What they all said, plus Pez.
I was in East Hollywood last night, where the apartments glossed with tobacco and dank back views go for $725 a month.
This morning I was at home in the Hills, which I will be leaving for good in three days, and my neighbor's mom stopped me in the driveway to ask if I knew who the strange men at the water tower were. Oh, she said, you're Sean and we haven't met and now you're leaving, where? Africa and America, I say. She is the director of one of the biggest-grossing comedies ever (has the word "World" in it) (though her latest movie didn't make much), and she has tried to call me about local politics in our four-house gated community on top of LA, and now here I am.
P: "You're a screenwriter?"
Me: No way. I do poetry and chase ideas.
P: "Oh, you're many levels higher than the rest of us, then."
(laughter)
Me: Well, I write some bad poetry --
P: "No such thing. Why Africa?"
Me: Friends with situations.
P: "Inspiration, you mean. Too bad. We should have a chat."
Me: When I come back, for sure.
P: "When do you come back?"
Me: As soon as I make a movie for twenty-five grand with Peter Fonda that grosses more than twenty million bucks.
P. likes that, we shake hands. I have a friend, and I know her daughter will speak generously of me, since I always play with the babies and throw grapes at the dogs.
Ta, ta, I drive up the driveway, shaking my head. Been here more than three years, in a dreamhouse on top of the Hills, writing and filming and recording music, and here is opportunity bumping into me yet again, days before I leave. Her comedy grossed over $200 million. She liked the line about the twenty-five thousand dollar movie.
My landlord is at the house, showing the place to a star-in-the-making Asian-American actress/comedienne, and a Penthouse Pet is standing on the driveway, tapping her shoe dramatically. I am late for a shoot, and I apologise. My landlord talks about somebody named Jennifer or Dominique to whom or for whom he has sold three houses, and about how she didn't think Forrest Gump would make any money so she took a cool mil up front to produce while Zemeckis and Hanks took nine points and look what happened.
We start the shoot while the landlord shows the actress/comedienne the place, and then I am conscripted into making the sales pitch. The Pet shakes her head and I ask her why she's annoyed. "Your landlord thought I was a real estate agent, so I told him I was a model and he sniffed at me." This is a serious problem. I can always use frowns in the picture, but a bad attitude can ruin a day. Listen Melanie, I say, he thought you were a real estate agent coz I asked you to come dressed conservatively in a business suit, remember, and I even wrote in my e-mail that you should wear something that makes you look like a . . .
"A real estate agent," says Melanie, smiling. "I fooled him."
We shoot for five hours and Melanie is intelligent and ambitious and cries in the scene about polar bears drowning in the Arctic while looking for a floe to stand on, and the shoot gets interrupted by my pal who cannot decide whether she should design for Guess (cash) or a kids TV series (rep), and we're watching the sun go down when my upstairs neighbors pull in from a long drive with a cat in the backseat, and I think to myself the city of angels will stay in my blood awhile because my upstairs neighbor is a cool, cool hombre who managed some of C&W's biggest acts and is very receptive to the idea that he and me jet off to Nashville to make a tiny art doc about how a song gets written, right there on the spot, in five minutes, and Kristofferson and Faith will sit down for an hour no problem (except I remind him that we won't spend more than 15 minutes on each, because WE don't have the time), and the cellie rings and it's BadTV in NYC saying
a song I wrote in five minutes is 13th top-rated song on youtube music vids, and I tell that to my upstairs neighbor as he unloads the cranky cat from the backseat, and he looks at me like Of course, a song in five minutes, and that's probably the name of the art doc we'll make . . . when?
