Don't Let Your Babies
Grow Up To Be Film Majors
We're standing in a chaotic but fast-moving line to get into the Diamond Anniversary Gala of the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television. We've arrived with plenty of time to spare; rumor has it they've overbooked the event by eight hundred people, and I'm prepared for the worst. There's a red carpet and a line of television cameras and reporters leading into the auditorium, but there's no reason for the flashbulb-shy to hang back: the carpet is bisected by a makeshift divider, and the non-famous among us are herded down the side hidden from the cameras. We glance through the divider and spot the elite: Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, Beau Bridges, that lovely boy from "Nip/Tuck," a couple of actresses from "The OC," gazelle-like in their heeled sandals.
It's been thirteen years since I moved to Los Angeles from Spokane to attend film school. The rapid-fire temptation is to claim they've been thirteen unlucky years, but that isn't fair, and it isn't true. Mostly isn't. My reasons for picking film school were sound, based upon the evidence I had on hand at the time. I wanted to write screenplays. I probably wanted to be famous, too, though that wasn't a wish that was verbalized. As soon as USC showed up on my radar, I knew it was right for me. I'd read my Bret Easton Ellis, I knew my "Less Than Zero," I knew about the University of Spoiled Children. I knew what I was in for.
Sort of.
My escort for the evening is an actor, in the emerging stages of his career path. He's new to this world, so he shares my sense of disassociation as we climb over elegant laps to take our seats in the balcony. He's out of his element too, which right now is a comfort. There are hundreds of people here. I recognize many actors, many directors, many producers, but I know no one, which is a shock. I start to get a little panicky as I look for friends, classmates, former roommates, some tangible proof that I spent four years at this place. Logic dictates there are others here from my graduating class, but if so, I can't find them.
Freshman year ended with the riots after the Rodney King verdict. USC, located smack in the middle of South Central Los Angeles, was surrounded by chaos. Our neighborhood burned, though the campus remained unscathed. That first night was spent sitting on the floor of my door room, lights off, away from the windows, listening to the gunshots, helicopters, sirens, hearing increasingly unbelievable reports about the violence outside.
The term ended right after that, finals canceled and forgotten amongst evacuations and hysteria. With friends and strangers, I shared a run-down house in Beverly Hills that summer, working at a movie theater and not quite paying rent. I'd take the bus home from work at night reeking of popcorn and an imitation butter-type substance. There were droves of roaches in that house, more than our fair share by Los Angeles standards, and fleas and dry rot. It was a long, hot summer. One of our housemates, a struggling actor, died of heat stroke; he went out jogging in the hills one hot July day and never came back. The Southern California sun became a lot less appealing around that time.
The gala is hosted by Will Ferrell. He introduces segments about the film school throughout the years, and I'm impressed by how well-done they are, how they hit the right notes of humor and sentiment, how it all goes off without a visible hitch. It's propaganda, but for once I don't care: this is where the film school is without peer. I'm most drawn to the segment about the 1980s, when the film school was riding high on George Lucas' star, gliding on the tail of the comet that was the "Star Wars" trilogy. USC in many ways never made it much past 1984, which was both the unofficial peak of the film school and an Olympic year in Los Angeles. The Coliseum is right across the street from campus, site of two Olympic Games and a gajillion student films.
My student films were abysmal. By every definition, creative and technical, they sucked. Part of this was a matter of economics: the more you spend on your student films, the better they look. I was poor; ergo, my films looked like crap. We were the last students to use Super-8 cameras and 8mm film, caught in the last gasp before digital video came along to make everyone's life ever so much easier. Film is expensive, and it all came out of pocket. We'd buy our film stock in three-minute reels. To produce a five-minute film, out of financial necessity I'd limit myself to two reels. That doesn't allow much room for retakes; pretty much ever scrap of film I shot made it into my finished product. Every scrap of film was not, it must be said, blindingly brilliant. I can't blame it all, or even most of it, on my lack of income; I could have tried harder. I should have worked at it more. I should have planned my films better, stretched myself thinner, drawn more inspiration from the mavericks who came before me, but by the time in our curriculum that we got around to making films, I was tired.
My program at the film school, the Filmic Writing Program, was always on the verge of cancellation. The creator of the program was canned right before my freshman year, and our time was marked by spells of interim directors and no directors. The program no longer exists, at least not in the form it did, and I can only feel good about that. I know my time at the film school was a time of flux, an anomaly, a dark vortex in the sunny 75-year history of the film school. Knowing that doesn't make anything right, or better.
