Julie Goes to Hollywood

What Not to Do When You Meet a Rolling Stone

2024-01-11T21:00:00.000-08:00

I was introduced to one of the Rolling Stones at a dinner party. Apparently he's the fifth one, though he's not skinny, old, or even English, so I'm not sure he really counts. Also he didn't have a supermodel on his arm, but rather a perfectly lovely conceptual artist around my age.

We talked local architecture, earthquakes and heart health, but I can't say I found him all that fascinating. Hollywood parties are about figuring out who has what you might want, and I'm just not looking for a backstage pass. I gave up champagne with the rest of my illusions, weed is something to be whacked in the garden, and I can put together my own late night snack table, with or without glutens.

What I am after is a lasting connection. To my mind, that means either a very big job offer or a request for my hand in marriage. Either or, I'm really not picky.

Imagine my reaction to a second pair of party guests visiting the same home on another occasion. He's a network executive credited with saving a certain ensemble sitcom from implosion after the cast created a mafia. She's his wife. They met on a bus tour of the Holy Land shortly after her starter marriage to some lesser specimen fell apart. "We were just friends," she said of the gem at her side in four brilliant words, translating from the Yiddish, "no chuppah, no shtuppah."

I could not decide which of them I loved more. He was a king. She was a goddess, and also a lawyer, which is a pretty cool combination in any town. Forging a friendship with either half of this power couple could only mean promising introductions and the sharing of well-guarded secrets. I would finally learn where to winter in Maui when Aspen gets snowed in! Oh, the laughs we'd have about the time I was single and on a budget.

Wouldn't you just know I'd be stuck on the far side of a huge table beside some ass yakking at me about his political opposition to Twitter. "All that 'liking' and 'following'?" he offered up like a stock tip. "Corporate conspiracy, look into it."

A delightful elderly lady on my other side suddenly began gushing about having found not one but two great dresses on sale somewhere for sixty-nine bucks each. Then again, she may have been visiting another era, since she was said to be suffering from advanced dementia, but given the right cut and fabric her enthusiasm made perfect sense to me.

This is around when I caught Tweetboy checking a baked salmon for extra eyeballs. With the steely determination of a Nazi hunter, he laid out the inevitable world domination of Norway's fish farmers, snapping a picture for his files. "Be afraid," he said. "Be very afraid." I definitely was.

The evening was over before I could reel in either one of my own catches. I vaguely remember a desperate attempt to pull focus with an off-color joke about some sexually ambiguous filmmaker, followed by a weak request to pass the potatoes.

I later reached out to the husband on Linkedin, though he has yet to accept. Like it or not, there is a food chain in Hollywood. It must be respected, even after you make your way into the right parties -- where rambling old ladies understand you completely, and rock legends are dismissed with the full-fat cheese, and the only thing certain your future holds is looking back at you from a beautifully polished silver platter.

Is That a Pipe Bomb in Your Pocket or Are You Just Glad to See Me?

2024-01-11T16:18:00.000-08:00

When people hear I’m a former travel writer, they often ask if ever I feared for my personal safety while abroad. Sometimes I nod my head yes, somberly exhibiting a burn scar on my left hand that I actually earned as a toddler reaching into the oven for a grilled cheese sandwich. In truth, I was not one of those flak jacket-wearing Wolfe Blitzer types reporting in a fetal position from some Baghdad bunker, but rather a pampered feature writer contributing to any number of breathless travel magazines you might leaf through then not buy at Barnes & Noble. I wrote about honeymoon hotspots for a bridal magazine and island life for one about pleasure boating. I compared cruises and tours for a sponsored publication mailed free of charge to travel agents; updated hotel reviews and restaurant listings in best-selling travel guidebooks; published sweeping personal reports, complete with original photography, for Sunday newspaper travel sections.

From time to time, though, I would in fact find myself covering an area that could best be described as, well, totally unstable. Following the bad press surrounding a civil war, political coup or loosely organized uprising, whatever regime left standing will quickly invite in the travel media in hopes of restoring foreign tourism. If the host committee were to jump the gun, so to speak, the first sign of trouble would be my reception at the airport by a heavily armed “Tour Guide” with a waxed black moustache and a nervous laugh bearing the news that the treaty hadn’t technically been signed yet. “Not to worry,” he’d assure me, reaching across my lap to lock my side of the armored Jeep after muttering something indecipherable into his wrist watch. “We dance on their graves tonight!”

Reviewing a string of falafel stands in Jerusalem, I dodged a pipe lobbed by a Palestinian kid of no more than twelve. At a Santiago naval station, the cutest little Chilean sailor you ever saw knocked the camera out of my hand with the butt of a machine gun when I tried to take his picture. On my own in gang-infested Kingston, Jamaica, I was advised never to publicly wear purple and red—or was it green and yellow? I do recall sleeping with my dresser barricaded in front of my hotel room door against a staffer wearing a hateful look and a passkey around his neck.

Perhaps I best remember the Balkan Mystery Girl who cornered me in the ladies’ room of a Dubrovnik restaurant to tell me she had incontrovertible proof that the recent local plane crash death of then U.S. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown hadn’t been an accident. “This is big story, very big,” she whispered off my blank look. “You are reporter, yes?”

“But I’m here writing about your potato pancakes.”

Though I never pursued her claims, the encounter changed my life forever as the catalyst for my becoming a screenwriter. I could no longer fight the desire to make up stories about people and places far more interesting than those I’d been chasing around the world. Within the ancient walls of the Old City, I actually found Syd Field at an English language bookstore. Taking this as a sign, I got down to work right there on my first feature script—about an embittered correspondent and a beautiful refugee fighting over a Miami home each believe she’d inherited from a dead photographer who owed them both.

After nearly ten years of fighting my own uphill battles here in town, this morning my Showrunner Friend Who Wants More e-mailed me that a Big Producer Pal of hers is looking for an assistant. Call me a prima donna, but not in the farthest reaches of my imagination can I picture opening someone else’s screening invitations and free CD offers all day while tethered to their desk by a headset. Knowing that plenty of people spend their days tending to the minutia of others doesn’t make it seem any less impossible to someone who once had to overnight her passport to Washington so extra pages could be installed. As for my personal work ethic, the reason I can write fourteen, sixteen hours at a clip is because I don’t even hear interruptions. At this kind of place, I’d finally look up from my computer screen and be like, “I’m sorry, what was all that noise about your coffee?”

While my friend feels certain this job would endear me to people who might eventually offer more meaningful work, knowing very well how hard I’d suck at it I’d have better survival chances combining red with purple in Jamaica. Though my screenwriting would surely suffer were I to return to the demands of journalism—especially if it meant being constantly on the road, or leaving town altogether—on days like this it all seems so inevitable. Another thing they won’t tell you in film school is if you can’t do something you love, at least do something you’re good at. -- Originally published October 13, 2005

Djulie Unchained

2024-01-10T17:30:00.000-08:00

Luckily there are no rules in Hollywood, or I definitely would have broken one by telling Darren Star he should be reading my blog. I also told him I would be referring to him here only as "Mr. Bigger" which was both a bald-faced lie and not terribly clever, simultaneously breaking two more rules that don't exist in the span of six seconds, give or take.

In my defense, the chances of Darren Star actually reading my blog aren't much better now than him doing so had I never spoken to him at all. He has people and minions who have people and minions of their own to not read my blog, so I can't imagine him wanting to not want to read it himself. Then again, if there's one thing I've learned about Hollywood it's that anything can not happen at any time.

We were at a Writer's Guild event where famous writers gather to tell the rest of us how that happy event comes to pass, and apparently it has something to do with following your instincts, except when it doesn't. Also it's about luck and timing, except when it isn't, and at the end of the day, it's about story and character except when it's about other stuff. One of these is being in the right restaurant at the right time with the right network president prepared to pitch a high concept medical procedural. "It's not a who done it, it's a what done it," you are supposed to lob across the table with the bread rolls. "The germs are the bad guy," you should add. You might want to use both your napkin and the finger bowl at this point, though both are optional.

This was apparently how "House' was sold, and though I never saw "House," I am impressed by the fact that the TV show, rather than say the United States House of Representatives, comes up first when you Google the word, with or without quotes. I didn't even stay to hear the "Breaking Bad" guy speak, since I never never saw that, either, and the sum of what I know about both series is 1) They are about guys, 2) They win awards and 3) None of this has anything to do with me.

Darren Star, on the other hand, created an iconic show about four separate and fully-formed women, all around my age. One of them is a writer. Who writes about sex. And the city. He created Melrose Place even as I lived all that right here in these pages. He gave the world Beverly Hills, 90210; I got a parking ticket there meeting with an agent who never signed me. On top of all that, he's a fellow Bruin, who told at least three anecdotes I'd heard or read elsewhere, including in the pages of a UCLA doctoral thesis around his work.

Really, there comes a point when failure and success are just a hair's breadth away from one another, and there is something incredibly liberating about being the one without a single thing to lose.

"Darren Star to produce irreverent new comedy based on unknown blog discovered en route to the men's room!" Variety would declare once we get our cast-contingent pilot pick-up after a lucrative network bidding war. "Not That Much Sex in This City," Nikki Finke would sniff come awards season, in the event it ever becomes legal for her to live snark the red carpet again. Oh, the early morning quips the big deal producer and his overweight sensation will trade with Al Roker about our kooky friendship that would have never happened but for my ~~inappropriate stalking~~ old school Hollywood moxie.

