I went to film school in Chicago, back in the early days of the internet as we know it. I thought that in the future, everybody would need somebody who knows how to use a video camera and generate original content. This was six years before YouTube existed -- so I wasn't wrong, exactly. I just thought that my specialty would be a bit more special in the years ahead. Nevertheless, I learned a lot of cool stuff along the way, even if I will likely never have to load a manual sixteen millimeter camera in the dark ever again or edit another movie with actual pieces of tape.
For my last semester of film school, I participated in their "Semester in LA" program. We congregated five days a week on the CBS lot in Studio City, sandwiched between the sets of Big Brother and Malcolm in the Middle. I was among the dozen or so aspiring writers who met in one trailer, while the hopeful producers found themselves situated in another.
Our mornings typically began with a lecture. Then we'd have a guest speaker, somebody who actively worked in the industry and could offer some valuable insights. We ate lunch in the commissary amidst the casts and crews of other familiar TV shows, and then we would return to the trailer and spend the rest of the day writing. We had two weeks to write a feature-length script, two weeks to revise it, and then one week to apply for jobs and internships. It was intense. I loved it.
I lived in LA for about two years. I spent my first few weeks in the City of Angels sleeping on the floor of a motel room in a sleeping bag. It certainly could have been worse. Before long, I got an apartment in the Valley with a friend of a friend, and then several months later, his girlfriend from back in Iowa joined us. At the end of our lease, they decided that they should have their own place, at which point I decided that I might as well get out of the Valley.
For my second year, I moved into a basement studio apartment carved out of a very old hotel in Koreatown. Everyone who lived in this building was an artist of some persuasion. It was stipulated in the lease agreement. As you might expect, I met a lot of really interesting people there, some of whom I came to play music with and who brought me along to some cool parties in other parts of the city. There is a kernel of truth to the notion that Los Angeles is place where fakery thrives. At the same time, it's also a place where a lot of genuinely awesome people go to make something of themselves. Most of the people I met were of the latter.
My first industry gig out of film school was as an intern for a management company in Beverly Hills, where I read screenplays all day and wrote notes and recommendations for the managers. After that, I worked as a production assistant on a popular television show for a few weeks, which to this day, I still have never seen. I'm pretty sure that I only got the job because the person who hired me thought that I went to Columbia in New York as opposed to the similarly named institution in Chicago, where I actually earned my degree. Even though it was clearly stated on my resume, I never corrected her. I was just happy to be working.
In the hierarchy of the motion picture industry, production assistants are at the very bottom. They are generally assigned the menial tasks that don't fall under anyone else's outlined responsibility. One of my jobs as a PA was to bring the newest script over to the star's house. Another time, I had to take two live pigeons in a cardboard box somewhere off set. I released them in a laundromat parking lot, where I saw some other pigeons with whom they could potentially make friends.
On Thursday of week three at the television show that shall remain unnamed and unwatched, I made a simple, stupid mistake. The single light in the tiny mailroom was out, such that I could only see with the help of a disposable lighter. Instead of putting the very important parcel in the express slot as I burned my thumb, I accidentally put it in the compartment with the empty envelopes. I was fired the following day, not long after somebody finally changed the lightbulb.
It took me a while to realize that this is how it goes when a job has hundreds of other applicants who would eagerly fill the position tomorrow, despite the poverty wages and lack of benefits. In retrospect, it was probably just as well, considering that my $350 car was not up for the challenge of commuting daily on the 405, as I had not yet moved out of the San Fernando Valley. Still, I think this was when my disillusionment with Hollywood officially began to set in.
For the rest of my time in Los Angeles, I got some freelance gigs reading screenplays and writing coverage in between unrelated office temp jobs. In both cases, work was sporadic. Sometimes I would have so many scripts that I hardly left my apartment. Other times, nobody would send me anything to read, such that I could barely afford to leave my apartment if I wanted to. Besides, if I forfeited my parking spot, it might take me forty-five minutes of circling the block like a vulture until I finally gave up and ate another ticket. I learned that LA is a particularly difficult place to be poor.
Two years and eight days after arriving in Los Angeles, one particular script and the story behind it led me to Oregon, where I worked on a next-to-no-budget feature-length documentary of my own design. I spent about a month filming it and a year and a half editing it with a friend of mine from film school. With just the two of of us, we made this movie using early digital equipment, all shot on Mini-DV tapes. As you may know, this is not an ideal format. Also, due to the aforementioned budgetary constraints, our playback device was a $200 camcorder that we had to return to the store multiple times. This was also not ideal.
YouTube came into existence during that period when we were editing my documentary. By the time we eventually had something to show for our relentless labor, we uploaded it over the course of several nights. The internet was still relatively primitive at the time, and video clips could only be a maximum of ten minutes, so we had to split the movie into nine parts. If you are so inclined, you can now watch it in its entirety. Despite and largely due to the extremely limited means that we had to work within, I am still quite proud of what we accomplished.
Fun fact: early film reels could also only be about ten minutes long. As the technology improved, they could be a bit longer, but this is why today sequences in movies (i.e., scenes that are part of a particular cause-and-effect chain of events, like a chapter in a book) are still typically between ten and sixteen minutes.
Not long after finishing the documentary, I got married. I continued to write coverage and work on various video projects while waiting to get paid what I had been promised for the documentary, which never happened. That's a harrowing story in itself. After our daughter was born, we moved back to the midwest to be closer to family. Film jobs, of course, are very hard to come by outside of certain epicenters of production, so I shifted gears and went into teaching.
Since that time, I have earned two graduate degrees, taught at several colleges, lived in other parts of the world, and written fifteen or so feature-length screenplays in multiple genres. For a while there, I was writing at least one script per year. That has tapered off lately, as I have been busy with other stuff. I have also learned that it is not much easier to be a screenwriter than any other role in the film industry unless you happen to live where the action is. There are exceptions, of course, but it has been extraordinarily difficult to get anybody to read my work over the years, despite it having placed in or even won some prestigious contests.
I still love movies, and I have not yet abandoned my aspirations in this arena. In fact, I usually have at least one screenplay in the works, even if I end up being among the only people who ever read it. Film is also my favorite kind of class to teach, and I'll be teaching another such course in the spring. I find motion pictures to be the most interesting and effective way to convey big ideas to mass audiences, which is a large part of what drew me to this medium in the first place.