I once heard my boss give ridiculously inane and completely unnecessary notes to an Academy Award-winning screenwriter.
This was back in a previous life of mine, when I toiled for 16-hours a day working in all the glitz, glamor, hell, and brimstone of Hollywood. I spent 2/3 of my waking hours making other people rich and other people famous and helping others on their path to realizing their own Hollywood dream.
Which was fine with my because, by the end of my run in Hollywood, I realized that the dream was only a thin illusion and that most people in the industry were unhappy in their friendships, relationships, and their own skins.
But there were days when I thought I should walk off my job, out of of the door, and out of the industry forever. (I’d usually end up staying.)
The day I heard my boss give a ridiculously unhelpful note to an Academy Award-winning writer was one of those days.
In my job, I worked in development. To those who don’t know, ‘development’ is the term for taking a script or a book or a newspaper article and turning it into a movie. To those who do know, ‘development’ is an old English word for “fucking up the original source every step of the way.” (We’ll use the latter concept as a working definition for the rest of this story.)
I remember the day clearly. It was a Monday and I was in my office on the studio lot. We had received the final draft of the script from the writer the previous Friday. My boss took the script home to read and make notes on for the weekend.
Now, this writer was one of the most incredible, honorable, courteous, upstanding men I ever had the pleasure of working with. Months later, when the writer and our company parted ways, I was the only one who received a ‘thank you’ note from him. I’ve kept it to this day.
The project he wrote was based on a marginally interesting and totally obscure book about an even less interesting and more obscure figure in the Civil War (who, by the way, was a confederate soldier. Tough sell).
The script was incredible, but the movie would be unremarkable because–well–the life of this soldier was unremarkable and the original book was unremarkable and the battles and conflict in this man’s life were unremarkable. But the script was solid.
The weekend comes and goes and Monday morning arrives. The man who lived in the rural area of Northern California was heading down to Los Angeles for meetings. He drove (he never flew) and he did not own a cell phone (nor was he ever interested in buying one).
The day starts with a phone call from him looking for my boss. I tell him that she’s unavailable. To most, ‘unavailable’ means that a person is not accessible. In Hollywood, ‘unavailable’ means the person is avoiding you as though you were Death coming for them during the Great Plague.
He understands. It’s early. She’s not in yet. The man then proceeds to call me at every rest stop and gas station between Los Angeles and Northern California. And each time–under strict orders from my boss–I have to tell him that she’s “in a meeting,” “not available,” or “just left for lunch.” With each deflection, I can hear him becoming more and more frustrating before he finally yells at me, “You guys are harder to reach than the fucking KGB!”
After successfully avoiding this writer all day, my boss finally gets him on the phone…where she proceeds to make “suggestion” after “suggestion” on each page.
I was listening to the call in disbelief and I thought to myself, “Now, I only understand that it is one more than you have, but this guy does have an Oscar.”
That was the day that I heard my boss give crappy and unhelpful notes to an Academy Award-winning screenwriter. All in an attempt to justify her own professional existence.
Can you see why I left the industry?
A couple of years ago, I heard that the whole of Yellowstone National Park is actually just an ginormous caldera to a super volcano.
Picture it: A mild Saturday afternoon. I’m lying on the couch, fighting off a nap. I’m flipping through the channels before landing on Discovery, NatGeo, or History. Great! A documentary on Yellowstone, I think. I often refer to Yellowstone as “Nature’s Disneyland.” I’m fascinated by the place and have warm memories of family visits. I nestled more deeply into the couch and settled in to a nap.
Until I heard the ominous voice of an announcer explain the horrific truth: all the geothermal activity underneath–the geysers, the hot springs–signal the reality that Yellowstone is a slumbering giant waiting to explode. Gulp. And like any disaster movie: panic and paranoia ensued.
It’s a super volcano. It erupts, like, every 600,000 years. And the last eruption…was 640,000 years ago. Yeah, see the comment about panic and paranoia.
Apparently, if this volcano erupts, we’re all screwed. The last eruption (640,000 years ago), brought the human species to the brink of extinction (Thank you wikipedia for that quote).
Sometimes I hear the harsh realities of the natural world and I shrug them off. Hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes: each equally terrifying, but each ultimately manageable. At the end of the day, the majority of people who experience these natural disasters survive. A super volcano? That’s not Dante’s Peak or Inferno. That’s on the magnitude of Deep Impact or Armageddon. We’re talking immediate deaths of millions within the very aptly named death zone. Scientists would expect the demise of millions more via suffocation because the tiny particles of ash would get into your lungs and cause internal bleeding. We’re talking about nuclear winters.
Yeah. Panic. Paranoia.
Sometimes I just do not need to hear about the slumbering giants…that have snoozed and overslept by 40,000 years.
When I was younger, I spent the night at my friend’s house, and I awoke at 2:00 a.m. and I heard his parents screaming at each other in an all out verbal battle.
I used to love going to Mike Thompson’s house to sleep over. His mom was especially cool. She would let us do things and get away with things that I could never do or get away with at home. She would let us stay out running around the neighborhood well past midnight. If we were too rowdy and too rambunctious, she would approach us with matching rolls of unwrapped toilet paper and tell us to “go burn off some steam” as she opened the front door.
The following morning the neighbors could not have imagined that their house was teepeed as a result of an idea entirely born and sanctioned in the mind of Mrs. Thompson.
It was a fun house to spend my childhood sleepovers at.
One night, though, it was not so fun. Mr. Thompson worked the graveyard shift and was often out of the house. When he was home, he was a shadowy and mysterious figure. We’d always have to tip-toe around the house and be quiet not to wake him before he needed to get up for his night job. One night, Mr. Thompson and Mrs. Thompson had been drinking. And they had been talking. And then they started fighting–in the very living room that Mike an I were sleeping in.
I woke up mid-fight and heard Mrs. Thompson allege that Mr. Thompson had beaten her. She talked about broken collarbones and fractured elbows. She talked about the excuses she made when she wore the casts. She even referenced birthday parties and friendly gatherings where these excuses–these lies–were told.
They were yelling at each other–oh man, were they yelling.
I woke up in the middle of it and tried to figure out what was going on. But at eight or nine or ten, I knew better. So I continued to pretend to sleep. And I concentrated on not moving a muscle. And I focused so hard on keeping my eyes shut.
I was scared. I was confused as to why they would fight while I was over. I was confused why my friend didn’t wake up. I was confused that Mr. Thomspon had hit Mrs. Thompson.
I don’t remember how I fell back asleep that night. But I know that I did. I don’t remember when the Thompsons stopped arguing, but I know that they must have.
This incident happened over two decades ago and this is the first time that I have ever talked about the night I heard the Thompsons fighting.