I told Darren Star I had no idea why I'd shown up to this event, which was probably the nuttiest thing possible to have shared, being the painful truth and all. I write unproduced features and I write them alone at Starbucks, where we screenwriters don't even look at one another, let alone tweak pages meant to be shot in the morning while simultaneously knifing one another in the back.

"The name's Djulie," I wish I'd added over a shoulder, blowing on an imaginary six shooter and walking off into the sunset with my head held high. "The D is silent, hillbilly." He would have forgotten it either way, but he might have had someone who was anyone call the police first, and you can be dead sure one or all of them would most certainly not check out my blog.

Diary of a Mad Screenwriter

2024-01-02T17:00:00.000-08:00

One of the best ways to tell if you're a real writer is you don't feel normal unless specifically engaged in the act or writing, which is to say hardly ever. Certainly there are days when I spend virtually all of my waking minutes working, but this only happens once the characters have sprung forth fully formed from the bare bones of my story. At that point, they're pretty much running the show until they've dictated every last one of their assorted wants and needs, which I'm expected to serve like a scullery maid between brief and fitful bouts of sleep.

What would seem to most people a disturbing psychiatric diagnosis indeed is in fact the writer's version of an overall sense of well-being.

It's hard to explain all of this to "regular" people, such as my brother, although in his case I use that term loosely. He chooses to live on some tiny little island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where they frequently run out of important staples such as diet Coke and cheese. To my mind this is where they ship guys named Chuzzleworth to go away and die in Dickens novels.

He returns stateside only occasionally to buy electronics at Wal-Mart, complain about the traffic and question the veracity of this supposed little Hollywood career of mine spanning the better part of two decades now. "I've got something going with Forest Whitaker," I'll report brightly. "The Forest Whitaker. That guy."

"Call me when the funding comes through," he'll sniff. Somehow convinced I'm supported by space aliens who drop little wads of cash around the garden for me to dig up on the full moon, he's equally mystified by this blog. "I don't see the point," he said during a recent visit. "What kind of writer writes for free?"

Did he really not know that some of Mark Twain's most memorable work comes from his journals? Oscar Wilde wrote his diaries behind bars, as did Anne Frank, Nelson Mandela, Václav Havel and pretty much every Russian with a pencil. To translate the tenacity of the genre in a more familiar language, I considered offering up some free porn from the memoirs of Anaïs Nin, Henry James and Simone de Beauvoir.

I settled on hitting him with the monetary potential around getting noticed in Hollywood. "If you build it, they will come," I said.

"No they won't," he scoffed. "Get out of the fairy tale."

Though most of our conversations end with these last words of advice, part of me had to wonder if he was right. I've been "building it" my entire life -- hellbent on getting into the fairy tale. This is where my Oscar awaited, along with my beloved Prince -- the artist, not some idiot on a horse -- eager to compose the imaginary soundtrack on the imaginary movie of my imaginary life. "I'm just creating an online repository of my work," I sighed.

"Why didn't you say so?" He returned to his laptop, presumably to scan some real work by real writers paid real money to put it there. Maybe I should be writing Wal-Mart ads instead of this nonsense. Nah. It looks like a full moon tonight, and the aliens are bound to deliver.

Search-Friendly "Scarlett O'Hara" (Make That "Foul-Mouthed Buxom Belle")

2024-01-01T11:09:00.000-08:00

Here in Hollywood, it used to be that getting someone to read a kicky little sitcom spec was far easier than eliciting a look at your challenging drama pilot -- or an intricately woven feature of all things. Even meriting the coveted weekend read, a half-hearted once over by the pool, wouldn't amount to somebody who was anybody cracking your actual script, but rather absently skimming a half-page of coverage. This unschooled opinion came courtesy of some twit on break from cheerleading camp whose dad was supposedly Spielberg's dentist. While they always wanted you to think content was king, the truth is nobody but your mother ever got that far.

Making matters worse, Mark Zuckerberg happened. In an age when every semi-literate with a pre-paid cell phone has a big story to share from moment to moment, even a young Truman Capote couldn't hope for much beyond a few limp "likes" for an intriguing status update. "Had craziest breakfast at Tiffany's. Pics on Instagram @hollygolightly."

It's been awhile since I've sought attention for myself as a writer, since I was getting far more of that than I wanted at work. I'm not sure how to get the rest of Hollywood excited about my newfound freedom, since they were never all that interested in the first place.

The last script I waved around in hopes of joining a network writing staff was a brilliant little episode of Frasier. "The best Niles-Daphne patter I have ever taken a really quick buzz through," gushed the up and coming William Morris agent who knew my sister in college. Oh, the fruity cocktails and frothy praise we girls shared that once before she abruptly stopped returning my calls.

I ultimately left it to my Very Supportive Manager to set up studio meetings that went nowhere and meant nothing after some big shot loved the breakthrough sample he never downloaded. Last time I heard from Supportive, she was urging me to online register for some live interactive social media short-form digital forum. Yeah, I had no idea what she was talking about, either.

Which brings me to last night, when I found myself trolling Twitter to promote my work here in 140 characters or less. I've always been good with a headline, so I quickly put to use my "leg up" over the other "girls girls girls." It turns out these particular search terms will perform far better than something like "clear advantage in the field" when Googled by some perverted studio executive. Oh, I am not above garnering the wrong kind of attention. After all, Hollywood heavyweight Mason Novick was admittedly trolling for porn when he happened upon "Candy Girl" by Diablo Cody -- the suggestively pseudonymous writer blog of a part-time Wisconsin stripper who later won an Oscar for Juno.

So enjoy the super naughty pics pics pics of the ultra booby hot hot hotties you'll find right here here here. Julie gives it away free free free, you nasty boys boys boys, so you may expect an all-new and so so sexy sorority sister live cam visit extra fresh every day.--Originally published May 3, 2013

Pulp Fiction

2014-06-08T23:09:00.000-07:00

Aleks never read my screenplays. In our early days—seventeen of them, to be exact, between our meeting and our wedding—he was reading Charles Bukowski in paperback. While I thus mistook my future husband for a hard-bitten intellectual belying the fragile spirit of a poet, the better description might be "blathering drunkard."

Aleks had been a dog trainer during his mandatory service in the Yugsolavian National Army. He skipped the country on a seaman’s visa before the outbreak of its civil war, when his duel ethnicity would have forced him to pick a side. We met one New Year’s Eve aboard a cruise ship, where I was a rookie journalist researching a travel guidebook and he was tending the midnight buffet in a white dinner jacket. He gave me a wink and a sprinkle of extra walnuts. I liked the way he said the word, as though it began with a “v” and finished with a “shh.”

The next time I heard from him he’d been fired and deported following a fistfight with a roughneck pastry chef from the wrong side of France. He only got as far as Frankfurt, since the Serbs had bombed the airport in his hometown of Dubrovnik. He hoped I’d come help him either escape back into Croatia or use my journalist credentials to return him to the U.S. I was half-way across the Atlantic before concluding, mysteriously, that wedlock was the best plan of attack.

I brought my surprise husband home to Miami, where he joined Mickey Rourke’s back alley boxing gym, discovered illegal drugs and struggled mightily with the pitfalls of capitalism, such as holding down a job. By night, he worked as a bouncer for actor Sean Penn, who then owned a South Beach bar called, ironically, Bash. Intervening during a bar fight one night, Aleks was seriously injured, nearly losing an eye.

He gave me half the court settlement in our divorce, and I used it to move to Hollywood and become a screenwriter. Aleks went to Marseilles to join the French Foreign Legion, but was deemed too large—and I’m guessing too often snockered—for covert operations. Last I heard he was in Dubai bodyguarding a Saudi sheik

All these years later, people often wonder why I never write about him, my real life hero with so many oversized flaws. Back in film school, when I mentioned the details in an e-mail to Obi Wan Kenobi, my legendary structure professor wrote back, “Is this fiction?” The trouble with writing your life, as Mr. Bukowski might have agreed, is even a fine, aged truth never goes down as whisky smooth as the lies.

Posted August 27, 2006
Hollywood, CA

Will Duck for Apples

2014-06-05T16:50:00.000-07:00

I remember sitting in a trattoria in Rome, just outside of the Catacombs, the day before I was to have an audience with Pope John Paul II among a group of American journalists. While we probably wouldn’t be given a moment alone, I was trying to come up with a good question just in case—other than who makes his really terrific outfits, which has always been a topic of personal interest. Pondering the other great mysteries he and I might discuss, I looked down to discover a Lucite floor, like that of a glass-bottomed boat, revealing the ruins of an ancient villa. The proprietor told me that construction of newer buildings always uncovers a layer cake of archeological sites—and he decided to showcase his find.

In my town, nobody gives a fig about history. I suppose that’s because Hollywood is like sex—every generation wants to believe they invented it for themselves. Even I have to confess that what interests me most here is where the bizarre, scandalous, glamorous past intersects with my own daily life. For example, I live in a 1929 bungalow house among six others sharing a central courtyard. I’ve been told that the life-long mistress of the original owner lived here rent-free until just a few years back. No longer able to care for herself, she was forcibly moved into an old folks home, but not before stripping the house of every last crystal doorknob and brass light switch. You damn well can take it with you was this old dame’s final battle cry.

