Straight after film school, I did a three year stint in Los Angeles during which my celluloid dreams were crushed to a fine, silvery powder. For the next decade I blamed myself. “You just weren’t strong enough to beat them at their own game,” I would say. I was in my twenties.
Last month I turned thirty-three, and while I’m no wise, old sage, I do have a better grasp on why my battle with Hollywood was not a fight worth fighting.
Allow me to backtrack a moment.
I have always wanted to be a writer. I wrote my first short story in the second grade around the same time I fell in love with my first book, The War of the Worlds (condensed and illustrated). Unfortunately, in high school, somewhere between the Indian villages of Nectar in a Sieve and the bleak New England town of Ethan Frome, I lost my love of reading. You can see the dilemma this presented me: Why become a writer when I hated books? Then, one day, a teacher walked into my english class to recruit students for the school’s film club. I realized for the first time that movies aren’t born fully-formed in the Hollywood Hills, but are stories written by actual humans. A year later, I was applying to film school.
I studied film and video production in Toronto, rather than New York (where I grew up) or Los Angeles. I did this for many reasons, not the least of which had to do with finances. All in all it was a great experience, if not the best stepping stone to the industry. I graduated with a couple of successful short films and a love for this new way of storytelling. During my four year education I focused primarily on directing because I knew I wanted as much control over the final product as an author has over his or her novel. Wishful thinking.
When I arrived in Los Angeles, two things happened simultaneously: I began experiencing “the industry”, and I rekindled my love of books, particularly children’s literature. I would go to pitch meetings during the day, in which I would be treated like a sad, malformed child, and then return home to read Roald Dahl. I saw crazy, crazy things in L.A. – sixteen year old pop singers getting final say over screenplays, a development executive telling me that the secret to his success was stealing other people’s movies and rewriting them for an urban (black) cast, a producer battling with an agent over whether or not his bald actor/client could wear a hair piece under another hair piece so he wouldn’t look totally bald in the comedic on-screen reveal that his character is… bald. I knew I wasn’t in the right place, but on some level I blamed myself. I always have.
Luckily, the instinct that followed wasn’t to quit the arts and go to law school. Instead, books became my obsession. I became a collector. I started writing prose again. I rediscovered that my particular voice is only true when written with ink on a page. This was ten years ago, so you’d think I’d have written at least three novels by now, right? Wrong. The thing is, I was riddled with self-doubt and I was rusty. It takes time to break the habit of writing like this:
INT. LIVING ROOM – DAY
Jack sits on the couch. The phone rings. He answers. It’s Jill.
Screenwriting teachers say:
“Write only what happens on screen.” “Write short, sharp sentences.”
How’s this:
Sit on it. I love words.
Still, I never really gave up film. It’s like that old girlfriend that keeps popping into your head every time you hear The Girl From the North Country. On one hand, I feel blessed to live in a time when filmmakers no longer need Hollywood to make movies – write a script, buy a camera, and make the movie! On the other hand, film will always be the girl I dated in between falling in love with my childhood sweetheart and finally marrying her. The affair has given me something of an identity crisis. Am I a filmmaker or an author? Do I have to decide?
Cut to the Oscars last week. What do these nominated films have in common? The Help, The Descendants, Moneyball, Hugo, Harry Potter, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, War Horse, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy, and My Week with Marilyn? You got it: they were all books first. Hell, even Midnight in Paris, which won for Best Original Screenplay, is about a screenwriter who wants to quit his trade to write a novel. It’s incredibly sad that Hollywood doesn’t trust new talent and would rather adapt a board game (Battleship). Even George R.R. Martin, the ubur-successful author of A Game of Thrones, has this gem of a sentence in his bio, “He has written fantasy, horror, and science fiction, and for his sins spent ten years in Hollywood as a writer/producer, working on Twilight Zone, Beauty and the Beast, and various feature films and television pilots that were never made.” Of course, HBO was very happy to greenlight Martin’s first television series after he had already written it as four bestselling novels.
In the end, it all comes down to stories. It always does. How you tell your story is up to you. I just find it ironic that I pursued film because I gave up reading (damn you, public school!), and that according to the Academy Awards last week, I might have been a little more likely to win an Oscar if I had stuck to writing books. Crazy.
