I'll Mature When I'm Dead (10 page)

I
n the field of professional writing, the best job is screenwriter. Why? As the late William Shakespeare—who wrote
Romeo and Juliet
and
Romeo and Juliet 2: The Rising
—put it: “Dollars per word, baby.”

Think about it. If you write a novel, it has to contain tens of thousands of words, because you have to keep describing things to give the reader a mental picture of what’s going on:

Do you see how much
work
this is? It’s already 377 words, and
virtually nothing has happened
. To get this novel off the ground and going somewhere, the writer will have to keep on cranking out descriptions for hundreds and hundreds of pages. It’s brutal, slogging work, comparable to coal mining, but harder. You never hear coal miners complaining about Coal Miner’s Block, wherein, try as they might, they simply can’t bring themselves to mine another piece of coal. Whereas this kind of tragedy befalls novelists all the time, which is why so many of them are forced to quit working altogether and become university professors.

That’s why screenwriting is such a good field for writers to get into. Screenwriters can skip most of the descriptions, because the movie viewers will see the action and setting for themselves and, if they are sitting behind me, comment upon it in a loud voice (“I have that exact same sofa! From Ikea! The Ektorp!”). If a screenwriter wants to write a scene in which some spectacu-lar action takes place, he doesn’t have to describe it in detail. He simply writes something like: “A savage monster clam rises out of the Potomac and eats the U.S. House of Representatives.” Then he moves along in the plot, leaving it up to the computer-graphics nerds to figure out what that scene would actually
look
like.

So if a screenwriter were to write the 377-word scene above about Steve and Corinne, it would look like this:

That’s a grand total of twelve words, or a whopping 97 percent reduction in word count. Simply by eliminating description, the screenwriter can work his way through the entire plot in a single morning, leaving the afternoon free for screenwriter leisure activities such as drugs.

And yet, despite producing far fewer words than the novelist, the screenwriter often makes a LOT more money. Why? Because the average novel in the United States sells 173 copies, forty-eight of which are purchased by either the novelist or the novelist’s mom. Whereas a screenplay has a chance to become a movie in which “Corinne” might be played by Angelina Jolie, and “Steve” might be played by Tom Cruise wearing special shoes to make him appear rangy, and it could make hundreds of millions of dollars and—even better—become a successful video game. A top screenwriter can earn tons of money, even if his movies tend to be, from an artistic and literary standpoint, monkey dung. That’s why the rest of us writers look down on screenwriters and would give our excess kidneys to be one of them.

At least I always wanted to be one of them. My problem was that I could never figure out specifically what I had to do. Over the years I’ve gone to a bunch of writers’ conferences, which are these gatherings where we writers form panels and explain to members of the reading public how hard writing is, after which there is a cocktail reception. From time to time at these events I’ve met people in the movie industry, and sometimes, after we’ve had a few cocktails, they’d say something along the lines of, “If you ever have any ideas for projects, let me know.”

Each time this happened, I would get excited, because I knew I’d been given a golden opportunity to turn my movie ideas into money. The problem was, I didn’t
have
any movie ideas. For almost all of my writing career, I’ve been a newspaper humor columnist, which means I have trained my brain to think of ideas that can be executed in short bursts between beers without heavy mental lifting. These ideas almost never involve deep cinematic themes. For me, the ideal topic is something like the one I used once for a Thanksgiving column, based on a newspaper story concerning the president of a company in Rancho Cucamonga, California, who proposed that the poultry industry could reduce meat contamination by Super Glue-ing turkey rectums shut.
¹⁶

Now if you’re a humor columnist trying to write a Thanksgiving column, a news story like this is a gift from God. It has all the elements you’re looking for:

But this kind of idea doesn’t lend itself to the plot of a major motion picture. It is difficult to envision the following conversation taking place between executives of a major movie studio:

My other problem
is that, even when I have a movie idea, I am not good at selling it. One time I was working on a youth novel called
Science Fair
with my friend and sometime writing partner Ridley Pearson. Ridley, who is more Hollywood-savvy than I am, managed to wangle us a conference call with some actual movie-studio people. The idea behind this call was that we would “pitch” our book idea as a possible movie. (“Pitching” is a Hollywood term for “trying to sell your project by acting like a low-cost prostitute, only with fewer scruples.”) It was a golden opportunity, except for three problems:

First, we had written just two chapters of the book, so we really didn’t know what was going to happen in it. All we knew was that we intended it to be fun and wacky.

