He’s the cutest actor from the movie, and I remember Sarah telling me that they had hooked up once on her boat, but he stopped short of having sex with her. They were just filming the movie then, and he wasn’t famous yet, and he told her he doesn’t have sex, something about being a good boy, and tonight he is regaling our crowd with stories about girls he didn’t like and how he always told them he was too good of a boy to have sex with them. I don’t say anything, and I don’t wish bad things upon Sarah even though she broke my friendship heart, but it would be slightly satisfying for her to know this.
Fifi is inconsolable so we sit by the pool drinking way too much, and I see a tall guy with blonde curly hair has been looking at me, so I look back, I’m single and buzzed, and he does a lot of staring before he finally comes over. He is so brooding it’s incredibly hot, and we end up kissing before he tells me he has a girlfriend. Sigh, that’s the story of my life. When Fifi and I are waiting for my car from the valet, I see the guy pulling away in his car – a Beverly Hills taxi. This finally puts a smile on Fifi’s face, and the whole way home she makes fun of me for making out with a cab driver. The only experience I have with cab drivers is my old roommate in Venice Beach, the assistant to the Big Action Producer, who my ex-boyfriend called the smelly cab driver because she had a peculiar odor. I don’t mind the cab driver thing so much, Fifi’s kind of a snob, but the girlfriend part disturbs me because I went down that road already, and that was my ex and he married his girlfriend instead of leaving her for me, they have two kids now and it took me years to get over. I’m not sure I’m even over him yet.
I deposit Fifi in her bed and drive home tired from my first full week of work. Early mornings and latte runs are okay though, at least I have a job and it’s for an edgy cool director who most likely is on Sarah's list of people to meet in Hollywood. My phone rings on the way home, and it’s the cab driver, his name is James and his voice is velvety and soft and I’m happy he called. He tells me his dad was a really legendary song writer who died tragically, was also a cab driver, and James is the subject of one of his most famous songs. The girlfriend is a stripper who has a six year old daughter, and although they are in a loveless relationship, he’s attached to the kid, so he stays. There’s literally electricity coming through the cell phone, I believe about half of what he’s saying but his voice is so deep and thoughtful I don’t really care. I tell him about my past with the guy with the girlfriend and he says he will stay away until his situation is resolved. I don’t really want him to stay away but I’m a grown-up now and I can’t handle more heartbreak so I hang up with a heavy heart not knowing when I'll ever talk to him again.
Before I make it to Koreatown I get a text from Don, he’s at a hotel in Beverly Hills and he wants me to come there. He says he can call me a cab if I don’t feel like driving, and I laugh to myself at the possibility that Little Boy Blue of the famous song could get the call and end up escorting me to an after-midnight booty call. I decide my drug addict new semi-boss is better than a guy with a girlfriend, and I drive to the hotel where Don is high as a kite, eyeballs bugging out of his head. I can’t stay long, I tell him, I have to work in the morning, and he laughs and says he will vouch for me with my boss. Is it so much to ask to meet a normal guy, someone who picks me up for dates and bores me with his talk of corporate life? After Don falls asleep I start reading some of the scripts he has piled up next to him, and now it seems this is not a wasted night as I find a script in the middle of the pile marked “confidential” with his name blasted across every page. The secret script is excellent, and not going out as a spec for a few days, so I take it with me when I sneak out of the hotel room with barely an hour before I have to be back at work.
I wonder what it would be like to have a job that does not require socializing, one of those nerdy jobs maybe the epileptic D-Girl would excel at, something smart and Nobel Prize-worthy like molecular biology. I get lost on my way home and have to turn my car around and go to work without a shower. Dirty, lost and tired, I think of calling my new cab driver friend for directions but somehow I don't think that would help me find my way.