Thirty messages on voicemail when I get back in, alone, and see the hellacious intellectual property yet to be packed: 17 external hard drives, too valuable to be shipped, must be drive to New York from here on Tuesday or Wednesday and I am the mule doing the driving, carrying with me four computers and easily 400 tapes and several thousand DVD-Rs. The messages are full of people wanting to get together just quickly before I go:
The comedienne who gives away neat clothes at Burning Man, which reminds me that Burning Man called last week and left a message that Carli needs to talk to me about whatever it is I am filming there. The comedian also named Sean, who is brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, who I promised at the Improv that I would make him a small video, he calls and says he just got a concussion opening a cabinet in his kitchen so maybe it's perfect to film now. My music partner Paul in Venice Beach calls, he's got a gig with a Finnish superstar at the Hotel Cafe and I made her music videos and I should come by and say hello because maybe there is more business to be filmed in Finland this fall, but really he wants to talk about Gina Gershon. I could recount the content of a dozen other calls from today, each a string in a ball of opportunity and pleasure, especially the one from the Shakespearean actor who performed these lines of mine on Thursday night before going off to be body double in some Big Brother reality show trash:
A screenplay, says the artist,
is a stone in a city of amateurs.
It's a pebble, written for third-graders,
assembled at Kinko's
like an erector set at Christmas.
Lego as Literature.
But what is this impulse to write a screenplay?
The urge to put words into glittery movement . . .
that urge is a beautiful toxin of the mind.
I think, ergo, screenplay!
And he performs this piece like it's Othello and I shoot it in a way that is, well, like Othello, and I scribbled it in front of him in 60 seconds while we were filming other things and after we performed it he says, Where did that come from? And that's what I like about questions like
Does a writer have to go to Hollywood to make it?
you end up writing stuff, fired by the experience not just of being in Hollywood but realizing that you're always better off somewhere else. What life keeps a writer from swimming out of his cranny into the free-flow of ideas and creative impulse? How could a writer (poet, essayist, pornographer, John Irving, or screenplayist) not come here? Hollywood bristles with loss and desperation, shines with costume cash, and is fouled by abandoned dreams which stain its boulevards like the shit fouls the beaches at Santa Monica and south, all of us surfers susceptible to the excrements of 30 million people crammed into paradise.
If you're young, come out. If you're not young and have responsibilities, come out and cut every cord you have to if that's what your blood is hinting you do. But don't come here looking to become something other than what you already are. The marketplace of dreams is looking for what you have and not what you think the market will bear. Come as you are, ready or not, and you'll sink or swim according to the length of your horizons and the depths of your imagination. Hollywood won't notice and will not care about your welfare unless you are an interesting bauble it can affix to the shimmery tiara of personalities it wears on its crown, the marquee the rest of the world gawks at with glee.
Phone rings, it's Paul. Dude, I was taking pictures of Sting and Stewart Copeland last night at a photo gallery and I kept on thinking about what I should say to them, or to all the other stars who were there, like Gina Gershon and Pee Wee Herman and Wesley Snipes. I laugh at Paul's indecision: "Paul, why didn't you tell Gina that I still have her dresser in the closet, the same dresser you left behind when you moved out and I moved in. It's right there where she left it." Paul groans. Dude, why didn't I think of that? She would have loved to know how the house is.
The house is up for rent.
I will post the video with Othello doing "Ergo, Screenplay" and the Pet crying over polar bears along with my continued essay, forged right here in this advice to somebody who doesn't know whether Hollywood fits, attached to this awkward message of my own, intended to be two short sentences saying "What Pez said," because one of my regrets leaving here is that I never got to talk to Pez and collaborate on a short for the good people at AW, writers launching spears of precise construct at an uncertain enemy, at publishing, at Hollywood, at fame and always at fortune, heaps of it.
It's been a hilarious trip. Can't tell the start from the finish, but who wants to?
I tell the actors and models and wannabes who come over and play with my words that the important thing is the process. I want to capture the effort at making something interesting. The results don't matter. We're trying, and there are people who won't try who will watch what we're doing and think, Jeez I hope these people are using a safety net.
Look, I am flying. Who cares about the floor?
I'm in Hollywood!
) but mostly because new writers may never ever be good enough to make it in the business and you will have made the move for nothing.