Virtually every other tenant of the fondly nicknamed Technicolor Village would be hard-pressed to relay any of its storied past beyond the installation of the new storage unit over the parking lot. Just as the other grocery shoppers at Bristol Farms are likely unaware that the store used to be the famed Chasen’s, where Ronald Reagan proposed to Nancy Davis in a booth located along what is now an overpriced selection of cheese. They still sell the restaurant’s famous chili—which Liz Taylor had shipped in buckets to the set of Cleopatra—a trivia fact lost on most every harried film exec stopping in for a fix.

Admittedly, it’s not always easy being a tourist in your own town. I've never been inside the Comedy Store, for example, even though I know it was once a world famous movie star hang-out called Ciro’s. I’ve not visited the Hollywood Park Memorial Cemetery, final resting place of so many early screen legends—despite its location near Paramount, where I leave plenty of inconclusive meetings feeling decidedly funereal. I do have a Crazy Actress Friend who claims the ghost of Rudolph Valentino chased her after a summertime outdoor movie screening at the mausoleum, a “Personal Note” she lists this on the back of her headshot.

I've dined at Hollywood's oldest restaurant Musso & Frank’s, knowing it was a very cool place to eat but wholly unaware about who drank here. Since the Writer's Guild was formerly located nearby, this became the favored watering hole of the literary giants lured out by studio money, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Reluctant transplant Dorothy Parker was a regular, famously calling Los Angeles “seventy-two suburbs in search of a city;” while William Faulkner liked to get up and mix his own mint juleps. Most all of them felt out of their element in Hollywood, and ended up drinking their lives away only steps from my house.

I never did manage to wrest the meaning of life out of the Pope that day in Rome, though I did get the name of his tailor. I have since read a lot of Dorothy Parker, who may have been a better person to ask, come to think of it, particularly in light of my similar predicament as an embittered girl wit stuck in a town that may never be sure what to do with me. “It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard,” she once quipped. And then there’s my personal favorite, “Ducking for apples—change one letter and it’s the story of my life.” You just can’t get this kind of material in Vatican City.

INVENTORY
By Dorothy Parker
Four be the things I am wiser to know:
Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.
Four be the things I’d been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.
Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.
Three be the things I shall have till I die:
Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.

Originally posted September 25, 2005 Hollywood, CA

The Stalkerazzi and The Screenwriter

2014-06-04T18:02:00.000-07:00

My super cool new friend Chloe (not her real name) recently returned from Avril Lavigne's star-studded rocker wedding in Santa Barbara . She wasn’t invited or anything, she was there with the stalkerazzi. Another recent scoop was a rare post-Suri, Tom-free interview with Katie Holmes, conducted in the streets of Telluride. I’m not sure why Chloe didn’t spring the poor girl, offering safe haven and a coach ticket back home to Cincinnati. Then again, a good yellow journalist isn’t there to fight crime, only to observe it while hacking into Paris Hilton's BlackBerry and going through the Osbourne family trashcans.

A self-taught snoop, Chloe has developed a complex research methodology rooted in her enjoyment of talking to people and her interest in listening to their answers—two skills sets I admittedly lacked as a journalist. It occurred to me that our personal stories converged might make a good television series, sort of a harder-edged Pepper Dennis featuring a friendly, globetrotting gossiphound and her trash-talking, overweight, screenwriting sidekick with mid-level industry connections. What Nielsen viewer from the flyover states wouldn’t want to tune in for that brand of free-wheeling weekly exploits?

I scheduled a dinner meeting with Chloe to pitch my big idea, only to learn the following: 1) Some very thin women do eat whatever they want, in Chloe’s case hot dogs, fries and a chocolate shake, 2) Not all women wearing Daisy Dukes with heels look slutty but instead rather leggy and chic, and 3) The networks are loathe to mine the tabloid craze for comedy due to the poor showing of Courtney Cox's weird and scary FX drama, Dirt. Besides all that, Chloe had to sign an agreement with the magazine she works for not to divulge any “trade secrets.” Even if it weren’t for those damn dirty Cox-Arquettes beating us to the punch, a gag order by any name would surely preclude us from writing our own buzzworthy television pilot, The Stalkerazzi and The Screenwriter, starring Lisa Kudrow and Valerie Bertinelli. I wonder if it’s lonely when the paparazzi stops following you around town and giving you unpublishable nicknames, like Lindsay “Blowhands.” I mean, if you puke alone in the bathroom stall, does it make a sound?

Chloe called the next day, en route to join Nicole and Keith on their Fijian honeymoon tour, wondering if I'd been too upset by our meeting. She was sure, she said, that she'd seen a tear well in my eye. While I admit to being overwhelmed by emotion, it was certainly not brought on by another career disappointment, nor even by a new friendship forged with a kindred spirit who'd dumped a perfectly respectable life to follow a ridiculous dream. I was crying for the milkshake. With extra whipped cream. And a freaking cherry. She just tossed it all back like it was nothing, and walked her bony ass out the door in that sweet little pair of hotpants. There's just no justice in this town.

Snow White and the Seven Screenwriters

2014-06-03T12:11:00.000-07:00

A little known fact about Hollywood screenwriters is we don't tend to like each other much. We don't really like anybody, actually, which is why we sit alone in a room all day every day making up stories about much cooler people living in way better worlds.

Although television writers do hunker down and work together over the course of a given season, I suspect their physical proximity is the primary source of both the comedy and the vitriol you hear so much about. It is likewise the probable source of the drama and the vitriol among one hour writers, although even they tend to break off alone at the first marginally socially acceptable moment possible.

As for satire and vitriol, that would be film school. Here not only writers, but also directors, producers and yes even those happy pants little animators must converge to blow up or die trying. Picture four years' worth of The Hunger Games only with more Oreos and just about the same amount of quad squirrel to chase in circles.

You see, when your mother warned you Hollywood was a scary place full of mean people, she didn't mean another wicked witch ensconced in a studio tower demanding some poor bastard in a headset bring back your still beating heart. Nobody wants your heart, of all things; this being Hollywood, you can check that crazy thing at the door. Anyway, you're not getting anywhere near the type with the power to crush you, who actually tend to be pretty awesome once they figure out you've brought along something they want, such as the lunch delivery from Panera.

No, not even the huntsmen (agents) scanning the forest (daily trades) in search of fresh meat (any passing reference to themselves) are the folks out to get you. It's the dwarves, people! Our own kind, an entire tribe of us overtaking every Starbucks up and down Ventura Boulevard by daybreak, endlessly pecking at laptops which may or may not even be turned on. Sleepy, Grumpy, Bashful, Dopey, Happy and the dreaded Sneezy—we're not a very original clan, all things considered.

Obviously, I am Doc, the one who knows everything and is all too pleased to share it with you right here and naturally everywhere else. I view this not only as an extension of both my prickly personality and longtime survivor status, but also my job as a part-time film school instructor. In fact, I routinely look parents in the eye and assure them everything is going to be alright, despite that being a bald-faced lie.

This is partly why, when my partner Fabulous and I were recently named one of five finalists in a filmmaking competition, I reached out to the other four with offers of Facebook friendship and congratulatory re-Tweets. Only one responded in kind, however, an obvious Happy who is also Young and Adorable. There's been nary a peep from Preoccupied or Self-Sufficient, though Cautiously Optimistic recently emerged, quietly following me on Instagram. Should we meet, I plan to present each with a Pez dispenser in his or her likeness, along with a passive-aggressive joke about Doc's happy pills.

Like I say, we screenwriters aren't exactly extroverts, but some of us are better than others at pretending these woods of Holly are ever so warm and welcoming. I, for one, will surrender neither my satire nor my vitriol, since I am hostessing this party, and we are all going to have fun if it kills us.

Pictured: Right, the late Adriana Caselotti, the voice of Snow White; Above, Marge Champion (now 93) the dancer used as her model. Although I have no proof, I can only assume they hated one another for life.

Friends Don't Let Friends Write at Starbucks

2014-06-02T15:53:00.000-07:00

According to Hollywood mythology, a local video store clerk took a regular booth at House of Pies to lay down the bones of an opus he was calling Pulp Fiction. Perhaps driven by some sense of originality, another unknown writer headed north a few blocks to join the hip counter crowd at Cafe 101, inspiring the world of Swingers. And then there's the Brooklyn comic who wrote Annie Hall. In the absence of his trusty typewriter, he scribbles bits of Oscar-winning dialogue on a small notepad in his shirt pocket, carrying the muse -- along with that tenacious little Asian girl, one presumes -- wherever his travels take him.

I can't actually confirm any of this, since I write in bed, where I am right now, coincidentally, watching the closing arguments of the Jodi Arias murder trial on HLN. Convinced I've developed a close personal relationship with the live Tweeting, phone-sexting, manifesto-authoring Lizzie Borden of our time, I suppose I'm cultivating my own legend.

That's not to say that this reclusive writer never leaves the house to form actual relationships with real people who aren't both overtly homicidal and remarkably telegenic. Why just this morning I stepped out to grab a footlong egg and cheese sandwich -- unconcerned that the counter guy at Subway knows my order, down to the light shaking of extra salt and careful slicing into four equal portions. Combine this with the pound of grapes and fresh pack of Dentyne I picked up, and I'm pretty well hunkered down for the day.

