Never Trust a Know-It-All Who Also Is a Never Was

During a 15-year stretch in my haphazard writing career, I completed a dozen original screenplays, optioned several of them and sold one outright. But I don’t have a single actual movie credit to my name, which makes me a miserable screenwriting failure--and puts me in position to finally make a real buck in Hollywood.

I can set myself up as a screenwriting know-it-all.

Hasn’t Syd Field been one (among many) for nearly three decades, squeezing precious dollars out of starry-eyed wannabes? When I first got the bug, I pored over his book “Screenplay.” I was rapt during his workshops as he revealed precisely where each turning point in our plots must be placed if we were to succeed as he had. Then, one day, I got a look at a few pages of one of Syd’s unproduced scripts, set in the world of race-car driving. The characters were as wooden as Pinocchio, the dialogue as flat as Olive Oyl. I decided to ask Syd, who was fond of promoting himself as a successful screenwriter, about his movie credits, and I got plenty of evasion but no titles.

Given my equally spectacular credentials as a never-was, I figure I can make a fortune too. Of course, you’ve got to have a gimmick to make it as a know-it-all, your own special approach. I have one: My book will be called “Screenwriting: Trust Your Way to Failure.” The first chapter, Trust Your Screenwriting Teacher, will be followed by others like these:

Trust Your Agent: My first agent had a great name--Blossom Kahn--and worked hard to get my scripts read by the right people. Blossom submitted one of my screenplays, a black action piece, to an African American producer who liked it. I happened to be in her office when he called to discuss it and heard her say: “Yes, of course the writer’s black.” The deal never happened, and I never met the producer, which is just as well, because I’m about as black as Philip Seymour Hoffman. My next agent, who had an office on the Sunset Strip and smoked really big cigars, read a script of mine and told me: “Kid, I’ll get you thirty-five thousand for this by the end of the week.” Six months later, mired in a deep funk because the script hadn’t been optioned, I ran into him as he tended bar in a dive off North Fairfax. When he saw me, he blurted, “I’ll explain later,” and poured me a double Dewar’s on the rocks at no charge. That was the last I ever saw or heard of him. Agent No. 3 . . . oh, never mind.

Trust Your Producers: Several years apart, two different producers pulled an identical ploy: We settled on the terms of a sale and they pronounced it a “done deal”--both times on a Friday so I could spend the weekend bragging to my friends and family and wondering what to wear to the premiere. Then they called me on Monday to say that unexpected cash-flow problems had arisen. Piece by piece, the producers dismantled the deal, taking back the promised money, until all that remained was the offer of a payment at the back end, when the big bucks would supposedly roll in. The second time this happened, I realized that I’d been duped by men who had the ethics of sewer rats--and that Hollywood has a sewer system large enough to accommodate the entire rodent cast of “Willard,” its sequel and the remake.

Trust the Pitch: I didn’t mind pitching the first time around, when I was able to work up some enthusiasm for a new story idea and my pitch felt reasonably fresh rolling off my tongue. It was after I’d repeated my spiel a few times that I’d have a slow-motion out-of-body experience, listening to myself drone on robotically like a salesman hawking a vacuum cleaner.

My most promising pitch meeting was with two development executives at a major studio. My top concept that day was a romantic comedy about a straight guy who falls in love with a wonderful woman who mistakenly believes he’s gay, resulting in all kinds of confusion. As I spun my tale, the junior exec laughed in most of the right spots, giving me hope. The senior exec, a dour-looking man whose father was an A-list producer, sat in stony silence. When I was done, the junior exec said he thought my concept had potential, although the gay element might be ahead of its time. The senior exec, still unsmiling, said bluntly: “I’ll be perfectly honest. I don’t believe in developing any projects that involve risk.” He then named “Problem Child” as his idea of the ideal low-risk movie and abruptly ended the meeting.

Years later, I sold the screenplay to an indie producer. It never got made, meaning my credentials are still impeccable. Watch for my tome at Book Soup, with classes to follow at the Learning Annex.