We didn't have professors in Filmic Writing. We had instructors. Visibly drunk instructors, deliberately cruel instructors, power-mad instructors, and most of all, instructors who didn't know what the hell they were supposed to be teaching. They were all industry professionals of a sort, some with credits that garnered respect, some without. Some were so incompetent, so harmful, so outright malicious that it became immediately obvious no checks and balances were in place: old cronies were hired by cronies, and they remained, despite the damage they inflicted. There were good instructors too, even great ones, and they deserve to be named: the late, great Nelson Gidding, crabby and sharp and witty. Sharon Morrill, smart and savvy with a good eye for what makes an effective script. Howard Storm, a kind man who got to us late in the process and who was visibly saddened by how burnt-out and cynical we were. These were the exceptions. We grew neurotic about our work, the twenty-four of us who started the program together, and we grew bitter. It wasn't even a bonding experience, really; we were not united in our common struggle, or even our common misery. It brought out the worst in all of us. Complaints about the status quo were met with a stock response: This is how the Industry works. Yes. It is. Because every year, the film school spits out graduates into the Industry who believe this is how it works. And so the poison spreads.
The gala continues. Will Ferrell introduces Darth Vader. Darth Vader introduces George Lucas. George Lucas introduces Steven Spielberg. Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Robert Zemeckis, John Singleton, onstage one after another. The surreality builds: Debbie Allen, famed choreographer of bizarre dance sequences for the Academy Awards, introduces a bizarre rap number - yes, with dancers - about how way cool USC is. The Trojan Marching Band swarms the stage, crowding the orchestra, too many people for the relatively small space; it's jarring, because the band represents the other side of USC, the football-playing, Republican-voting, frat party-attending side that for the most part remains disconnected from the film school. Confetti drops from the ceiling and is blown into the balcony; in the stage lights it shimmers like gold, but when I catch a piece, it's white tissue.
Three days after graduation, I got called in to a big-name production company to meet with two up-and-comers, recent graduates themselves. They were producers of big-budget sci-fi films. They'd heard I'd written a good sci-fi script. They wanted to meet me. They were nice guys. I liked them. They liked me, I'd swear they liked me. I met with them, and never heard from them again. Later, their company produced one of the biggest bombs of the year, a near-legendary box office disappointment. The nice producers got the boot. I couldn't bring myself to gloat. They were nice, and nice people are a rare commodity.
I spent three years after graduation working on a well-received, decently rated cable television show. In 1997, we went to the Emmys. The non-televised portion of the Daytime Emmys, yes, but the Emmys nonetheless. We lost both of the awards we were up for: that year, the Outstanding Special Class Program went to "The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade." The writing staff was disgruntled, and rightly so: they lost the Outstanding Writing award to, er, "Jeopardy!", which is insulting no matter how you look at it. Later that year, I met up with a fellow Filmic Writing survivor while she was attending law school in San Francisco. Over bowls of good pasta, we traded horror stories about our instructors and our experiences. Her boyfriend and my sister listened, mesmerized, as the growing hysteria crept into our voices, as we laughed at things that weren't funny then and aren't funny now.
The reception following the gala is held in the courtyard in front of Doheny Library. It's a cool night, so I have cause to be grateful for the long coat I threw on over my little black dress in a sudden wild fit of insecurity about my upper arms. I'm unaccustomed to heels, and my four-inch spikes are creating divots in the lawn. The last time I gouged a lawn was on graduation day, in this very courtyard, where sixteen Filmic Writers graduated of the twenty-four that had started. I had fretted about looking out of place tonight, but we look just right. He's polished and sleek and poised; I'm plucked and pedicured and exfoliated. We're undeniably cute. We blend in, and yet we're out of place.
By 2000, I had moved on - moved down, as it turned out - to a worse job on a crappy show. Yes, but it was a crappy network show as opposed to basic cable, and therein lies all the difference, at least in terms of pay and perks and quality of craft services. It went out of production for the season, and I found myself unemployed. And there I stayed, unemployed, for what can only be considered a ridiculously long time. The following year, a respected, well-known Oscar-nominated screenwriter/director spotted me walking one afternoon. I have no car and I loathe the bus, so I walk great distances, inhuman distances, daily. New York-based, he was in town to work on a new film. Which, on the basis of seeing me waiting for the light on La Cienega Boulevard, he decided I was perfect for, despite my lack of acting experience or ability or, one presumes, talent. Variations on this story have been around longer than the studios themselves, with both legendary and seedy endings. Mine falls somewhere anticlimactically in the middle. There was an unreality about it that contradicted any suspicion he was after more than undiscovered talent: I'm brainy, damn it, and this sort of thing doesn't happen to brainy girls. Except when it does. To this day I still haven't figured this one out; all I can say for sure is this: at some point he stopped calling. So, no film stardom for me. This cannot be interpreted as any kind of loss to the film industry.