Obviously I bypassed the herd of wannabes shirking a real workplace in pursuit of high creativity -- only to invest our scant pennies in an establishment as unimaginative as Starbucks. I buy Folger's Classic Roast -- memorably dismissed by my Serbian communist ex-mother-in-law as "black water" -- in oversized plastic tubs on sale at Vons. (I find it's important an anecdote be equal parts colorful, confessional and specific in an age when your garden variety death row murderess fancies herself a significant literary voice).

Speaking of life sentences as only a writer can, I once saw a picture of Dorothy Parker hard at work while inadvertently dating herself in the dim light of a mid-century lamp, stubbornly studded with stars. Years beyond the Jazz Age glamor of the Algonquin Round Table, she appears to be at home, lost in thought and chewing on her pencil with an anemic houseplant in the shadows and yet another blank page staring her in the face.

Though she must have been around my age, seated there alone she seemed old before her time. A martini just out of frame might have been her only form of companionship, since she'd surely scoff at the notion of coming up for air to visit an inferior square table at some weenie internet cafe. Today we can compulsively check e-mail for a sense of connection, however false; or dial into Facebook with a quick quip in exchange for a word of recognition -- where Parker's crowd had to surface for an afternoon cocktail. "I like a good martini," goes her familiar toast, "Two at the very most. Three I'm under the table. Four I'm under the host." You don't get that kind of gem down at the corner Coffee Bean.

The thing about being great with dialogue is that's the easy part. As for the rest of the story -- and mind you I am no breast-augmented murderess with a built-in audience and a seven figure book deal in the works -- that's the part that drives a girl to drink. Of course, the only thing you'll find in my cup today is some weak and pathetic yet very reasonably priced coffee.

Manager & Me: A Love Story

2014-06-01T13:58:00.000-07:00

It begins like any other Hollywood romance. You, perched on a bar stool, dangling a brand new, high concept feature spec like a femme fatale with a cigarette between her lips, awaiting the flame of a passing Zippo and a memorable quip. You know very well how to play it cool—Jessica Rabbit, Lauren Bacall, Olivia Newton-John "Bad Sandy" cool. You could write cool in your sleep, and often do just for kicks.

Unfortunately, this describes pretty much every unagented screenwriter in every Starbucks up and down Ventura Boulevard, desperately available, quietly dying inside, hellbent on forging that elusive bond certain to change everything forever on the sheer force of your God-given gift for wordplay.

You were with your former manager for nearly ten years, a virtual lifetime in Hollywood terms, before the light went out in your eyes. Oh sure, you flew solo for a time, content to ignore your own calls, offer up your own indecipherable script notes and buy your own Pan Asian noodle bar lunches.

You might have accepted a casual reference or two from a writer friend—who'd mysteriously declined representation from some prize catch or another herself. Seriously, if some bozo with a resume can't find the time to read you during a twenty-one hour flight to Club Med Phuket, what possible hope could the two of you have for a future?

Then one day you look up and there she is. Of all the gin joints in all the world. Okay, so there's no gin, because gin is about as passe as gluten and Range Rovers. Also, it isn't a joint, but rather her fancy Beverly Hills offices with the exposed pipes and the polished concrete. An exceedingly polite male assistant bears a passing resemblance to Steve Urkel, grown up now with a light English accent and a Wharton MBA.

You honestly couldn't say what she's wearing when your eyes first lock, beyond an air of confidence and a shimmering coat of that long-wearing lipstick that looks great on her and Halle Berry in the magazine but ridiculous on you. "I didn't want to read you and I didn't want to like you," she says. "But I did and I do."

The Zippo, the quip, the spark, the flame—you, my friend, are a goner. Everything feels new and alive and all things are possible. Not so fast, agent lady, you will suddenly think, dialing it back a notch.

No stranger to relationship mechanics, having failed at so many over the years yourself (see here, here and here), you know very well a girl can't just give it away. Certainly not in Hollywood, where honesty is the hallmark of a rank amateur, does one start throwing the truth around in the company of a virtual stranger with blindingly white teeth.

A formidable opponent indeed, she's lined her walls with books, real ones with hard covers filled with actual paper and words printed on them in ink. You remark on one whose title you like and she writes it down—with a real live pen on an honest to God notepad—in the event you want to attach to the screen rights. "Are you real?" you want to cry out.

Instead you slip in a little indie project that would have made your ex's head explode, given the amount of sweat equity required of her. "On it," she says, jotting that down, too, in the prettiest cursive you've ever seen. It turns out bypassing the studio system is how she broke in not one but two recent Oscar-winning clients she is far too humble to describe as such, despite all that being Hollywood legend.

She seals the deal with an anecdote about once stopping a pitch meeting with Oliver Stone upon the discovery of something sparkly on a client's ring finger. "I'm not the type to sit there and ignore a rock that size while talking deal points," she says.

"I'm yours!" you blurt out. "All yours! Forever!" So much for Jessica Rabbit. Under her firm but gentle guidance, you've already become Betty Boop, the world's oldest fresh young thing, who just wants to be loved already.

The plan is to start at awards season and work backwards to the part where the light might very well some day die in your eyes. Like love itself, Hollywood is anything but linear; we go round and round in circles here until the dizziness drives us mad. Another thing they won't tell you in film school is, yes, your story must have a beginning, middle and end, but it doesn't necessarily have to happen in that order.

Boop boop be do.

What to Do When Your Dad Becomes an Action Star

2014-05-31T11:09:00.000-07:00

It's a tricky thing, writing about people you love. And I don't only mean from a legal standpoint, which is a whole other can of worms when most of them are lawyers, but also on a more emotional level. The one where you're afraid they might get together and shun you if they ever so much as read your blasphemous diatribe, officially disown you if anybody else reads it, and execute you as a heritic in the unlikely event it actually gets made.

I like to write about my family. I suppose I'm inspired by people who once lived in my house over those living in other people's houses because I know this particular bunch much better. Also because I love them. Oh, and because we are a loud and aggressive clan, particularly when confronting one another as a group, and I'm not sure any of them fully understood my point of view the first time around.

My mother is a retired English teacher with an advanced degree in British Literature. Naturally I expect a degree of objective professionalism from her when offering up my work for a proofread. However, when recognizing characters she may have married or given birth to confronting situations she remembers quite differently, her reaction is as mixed as the rest of the family. On the one hand, they are all flattered to be memorialized, even in something as flimsy and irrelevant as an unproduced screenplay. On the other hand, they are highly insulted. An indignant re-working of a "scene or two" is requested at once, and since I asked, one particular character's over-arching motivations could use some re-tooling throughout!

What loved ones have trouble undersanding is that regardless of who inspires them, characters exist only to serve the story. If I were looking for historical accuracy, I would be a failed documentarian, not a failed screenwriter of heartbreaking and poignant adult family dramedies. Back in film school, My Legendary Story Structure Professor handed out a sheet of loglines of various classics, which in and of themselves were open to extreme interpretation. "Traumatized Kansas runaway suffering a severe head injury falls under the spell of three homeless men in the grip of their own psychiatric issues," for example, would become a very different film than The Wizard of Oz in the hands of, say, David Lynch. My professor's point was not only that there is no such thing as an original idea, but also that there is no such sin as thievery. Writers who don't borrow from their own lives in an effort to imbue their stories with an air of authenticity are otherwise known as hacks.

I'm writing a spec script loosely based on a family vacation whose protagonist is a man vaguely resembling my father. Him and Steve Martin, actually, since I'm no fool and I'd like to actually sell the damn thing this time. My goal is to make my dad not only my real life hero but also the hero of a big screen Hollywood adventure. Then again, I hope he knows that fictional heroes are flawed. In movies that do any box office at all, they are often animated, lacking in personal insight and the butts of their own jokes.

Though he's now retired, my father was once a big, blustery Miami lawyer, whose unlikely connection to Hollywood was a cameo in The Birdcage. In the scene where Robin Williams convinces Christine Baranski to meet Calista Flockhart's parents, she is held up by an open causeway leading to the mainland. At the request of a city official he knew from the Rotary Club, my father agreed to sail his boat at full mast again and again beneath the draw-bridge. Though amused at the idea of his becoming an action star, I'd have been even more impressed had his direction been provided by Mike Nichols himself rather than some no-name second unit A.D. with a bullhorn.

Dad also once negotiated a Hollywood deal for a client whose bayfront mansion served as the primary location for Two Much, memorable only as the film on which Melanie Griffith first met the then married to someone else Antonio Banderas. The sexy European superstar was attempting to cross over on the heels of his early work with Pedro Almodovar. Never having heard of any of these people, Dad walked right past "the little Spanish guy," likely mistaking him for a cater waiter. I'm not sure if Dad asked the leading man for a Myers on the rocks, but that was Dad's drink, so it's a safe bet if his big star sighting happened to occur around cocktail hour.

Dark rum and expensive steak and cigars. That's how I remember my Dad smelling growing up. I remember him stepping into his big white Mercedes at the valet of a fancy restaurant after treating me to a special birthday lunch. "Have a martini," he would say. "You're old enough now, aren't you? Go on and order the Caesar salad, they make it right at the table." But that's not the dad I'm writing about, mostly because that one doesn't work with the story. I need to focus on the hapless dad bellowing orders on his sailboat while the rest of us did our best to ignore him. The dad who wants something, in this case a loyal and receptive crew, and can't get it until the bittersweet end when he learns the price was too high. That's the movie version. For the Hallmark version, I'll have to spring for the oversized card come Father's Day. And pray that this is the one that gets made, because while he may not know a thing about Spanish independent cinema, I sense my father will recognize a loving homage when he sees one coming his way.

