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AFF 2007: Ritual Suicide Edition
Oct. 14th, 2007 08:10 pmI'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.
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.