Second, Ridley and I are older guys born during the Civil War. This meant we had a generation gap, because the movie industry is very youth-oriented. The average age of movie-studio executives, at least the ones willing to talk to the likes of us, is approximately fourteen. But they are not the fun and wacky kind of fourteen-year-old. They are more along the lines of really young pension actuaries.

Third, since I had done most of the writing of what little of the book we had, Ridley and I decided that I would be the designated talker for our team, with Ridley providing backup. This turned out to be a large mistake. I have never “pitched” a movie. In fact, I am the world’s worst salesperson. As a child, I never sold anything to anybody who was not one of my immediate parents. When I was supposed to be selling candy to my neighbors to raise money for Little League, my strategy was to walk very slowly to within thirty feet of a neighbor’s door, then—this was my signature move—turn around and walk briskly away. The only way this sales strategy would have worked is if the neighbors happened to see me out the window and decided to chase me down, tackle me, and
demand
that I sell them some Little League candy. Even then I would probably have tried to talk them out of it.

So the conference call did not go well. I’ve managed to delete most of the specifics from my memory cells, but basically this is how it went:

You think I’m
exaggerating, but if anything my pitch went worse. I was not connecting on any level. I was like a man trying to explain the Theory of Relativity without knowing anything about it, using only hand puppets. At one point the movie people mentioned that they were particularly interested in movie concepts that had main characters in four “quadrants”—male adult, female adult, male child, and female child. In an effort at a joke, I responded: “We have
six
quadrants! We have quadrants out the wazoo!” But the movie people did not seem to be amused. You could tell they took their quadrants seriously.

It will not surprise you to learn that Ridley and I failed to get a movie deal. But that was not the end of my Hollywood career, thanks to another friend of mine, Gene Weingarten. (That’s right: I have
two
friends.) Gene has actually sold a screenplay, and he suggested that we should work together on one and become fabulously wealthy. That sounded like a solid business plan to me, so we agreed that he would fly down to Miami and stay at my house for a few days, during which we would have a movie idea, which we would then turn into a screenplay, which we would then sell in exchange for a large quantity of money.

I met Gene’s flight at the Miami airport, and even though we had never collaborated on a screenplay before, within an hour—this is the kind of creative magic that can happen when two “pros” get together—we were able to locate my car in the parking garage. Like many aging Baby Boomers born before the discovery of quadrants, I’ve become forgetful, so I often have to locate my car by walking randomly around waving my remote control in front of me like a small magic wand, pressing it and listening for the answering beep. If for some reason you ever want to attract a bunch of Boomers, all you have to do is make a machine that beeps every few seconds and put it in the middle of a busy parking lot. You’ll have Boomers swarming to it like ants to a Ding Dong.

Anyway, once we located my car, I figured we’d go to my house and try to have an idea, but Gene said, no, first we had to go to an office-supply store and buy a magnetic board. Really. Gene explained—remember, he was the guy who had actually sold a screenplay—that once we had a movie idea, we would break it down into scenes, and the correct way to organize these scenes was to write them on index cards, attach them to a board with magnets, and move them around until we had the right order. Gene insisted that this was how all the professional screenwriters did it.

So we went to Office Depot and bought a large white magnetic board, a bunch of index cards, and several dozen magnets. Then we went to my house, set up the board, unpackaged the magnets and the index cards, made some coffee, settled into comfortable chairs, and prepared to have an idea.