Things to Do:
1. Buy a GPS so I stop getting lost..
2. Download all 70’s folk songs to brush up on new semi-boyfriend’s past.
3. Look into joining a Religion – possibly a trendy Hollywood one.
This is the first time I’ve been out of my pajamas before noon in two years. I’ve been at my new job for a week now, and I haven’t alienated any of my new co-workers, which is a small accomplishment. Because I have to drive my new boss around, however, I’ve gotten lost about a hundred and fifty times. I’ll never get used to the sprawling nature of the streets of Los Angeles and I miss the smelly, crowded subways of NYC chauffeuring me around, although after 9/11 the Famous Actress didn’t make us take the subway, mostly due to the Famous Actor/Conspiracy Theorist who had a production deal with us. He brought in personalized gas masks after the Big Day and assured us that the bridges and tunnels into Manhattan were rigged to blow up. I was lost a long time before 9/11 though. I was born without an internal compass and no innate sense of direction, and come to think of it, I lack direction in my life, and I’m missing a moral compass. I feel like I deserve a Handicapped sign for my windshield for these maladies, and maybe if I had one of those I wouldn’t have gotten three parking tickets in a week. So far this job has cost me more money than I’ve made.
I find comfort in the way I’ve worked my way down the proverbial corporate ladder in Hollywood, this way nobody expects anything from me, I went from temp to assistant to executive to assistant and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m starting to pad my social calendar again, now that I have something to talk about, so I had dinner with my friend Ellie last night who is a real D-Girl on the up and up, serious and bookishly pretty and I wonder how a girl this lovely can be so shy, until she tells me she followed a boy to a party in the seventh grade and had a Grand Mal seizure. She may be the only epileptic D-Girl I know. I met her in New York when she was job hunting, and when I got diagnosed with M.S. she sent me a plant. Not flowers: a whole living, breathing plant. Friends for life.
My new boss hates the term d-girl so I’m going to have to think of a way to keep my development girl ways on the down low, he really just wants an assistant, not a future V.P. and I’m trying to remember that as the emails and texts start trickling in as people hear about my new job. He has a small staff around him, a cushy deal with Universal, and everyone is very friendly because it’s my first week. It’s a miracle I have not made any major mistakes, except sleeping with my Boss’ producing partner the day I got hired, but that’s only a mistake if anyone finds out. Don has been perfectly cordial; to be honest I’m not even sure he remembers sleeping with me. Forgettable sex, that’s me. On my desk at work I have a Word-A-Day calendar, and its all development terms – “Spec” is today’s word, and underneath it says “Available Script.” – and my boss has already told me he’s annoyed by it. I’ve worked for anti-development people before, my Big Comedy Director Boss’ producing partner hated Hollywood, but I’m pretty sure he’s barely in the business anymore. Everyone hates it until they can’t get a job out here and may have to go back to waiting tables for a living.
The girl I replaced at this job knew she was leaving here for months, and there are stacks and stacks of papers to file – I think she stopped doing her job about three months ago based on the dates on some of these papers. I hate filing and cheekily tell my boss I think he is obsessed with notebooks as every other paper has “make a notebook” written on it. Is he really going to be making a movie about airplanes, I think as I make a shoddy looking airplane notebook and I haven’t counted the minutes before my work day was over in years. I’m bored so I check my ex-boyfriend’s voicemail, and it’s the usual flirty messages from random girls, I wish Jane the d-girl who died in a car accident hadn’t taught me the addictive lure of voicemail checking, there is way too much information here and we have been broken up for years, it’s possible I should move on.
