I
finally did get an internship in Hollywood. I got the lead through a friend of
a friend of a friend who currently worked there. I don’t know whether the
person knew I was a lawyer when he passed my name onto his boss. In some ways,
less was definitely more. When I arrived in a grimy part of Hollywood
I said as little as possible as I
listened to a man younger than me whose bald head made him look ten years
older. I only had one question at the end -- “How’d you get here?”
He talked about being an intern for
some powerful producer.
I nodded. “Just like this.”
He frowned. “Not really. We’re
talking the big time here.” He mentioned a name that I’d heard of. “I was there
for two years. One time I had to play a clown at this party. It was the boss’s
kid’s bar mitzvah.”
“A clown?”
He forced a smile. He did have a
face that would have been improved by greasepaint. If anything, he was the
“angry clown.” He kept talking -- something about driving around in a midget
car wearing a plastic nose and holding a trained monkey on a leash, but somehow
it segued into “within three months I had a deal where the company got the first
look at all my ideas. I also got the backing for this place.”
This man got his big break in life
by being a clown. I certainly didn’t mention my jury trial experience and
editing the law school newspaper after that.
The next day, after driving around Hollywood
The place felt like a fifteen ring
circus with all the animals wearing ripped jeans and Armani shirts. I looked
around. I was the oldest person in the room. No one talked to me.
The clown pointed to four piles of
scripts. He took a certain amount of glee pointing to the first pile --
“honorable mentions.” Apparently my job was to read all the honorable mentions
of some national screenwriting contest. If I did well, I’d be promoted up to
Quarterfinalists, Semifinalists, and then someday, I’d be directing my own
films.
The clown bluntly told me not to
talk about my own scripts for a few months, “until we get to know you and feel
comfortable with your work.”
I sat on a desk of someone who was
sick, the first day. When I finished a script, they handed me another. The
clown was locked in his office, still angry.
The next day, the owner of the desk came back.
Before I could introduce myself, the clown pointed to another desk, of someone
who was away at some “international film mart” or something like that.
No one talked to me as they buzzed
on about this party and that, and some tidbit about one of their friends
getting written up in the trades. As they talked about some lawsuit, I was
about to pipe in about law school, but they had already switched the subject
back to the party.
Reluctantly I turned my attention
back to page seventeen of a “coming of age” script. There was something lower
than a quarterfinalist and that was a “friend read,” which had been written by
someone’s friend and was getting the most cursory of looks. Unless the script
was Sunset Blvd, I figured I should
reject everything. Before I could smirk, I realized that as a “friend hire,” well
as a “friend of a friend hire,” my own scripts wouldn’t even make it to that
pile yet.
By page eighty-seven, I was long out
of friendship with the “friend read.” I needed a bathroom break and nearly
bumped into the clown on the way out. He said nothing; he had already forgotten
my name.
The next week, everyone came back
from wherever they were, if this was a circus, they‘d run out of rings. The clown pointed to the couch in front.
“Just sit there today.”
The light was bad and I could barely
see the words “cut to” and “fade in.” I was now the guy who cleaned up after
the elephant shit, yet bragged about “being in show business.”
I wiped my eyes when suddenly I
noticed a woman sit down in front of me. She wasn’t beautiful; she looked like
a female version of me. The clown pretended to be the happy clown, shook her
hand, and told her they’d be able to meet after he took a phone call and
couldn’t wait to talk about her “concepts.” They knew each other from college
or something.
She fidgeted nervously after he left
and closed the door. She was mouthing the words of her pitch, something about a
supernatural legal thriller, but with a heart! How many times had I sat where
she was sitting? How many times had my heart been broken just like hers was
about to be?
I smiled at her, and then got back
into the “friend read.”
She noticed me holding the script.
“Is that yours?”
“No, I work here. I’m reading the
script as a favor for someone.”
My jeans didn’t have rips in them,
and with me looking older than the others, she must have figured that I was
someone important. She smiled back.
“What’s a nice girl like you doing
pitching in a dump like this?”
She laughed. She opened up, talked about her life. She had
gotten her idea for a legal thriller from being a paralegal in a big law firm
downtown.
Paralegal? This was too good of an
opening.
“I was a lawyer,” I said. And before
I knew it I launched into the whole spiel.
She was fascinated, impressed. She
was about to hand me her car when the clown looked out from his glass office
and saw me. He cursed, then put the important phone call on hold, and seemed to
penetrate through the glass and appear right in front of us in a cloud of
smoke.
“Don’t talk to the writers!” he said
with a snarl. “Never, never, never talk to the writers!”
He pointed to a dark corner and a
single metal chair. I nodded sheepishly at the woman as I got up. She averted
her eyes.
I could hear the other people in the
room look up from their cell-phones for a second. They started laughing. One of
them spoke into his cell-phone about the “stupid new intern.” He muttered
something else, but I couldn’t hear it, then he laughed again, louder…
I moved to the corner, and put down
the script and just wrote “pass” on it. I felt bad for the “friend read”
writer, but that quickly passed. I was
37 years old. I could handle not being a
lawyer, perhaps not being a writer, but I certainly didn’t want to be a clown.
I quit the next day.
No comments:
Post a Comment