Just to be clear up front: I am not writing a screenplay. An endeavor like that is a combination of time available and ambition, an alchemy that feels like fate or genetics (depending on how much woo-woo you do) but are really both choices we actively make. Ambition eats time the way alfalfa production eats at a water supply: it's hilariously high-cost, but it's a question of prioritization. I have exactly as much time I need to have written a screenplay or thirty by this stage, but instead I've decided to spend the last almost 20 years plinking away at this blog business for a few hours per week instead. But even then, it's not a question of time as much as it is a question of choice. I choose to chip away at a product that I then choose to put into the world almost for free. I would call it generous. My therapist would likely have a different word. Not much to say when I'm trying to blame my parents for my generalized anxiety disorder, but when it comes to whether or not I'm hiding from my own modest talents, suddenly she's a goddamned thesaurus.
What I am doing is getting a vicarious look at the process by doing what most sensible people do, glomming on to the experience of someone who is better than me in most of the measurable ways. I've mentioned before that I have a friend who is very seriously actually writing a screenplay, like a proper one, with the funny line breaks and everything center-justified on the page and the dialogue and the characters and the plot and whatnot. I'm still not sure she's allowed to just do it on her own, without getting anyone's permission first, but hey, I guess I'm the jerk for trying to secure my validation before I risk the rejection, right? This system is so fucked up.
So I thought I'd just give an update of how it's going since it's been a while. If I had to sum it up in one word? Fuckin' hard. I know that's two words, but the first one is an adjective and everyone knows adjectives don't count. This is also why I'm stressing a little bit about my role in the process since a lot of it now, at a very advanced stage, is built around efficiency; cutting and combining for clarity, flow and a manageable page count. If my body of internet-freely-available work is a testament to anything, it's the concept that the best way to express a single idea is to have a lot of words carry around the very few really necessary ones, like a sedan chair but for thoughts. All the extra, unnecessary words are like a team of eight burly eunuchs dedicated to conveying forward a lazy, obscured concept that would get around a lot faster if it just got out and walked on its own. But no! We can't risk just giving away the good stuff. In the grand tradition of the laboriously verbose, like Charles Dickens, we're going to build a three-bedroom house on a foundation eight miles deep, rooted to the earth's mantle because bedrock is for pussies. Dickens famously got paid by the word. If I can ever figure out how to get that kind of pay scheme to kick in for me retroactively, daddy's getting a boat.
I'm still flattered, confused and so happy to be asked to help, to be even tangentially part of something that seems like a magic trick if magic tricks took years to execute and represented the blood, sweat and soul of someone you dearly loved. A pressure exists to contribute meaningfully to something you yourself lack the ability/courage to do (or even try!). The only thing that makes the feeling of absolute fraudulence tolerable is knowing she's never written one before either, so we're gaining our experience at exactly the same rate. The only difference is she is gaining her experience as Screenwriter and mine is in the slightly less marketable category of Screenwriter's Friend. It's a less obvious career path, but it worked out for Jason Mewes.
I have to say, as impressed as I was with the fact that she actually got to the end of a draft--a full, complete story with a beginning, middle and end--watching her deface those hard-won pages with the blood of murdered darlings through the process of rewriting and rewriting and rewriting is an absolute wonder. The ambition isn't manifested in the idea or the outlining or even the writing, it's in the harsh, heavy discipline of stomping on this thing you made, over and over and over again, until you can get it to fit in the trunk, with entirely undefined dimensions, of a car you're not allowed to drive. Whatever level of achievement it is (and it is genuinely awe-inspiring), ultimately someone else gets to tell you whether or not it's good enough and we can get this show on the road.
But you're also not even allowed to know who the someone-else is until you finish in the first place. How a script becomes an actual movie is a wholly separate species of questions and challenges you can't even reasonably consider until you finish the first thing, but I have to say: we're really close. And I say "we" because we have this running bit where we pretend I'm some kind of co-writer even though I'm responsible for 0% of any of the words contained therein. But look, I don't get to decide what my very dear friend considers helpful. If me showing up and accepting payment in vegan food and donuts for occasionally saying "that seems better than it was" or "wait, which character was the vampire again?" even though it is not in any way a vampire movie counts as "help" in her eyes, then it is.
And when she's up on the stage accepting the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and she forgets to mention me entirely, well, the rage and spite I feel in that moment, I'll know I'll have actually earned it, unlike the rest of Hollywood who are bitter and spiteful for a bunch of prosaic reasons, like misogyny or typecasting. But once all that resentment burns off,* underneath it, I know I'll find the pride. I know that, hey, yeah, you were right there, sitting next to her, not really saying anything while she came up with that bit about there not being any vampires. Nobody will ever be able to take that away.
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*Well, "all," I'm not sure we'll ever get there. Enough to stop actively screaming.
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