It’s surprisingly easy to tell my boss I have a dentist appointment on my seventh day of having a real job in over two years, and I rush over to Fifi’s house because she’s hysterical. She’s been dumped by a 60 Minutes anchor with whom she was having an illicit affair, mostly in elevators. I’m not sure elevator sex even counts as a relationship and I tell her this but it doesn’t seem to help. So I throw some cute clothes on her and drag her to the Roosevelt where my friend whose brother is famous is having a drinks gathering. The Roosevelt is yesterday’s news but there’s still a small group of passé actors who frequent it, and I recognize one of the actors from Sarah’s first big movie, a huge teen comedy that put her first boss on the map out here. He’s the cutest actor from the movie, and I remember Sarah telling me that they had hooked up once on her boat, but he stopped short of having sex with her. They were just filming the movie then, and he wasn’t famous yet, and he told her he doesn’t have sex, something about being a good boy, and tonight he is regaling our crowd with stories about girls he didn’t like and how he always told them he was too good of a boy to have sex with them. I don’t say anything, and I don’t wish bad things upon Sarah even though she broke my friendship heart, but it would be slightly satisfying for her to know this.
Fifi is inconsolable so we sit by the pool drinking way too much, and I see a tall guy with blonde curly hair has been looking at me, so I look back, I’m single and buzzed, and he does a lot of staring before he finally comes over. He is so brooding it’s incredibly hot, and we end up kissing before he tells me he has a girlfriend. Sigh, that’s the story of my life. When Fifi and I are waiting for my car from the valet, I see the guy pulling away in his car – a Beverly Hills taxi. This finally puts a smile on Fifi’s face, and the whole way home she makes fun of me for making out with a cab driver. The only experience I have with cab drivers is my old roommate in Venice Beach, the assistant to the Big Action Producer, who my ex-boyfriend called the smelly cab driver because she had a peculiar odor. I don’t mind the cab driver thing so much, Fifi’s kind of a snob, but the girlfriend part disturbs me because I went down that road already, and that was my ex and he married his girlfriend instead of leaving her for me, they have two kids now and it took me years to get over. I’m not sure I’m even over him yet.
I deposit Fifi in her bed and drive home tired from my first full week of work. Early mornings and latte runs are okay though, at least I have a job and it’s for an edgy cool director who most likely is on Sarah's list of people to meet in Hollywood. My phone rings on the way home, and it’s the cab driver, his name is James and his voice is velvety and soft and I’m happy he called. He tells me his dad was a really legendary song writer who died tragically, was also a cab driver, and James is the subject of one of his most famous songs. The girlfriend is a stripper who has a six year old daughter, and although they are in a loveless relationship, he’s attached to the kid, so he stays. There’s literally electricity coming through the cell phone, I believe about half of what he’s saying but his voice is so deep and thoughtful I don’t really care. I tell him about my past with the guy with the girlfriend and he says he will stay away until his situation is resolved. I don’t really want him to stay away but I’m a grown-up now and I can’t handle more heartbreak so I hang up with a heavy heart not knowing when I'll ever talk to him again.
Before I make it to Koreatown I get a text from Don, he’s at a hotel in Beverly Hills and he wants me to come there. He says he can call me a cab if I don’t feel like driving, and I laugh to myself at the possibility that Little Boy Blue of the famous song could get the call and end up escorting me to an after-midnight booty call. I decide my drug addict new semi-boss is better than a guy with a girlfriend, and I drive to the hotel where Don is high as a kite, eyeballs bugging out of his head. I can’t stay long, I tell him, I have to work in the morning, and he laughs and says he will vouch for me with my boss. Is it so much to ask to meet a normal guy, someone who picks me up for dates and bores me with his talk of corporate life? After Don falls asleep I start reading some of the scripts he has piled up next to him, and now it seems this is not a wasted night as I find a script in the middle of the pile marked “confidential” with his name blasted across every page. The secret script is excellent, and not going out as a spec for a few days, so I take it with me when I sneak out of the hotel room with barely an hour before I have to be back at work.
I wonder what it would be like to have a job that does not require socializing, one of those nerdy jobs maybe the epileptic D-Girl would excel at, something smart and Nobel Prize-worthy like molecular biology. I get lost on my way home and have to turn my car around and go to work without a shower. Dirty, lost and tired, I think of calling my new cab driver friend for directions but somehow I don't think that would help me find my way.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
November 4, 2009
Things to Do:
1. Send a postcard to the nurse from the mental hospital as she requested telling her I'm doing okay.
2. Compose mass email to be sent out as soon as I land the job with the Big Director – keep it humble, but make sure Sarah is on the email list.
