Why the Hell Would You Do That?

Midlife Folly, Midlife Renewal

Almost exactly five years ago, I moved to Pasadena, California from Evanston, Illinois with Adam, my domestic partner. This physically challenging, expensive, and potentially foolish relocation was my doing—I’d been thinking for many years about moving to the West Coast, having lived all my life in the Midwest, with the exception of three years in D.C. and one year in France during college.

What I hoped to do in L.A. was write for film and TV, and as we packed up our apartment, and subsequently filled a couple of containers that would be trucked out west ahead of us, I believed I’d eventually figure out a way to earn some part of my living from scriptwriting. I knew it would take a while to get any kind of foothold in the industry—at the very least a few years, but I had witnessed other fiction writers I knew doing it, some of them very successfully: Patrick Somerville, Tom Perrotta, Karl Taro Greenfeld, Matthew Klam, among others.  

All XYs, you’ll note—I hoped there was room for an XX (me, specifically!) in a writers’ room somewhere.

(Yeah, right, dream on! some of you are doubtless saying.)

(Taken in Vail, CO, one of our cross-country pit stops, late May 2018)

I knew I was a cliché but didn’t care—everyone is a cliché in some way—what we want from our lives doesn’t appear to vary too much from one melancholy, yearning heart to the next, based on my lifelong, informal study of friends, family, and frenemies.

Once we arrived in L.A. and unpacked our scratched and bruised furniture and mangled bicycles (I don’t advise the container method of moving your household cross-country if you can afford a more traditional option), I enrolled in a number of entertainment industry-related classes: late-night comedy writing, improv, screenwriting, and stand-up comedy. I read and wrote one script after another. I wrote on my own and with a partner. I wrote pilots, features, treatments, and sketches and subsequently paid a lot of money I really could not afford to be frittering away on entry fees for script contests and notes from screenwriting services. I hired a career coach to advise me on breaking in somewhere, anywhere (not worth it).

As for the script/logline/pitch contests (there are hundreds, literally, each year), I was told one of the best ways to snag the industry rainmakers’ attention is to win a big one, e.g. the Austin Film Festival’s, the PAGE, or the Nicholl. But if you do win, it’s very unlikely your script will ever be produced (which of course no one administering these contests will say). It could lead to you getting a manager though and eventually selling something else.

I picked up a few accolades with these contests, and one of my feature scripts was a Nicholl semifinalist. The Nicholl is administered through AMPAS, which also houses the Oscars—there were nearly 8,000 scripts in that year’s competition, and my entry was among the last 175 (185? I can’t remember) scripts in the running. I heard from a couple of agents and producers after the list of Nicholl script titles and loglines was published, but in the end, nothing came of it. Networking and dogged persistence (and luck)—that’s how it happens for most writers in Hollywood.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my film-related aspirations in recent days. I’m in the WGA, which  you likely know is presently striking. I haven’t sold one scripted word yet, but I managed to become a WGA associate member because of the Nicholl semis and by writing and directing a short film last year. (Thank you to fellow novelist—All the Girls in Town—and erstwhile Days of Our Lives cast member Staci Greason, and to Adam, for acting in my film).

(Gratuitous great movie photo: Ethan Hawke & Julie Delpy in Before Sunset)

I remember talking to a TV writer in 2018 a couple of months after moving to California. He had been earning a very respectable living for more than 25 years writing TV scripts for various network and streaming services. One of the first things he said to me was, “Why did you want to come out here just to have your heart broken?”  

That certainly made me pause. This man was a success by most Tinsel Town metrics. He’d worked steadily for more than two decades as a writer here. He had a nice home and a pretty big life. He had a manager and an agent; producers, showrunners, and other Hollywood folks returned his emails and phone calls.

But there was such sadness and fatigue in his voice. I don’t remember what I said in response, but it was probably something like, “I’ve been writing books for a long time and not earning much of a living at it. I know it’ll be hard, but I’ve loved movies for as long as I’ve been able to watch them, and I want to try.” 

He was a nice guy—he understood my reasons, but he also knew that even if I did manage to sell a script or get hired for a writers room, I’d eventually end up feeling shortchanged in some way: You write a great script and sell it, but it doesn’t get made. Or else it does get made and they desecrate it. Or you write a lot of good to great scripts and none of them sell. You’re not commercial enough. You’re not original enough. You’re too original. You’re too late—someone else just sold a film like that one…

Adam asks me almost every week, “Are you still glad we moved out here?”

Some days I’m sure I’m glad. Other days, I’m not sure.

But I do know that in 2018, I really, really needed a change. I was 46, spinning my wheels career-wise (my last two books had sold five years earlier, and I was having no luck selling new novel manuscripts), and with Trump in the White House, it felt like the world was, on the bleakest days, about 3 minutes from blowing up.

It was time to move, to chase my dream (foolhardy or not) of writing for Hollywood and living in a warm climate. I’d done my time in the land of blizzards and swampy summer humidity. I knew I couldn’t stay in our little apartment for much longer without losing my mind. We’d kept our overhead low and lived modestly. We didn’t have kids. We didn’t even have pets. I could take my various part-time teaching and admin jobs with me. That’s one of the few good things about the gig economy—some of these jobs are portable.

Since the pandemic began, the great communal and emotional experience of sitting in a theater with strangers, of watching with delight and suspense a picture on the big screen, seems to be on the verge of extinction. I don’t know if it’ll ever again be like it was before mid-March 2020, but I hope so.

(Louisville, CO, late May 2018)