Hat in Hands

So if no one claims the great 5,000 prize by Friday, the prize goes by default to Lee. She's good people, and she asked for it.

I swear, I had ideas about what to write about earlier. I'll muddle through, though. I haven't seen a movie in the longest damn time, and even TV has fallen by the wayside for a while, aside from my marathon 24 viewing I did last week (3 episodes. I have two more taped I need to watch to catch up now. Don't you dare tell me what happens).

I'm getting pretty psyched about the holidays...both of them. When I was a kid I was a little indignant about Christmas because, as a Jew, it was simply all around me, while Channukah got short shrift. Since entering into a new family that cleebrates it, however, I've been able to let some of that angst go. Everyone can have whatever celebrations they want, I say now. And I for one am looking forward to a nice meal and presents and a roaring fire and the whole nine yards.

I've actually been letting go of a lot of my youthful angst lately, I've come to realize. Take yesterday for example, when I came home from work and Brooke was listening to the Grateful Dead, whom I've always hated. And then I realized, hey, these guys aren't so bad. I really just hated them because they seemed mediocre and everyone seemed to love them so much. But now I've matured enough to the point that I don't give a rat's ass about that.

If he's reading this, I'd like to apologize to Joey. I may not be enjoying what you're doing, but at least you're trying something new. My journal's just limping along. Keep on keeping on, and I'm sorry it came out as an attack.

In fact, trying has been something I've had a hard time with lately. I haven't done any Daily Show writing in weeks and weeks. Frankly, I think i'm afraid of trying and failing. Hopefully this weekend I'll have the time to sit down and try and not fail. And then do my comic script, and any of the other number of things I put off because I'm afraid of doing them badly.

Incidentally, two unreturned emails and one unreturned phone call later, I think it's safe to share the world's worst-kept secret with you: What the hell I was so excited about a couple of months back. Ready? Here we go.

Through someone at work, I was put in touch with an executive at a fairly major Hollywood studio. In the course of conversation, I was able to ask him if I could pitch a couple ideas. He said yes. I pitched two ideas: my movie that I actually wrote in college, which, with some minor tweaking I think could be a huge hit; and an idea that i just had a very rough idea of. Guess which one he said he liked and would like to see a treatment for. Right.

So then I had one week to flesh out the story and write a treatment. I started with an outline, of which one of the bulleted points in act 2 was "Huge Hole Where Plot Should Go". I'm sure most Holloywood films never bother to remove those notations. Anyway, at the end of a week, with moments to go, I finished, registered with the WGA and sent it in.

And waited.

I never seriously expected anything to happen, but it would have been nice, at least to get some feedback. I did get some feedback from Wolf, who pointed out that I made some amateur mistakes, which now embarass me. Regardless, I think it was a pretty good story and would have made a good movie. Now I consider it a learning experience. Maybe I'll try to send it somewhere else.

So that's what I was reluctant to talk about. A tempest in a teapot, maybe, but it was pretty exciting at the time. Someday I will make a living purely as a writer, and not as a writer-slash-editor or slash anything, but that was not to be my ticket out.

Anyone need to buy a treatment?

Posted by Justin at December 10, 2003 01:14 PM