Creating My Masterpiece

 Ensconced back in my bungalow, I set about creating my masterpiece. Like I said, I was totally in my wheelhouse then, doing the very best writing of my young career. I buckled down and poured my heart and soul into the idea. I skipped Radiohead concerts, cancelled dates, ate nothing but bad Chinese and Thai delivery. Twenty-four seven, I labored to make the story not just a kick-ass MMA thrill ride -- the essential dynamic driving the entire project in the first place -- but also a film which actually had something to say.

 

I saw it as a classic have-your-cake-and-eat-it-to opportunity -- killer action and ultra-cool, franchisable genre characters, with a timely message to the contemporary audience nestled behind all the head-butting and hard talk.

 

Listen, if all you wanted was to see somebody's trachea stomped into tomato soup, or some asshole's nutsack blown off, yeah, you would get that in spades. I mean, this was an ACTION MOVIE after all, mass escapist entertainment. But for the more discerning genre lover (like myself) there would also be a legitimate subtext we could hang our hats on. A little something... better.

 

One month later I submitted my twelve-page, single-spaced treatment. I was anxious, but extremely confident. Never had I felt better about the work and what I was trying to accomplish. I believed it awesome that Hollywood execs were willing to push for a meaningful story, even within the confines of a smaller genre pic like this. Maybe the self-serving, head-time-capsuled-up-ass development stereotypes I'd been brutalized by firsthand in the past would be proven wrong this time around.

 

A week passed. Then a second. Neither my agent nor myself heard so much as a whisper.

 

Believe me, if there's anything a writer learns in Hollywood, it's this -- the silence is deafening.

 

Silence is never good. Silence says disinterest, displeasure or -- scariest of all -- disappointment. When you put finished pages someone paid for in their impatient little palms and they don't get back to you a.s.a.p. something is terribly, irrevocably wrong. In my experience, there are no exceptions to this rule.

 

Sure enough, start of week three we finally got word. It wasn't good. Let's just say nobody loved it. The company initially didn't hate it, per se, but, the Director's people did. They hated it with a passion. So that meant the company had started loathing it as well.

 

Judgment Day took place in the company's flagship conference room. Picture a Hudsucker Proxy-sized oak conference table, all five of my company inquisitors massed at the far end, and me -- best of intentions, isolated, confused -- docked in a half-mast Aeron chair at the other. The Famous Director was now very, very busy, slammed in fact, and sadly could not attend.

 

Instead, the Head of Development lead the prosecution. He was a real trip, an IMAX D-Guy Cartoon brightly penciled in by Pixar. We're talking an Aliens-level development exec here, with him cast as the egg-laying Queen, not just one of the day player xenomorphs. For the safety and sanity of all involved, let's call him Exec X.

 

"This treatment is too preachy, too grim, too goddamn G-L-O-O-M-Y," his first salvo whistled across my bow. "Where's the fun in this world, John? The Lethal Weapon of it all? The hijinks, the wink-wink, the Wow Factor?"

 

You mean, where's the fun in... illegal immigration? In the callous rich taking advantage of the struggling poor? Is that what he was asking?

 

"Look, John, trust me -- it's NOT THAT BAD down there. There are plenty of happy stories to tell. Happy stories which give those people plenty of hope."

 

Whoops. My Spidey Sense suffered an ugly spasm. "Down there". "Those people". When coming from a white guy's mouth, this couldn't be going anywhere good.

 

"To some, you know, this might sound controversial. But I'm going to go ahead and say it anyway, 'cause frankly I'm not a P.C. person and I could give a shit," Exec X leaned forward, Sunday smile, as if confiding in me. "You know what, John? I have a maid, and she's an illegal. That's right. An illegal. And guess what? She LOVES working for me. Loves it! She's fuckin' overjoyed, couldn't be happier!"

 

"Me too." The famous director's D-Girl joined in. "My husband and I have an illegal nanny. Always smiling, that woman. Very Zen."

 

"In fact," Exec X bulldozed forward, "Recently I had a bit of a funny conundrum. My maid's daughter was having her quinceañera, and she told me they didn't have enough decorations for it. So guess what I did? This is great -- I let her go around the house and gather up all the old flowers that'd been there a few days and take those to the party! Isn't that terrific? She was soooooo happy."

 

Another exec in the room I'd met before, a decent guy, coming from the right place. I watched the same horrified shockwave blitzkrieg his face that had already darkened mine. So they weren't all Replicants, I thought. Thank Christ.

 

Oversharing kills. No doubt, I'm every inch as white boy as the next honky motherfucker out there. But there was one huge problem.

 

I wasn't that kind of white.

 

Both my mother and father had Ph.D.'s from Teachers College at Columbia. Their specialties? Education for Gifted Minority Students. My girlfriend was Hispanic, a social worker born literally -- true shit -- in a dirt-floored shack in Pacoima. So yeah, this wasn't going to be the best of fits.