Note: Republished for Father's Day 2014, from an original post on May 20, 2007.

This Hollywood, Is It Real?

2014-03-27T18:04:00.000-07:00

Toward the end of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, my Croatian Ex-Husband and I drove up the still stabilizing Dalmatian Coast to Venice, lured by the promise of a cheap vacation. The only major flaw in our travel plans was a small section of Bosnia, where the fighting raged on, and which I will only remember as a series of tense military road blocks along the craggy coastal highway fronting the Adriatic. While the attitude toward a Dubrovnik-born national would vary according to the religious and ethnic identities of those controlling the area in question, all factions seemed very friendly toward me, an American, a Southern Californian, no less.

I remember one curious young soldier stamping out an unfiltered Camel to examine the address on my driver’s license, smiling broadly through a set of tobacco-stained teeth. “This Hollywood,” he mused aloud. “Is it real?” He'd apparently mistaken Hollywood for a concept rather than an actual city where ordinary people go about their daily business. Given our famous way with illusion, this is an easy trap to fall into, even among those of us who call the place home.

This morning My Very Supportive Manager set up a meeting with Yet Another Confident Young Producer interested in my Hilarious Funeral Comedy. By “interested in” I mean she wants the right to pass it around among her Big Deal Movie Star Friends without having to put up the money for an option, while at the same time being guaranteed the credit rightfully due her should a feature film ever result from her tenuous involvement. For her part, Supportive is a master at making these people think this lopsided deal would be ever so interesting to us, while she’s primarily trolling these waters in search of work for me among the producer’s open studio writing assignments.

Either way, I get a free meal, and this one would prove to be some seriously glamorous eats. Though it’s only blocks from my house, I’d never been inside the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel—a mammoth, Spanish Revival grande dame—into which I, the jaded former travel writer walked in and gasped, “Is it real?”

In a case of art imitating life, the recently renovated hotel—the sight of the very first Academy Awards Ceremony in 1929—seems to have inspired the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror at the Disney MGM Studios, a thrill ride trailing a Shirley Temple-esque child star who falls to her death in a runaway elevator. Those crafty Imagineers were clearly aware that the real Shirley Temple received her first tap dance lesson from Bill “Bojangles” Robinson on the Moorish tiled stairway in the lobby.

The place is said to be haunted by Montgomery Clift, who stayed here during the filming of From Here To Eternity while learning to play the bugle—a skill he still practices, or so the hotel guests claim, on long, windy nights. Marilyn Monroe’s ghost often appears in the mirror re-claimed from her poolside bungalow—which is no big surprise, since it’s now strategically placed to reflect a portrait of the starlet hanging in a public hallway.

Having undergone a major renovation, the hotel made more recent headlines when Courtney Love passed out while partying here and had to be whisked right back to rehab in an ambulance. The clubs and restaurants are being vigorously marketed to the Hollywood A-list by promoter Amanda Scheer-Demme, widow of the much loved late director Ted Demme, who was apparently a close personal friend of the Confident Young Producer hosting me for breakfast today at “Teddy’s.”

“Actually, I knew the gentleman this place was named for,” she told the Snooty Maitre D’. This was at least partially in response to his inquiry as to whether we had reservations—or were at least guests of the hotel.

“You knew Theodore Roosevelt?” he sniffed.

“Oh. I thought it was named for Ted Demme,” she said.

“It’s been the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel,” he replied, “since Mr. Roosevelt was President.”

“Right,” she said, deferring to this geek sporting an attitude dyed to match his employer-provided tuxedo. I mean, here she was about to drop a hundred bucks on a couple of plates of hash only to be trumped by the help.

“Wait a minute now,” I piped in. “Maybe Ted Demme was named for Ted Roosevelt. In fact, I’m sure I read that somewhere.”

This pretty simpleton had never read anything anywhere, and thus didn’t have much to add. He slinked away, a failed soap star with a spray-on tan relegated to inquiring if lowly tourists are “on the list” while buffing the oversized leather menus with Armor All.

“Thank you for that,” Confident mouthed. “Thank you for this,” I said, as a far more appropriate waiter—the type whose father used to serve Erroll Flynn at this very table, who considers all this his legacy—unfolded a crisp white napkin on my lap. “I think I’ll try the Eggs Benedict, so what if it is a Tuesday.”

I'm sure I heard that ghostly bugle whistling the theme from Bridge Over The River Kwai as coffee and water were poured from linen-tied silver pitchers. Another thing they won’t tell you in film school is that while you’re waiting around for that big phone call certain to change your life forever, success really can sneak up on you one meal at a time. And maybe not every day, but certainly on some of them, yes, this Hollywood is real.

Fly Me to the Moon

2014-03-26T12:28:00.000-07:00

This week I went in to pitch an open studio assignment to re-write an R-rated comedy. This was somewhat tricky, since the producing partner of an A-list, twice Oscar-nominated actor wrote the original draft off which I'd only managed to preserve the character names. He would have the final word on my hiring, so my Very Supportive Manager told me just march in and "be adorable about it."

Yesterday the studio executive phoned Supportive to say I had indeed "delivered a movie." The producer reported that I was in fact adorable but he’d like to have lunch with me privately just to be sure I hold up well under harsh lighting conditions. Oh, and he’s got to hear one more “courtesy take” next week—either from his lover, his nephew or the brother-sister team of Sofia and Roman Coppola would be my guess—before making the final decision.

This time it’s not a one in three chance, or even two in three. It’s ninety percent, Supportive estimates. We’re relying on the executive who is trying to set up my spec script and senses I can’t wait as long as that might take. While Supportive feels I should avoid begging, fawning or crying in the meeting room, just for laughs I may have intimated how I only have three weeks left on my unemployment claim and plan to either sell my car to pay next month’s rent or give up my house and move into my car. Supportive isn’t sure of the exact pay on the ten-week re-write, but the ballpark figure is more than I’ve managed to scratch together over the last four years combined.

Surviving this kind of wait requires many hours of re-arranging my sock drawer, polishing what I haven’t pawned off of the family silver and scrubbing the bathroom grout with an old toothbrush. I sorted through an old music box filled with jewelry I never wear and thought about throwing out the box along with the J.Lo hoop earrings the size of shower curtain rings that seemed fabulous at the time. Then I remembered my grandmother had given me the box one Christmas. I doubt it was very expensive, just something she picked up on sale at J.C. Penney’s while passing the last of her Golden Years mall walking for exercise.

I never knew her very well until I was in my twenties and she bought a condo near my first apartment. She’d raised my mother alone and never felt obligated to say exactly why. It seemed to me she hadn’t answered to much of anyone in her life at a time when a girl could get arrested for that. She worked two jobs to put my mother through Catholic school, private college and even grad school. Beginning the day my mom gave up her teaching career to marry a struggling law student, Grandma referred to my father as “Whatshisname.” Though she didn’t drink often, she didn’t do it well. Even a glass or two of dessert wine on Christmas Eve fostered some paranoid delusion that Frank Sinatra was trying to kill her. I never did get the details, but frankly it seemed perfectly plausible. She died when I was twenty-six, of natural causes. Later appearing to me in a dream, young again and dressed in fox furs in front of some swank, pre-War hotel, she'd never looked happier.

I couldn’t remember the song the music box played, so I wound it up, expecting the usual "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies" or "Moonlight Sonata." It was "Fly Me To The Moon," made famous by Frank Sinatra.

Fly me to the moon

and let me play among the stars.

Let me see what spring is like

on Jupiter and Mars…

With that, she'd managed to deliver another message from beyond that there was never a thing to fear, that the future most certainly holds something truly magical for me if I can only hang on long enough to let it. I gave myself exactly five minutes to cry before getting up to clean the bathroom.

Note: In response to a student's request for specifics of my Hollywood journey, I've re-published this piece from January 7, 2006. And yes, I did get the job. Stay tuned for tomorrow's post, "Be Careful What You Wish For, My Little Hollywood Hopeful."

Miss Julie Makes a Movie

2014-03-05T12:12:00.000-08:00

My first name has inspired quite a few screen gems over the years. Much of the early credit for my nominal popularity belongs to August Strindberg, who wrote a 1888 stage play about love, lust, power, class warfare and death before dishonor. Though the movies were decades away -- courtesy of those judgy French of all people -- this Miss Julie is here to tell you that's the plot of pretty much all of them.

If you don't believe me, look no farther than the poster outside every brand of world theater. This time of year it's a sure bet I'm being mounted, forgiving the innuendo, on a summer stage near you. While the community player crowd can't get enough of me, how is it nobody's after new material with my name on it? Et tu, Main Street?

A longtime favorite at the cineplex, I was once played by Doris Day, according to what has to be the coolest piece of key art ever. Boy, they really laid it out for you back in the '50s, when enticing the masses into the cheap seats meant painting an extra disturbing portrait of the female psyche. "What happened to Julie on her honeymoon?" You'll have to pony up a quarter for the answer to that freaky diagnosis. Something tells me Hitchcock passed on me, the fat bastard. So what if I'm not an icy blonde with a kitchen knife? "Run, Julie, run run run for your life!"

