SEEMED LIKE A GOOD DEAL. Instead of writing about me I gave him my dead idea file, basically a little list of ideas I liked but couldn’t develop, and asked him to write about anything that sparkled with him. Here’s the result – great job Greg!

I’m not the best person to talk to about TV specifically – I’ve only written features – but I can speak to the state of the industry a little bit and maybe give you some general advice. Some of the things I’m about to say will make me sound like an asshole, and I can be, but it’s truth. I’m a baby writer – I’m repped by CAA, my first feature was on the 2008 Black List and it’s currently with producers.

1. The industry, mirroring the state of the American economy, is becoming income-polarized. Which is to say that there are a handful of writers that make millions/yr (the JJ Abramses of the world) a majority of others who are just hanging on and a middle that is being squeezed out. This is because every major studio is owned by a larger corporate master that ceaselessly looks to cut costs. This was not the case even ten years ago. The romantic age of screenwriting, where you could come to town with a killer spec and make a million dollars, is over. A very common deal now in features is called a “one-step” – instead of writing a bunch of drafts for a studio and making the WGA-mandated minimum of ~$100k, a young writer will be hired for one step, one draft, and they pay you $30k. Then, often, that’s as far as you go. Mid-career writers with $500k quotes are secretly working for WGA minimums. It’s not fun. The indignities keep coming – for example, The Walking Dead was a big hit on cable this year and after the fifth episode they announced they were firing all their staff writers and will be soliciting freelance script orders for the second season. That’s what happens on a HIT show.

2. In order to work in television, you have to come to LA. And if you’re going to come to LA, you have to give yourself five years to take your shot. I’ve been here almost ten years and have just started to get a little bit of traction. Think about it. I have a whole business on the side doing iOS software development – if I had been relying on writing to make a living, I’d be dead by now. So either you’re independently wealthy or you’re going to have to take a job that’s going to give you big chunks of time to work on your writing.

3. Your xxxxxx education means nothing. Nobody cares, it’s all about the quality of your work, ability to write fast, and relationships.

You should only embark on this course if you feel you will die if you don’t become a TV writer. If it’s about money, do anything else. If it’s about ego, open a restaurant and hire cute waitresses. If you’ve cleared that hurdle, I suggest you stay where you are and strategize about how you’re going to do this. Write a funny novel and get it published, it’ll get optioned and that will pave the way to getting a TV agent. Win a screenwriting competition or a fellowship. That’s my advice.

Best,
Geoff

“Stop,” I said urgently.

I sat down and watched the whole rest of the movie while Louis (I think realizing his friend was entering a powerful fugue) generously played Nintendo alone in the other room. The plot was meaningless and there were moments of dispensable parody, but what sang out was how all the characters, in their own ways, were obsessed with the woman, Elvira. She was quick, resistant to imposition, cheerfully selfish. What she wanted for herself was a captive, impersonal paying audience and by the end of the film she has it. She performs a burlesque in a nude bikini embroidered with black crystal spiders, twirling tassels on pasties.

Elvira was a crucible that burnt away my childhood and Elvira provided the physical prototype that shuts down my forebrain: pale ravenesses, stacked. Real girls aside, she has been in my heart since that summer. I know all there is to know about her, have seen every photo, every frame of film and even her unaired CBS pilot, which was passed to me through a network of fellow-travelers.

Before you email the cops, I should say that I have no interest in Cassandra Peterson, the actress who created and plays Elvira. She actually posed for a few magazines – skin rags – in the late 70s, and of course I have seen these images but they don’t wreck me the way her second self does. Cassandra is soft honey poured over sunshine but Elvira is sex and death in one, the face and torso of upbeat nihilism, the centerfold for a world without god.

We will never meet

I make no secret of wanting to write the screen adaptation of Gantz and that would be my starting point, using the freneticism of Crank 2 as a chassis for modern Japanese horror sci-fi.

SOOOOO

In the October 1988 issue there’s an article about the (beautiful, by the way) 1967 Topps set by M.L. Stapleton, a professor of English and Ovid scholar. As a way of teasing him about his field, Kiefer dropped in a sidebar of “Selected Reading: great works of literature that ought to be on the nightstand of every serious baseball-card collector:

Catch-22, Joseph Heller: You want Fleer packs because you can’t get them, but if you could get Fleer packs you wouldn’t want them. Takes place during World War II.

Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain: A boy, a river, a raft, and five vendor cases of ’88 Topps to sort through. Tom Sawyer makes a guest appearance as an insert card.

The Odyssey, Homer: An epic poem which follows Ulysses as he attempts to complete a 1952 Topps set. After 16 years of wandering through card shows he returns home and is only recognized by his dog and his paperboy, who is awful sore at him for not paying his subscription all that time.

Romeo And Juliet: He likes to collect cards and loves her. She loves him but can’t figure out why he always has bubble gum on his breath. Her parents hate his parents. He gets a Don Mattingly rookie in a wax pack and bloodshed erupts.

The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer: A group of pilgrims on their way back to the National check into a Motel 6, order pizza and start swapping stories. The Wife Of Bath tells what actually goes on when Bath is at the card show.

Remembrance Of Things Past, Marcel Proust: A veteran collector muses about the good old days, when cards were cheap yet no one bought them, and no one dared make money on the hobby they loved. And the way baseball cards used to smell! Seventeen volumes.

Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka: A collector wakes up on morning and finds he has turned into a cockroach. He rents table space at a card show, sells Fleer wax packs for $2 each, and begins sleeping in a cheese sandwich.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald: All the glitter of the Jazz Age, the fast cars and endless parties and beautiful women, turns shallow and rotten when Gatsby doesn’t get his shipment of wax cases.

Heart Of Darkness, Joseph Conrad: Kurtz won’t come down on a ’56 Topps Clemente, and the show site has no air conditioning.

Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte: The tempestous Catherine Earnshaw enters into a doomed and foolish marriage with the weak Edgar Linton and denies her true love, a 1975 Topps Ed Spezio.

Moby Dick, Herman Melville: A crazed captain (who looks and talks remarkably like Billy Martin) hunts down a great white whale who promised to hold a Pete Rose rookie for him.

Great Expectations, Charles Dickens: An ambitious young man spurns the virtues of his home when he discovers a rack pack with two Mattinglys showing. Giant snapping turtles eventually eat the pack, forcing him into an abject reunion with his family.”

Faithfully yours, &c.

The “&c.,” with a period and no space between the ampersand and the letter c. I understood what it meant from context – “and so forth” – but never its precise meaning or origin.

Anyway, I think I’ve figured it out. The ampersand symbol is, according to Wikipedia, a ligature for the letters “et,” which is “and” in Latin. So &c. spells out “etc.,” short for “et cetera!”

The voice belonged to a girl of perhaps nineteen who peered at him through a heavy, clipped pink fringe. Her eyes were thickly rimmed with kohl, her mouth neatly outlined in a vivid shade of orange that clashed perfectly with her hair.

Right. This is from Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children:

“Darlings! Welcome! And you must be Danielle?” Sleek and small, her wide eyes rendered enormous by kohl, Lucy Leverett, in spite of her resemblance to a baby seal, rasped impressively.

Kohl! Both books were published last year. Is there a store, or something, where the year’s prospective glimmering literary words hang on racks? Wouldn’t it be great if there were word consultants who issued palette forecast cards the way the color consultants do? Writers could pay with cigarette butts.

The lake house we stayed in as guests was hot and creaky. Everything was old. The house itself dated to the Centennial, the fans that sort of cooled us were 50s models with cast-iron bases, the freezer part of the refrigerator was so unbalanced and cold that it turned water to ice in half an hour. The Ellery Queen Digests in the downstairs bathroom were from 1978 and it was 1987. One of the stories was about a police captain who realizes he’s eating the leg of lamb his murder suspect used to kill her husband. “You thought you could get away with it, but I read,” he said, arresting her, which I thought was very funny at the time. The meat turned to ashes in his mouth.

My ‘vacation allowance’ was seventy-five cents a day, which was enough for a can of Sunkist at the store every day and a pack of baseball cards every other. I’d go there with K. and M. They’d buy candy I didn’t really like – the segmented Sky Bar, Candy Buttons. (“I like eating the paper on the back,” M. explained.) I realize now, checking the web, that the store must have had a deal with a Necco distributor.

