Bad At Apologies

This is going to seem like a stupid question, but can you get Fritos just anywhere? It's not just a Texas thing, right? I can go into a store in Phoenix or LA or Berkeley and get Fritos? (well, okay, not Berkeley, because I'm sure the Frito is an oppressed species or made of GMO corn harvested without a reparations ceremony presided over by a Jainist or is shaped like a labia and therefore misogynist or something. But maybe Oakland.) Damn, I love Fritos.

Also, Fritos are like the grossest thing ever. Please pass the Fritos. Pop me open a Lone Star while you're at it. I need something to wash down these Fritos. I don't know what you send in to get the taste of Lone Star out of your mouth. I'm sure you good people will have some suggestions.

And yes, I remember the Frito Bandito. And Casa De Fritos at Disneyland. I know people know what Fritos are, but I can't remember the last time I was in a store on the west coast and there were Fritos. Tostitos, sure. Every kind of lame-ass potato chip imaginable, yes. But Fritos? Well, we shall see. If I make Fritos the Official Corn Chip of mcbrennan will they send me a case of 'em or will they sue for defamation? Tough call.

All I have had for food today are two slices of cake and 13 Fritos, so I may be a bit buggy. Also all the good music is on the other computer. I forgot my iPod when I left Berkeley. This is the pre-divorce laptop and it has only pre-divorce music, all of which I hate. All 65 gigabytes of it. Fuck you, 13,991 pre-divorce songs. Your naïve doe-eyed reality is as dead as grunge, Phil Rizzuto and representative democracy.

I had no breakfast, lunch or dinner, but I did have a good meetup with my wayward lunch date, who it's safe to say has some potential future involvement with my movie, and so we had a good chat about movie-related matters. I also got to spend some nice time this evening with my generous host, who I will miss as I head off to Phoenix, that land of peril and promise but mostly peril.

Plane's in the air at 3:15 central, lands at 3:15 pacific. Two hours of my life will disappear without a trace, except for vague memories of being groped against my will by horrible creeps. It's Daddy Day Camp all over again.

I'm....gads, where am I, actually? "The Hideout". Fitting. I am in "The Hideout" on Congress and seven-thish. It's a coffeehouse. Of course we all know I don't drink coffee but I'm having a strawberry banana freezy-smoothie thing. That song that's been stuck in my head since last Wednesday, Lucinda Williams' "Lonely Girls", started playing over the PA the instant my ass hit the chair. My compliments to the music supervisor.

The screenwriting-conference portion of the festival is over. Most everybody's left town. Yesterday the Driskill Hotel was the epicenter of the nouvelle vague of contemporary screenwriting. Today it is a meeting place for what appear to be drunken government expense-account conventioneers from the National Park Service. The good news is my chances of getting laid just quadrupled. The bad news is...aw, fuck off, make your own wood/timber/splinters joke. "That's not tree sap," etc.

Every year on Sunday morning AFF has a "Hair Of The Dog" brunch, which, on the off chance you've sobered up overnight, you can launch a guerilla counterattack on your liver. I didn't go. I had a real breakfast with real food and then went to two entirely unglamourous but hugely informative meetings about financing and budgeting. I passed up not one but two sessions on craft--and god knows I needed 'em--but what can I say, there is something sexy about the phrase "hot costs". It's not just an informational daily accounting sheet, it's a handy truism.

Oh. I was one of many people in this development session with a few bigtime studio development execs, and the execs were defending why they avoid new talent like the plague (liability issues) but they value festivals like this because sometimes they find "breathtakingly original new voices", and Mary P. Hansell, the screenwriting competition director said--I swear to god--she said "like Cait--there, in the back, Cait's been a finalist or semifinalist here twice and our judges think she's one of the best and most original new writers they've ever read." What can you say to that? Thank you, I guess, which I did.

The development execs smiled and nodded, and took off early.

So I went to see a movie tonight--Juno, at the Paramount. Diablo Cody wrote it, Jason Reitman directed it, Ellen Page and Michael Cera are in it. It was very funny, very touching, sharp, witty, stylish.

It was almost exactly the same movie as Dramatis Personae.

Okay, no. There's no transgender or queer content, and it's not set in the 80s--but like Rushmore, Napoleon Dynamite, Superbad, it had a retro 80s feel, right down to the plastic novelty telephones and vintage 80s toys, cars, clothes and language scattered throughout. I swear to god I sat though a meeting not eight weeks ago where a guy told me a movie like the one I was pitching could never get made, yet here I am staring at it. The lead character is a whip-smart teenager in big trouble (the marketing materials use that exact phrase!)...rapid-fire pop-culture dialogue...christ, the kid even orders a scotch from an adult before the second act. It's like the big-budget commercial heterosexual version of my movie. I am so fucked.

What should I do, you think? Heighten my language and characterizations even more? Go to great pains to drive hard away from the similarities? Leave it as is, hope Juno is a big hit and mine gets picked up as a movie "like that big hit movie Juno?" Do nothing and not worry about it? Go write something else? Is this just a giant opportunity that my massive ego is preventing me from seeing? I think maybe.