In the seventies, Julie went to Bollywood, where I naturally became a huge blockbuster among all four quadrants of the lucrative Younger Older Sikh Sunni audience. I am a girl next door from Goa who gets dumped by my boyfriend and moves to Mumba to become a call girl. Mayhem ensues when my boyishly handsome millionaire industrialist boyfriend (think President of the Senior Caste) uncovers my checkered past. Still a very hot ticket, I likely incite many a hallway skirmish in the rougher Punjabi film schools.

Judging from the poster pimping his good name beneath my own, Peter Sellers plays either my dad or my boyfriend in John and Julie. I'm a cheeky English schoolgirl who runs off to London to see the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Eerily similar to my real life story, my journey to that big party to which I was never invited is seriously impeded by the many questionable characters I encounter along the way. I ask you, how can one name in all its various derivations enjoy so much significance in film and so little in filmmaking?

Call it Romeo & Juliet, Gnomeo & Juliet or Homeo & Juliet, the all-new queer film certain to open a future fringe festival.
Call it Fröken Julie from Ingmar Bergman's bunch or Mademoiselle Julie of the French New Wave.
Call it blog-based The Julie Julia Project,the rare one hundred percent inconsequential Meryl Streep spot-on cultural icon vehicle. And yes, I do have an ax to grind, since I formally answer to both Julie and Julia -- and also have an eponymous blog overdue for a big screen debut. Or a small one. Seriously, would it kill someone to fund, cast and shoot me for free streaming in some obscure web series nobody's talking about?

Though that pretty much wraps it up for my on-screen credits, I also enjoy remarkable irrelevance in pop music. Look no farther than Bobby Sherman, who never once bothered to meet, date or marry me. Though I highly doubt he actually wrote "Julie Do You Love Me," that guy built an entire career on my name -- which sure makes one of us.

All Quiet at the Best Western Burbank

2014-03-01T14:42:00.000-08:00

I started writing my first screenplay while literally under fire. At least that's the way it felt visiting Dubrovnik at the tail end of the civil war. Working as travel writer at the time, I was there with some well-meaning congressional sub-committee or another bent on helping the city re-build its tourism infrastructure just a tad prematurely. For one thing, once the Serbs bombed the power plant for what seemed to be sport, no electricity was to be had, not even at the finest hotel.

We toured shelled out castles and imploded museums, visiting shrapnel-riddled churches guarded by decapitated Jesuses. Daniel Day-Lewis, in his bravest performance ever, dodged sniper-fire— along with snickers from battle-scarred locals judging him pretty goofy, under the circumstances—to stage Hamlet on the ramparts. Seized by the tragicomedy of it all, I sat alone in a waterfront bar, turning the sweat-dampened pages of my reporter's notebook to scribble the bones of a classic wartime satire.

Yeah, not so fast.

All these many years later, just when I've finally regained the luxury of writing at home, my television set broke. I was thinking of cutting it off anyway to save on the cable bill, since I never watch anything but Jeopardy, Chopped and the live trial of some oversexed murderess who'll probably end up V-logging in hiding after the bombshell verdict. Disparate as my programming choices may seem, is each not the stuff of high drama?

Will the geek grab the cash? What about the chef who lost his finger in a head of escarole to save the family diner? Will the twat Tweet from the gallows?

Though I'm not at all sure how to go about my day without the most basic of creature comforts, the fact is comfort is anathema to the serious writer— even an out-of-work Hollywood writer with the hard-won humility to use that term very loosely. The point is, if drama is born of conflict, why are we writers always fighting it tooth and nail?

“It is easy to write," goes the quote most often credited to Ernest Hemingway. "Just sit in front of your typewriter and bleed.” The fact that these words have been claimed by no less than fourteen subsequent writers should tell you something extra about the brutality of our ragtag little militia.

As with any battle the career soldier will somehow learn to survive, a bout of writing gets easier once the adrenaline kicks in.

There does come that magic moment, once I'm deep enough into a story, when the characters will capture my fingers and deliver the story on my behalf. I wouldn't say peace washes over the land, but there is detente. For now, anyway, I am where I'm supposed to be, doing what I'm supposed to be doing.

As for learning to live inside the green zone of my mind without surrendering to an onslaught of daily distractions, maybe I don't need a battalion of extraneous characters buzzing around the home front once I get my own brigade of imaginary friends primed to come out and spar. All it takes to charge on alone into the unknown -- all it's ever taken, now that I think of it— is feeling okay about turning my back on my real friends, past and future, along with the new husband I never married, the home we never bought and the family we never had.

Like I say, folks, war ain't pretty. War is war, war is hell and war happens for a reason, not the least of which is it makes the best movies.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to write one of those here in the idyllic suburbs of Southern California. Right after I call the junkman to haul off the corpse of the dead TV—and take a quick look online to see if we've got a verdict on the whack job with the boob job tearing up the airwaves.

I Dream of Julie

2014-02-11T20:03:00.000-08:00

Here in Hollywood, we have many theories about how to get material into the right hands. An old film school friend once told me if you're convinced you have a great screenplay, toss it out the window on the freeway to make sure. His name was Greg, and he had been a successful musician, touring the world with any number of jazz legends before setting his sights on screenwriting. Like me, he had been living a dream life, just not his dream. Having stumbled into our earlier creative successes, we felt reasonably confident about sitting back and letting Hollywood happen.

Sadly, while there are plenty of stories about starlets discovered only by happenstance, it turns out not a single movie has been made after its script was found sitting on a stool in Schwab's Drugstore. We do love our underdog stories, and those of us charged with dreaming them up have an unnerving talent for putting a plausible spin on the unlikeliest scenarios.

For example, I am always in awe of writers I came up with who are still out there entering screenwriting competitions. Designed to discover newcomers, for the most part, the more prestigious of these generally don't allow anyone who's formally reached professional status to enter. Yet here these folks are, year after year, refusing to give up. I guess there's the prize money to be considered, along with an expected flurry of interest from agents and producers. Probably most important, though, is the tangible proof we all crave that we are not stark raving mad.

The other day I came across some studio coverage of an early script of mine. "Pitch perfect," the story analyst pronounced it. "A little gem."

Having indeed won a big competition back in the day, the script earned me an offer of representation by my longtime former manager, who'd served as an industry judge. It landed me a bunch of meetings around town and secured my first feature assignment. What it didn't get was produced.

"Whenever a script has this many laugh out loud moments, it's got my vote for development consideration," the analyst concluded. I never met this random fan, before or since, though I did Google her name to learn she's now a professor of creative writing. You can read the rest of her coverage here. It's old and it has a big coffee stain on it, but I uploaded it just as it is.

Hollywood is anything but a meritocracy, so good writing has little if anything to do with making a good living nor heaven forbid making a good movie. Once you've been told you've got talent by someone other than your mother, it's very hard indeed to walk away.

I haven't spoken to Greg lately, but I heard he's back in the music business on the East Coast, and that he recently self-published his first novel on Amazon.

Who Do You Know, What Have You Got?

2013-12-12T10:37:00.000-08:00

"You can't find any true closeness in Hollywood," Carrie Fisher once said, "because everybody does the fake closeness so well." While I don't have her pedigree or connections, I recently got to test the veracity of my longstanding personal friendship with the president of a cable television network. In Hollywood terms, this means we've never met but he's been following my blog for awhile.

A light but loyal surface skimming is about as intimate as it gets between two people in this town. The stakes are only heightened when one of you is a power player and the other is a struggling screenwriter dishing up the snark safely under the cover of semi-anonymity. So ardent is this highly-placed executive's fandom, however, he signs his actual name to our volleyed chuckles in my comments section.

This open display of e-ffection here on my digi-pedestal might have emboldened me to contact him to enlist his support of a big TV gig I'm after. In any other business, in any other town, ours might be considered a casual e-ffair, but here in Hollywood we are as real as it gets. Unless we'd been bonded by blood, of course, or went to the same day camp, where we later become counselors and made out.

Whether she likes her mother or not, Carrie Fisher would tell you this is a family town, where careers are built on going to the right barbecue in the right bikini emblazoned with the name of the right university across the right butt. I certainly don't have anything that cheeky for him to latch onto in the big bunny hop around the pool.

No, ours is a virtual connection, far too flimsy to survive a jump to the flesh and bones of a cell phone call placed to his convertible on PCH. He'd have to be patched through by a snoopy assistant, some niece's niece barely out of her teens who's after the same job. There would be poor reception and a lot of those awkward, overlapping bursts before the line went dead and we all three knew the jig was up, however bravely played.

I decided to drop him a short LinkedIn message it took me a day and a half to craft. "Hey you, it's me, please help," I finally wrote, attaching the job posting. His reply came about a week later. "Oh hi. Yeah sure. Will do."

She shoots, she scores!

Though hardly cinematic on either front, in my mind he may as well have gotten down on one knee and proposed marriage on live national television. He'd have to initiate a speedy divorce from his beautiful wife and relinquish sole custody of any and all sticky little children, but still. Winning.

As for how such a casual exchange could be perceived with such glee on my part, I guess it's true that we just don't do genuine very well here in Hollywood. We reserve heartfelt dialogue and big, feel good endings for the screen, where we have ninety meaningful minutes to effect the unlikely triumph of a little guy like me. Unless you were born into this game -- or know somebody who knows somebody who was -- that often means writing about life while you sit and wait another day for yours to happen.