 

All this time, Dear Reader, I'd been racking my brain, trying to figure out why they hated my treatment so much. Why everyone was acting like I'd totally butt-fucked the pooch on this one. Now it hit me full-force -- my pages were too, well, Robin Hood. I'd done exactly what we'd agreed upon, gotten it pitch perfect... which was worst-case for these folks.

 

Class struggle? Rich vs. Poor? Wise up, dummy. They wanted our MMA Hero disguised as a grubby street urchin, crashing Beverly Hills parties, stuffing his pockets with hors d'oeuvres and stealing wads of cash from fur coats in the coat room (I mean, is anything funnier than the poor stealing?). And that's precisely the revised take they now pitched me.

 

Everything became a vague blur, Charlie Brown's teacher shot-gunning syllabic nonsense. The only part I remember was Exec X's take on our protagonist -- "It's like Ché Guevara. He was sexy, he was hot, did a couple of cool killings. Perfect, right?"

 

Talk about mind-fucks. No class struggle, no six-hundred-year-old legend.

 

Their brainstorm was to take the Robin Hood out of Robin Hood.

 

Meeting over, we shook hands with the nauseous smiles of strangers who'd eaten the same rotten shellfish. I grabbed my '66 Bug -- the same car I'd driven out to L.A. years earlier -- and puttered straight up Wilshire to my agent Marty's office.

 

When I walked in, I just unloaded. Play by play, line by line, detailing the nuclear winter I'd just lived through. From Marty's expression, I could see he was having trouble grasping it all. He knew my background, knew the man I was, but still. After I'd slaked my desperate need to rant, I punctuated it with this little gem --

 

"They can keep the money," I said. "I don't want it."

 

In Marty's entire life, I don't think a single client had ever told him that. And why would they? Idealism and moral outrage are the privilege of a rarified few. In this Biz, at the grunt level, those concepts played worse than kiddie porn. Besides, who the fuck was I? Claude Rains in Casablanca? "I'm shocked, shocked to find that half-baked racism is going on here!" It's not like I'd signed up for the Peace Corps or anything.

 

Still, I had my principles, and I was willing to put all that Monopoly money where my naive cakehole was. Marty's advice was to go home, cool my tool and let him do some reconnaissance. Once he'd sussed everything out, he'd get back to me.

 

Two things bailed me out. First, the exec I knew called Marty and totally vouched for my eyewitness testimony (told you he was a good guy). Second, Exec X himself realized he'd fucked up and called to try and smooth things over. "Listen, Marty," he told my rep, "Nobody over here wants to make an... irresponsible movie."

 

A second meeting was scheduled to try and salvage things, but in many ways it was worse than the first. My time was spent daydreaming about grabbing Exec X and going Sharky's Machine -- pile-driving us through the plate glass and plummeting 200 feet into the crushing calm of warm pavement below.

 

So that was that -- the deal died. They paid for the treatment, and I -- insisting on principle -- left the other $65,000 sitting on the table. SIXTY FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS. Just walked away from it. The real world cost of maintaining some integrity.

 

You may be wondering -- what about the Famous Director, the one guy who surely would've had your back? Predictably, after that first, glorious Hollywood dry-humping, I neither saw nor heard from him again. No phone call. No email. Nothing. To this day, I don't know if he actually hated it, or his illegal nanny D-Girl had cut my throat without him getting the real scoop on any of what went down.

 

And Exec X? Was there any Bad Karma due a producer like that? Would the bold heavens take a stand and angrily smite down what the film industry itself would not?

 

You're fucking kidding, right? This is the Film Biz.

 

Years later, I was on autopilot at some friends' place watching a minor awards show. About five hours in, after two dozen self-aggrandizing ass-kissers had hammed it up for the cameras, they finally got around to Movie of the Year.

 

And who should win but Exec X -- now a full-fledged Producer. Producer X.

 

This go 'round I did crap my pants. Openly and without restraint. But this wasn't even rock bottom. Because his acceptance speech came next --

 

"I'm soooooo happy you've taken my movie into your hearts, this wonderful little film about racial harmony, the end of prejudice of all kinds, and, of course, hope. Always hope, for those people less fortunate than ourselves."

 

Producer X had just won a second-tier Indy Movie of the Year award. By playing the race card. In their favor. Before he even left the stage, I was stumbling into the backyard, begging a frenzied bong hit. A man can only take so much, and my mind was dangerously close to snapping, the only hope of retaining my sanity a bright, protective sheen of cannabis.

 

As I slipped into a numbing, stony oblivion, a single thought ran roughshod through my head --

 

"I wonder if Producer X's illegal maid is back at his house watching this, too?