ScreenwriterGuy.com

You’ll get what’s coming to you…
Good things happen to good people? People who screw over others will meet retribution? Uhhh… no. Still, folks in L.A. are true believers that karma rules the entertainment industry. This despite flagrant, flagrant evidence to the contrary

The inalienable, God-given right to a sunny day
Being from the Seattle area, I’ve seen winters with successive rainy day records on par with that endured by Noah. People grumble a little, and definitely look forward to spring. Here in L.A., similar griping beings about halfway though the first cloudy morning.

It’s a dog-eat-caviar world
L.A. is a cutthroat city, and people treat each other like dogs. Except, of course, that they treat their dogs like royalty. A dog owner will not flinch to bring her pet into public places or to work, and will certainly not ask those around them if they mind, or if they are allergic. All that displaced maternal instinct leaves mommy quite certain that everyone loves her Poopsykins. Yes they do! Yes they do wuv wittle Poopsykins vewy much, doesn’t dey!?

GILF? No thanks.
There’s a line in the musical version of Sunset Blvd: “Nothing’s wrong with being 50! Unless you’re acting 20.” This town has a staggeringly high percentage of middle-aged to elderly women dressing and primping as if they were high school seniors. Don’t get me wrong. It’s important to take care of yourself. Still, there’s such a thing as grace. It is nothing but delusional to respond to one’s mortality with yet another surgery and ever-tighter skirts. Lipstick has a point of diminishing returns, ladies.

Aren’t you that guy…?
Supposedly in this business, you’re only as good as your last project, and it’s not what you’ve done, but what you’ve done lately. But I’m impressed with how much mileage VIPs seem to get from something they did long ago. For example, I recently received a Happy New Year e-mail from a producer who included a picture of himself wearing a jacket from a syndicated TV show he had executive produced in 1988.

Me, Me, Me! MEEEEEEEP!Nowhere is L.A.-style selfishness more evident than in driving patterns. Sure, every city has those obnoxious people who handle a line-up at a freeway exit by driving in the next lane as far as possible and then blinking and waving to get in. (I like to believe there is a special circle of hell just for such individuals, who evidently didn’t learn any important life lessons while in line for the kindergarten drinking fountain.)  And yes, heavy traffic in most big cities requires that left turns happen AFTER the light goes red. (In L.A., there seems to be an unwritten law that three cars should be able to go at a major intersection, and you are rude if you don’t pull forward enough that they can all wait in the intersection together.)  But only here have I actually witnessed a man speed through an intersection despite a perpendicularly oncoming ambulance, all so he could make the yellow light.

The big thing that gets me, though, is honking one’s horn at those who are packing unnecessary seconds onto your day. In Washington, a friend of a friend once actually got a ticket when he passed a friend’s house and beeped hello, because he was sounding his horn in a non-emergency situation. Here you get honked at if you are insufficiently aggressive. I’ve managed to avoid getting honked at for the most part, but sometimes when I am preparing to make a right turn and allow pedestrians to cross in front of me, the car behind me gets mad. This has happened to me several times now, such that if I were to accelerate at the moment the person sounded their horn, I would have killed a person. I’ve been thus encouraged to get out of a car’s way despite the fact that I was allowing a BABY carriage to cross directly in front of me. Twice.

This is the dawning of the age of my ass
When I first looked around for housing in this fair city, more than one potential roommate skipped any questions about cleanliness or schedule and wanted instead to know my astrological sign. When I returned to the kind people who were letting me crash at their place and tried to laugh with them over why I might be incompatible with a Virgo, I was treated to a half an hour on meanings of various signs, all from memory. Astrology is more than a diversion at the bottom of the funny pages to people out here.The stunner to me is the idea that our lives get all chaotic when Mercury goes retrograde. This belief comes from early civilizations noticing that the planet Mercury’s orbit would every so often seem to shift directions and go backwards for a couple of weeks. Since Mercury is the Greek messenger god, the only logical conclusion is that all of Communication should be disturbed. Now, the phenomenon of Mercury’s retrograde is based on the relative positioning of our two planets and our perspective of Mercury’s orbit–a concept I fully understood as a planetarium worker demonstrated it when I was EIGHT.

Nonetheless, there is a widespread (and I mean wide) belief down here that the orbital shifting of a planet that is millions of miles away somehow causes a general disarray of schedules, travel, and (my favorite) the internet.Let’s be clear. Mercury’s orbit doesn’t actually shift. In fact, it does the exact same thing it does when it’s not “in retrograde,” moving around the sun. But this observational illusion is the reason my e-mail isn’t working. A former employer actually waylaid a staff meeting to explain to us all how we shouldn’t create any new business or draw up any contracts for several weeks while the retrograde thingie happened. Yep. I was ordered not to generate any new deals for a couple of weeks. That’s sound business planning.

We should totally get together sometime!
For an industry that almost cannot function without collaboration, entertainment sure has a lot of people involved who are looking out for #1. Don’t get me wrong; I count myself just as selfish. It’s just sorta part of living here and pursuing the dream, by definition. You want your big break, and that means your time is precious. Combine that with the fact that it takes forty-five minutes to get ANYWHERE, and keeping in touch drops in priority. The weird corollary is that thread-flimsy friendships are good enough to contact someone for a favor. As long as you don’t mind it taking months for that favor to happen, you’re golden.

Dreams. The most valuable (one-way) currency.
Everywhere you go, producers want writers to crank out weeks or months worth of work because of the promise of just how tremendously huge this or that project is going to be. They’ve got it all figured out, and all they need is a script. But that’s no big deal, right? Try to pitch something you’ve already written, however, and sell it on the just how big you know it could be, and suddenly dreams aren’t worth as much.

Do not arouse the wrath of the great and powerful Oz!
Power matters to people everywhere, of course. But what is interesting about L.A. is that the illusion of power is at least as much if not more important than the power itself. And so I present to you a top-ten list within a top-ten list! (Oooh!!!) Here are ScreenwriterGuy’s Top Ten Things You Must Do To Make Sure Everyone Around You Knows How Important You Are, Hollywood-Style:

#10. Name drop, ever-so casually, on a daily basis.
#9. Have a wicked-hot assistant in her early, early 20s.
#8. Do not call anyone yourself. That’s (partly) what your wicked-hot assistant is for.
#7. Get your group on “The List.” Be careful to off-handedly imply how this is an feat that only you could have accomplished.
#6. Hate everything. You could have done better.
#5. …but be sure to rave about really obscure things. You are allowed to love that recent lesbian film that was shot in Australia by a Bulgarian director. Be sure that everyone around you sees it, too. Anyone who doesn’t agree how great it was is wrong, and doesn’t understand how powerful you are.
#4. Keep people waiting for you at the beginning of every appointment, even if you have to play a couple games of tetris to do it.
#3. Own a ridiculously shiny and impractical penis… I mean car.
#2. Wear a t-shirt to business meetings. Preferably a rock concert shirt, or one with something immature printed on it. Sure, powerful people dress to impress. But you! You are TOO powerful to need to dress nicely.
#1. Abuse your underlings–the more eccentric the manner, the better.