3. Get a boyfriend before New Year’s Eve.
It’s not that I miss New York for its qualities, it’s more because I’m most comfortable when I’m suffering and it’s too sunny in Los Angeles. I think I would like it here a lot better if I had a job, so I’ve spent the last few days jumping through hoops for the Big Director in hopes that he’ll hire me. First, he asks for two scripts. Thinking he means some undiscovered, unsold masterpieces that he can set up and direct, I dig up two scripts written by friends of mine, a dark period drama and a big comedy. His email reads: “I hate these scripts, but I want to hire you. What should I do?” Realizing he doesn’t want me to discover his next project, he just wants to know we like the same things, I quickly send him two scripts that have already sold for half a million dollars each. Seems too easy, but Hollywood is all about trust, and I suppose trust is garnered in this case by stating the obvious. Next, I have an agent call as a reference, and he emails me again. “I hate these people. Why are you friends with them?” I can’t denounce my friends fast enough, I need this job.
The Big Director has a Producing Partner, Don, and by some small coincidence my brother was his roommate years ago, and he’s friends with my friend Fifi who looks like television’s Maude. I’ve never met Don, but when I call him to introduce myself and set a general meeting, he tells me he is going to Fifi’s dinner tonight. When I arrive, I’m seated next to him, and he’s cute, I guess, in a hazy, he’s-on-Quaaludes kind of way, or maybe it’s the fact that he works with a Director I have idolized for years, I can never tell out here why I am attracted to some people. We all have dinner and it’s pleasant enough, and somehow I end up in Don’s car as everyone carpools to Fifi’s for drinks. Don needs to stop and get his bathing suit, and, well, I am either about to give the best job interview of my life or the worst.
Don is very complimentary of my tiny frame and makes me swoon when he says he can’t find an ounce of fat on my body. I guess I can throw away those cans of Ensure in my car and stop trying to gain back the weight I lost in the mental hospital. Apparently Don has always liked skinny girls with light eyes and dark hair, and I think he gets a good look mostly at the top of my head as we stop by his house for his bathing suit and we end up staying for a bit…
We arrive at Fifi’s appropriately sheepish, well I am sheepish, Don seems about to pass out from Quaaludes. Fifi is outraged. You are trying to get a job, says angrily, why would you sleep with him, that’s just a bad idea… My life is a series of bad ideas, so I ignore her protests and get into the car with my new boyfriend Don at the end of the night to go home. Fifi has always been a little controlling, I have an unproven theory that she's secretly in love with me, and I'm certain her protests stem from that. As we are crossing Wilshire to get to my apartment, he falls asleep while driving and the car ends up on a curb. I guess it was the Quaaludes. Something tells me I have not found true love with this guy. I’m supposed to meet with him in the morning about the assistant job to the Big Director, and as I’m getting out of the car he mumbles almost incoherently, um, you probably don’t need to come in for that meeting. Calling him my new boyfriend may have been a bit premature, I think as I climb out of his Escalade, and I wonder if I impressed him so much with my free-wheeling nature that he wants to hire me, or if he thinks I’m a dirty whore and the job is gone.
When I get home, I have an email from the Big Director. I’m hired! It’s slightly aggravating that he tells me by email, but he’s eccentric and I’m desperate, and anyway it would have been awkward to get that call while in bed with his producing partner. His email is flattering, he tells me my graduate degree really impressed him, and he was crazy for the set of notes I did on the script he sent me. The salary is ten thousand dollars less than he was originally advertising, but that’s my fault for putting myself on sale. He also mentions that it's not necessary for me to come in and meet with Don, who had called him earlier in the evening to tell him we met at a party and he thinks I’m perfectly charming. Phew.