Panties Are Not a Punchline, Honey, Just Shut Up and Bring the Funny

2013-11-11T11:16:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about what it is to be a funny, female writer who gives it all away in these pages as though hostessing some budget-friendly girlie show in the sky. The way I figure it, a humor blogger should really shoot for adorable, self-styled glamour-puss over bitter little misanthrope when welcoming a crowd gathering for a laugh. Not that any of that happens much here. Stop me when I'm overreaching.

"The definition of 'crazy' in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to sleep with her anymore," Tina Fey tells us.

In that case I'm in a pretty good position, as positions go, since I mostly write quietly and for my own amusement. Then again, there's only so much navel-gazing you can do and hope to become as relevant as say, Leah Dunham's anus. However ass-backwards, maybe the rest of her only got into the game because self-deprecating humor was her birthright as a direct descendent of Manhattan's post-feminist gliteratti. There's a crowd that kept right on gabbing long after the sexy came and went.

Back in the day, a midwest housewife named Phyllis Diller was actually too hot for this job, and only came up with the whole crazy chicken look to take your mind off wanting to nail her. Joan Rivers felt Johnny Carson both brought her up and took her down as though she'd belonged to him on both ends, like a disposable early wife. To check the strength of current ties between comic appeal and sex appeal, count up all the comediennes -- from Kathy Griffin to Molly Shannon, Sarah Silverman and even Sandra Bernhard -- whose underwear you can describe in some detail. Now try this with the guys -- until you get to a single goofball who looks any good in it.

In life as in comedy, most girls will do what it takes to draw an audience, and the truth is we don't care how you got here as long as you pay for your own drinks and stay awake for the show.

At my level, even bothering to read my work earns you the right to rip into it at leisure. My mother told me that my brother didn't care for an online novella I wrote about a sexually adventurous former panty model who goes to work for L.A.P.D. Hollywood Division. To me this is the perfect comic set up, but he found it inappropriate for children, of which he has three, apparently comprising the remainder of my readership. The whole brood gathers around the family laptop in the evening to read Auntie's uncensored internet musings. And I'm inappropriate? Seriously, get an X-Box and some boundaries.

Mom herself dismissed my brief foray into smut writing with a snort. "You're better than that," she announced. Really? Who knew? I figure in the absence of any monetary recognition (or really any other kind) in this digital cabaret of mine, I am entitled to some authenticity of voice. As I tell the students in my on-again off-again film professor gig, there's all kinds of talent in this town, but nobody brings you but you.

Though there are many schools of thought as to whether comedy can be learned, I see my whole life as a sketch in search of its rightful pay-off. "I think if you have a comic perspective, almost anything that happens you tend to put through a comic filter, " Woody Allen told The Paris Review in an interview on the art of comedy. "People think it’s very hard to be funny but it’s an interesting thing. If you can do it, it’s not hard at all."

While you'd expect a few choice pearls of "hisdom" from the guy behind the loopy, self-doubting humor of Annie Hall, his comic perspective is remarkably free of gender bias:

It would be like if I said to somebody who can draw very well, My God, I could take a pencil and paper all day long and never be able to draw that horse. I can’t do it, and you’ve done it so perfectly. And the other person feels, This is nothing. I’ve been doing this since I was four years old. That’s how you feel about comedy—if you can do it, you know, it’s really nothing.

"Is he still shtupping his daughter?" Mom inquired, as if that were right on point with today's topic. I saw him in a Q&A a few years back and told her this hadn't come up. But the two them have been married awhile now, so I doubt it. See, now that's funny.

Halloween in Hollyweird

2013-10-26T16:04:00.002-07:00

With the possible exception of special effects artists, who tend to be year-round freaks, folks working in the entertainment industry don't much care for Halloween. We see our share of illusion, day in and day out, and unless somebody's paying minimum union scale plus pension and healthcare, we're rarely in the mood to dress up and play along.

Coincidentally, this is also my theory as to why your big Hollywood starlet runs off to an ashram for her first couple of weddings, barefoot and clothed only in her own hair; she has worn the big white dress at work and it just wasn't all that interesting. Then again, neither was the semi-nude thing on the banks of the Ganges at sunrise under the spell of some faux yogi and a wicked hangover. It takes an average of fourteen months to sort all that out, claim she was off her meds and seek a quick Mexican annulment and secret tummy tuck.

Anyway, that's how it went for me, give or take a few fungible details. The point being that, although the search for high drama is what brought us here, we are unlikely to make our own just for sport. Having made our big escape into the bowels of fantasyland only to discover there's no way out, we know all too well that fun can be anything but good and clean. Somewhere along the way, we gurus of glamour become the proverbial shoemakers with no shoes, kitten-heeled or otherwise.

Though I have been a working writer for the better part of thirty years, my showbiz career actually began in front of the camera. While I sometimes refer to myself as a former child actress, that's really mostly to throw you off as to my true age.

The fact is, I worked well into my twenties, starting on the stage and working my way up to television commercials and even an iconic network role or two. I auditioned for (but didn't get) the role of Nick Nolte's secretary in Cape Fear and Burt Reynolds's secretary in Striptease. Apparently I exuded a screen presence that made me ill-suited for office work. Apparently.

Digging through some old photos this past week, I couldn't find a single picture of myself in costume just for fun. I was either starring in the school play, thus turning in some of my greatest work to date—or else being snapped by a script supervisor for continuity on location somewhere far more exotic than anywhere I've been lately.

As for my current Halloween plans, I live in a barn set behind a large main house, where I wouldn't get much attention from the trick-or-treaters unless I set the place on fire. I'm off sugar, as well as alcohol, carbs, high heels, low necklines and brief, barefoot marriages, doomed before they began. I may decorate a pumpkin or two but I don't like to carve into them at all so they last all the way through to Christmas. Life imitating art and all, that's a ho-ho-holiday we ho-ho-Hollywood hoes can get behind.

Big Hollywood Call In the Sky

2013-10-20T11:37:00.000-07:00

My cousin's kid, a college freshman back east, wrote me that he hoped to make it to Hollywood some day and maybe even have a future in showbiz. I told him what I tell my own students who share that unfortunate yearning. "You can do or be anything you want to be," I offered up in all its American Girl doll-of-the-year theme song simplicity.

I left off the second half of the sentence—"That is, as long as you are willing to pay the price"—as I often do in cases of extreme fresh-faced youthful optimism. Part of me thinks this little hitch is so obvious it's not worthy of a reminder. The other part doesn't want to be the first to offer up the gory details.

All these many years into my own Hollywood journey, the price to which I refer has not so much been the sting of rejection, as one would expect, but rather the endless, relentless, unyielding anguish of waiting.You learn to live life riding the hold button like an electronic bull, not sure why you're hanging on when being thrown off would be just as sweet a relief. Something, anything to break the monotony of anticipation—even a no would do once it becomes so painfully clear just how rare and delicious a yes will be.

Worse yet, in a town where anything can happen at any moment and hardly ever does, the self-imposed sentence to life in limbo as time marches on—toward your inevitable irrelevance either way—applies to all levels of success. I once heard, for example, that the Oscars after party for Saving Private Ryan felt downright funereal after Steven Spielberg spent the entire awards season waiting for his name to be called, only to lose in a last minute upset to Shakespeare in Love.

I can only imagine his camp's more recent state of embitterment after Lincoln fell victim to the same waiting game all year, only to lose to that scrappy little Argo bunch. Still, you can't help but envy the Dreamworks crew for knowing, at long last, whether the next morning would hold firings or promotions and a fleet of new Priuses peppering the lot, courtesy of the boss.

For my money, some news, any news—good, bad or, yes, even indifferent—is always going to offer up some peace, however bittersweet. Another thing about Hollywood, though, is nobody wants to be the one to tell you no. They don't even want to tell you yes for fear of taking the heat should you and your little project fail, against all odds, to hand Spielberg his ass in the underdog story of the century.

I did not share any of this with my cousin, most especially not that last thing. You don't come to Hollywood to get good at waiting. You come here to happen, and then it turns out there's no such thing. For my part, there is always blogging. I figure you can't get any more proactive then hitting "publish" at will between steady gigs such as mine, most recently, writing theme songs for American Girl. "You can do and be whatever you want to be." Oh, come on. Did you really think I just pull that kind of gold out of the sky?

In The Clearing Stands a JuntoBoxer

2013-09-19T13:11:00.000-07:00

Forest Whitaker started following your project. Keep up the good work! Congrats--The JuntoBox Staff

Oh, what happy words to the ears of a young filmmaker, although in my case I use that term loosely on both counts. The point is, whether you are an Oscar-winning actor or a low level screenwriter with a dog named Oscar who is eighteen years old and waiting for some good news so he can go off and die in peace, a whole new Hollywood is happening online.

There used to be a smoke-filled office where a script like mine might have managed to make it onto the desk of some cigar-chomping fat cat who couldn't help but chuckle over a kicky line of dialogue here and there. "Who wrote this crap?" he'd demand of the nearest suck-up. "Julie Ann Sipos," a voice would croak from behind a tower of competing screenplays far more likely to reach the shredder than the screen. "Also known as Julie Goes to Hollywood. She has a blog." In the old days they called it a "column," and it turns out I began gathering an internet following long before anyone knew what to do with one of those.

A relative newcomer to the digital space, Juntobox Films is an online community set up by Whitaker and his partners to mentor, fund and distribute micro-budgeted features among an open membership. Only dressed up to look like forward thinking innovation, it's actually an ancient concept to invite the folks in the cheap seats to make clear what does and doesn't interest us simply by virtue of showing up and making some noise.