Mine is better, you understand. Sharper, dirtier, funnier, more stylistically and thematically original. I'm still confident in the material. But I don't know if that stuff matters.

Anyway. So I'm a bit discouraged tonight. I probably succeeded in doing what I came here for--make this contact or that contact, build my relationship with the AFF people, etc--but it feels like I'm perpetually (and unsuccessfully) playing catch-up. I suppose I should just do what I do, write my own stories and let the chips fall, etc, etc. But dammit, I cannot continue to live like this, this fucking hobo existence. I would very much like to go home, instead of to this city and that city and this guest room and that guest room. And I am not getting it done.

I did come up with about 10 new screenplay ideas while I've been here. When I get home I'll take a few weeks and write the best one. And who knows. Maybe something good will happen.

I'm in Austin until Wednesday afternoon, then it's off to Phoenix for a week or two. Then back to Berkeley. Then? God knows.

I don't have a camera phone--or a friend to take the picture, for that matter--but I pretty much still look like this photo taken at last year's festival. And in fact, I left the hat at home but the creepily perfect, grown-in-a-tank Dos Equis girls gave me an identical one yesterday. I would have photoshopped out any extra age-lines anyway, so just use your imagination. I do have a DV camera with me, and have been making my usual snide remarks to its nonexistent audience, but I don't have any way to get its stills and video into the computer. Count your blessings there.

I'm in the Driskill in a secret hidden location above the bar, listening to the piano man play "Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime." There's something about bars, old bars especially, that are eternal. One imagines this same setlist, these sights, these sounds, those conversations, that fragrance, 20 or 30 or 40 years ago or more. Only the lack of cigarette smoke places us firmly (and thankfully) in 2007.

Dinner was some kind of pita thing. I didn't feel like seeing Oliver Stone present Born On The Fourth Of July because I am a jerk. Sadly I am not feeling well, so I have found a hidden chaise longue and am longuing. We have now moved on from "L.O.V.E." to "Someone To Watch Over Me", played at a sprightly player-piano allegro. The bar is packed, or I would saunter down and try to be social. I may try to walk a block or two to the place where ol' Uncle Billy Bell had his picture taken 120 years ago...he may have even stayed at this hotel, who knows.

The trouble with giving up and calling it a night is it takes more energy to go home than to sit here and twitch like so much electrocuted bullfrog. But I suppose I should stop pestering the friends' list. Hope your evening is a delight, wherever you are.

I am sitting in the lobby of the fabulous Driskill Hotel, feeling a little like Bob Hoskins in Mona Lisa, only there's no high-class whore involved, or Michael Caine, and in fact despite my recent cupcake binge I bear no resemblance to Bob Hoskins. But I'm a Hoskins-esque smidge out of place, and Neil Jordan would be a decent bet to direct a movie about my life, so the analogy is not entirely preposterous. One day I hope to actually stay in this hotel instead of loitering in the lobby like 130 pounds of insousciant, pixieish, perky...um, Bob Hoskins.

Polite of you not to ask what the other 40 pounds are doing. Thanks much.

So far, so good. Nice day. Warm. Freezing cold in the hotel, as if the Driskill A/C is single-handedly trying to defeat global warming. Film Types everywhere. And I do mean types. There's a certain reductive value when you've been to a lot of these things; you can learn to spot who's who without a guidebook. The slick, manic, manicured intensity of the agent, the sport-casual producer, the disheveled anonymity of the Successful Writer, the up-and-comers who all seem to look like Beck, the distressingly callow, calculating ambition of the Recent Film School Graduate-Slash-MBA Who Loves "The Godfather" Series and Everything Scorsese Ever Did And Also "Memento". Many, many of those guys.

And of course, the fatally flawed, slightly past-her-prime gal-with-a-past trying to make good. There's one in every crowd. So I'm told.

I love "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore". And "The Conversation". Get off my back, mob movie fans.

Interesting meeting with Nicholas Kazan, which was fun. "The art is in what you withhold," says Nicholas Kazan. Must not have been much art in my last script since I didn't withhold anything. He had lots of valuable tips like that.

I'm off to a welcome party in a minute. There's an overnight "grown-up" party which I may or may not attend since I was sinking before the ship left port. But we'll see. I love Austin and I'm glad to be back here, but so far I've been too tired to make any friends at the festival. But I shall gather myself up and get back in the ring momentarily.

Remember when I used to use this blog to complain incessantly about Natalie Merchant or go on and on about my feeeelings instead of constantly flogging my career?

Yeah, neither do I. Anyway, this morning the Austin Film Festival made it official: Dramatis Personae (and its author) made the semifinals at this year's AFF screenwriting competition. I am, of course, delighted, and I'll be headed to Austin next month for the festival, so if you're there, do come say hello.

We now return you to "Mr. Belvedere", already in progress.

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...and my apologies if you're hearing this twice, beloved writing-filter friends...