I resist the urge to write the Big Director back and reference his earlier email about my choice in friends, as I'm now aware that his producing partner is not only a total dog but probably a drug addict. I think it's best not to let him in on the events of this evening. Eventually, I'm sure, he will find out about my exploits, my brief jaunts in mental hospitals, my penchant for drama, and my horrible driving, but I am going to treat this like one of my few relationships - hope once he gets to know me he gets hooked on my crooked soul and forgives me my faults.
It’s 2 AM and I start work in the morning, but I can’t sleep I’m so excited. I send out an email to my family and friends about my new job, and cc Sarah, who apparently skipped our mutual friends’ husband’s book signing the other night because she was afraid to run into me. My new boss is a Big Deal, and even though it’s just assistant level, it’s all about access out here in Hollywood. And starting at 9 AM tomorrow morning, Sarah either better cross the Big Director’s name off her Director lists for all her projects, or think of a way for us to coexist in this tiny little industry.
My stalker calls a little after 3 AM, and I decide to answer and chat with him for a while because I’m nervous about rejoining society and this seems like a perfectly unhealthy way to end my day. I met him a few years ago at a party I threw for my friend Nelly’s birthday, he was a junior agent at the time, and he has been calling me late-night ever since. I never answer his calls, and he rarely leaves a message. I’ve only seen him in person one other time, in the Hamptons, and he has actually blown up quite a bit as an agent in the interim, one of his clients is one of the biggest show runners in TV. I tell him about my new job, and he breathes into the phone encouragingly. It occurs to me I’ve never heard him speak a full sentence, until now. As I’m hanging up the phone he says, “Your whole life is about to change.”
He’s right, I’m officially Back and everything is about to change -- I have a real Hollywood job, a weird new boss and a complicated romantic office entanglement. Yes, I took a few years off to refresh my spirit, but somehow as I watch the sun coming up and the Hollywood sign glowing off in the distance from my apartment window after watching my new boss' old movies for the rest of the night, it all feels familiar, and it's just as if I never left this town.
1. Send a postcard to the nurse from the mental hospital as she requested telling her I'm doing okay.
2. Compose mass email to be sent out as soon as I land the job with the Big Director – keep it humble, but make sure Sarah is on the email list.
3. Get a boyfriend before New Year’s Eve.
It’s not that I miss New York for its qualities, it’s more because I’m most comfortable when I’m suffering and it’s too sunny in Los Angeles. I think I would like it here a lot better if I had a job, so I’ve spent the last few days jumping through hoops for the Big Director in hopes that he’ll hire me. First, he asks for two scripts. Thinking he means some undiscovered, unsold masterpieces that he can set up and direct, I dig up two scripts written by friends of mine, a dark period drama and a big comedy. His email reads: “I hate these scripts, but I want to hire you. What should I do?” Realizing he doesn’t want me to discover his next project, he just wants to know we like the same things, I quickly send him two scripts that have already sold for half a million dollars each. Seems too easy, but Hollywood is all about trust, and I suppose trust is garnered in this case by stating the obvious. Next, I have an agent call as a reference, and he emails me again. “I hate these people. Why are you friends with them?” I can’t denounce my friends fast enough, I need this job.
The Big Director has a Producing Partner, Don, and by some small coincidence my brother was his roommate years ago, and he’s friends with my friend Fifi who looks like television’s Maude. I’ve never met Don, but when I call him to introduce myself and set a general meeting, he tells me he is going to Fifi’s dinner tonight. When I arrive, I’m seated next to him, and he’s cute, I guess, in a hazy, he’s-on-Quaaludes kind of way, or maybe it’s the fact that he works with a Director I have idolized for years, I can never tell out here why I am attracted to some people. We all have dinner and it’s pleasant enough, and somehow I end up in Don’s car as everyone carpools to Fifi’s for drinks. Don needs to stop and get his bathing suit, and, well, I am either about to give the best job interview of my life or the worst.
