As a travel journalist, I have roamed the globe and occasionally have found myself in a tricky or potentially fearsome situation. But nothing, nothing compares to the trickiness or fearsomeness I experienced as a Hollywood screenwriter.
One time, for example, I was working with a hotshot director. Our meetings consisted of my going to his expansive Malibu house and staring into soles of his tennis shoes while he leaned back in his swivel chair and thrust his feet across his desk in my direction. As I sat there, feeling as though I were one step away from being fed cat food, he talked loudly on his phone, inquiring about some obscenely expensive item he was thinking of purchasing to feed his insatiable duffle bag of an ego.
He asked me to do something I was loathe to do. A screenplay for a two-hour film is about 120 pages long. He said that every l5 pages I wrote, he would send a messenger to pick up my opus-in-progress so he could be sure we were, literally, on the same page.
How could I do it? A writer writes, deletes, rewrites. On page l6, I wanted to go back to page two to change something. But the director insisted and I was aware I had beat out dozens and dozens of other writers to get the gig, so I concurred. I wrote. The messenger came. My pages went out. I never heard a word from Mr. Tennis Shoe Soles.
When I hit page 120, I called the producer and said I would love a reaction to the whole script. A week later, the producer called back. He said the director hated the script. What? Hadn't he read each chunk of l5 pages? "No," the producer said. "He didn't have time to be bothered. Now he wants to replace you as the writer."
He won the Academy Award for Arrogance.
Then there was the time I told the head of a studio I was morally opposed to writing anything violent, against women, racist, or demeaning to any nationality. He burst out laughing in my face. "Who cares about morality?" he asked me. "We just need 7 good scenes and a bang-up ending."
Sweet.
Then there was the time a producer asked me to insert a child into a script because kids were in vogue. I said a child really didn't fit in the story. He leaned across the dinner table, grabbed my arm, looked me intensely in the eyes, and said, "I am your friend. Tell me why you don't have any children." My friend? Yeah, like Qaddafi was my friend. I said I didn't feel the need to have children. He wouldn't drop it. He kept grilling me and stroking my hand and finally I made up some story and told him it was confidential. He closed his eyes, as though he were praying, and said every word between us was sacred.
Two days later, we sat in the office of a studio V.P. She was moaning about the fact that she couldn't find a decent suit for under a thousand dollars. I commiserated. Then she asked about the script. The producer placed his hand on his heart, as though he actually had one, and said the script was stuck because I was reluctant to insert a child. And he proceeded to tell her that I didn't have children and what my secret (invented) reason was.
I went into the bathroom and kept scrubbing the hand he held a few days before that.
Another time, I worked with a famous T.V. star. He wanted to direct a film and he chose my script. Every day he called me. He asked for spiritual advice. And then he insulted me and my script.
He let me know that I was lucky he wanted to speak to me. He said certain words in my script offended him because they evoked childhood memories. I used to pray he wouldn't call. One day, he didn't. I was so excited. Then the phone rang. Someone from his office called me to tell me that he had died. I couldn't even say, "I'm sorry." I was so relieved not to be working with him any more.
At first, I was horribly ashamed of these interactions. I thought something was the matter with me. Maybe I didn't know how to write. Maybe my tennis shoes weren't expensive enough. Maybe my skin was too thin and, as one Lucrezia Borgia-like producer suggested, if I couldn't stand the heat I should high tail it out of the kitchen.
When a screenplay of mine was chosen for development at Robert Redford's Sundance Institute, I was the only woman, the only screenwriter without a director attached to her screenplay, and five of the most acclaimed screenwriters in Hollywood invited me to dinner. They were the mentors, the Academy Award winners, and I had a crick in my neck from looking up to them. Soup came, I looked at them all and asked, "Have any of you ever had a bad Hollywood experience?" There was a thunk of silence. Suddenly I got it. "Have any of you ever had a good experience?" I inquired. The second silent thud was pierced by one of the writers who said he had had a great experience.....twenty-five years before.
It was both horrifying and healing to hear that. I must say that one of the things I am proudest of in my life is that after that dinner, I didn't take any of the screenwriter abuse personally. I knew it was the way things are. I often wanted to jump across a desk, grab some studio exec or producer by the lapels of his Armani suit and scream, "Who did what to you as a child to make you behave like this?" But I refrained. I thought what I thought. I smiled.
For a while I was the Flavor of the Month. Then I was stale matza.
Then I would be a nice Ben and Jerry's flavor. Then I was moldy cheese, and not the good kind. Up. Down. Up. Down. My screenplays were flopping on the line of production. Then they were removed, moribund, and tossed into Development Hell. On. Off. On. Off. One of my last experiences was when a producer asked her seven-year-old child to sit in a tall chair, looking down at me, and give me script notes. The kid said she thought I should add a dog to the story.
I barked at her mother.
Then there was the time I wrote a T.V. script about my friend, who had died an early, tragic death. There was a little bidding war for that screenplay. I was no longer living in L.A., so the producer flew me there, put me up at an outrageously expensive hotel, fed me till I felt like a goose whose liver was about to explode to make paté, kissed me on the lips, and then replaced me and had the script rewritten. When it aired, I didn't even watch it.
You are probably thinking that I should have shut up and cashed my checks. Yes, I received checks, but I filed them in a two-word category: Blood Money. What about all the stellar meals in fabulous restaurants? They were later followed by emotional reverse peristalsis. What about parties and fun? They would have been great, if it weren't for the morning after, when I woke up with a hole in my soul.
One day, I was asked to give a talk about being a Hollywood screenwriter to a large assembly of students in a local school. I looked out at those fresh, innocent faces, and decided to tell them the truth of my experience. I poured it all out on that high school stage. You could have heard a #2 pencil drop in that room. When I finished, many hands went up in the audience. "Can you give me the name of an agent?" one wanted to know. "Can you connect me with a producer you worked with?" queried another.
They were like I once was. They thought it would be different for them. Even though they knew there was a machine operating, they never thought that they would end up as ground creative meat.
Tricky and fearsome.
Few escape it.
Judith Fein is an award-winning travel writer and the author of LIFE IS A TRIP: The Transformative Magic of Travel. Her website is www.GlobalAdventure.us