Though movies were born in a place called a "nickelodeon," somewhere along the way, your nickels stopped mattering. Filmmaking became so expensive that films evolved into events rather than on-screen stories, and only a bunch of rich guys deemed themselves equipped to determine what got made and by whom. Then the Red camera and the MacBook appeared, allowing the random penniless storyteller to get back in cahoots with the audience and make movies about people of all things.

Next up for JuntoBox funding is a comedy, so if you find yourself on the planet with Internet access anywhere in the vicinity of your yurt, please consider logging on to support my film. Seneca Falls is a tiny little heist movie with big, universal themes like sex, death, love, loss, a bossy sister, an asshole brother and a bunch of small town relatives fighting over an inheritance too insignificant to be the point of any of it.

If none of that works for you, forget me and log on and vote for something, anything you'd like to see up on the screen. You may be one of my students, a longtime reader of this blog or that scary guy in his basement who got here trolling for porn using the search term "Linda Carter's big gold tits." If you love movies, yours is the hand on the greenlight and this is the smoke-filled office where dreams are made.

Random Things I Learned About Hollywood While Driving Across Country

2013-09-14T09:22:00.000-07:00

While screenwriting should always be about telling a great story, it's probably a good idea to know a little something about the folks you're telling it to. Last week my friend B! and I drove a car from Florida to California, overnighting in Louisiana, Texas and Arizona and blowing through a bunch of other states comprising a good bit of the domestic box office. Here are some things about Hollywood I learned along the way:

Snark is a foreign language. There is not a lot of double talk among regular Americans, so there's no need to look for hidden meaning in every passing exchange. The waitress really is just a waitress, not a panty model with a flawed life plan and a bad attitude When she asks how you want your burger, she really wants to know this, and is not in any way judging you for going with the full bun.

Fox News is a thing. We don't have to like it. We just have to accept that they like it. All day and all night they like it. If only my scripts featured more smiling fat guys talking to hungry former beauty queens about the whole country going to hell, they might actually sell.

Red is the new purple. The entire Florida peninsula getting swept away in a hurricane is a popular sentiment on the typical Hollywood Facebook wall. It turns out they're posting about California crumbling into the sea when the big one hits. How can any of this be good for box office? Let's dial it back, folks. America, good. Natural disaster, bad. Texas, big. Really big. Do not mess with Texas, on or off screen.

Guns don't kill people, plucky heroines kill people. For dramatic purposes, gunplay is a good thing. Paraphrasing Anton Chekhov, guns are fun, when used properly, which is to say they come out in the first act and go off in the third. The last thing we need is for America to become disenchanted with good old-fashioned Hollywood justice, so let's keep violence off the streets and on the screen where it belongs.

People get old. I don't know why we keep writing for young boys, since they are making their own movies now when they are not watching free internet porn and playing video games. Seniors have both money and time, so we should be charging them more for tickets, not less, and maybe even making some in which they exist, even if they are women.

We Hollywood types live in a tiny world, telling the same lies and chasing the same dream until it dies or kills us, whichever comes first. Our audience, on the other hand, lives in a big beautiful place full of big beautiful people, who often smile, free of charge, all the while relying on us to whisk them away somewhere better. I guess there's a reason they call it the heartland. I hope I can remember that, no matter how many times mine ends up broken.

Write Young, Stay Pretty

2013-09-13T15:05:00.000-07:00

A former student called to tell me he's giving up. He's tired of Hollywood and frustrated with his night job editing scripted barbs for some low-rent "unscripted" show. Some guy he personally hand trained was promoted to day shift above him. This means big benefits, such as permission to sample the congealing Poquito Mas while clearing the crafts table. My guy is done trying to fight his way up, covets a vintage Mustang and wishes he'd majored in accounting. He's twenty-five years old, after all, and at this for nearly three years now.

I got here way back when the first Clinton was in the Oval Office and nobody suspected the rude kind of stuff he was up to in there. Around this time the little wiener on the phone was celebrating his first big boy birthday at Chucky Cheese. "Snap out of it!" I wanted to say. "Twice I took the name of the Lord in vain, once I slept with the brother of my fiance, and once I bounced a check at the liquor store, but that was really an accident," I would add, because that's another great Cher line from Moonstruck.

All of us doe-eyed Hollywood types arrived here convinced to the core we had that kind of gold to offer -- rightly or wrongly, judging from the mixed bag I've read over the years. It all feels so random, though, the way things turn out -- who made it, who didn't, who's been teetering so dangerously close to the edge for years. Who gave up and went home without so much as checking into Foursquare with a status update as the new Mayor of Nowhere.

In film school I knew a girl who didn't have the five dollars I was collecting to buy our teacher a class gift. "I'd have to give you my food money," she apologized. "For the week." She ended up marrying one of the creators of Lost, and picked up a few Emmy nods herself writing on The Office and Modern Family -- before selling her own series to ABC as part of seven figure deal. I'm pretty sure she has groceries now, though I doubt she does much eating. She's probably trying to lose her recent pregnancy weight with a celebrity trainer before turning a new baby over to the back-up nanny up in Bel-Aire Canyon.

A guy in my first writer's group wanted notes on some teenage alien script he was polishing. He became a big TV director before jumping to four-quadrant features and marrying the highest paid female screenwriter in history (for all those vampire movies), though not necessarily in that order.

My funniest collaborator ever, ironically, has had as tough a go of things as I have. After college, we did improv in a space rented from a downstairs tow truck company, and starred together in some TV commercials. For awhile he was Mr. Goodyear. Or was it Mr. Goodwrench? I don't know, one of the good guys. Meeting the other day across another wobbly coffee table over another slice of pie, it hit me that somewhere along the way we grew up. While I couldn't pinpoint the exact moment it happened, there's no real mystery as to how things are going to turn out for us. He's been married for twenty years and has a daughter studying abroad. I have a fairly useless master's degree, an on-and-off professorship and some kid calling to insist I make sense of the whole deal.

Given the gift of prophecy, what secrets would I have revealed to the earlier versions of any of us? For even the casual dreamer, I'd announce at one of those coffee houses bubbling with aspirations, Hollywood is the best game in town. For us there is no other game or town; there's nowhere else to go and nothing to do when we get there. Time passes. Everything changes. Nothing changes. And we are only young for now.

Julie Goes Indie

2013-08-25T15:10:00.000-07:00

Having recently submitted a project for possible independent financing at Juntobox Films, I've been thinking more about not making a movie, as opposed to not writing one -- and really these are two different things, requiring two separate sets of delusions. Just when I thought I'd run out of ways to disappoint myself and others around a script that didn't come together, wasn't worth re-working and had to be permanently shelved, this time an actual movie would have to fail before all that happens.

So far most of my creative energy has gone to how I would post the happy news on Facebook. Right now I'm going with "Greenlight, bitches!," beside an old still I found of a topless go-go girl shooting a movie, in the woods for some reason. I figure if she could get off the pole and pursue an even more dubious second career, why not me?

Where screenwriting amounts to getting up and dressed in time for another big game of rocks, paper, scissors, filmmaking means being on set at dawn to plug important things into other important things because you have something important to say. I'm not very mechanical by nature, but I am jotting down mental notes for the trade press on my improbable triumph over sexism, ageism and cronyism. Oh and lazyassyism, perhaps the best explanation why we avowed recluses don't tend to roll up our sleeves and collaborate of all things.

So far my favorite part of being an independent filmmaker is the high quality procrastination it offers. Honestly, I can't think of a better excuse for ignoring my silly little pages than thinking really hard about making a Serious Piece of Breakthrough Cinema. Okay, so it's a quirky little funeral comedy with elements of a feel good sex romp climaxing with an action-packed heist, but still.

I'm not the first writer to grapple with the jump from the page to the stage. "One deceptive appeal of being out there with other people is that it gets you away from the job of writing," Woody Allen told The Paris Review. "I’ve always felt that if they told me tomorrow I couldn’t make any more films, that they wouldn’t give me any more money, I would be happy writing for the theater; and if they wouldn’t produce my plays, I’d be happy just writing prose; and if they wouldn’t publish me, I’d still be happy writing and leaving it for future generations."

It's probably easier to believe your unproduced work will have lasting merit when you are Woody Allen -- who doesn't even show up to accept his Oscars because it interferes with band practice.

Now that I'm going to be a multi-hyphenate, maybe I should get mentally prepared for awards season, which has gotten so out of control between Cannes and Taormina and I mean, BAFTA? Really? I'm not sure how the Brits got to be in charge of everything again, but should Kate Middleton show at my after party, I really need to start reducing now. Even pregnant those princess types make the actresses look like tubs of lard -- who in turn make us writers seem especially ginormous and awkward at these events.

Then again the whole point of bypassing the studio system is avoiding the judgement to step out of the shadows and grab what's due me. Somehow this never occurred to me before, despite all my yakking here over the years about how awesome I am.

I guess my big priority should be becoming a living legend already, because, really, what fun is it to be a dead one? "Not that immortality via art is any big deal," summed up Allen. "Truffaut died and we all felt awful about it, and there were the appropriate eulogies, and his wonderful films live on. But it’s not much help to Truffaut."

Maybe one day some idiot blogger will be sitting alone in a Toluca Lake coffee bar quoting me on death, comedy and grabbing the spotlight while there's still time. Like I said, brand new skillset, same old delusions.