I got a nibble on my screenplay. It’s just a nibble. One of the producers has written back. Has to show it to producing partner. He said he liked it. Said it had promise. Promise! And that was all. I’m not going to go crazy, not going to start dieting for the Oscars or put a down payment on my Porsche. A big producer took me through a summer of rewrites on my first script and then showed it to the one actor he had in mind for the lead, Kevin Kleine, who declined. Game over. Cinderella story gone in an email. I promised not to get bitter. Better to have loved and been swiftly dropped than never to have been swiftly dropped at all. I’m sober. I’m not casting the movie. There isn’t a director’s chair with my name on it, a baseball cap with the name of the movie on it, a baseball jacket with the name of the movie on the back and my name in gold thread stiched into the front. None of it. Fuck me dead.
What is your fantasy?
Filed under: Film, Rejection, Screenwriting, Uncategorized | Tagged: nibble, Oscar, screenwriting, script | 53 Comments »
Today, I was accused of not being a free spirit. Guilty as charged. Not only am I not a free spirit, I might even experience a fair amount of animosity when in the presence of free spirits. The first time I knew that I wasn’t a free spirit was when I was about to graduate college. My roommate was pursuing his dream of being a modern dancer. The boy I had a crush on was moving to London to be a playwright. A woman I envied was going to Provincetown to write a screenplay. Me? I had accepted a job as the corporate file coordinator at a major investment bank because, well, the idea of trying to be a poet for real was not happening, not then, not now, not ever. And please don’t tell me about William Carlos Williams being a doctor and Wallace Stevens an insurance executive. And please don’t mistake promiscuity for being free ha ha ha ha. I am the emperor of my own damn wheelbarrow. I am a little old ugly man, cousin to Rumpelstilskin, friend to none. I am obsessive, compulsive, anal, retentive. Free spirits implode when they cross my path. Please don’t ask me to walk barefoot or wear flowers in my hair. Free spirit? I can barely manage spontaneity.
There is a reason they don’t let me out much. What was it? The beauty of the buildings, slate the color of pigeons, the girl with striped tights, purple water bottle swinging astride. I sat alone in a church and listened to an organist sigh between pieces.I dined with bright minds and tried a new food. I bought a notebook that always spells hope. Flimsy, gorgeous new ideas that blossom and die in a moment. I am at Kenyon College and tomorrow I will talk about the writer’s life. You know that lonely clacking train, that aggravated assault, that self mutilation, that particular hope, that elegant insistence, that awkward moment, that drone in your head, that never ending conversation.
Remember when I asked everyone to get in touch with good news?Well, Jess Lahey has hit one out of the ball park. Go
I was out for two weeks taking care of my mom (yes, Sabitha, I do have a heart). I returned to two enormous stacks of mail. All of the query letters were about dysfunctional families, addiction, mental illness, etc. Is it like I have a sign over my head? Couldn’t just once someone send me a book about the history of jam, or Jews in Ireland, or the true story of Karen Carpenter? I want zombies, vampires, NFL champions who dance. I’ll take Harry Potter’s ugly cousin. Two Shades of Gray. I want books that fly or compute. My Kingdom for a book about depression that isn’t upbeat in the end. I want Daniel Day Louis pre-Lincoln. I want a book about gold leaf. About golden pears. About Benjamin Franklin’s theory of trees. About pigeon holes and whack-a-moles and Spanish sauce and moss.
Betsy Lerner 