Don is very complimentary of my tiny frame and makes me swoon when he says he can’t find an ounce of fat on my body. I guess I can throw away those cans of Ensure in my car and stop trying to gain back the weight I lost in the mental hospital. Apparently Don has always liked skinny girls with light eyes and dark hair, and I think he gets a good look mostly at the top of my head as we stop by his house for his bathing suit and we end up staying for a bit…
We arrive at Fifi’s appropriately sheepish, well I am sheepish, Don seems about to pass out from Quaaludes. Fifi is outraged. You are trying to get a job, says angrily, why would you sleep with him, that’s just a bad idea… My life is a series of bad ideas, so I ignore her protests and get into the car with my new boyfriend Don at the end of the night to go home. Fifi has always been a little controlling, I have an unproven theory that she's secretly in love with me, and I'm certain her protests stem from that. As we are crossing Wilshire to get to my apartment, he falls asleep while driving and the car ends up on a curb. I guess it was the Quaaludes. Something tells me I have not found true love with this guy. I’m supposed to meet with him in the morning about the assistant job to the Big Director, and as I’m getting out of the car he mumbles almost incoherently, um, you probably don’t need to come in for that meeting. Calling him my new boyfriend may have been a bit premature, I think as I climb out of his Escalade, and I wonder if I impressed him so much with my free-wheeling nature that he wants to hire me, or if he thinks I’m a dirty whore and the job is gone.
When I get home, I have an email from the Big Director. I’m hired! It’s slightly aggravating that he tells me by email, but he’s eccentric and I’m desperate, and anyway it would have been awkward to get that call while in bed with his producing partner. His email is flattering, he tells me my graduate degree really impressed him, and he was crazy for the set of notes I did on the script he sent me. The salary is ten thousand dollars less than he was originally advertising, but that’s my fault for putting myself on sale. He also mentions that it's not necessary for me to come in and meet with Don, who had called him earlier in the evening to tell him we met at a party and he thinks I’m perfectly charming. Phew.
I resist the urge to write the Big Director back and reference his earlier email about my choice in friends, as I'm now aware that his producing partner is not only a total dog but probably a drug addict. I think it's best not to let him in on the events of this evening. Eventually, I'm sure, he will find out about my exploits, my brief jaunts in mental hospitals, my penchant for drama, and my horrible driving, but I am going to treat this like one of my few relationships - hope once he gets to know me he gets hooked on my crooked soul and forgives me my faults.
It’s 2 AM and I start work in the morning, but I can’t sleep I’m so excited. I send out an email to my family and friends about my new job, and cc Sarah, who apparently skipped our mutual friends’ husband’s book signing the other night because she was afraid to run into me. My new boss is a Big Deal, and even though it’s just assistant level, it’s all about access out here in Hollywood. And starting at 9 AM tomorrow morning, Sarah either better cross the Big Director’s name off her Director lists for all her projects, or think of a way for us to coexist in this tiny little industry.
My stalker calls a little after 3 AM, and I decide to answer and chat with him for a while because I’m nervous about rejoining society and this seems like a perfectly unhealthy way to end my day. I met him a few years ago at a party I threw for my friend Nelly’s birthday, he was a junior agent at the time, and he has been calling me late-night ever since. I never answer his calls, and he rarely leaves a message. I’ve only seen him in person one other time, in the Hamptons, and he has actually blown up quite a bit as an agent in the interim, one of his clients is one of the biggest show runners in TV. I tell him about my new job, and he breathes into the phone encouragingly. It occurs to me I’ve never heard him speak a full sentence, until now. As I’m hanging up the phone he says, “Your whole life is about to change.”
He’s right, I’m officially Back and everything is about to change -- I have a real Hollywood job, a weird new boss and a complicated romantic office entanglement. Yes, I took a few years off to refresh my spirit, but somehow as I watch the sun coming up and the Hollywood sign glowing off in the distance from my apartment window after watching my new boss' old movies for the rest of the night, it all feels familiar, and it's just as if I never left this town.
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