We stayed two weeks, which felt like forever. I fell in love with K., silently, and took to writing notes to myself about it on oversized index cards which I cut down and hid among the rubber-banded stack of my new woodgrain-styled baseball cards.

And that’s how the trouble started: the written word as an emotional outlet, the instinctual move toward secrecy, girls, having to leave paradise. When we left we left with hand-filled glass bottles of spring water and rainbow trout on ice in our trunk. We stopped at a Howard Johnson’s on the way back. “That was a good trip,” my dad said. I ate my grilled cheese with one hand and tightened my grip on the pack of baseball cards in the other.

Syzrgy and Jorge are eating hot wings out of paper boxes.

SYZRGY
Dude, she viewed my profile on MySpace. Your ex, homebagel.

JORGE
You can’t see who’s viewed you on MySpace.

SYZRGY
You can if you’re really friends with Tom.

JORGE
Bullshit.

SYZRGY
I know his cousin – he gave him this backdoor API key and passed on to me. It doesn’t work all the time, but I mean, I’m positive about Virginie.

Jorge cracks a bone in two with his teeth and spits both halves back into the box.

JORGE
But you’re so ugly. You’re – god damn it.

SYZGRY
I’m sure she just clicked on me from your Friends page. We used to talk while you were out, right? About geopolitics. US military positions in the Pacific Rim and China and shit.

JORGE
This is stressing me out. She wouldn’t have gotten into that with you unless you made her a little nervous or she was attracted to you.

SYZGRY
Same thing.

Beat.

SYZGRY (con’t)
Look, just know that I would never do anything with her. Unless it were really easy, like really, really convenient. Like she’s on rollerskates and I’m in my car. And she’s like, hey, mind if I sit here in the passenger seat while I get off these rollerskates? I don’t even know why I got them, they’re so stupid. And then I’d be like why don’t you close the door? I think my air conditioning is getting out. And she’d close the door and be like sorry! And I’d be like look, Nini, do you need a ride somewhere? And we’d go back to her house, and she’d ask me in for a drink, like oh, hey, my uncle gave me a bottle of calvados I’m trying to get rid of? And then after several hours of deal-closing I’d get back in my car and have that hazy feeling you get when you’ve just slept with a girl you’ve never been with before, and it was good, and you’re wondering if you’ll ever see her again, thinking, well, what number was she? And just feeling great that you can’t pin it down exactly, like maybe she was eleven, or maybe twelve. And I’d call you, dude, I’d totally call you and tell you what had happened. And I’d take a shower but not put on deodorant and you’d come over and hit me, in the face, give me a real – shiner – and then we’d get high and drive around and I’d silently decide never to see her again.

Beat.

JORGE
You’re dead to me.

MUSIC: Loose Joints – Is It All Over My Face?

They wrestle.

Jorge is sitting in a booth with BRENDA, the girl with the dead father who may or may not have killed himself. They’re watching a frat guy hit on Mandy at the bar.

BRENDA
Look at her go.

JORGE
You think she’s into him?

BRENDA
No way. Look at her posture.

Brenda’s right; Mandy’s shoulders are pitched back away from the guy.

JORGE
Why doesn’t she just tell him she’s not interested?

BRENDA
Doesn’t he deserve a little conversation for trying?

JORGE
What?

BRENDA
When you hit on some girl at a bar-

JORGE
If.

BRENDA
If you hit on some girl at a bar, even if she’s not into you, wouldn’t you want her to be nice about it, talk a little?

JORGE
NO. Absolutely not. Why?

BRENDA
So your feelings aren’t hurt?

JORGE
Look, here’s my ideal world.

INT. THE DROWNED SCOTSMAN BAR & GRILLE – IDEAL WORLD – NIGHT
Twenty or so girls are standing in a semicircle around the entrance. Jorge walks in.

Eight of the girls raise green flags; eleven of the girls, red. Beat. The last undecided girl gives him a yellow.

CUT TO:

INT. THE DROWNED SCOTSMAN BAR & GRILLE – NIGHT

BRENDA
That would mean girls would have to carry around three little flags when they go out.

JORGE
Work with me here.