I went on a series of interviews for a series of production jobs I didn't want and didn't get. I attended a conference for screenwriters run entirely by big stinky assholes. The conference consisted of a number of seminars conducted by overly-smug filmmakers, followed by a grisly musical chairs-style marathon pitch session. These things fill up fast, so I only pitched to one production company, represented by a couple of nice kids. They liked me. I liked them. I gave them my best pitch for my best screenplay. It wasn't the right project for them; I knew it and they knew it, and the politely-worded rejection email I got a couple weeks later was unnecessary but nice, and I think well of them for bothering. It was a moot point anyway; by that stage, I knew I would never sell a screenplay, in the way that I know I will never win the lottery: it is not in my cards. I wrote my first novel in the month following the conference. Interesting a publisher in a novel, I thought at the time, couldn't possibly be as difficult and draining as hocking a script.
We're drinking too much too quickly. It's a full bar and free, all free, the world ours for the asking. The food is passed on silver trays, and in this as in everything this evening the film school has done itself proud: itty bitty servings of raw tuna, mushroom ravioli, shrimp served in martini glasses. He and I are an island, undisturbed and unmolested by the crowd around us. About the only one who pays us any attention is the photographer, who observes us carefully before he concludes we're no one he need bother with and goes in search of bigger fish. A bigger fish is standing right next to us, in fact – John Singleton, handsome, smiling, radiating success, and this makes me pause. Singleton was a Filmic Writer as well, and as much as I claim the film school failed me, it cannot be said to have failed him. Perhaps he didn't allow it to fail him. His obstacles were greater than mine, and yet he triumphed his first time out of the gate. Luck? Probably not.
In 2002, I started working a desk job at Paramount, thus ending a long drought of unemployment. In desperation, I got the job through the aid of a childhood friend from Spokane. So much for the much-hyped USC network. The year at Paramount was long and unhappy, salvaged only by one fantastic party to promote the DVD release of "Grease" and "Footloose" and "Flashdance," a fete designed expressly to speak to my Eighties-geek soul. At one point, I had a watermelon martini in one hand and a Pink's hotdog in the other, standing beneath a building-sized poster of Kevin Bacon while Duran Duran music blasted over the studio lot; there are worse ways to spend a Tuesday night. Eventually, John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John took the stage to perform a rousing medley of "Grease" tunes, but as far as I'm concerned that was just icing.
I went back to USC for career counseling provided by the film school. The counselor told me that I had a strong résumé, that I'd positioned myself well, that I was on the right track, and that all I needed was to learn to network, and to keep the job at Paramount. I was gone by January.
Bored with circling the lawn, we collect our goodie bags to give our hands something to do other than hold our wine glasses. A baseball cap, a commemorative copy of Variety, a bottle of tangerine juice; with a touch of jaded sophistication, I can say that I've been to events with better goodie bags. I also am given a small velvet pouch that contains a key that might unlock a jewelry case at Harry Winston holding a bracelet Halle Berry wore at the Oscars; the odds of winning really aren't that bad – 1:1200, which might be better than the odds of selling a screenplay – but I know I won't have the nerve to go in there to try my key, me with my Prada bag patched with duct tape and my Payless shoes with the unevenly-worn soles.
Wine has been jostled onto my coat. By the time he says, "Any time you want to go is fine with me," I know we've stayed too long.
Publishing a book, it seems, is not noticeably simpler or fairer or less traumatic to the nervous system than selling a screenplay. The rejections flow in a steady tide. A rejection arrived this week that hit like a body blow. Once again, I had lulled myself into optimism: it was the right book for the right editor at the right publishing house. And yet, no. If it had been yes, then damage would have been undone, confidence would have been restored, a playing field would have been leveled. Instead, once again, it's time for new strategies, new ideas, new query letters. Fortunes turn on a dime here. Even, presumably, mine.
We're walking across campus, away from the fading strains of John Williams themes, toward the parking structure. It's late, but there are still plenty of college kids up and about, participating in timeless late-night college kid activities: skateboarding, hacky-sacking, hanging out. One of the skateboarders approaches and asks us with undue politeness about the festivities in the courtyard. Film school shindig, we tell him. Was it fun, he wants to know. There are too many ways to answer that. I say the first thing that pops into my brain: "Will Ferrell was there." It seems to be the magic phrase. He grins. "Cool," he says, or says the equivalent in the lingo of the day, and skates off.
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