The Battle of Los Angeles Part 5: I Wish...

There are 1,200 players on the expanded rosters of the 30 teams in Major League Baseball. In the NFL, there are 1,696 players on the 32 teams. In the NHL things get a bit more confusing as teams have rosters of active players and contracted players, but we’ll use the contracted players number, which is about 1,500 total players. There are 450 players in the NBA (and about 9 million tattoos). All told, there are roughly 4,846 professional athletes in the four major sports in the United States. By comparison, in 2005, the year I enrolled in the MFA program for Writing for Screen and Television at USC, 4,566 Writers reported earnings through the Writer’s Guild of America, with 3,259 reporting earnings from TV and 1,940 reporting earnings from feature film writing. Some writers made money from both TV and film and some writers made money from news writing, but you get the picture. It’s an elite class.  In 2015, 5,159 Writers reported earnings through the Writer’s Guild of America, with 4,129 reporting earnings from TV and 1,799 reporting earnings from feature film writing. I think if I’d known these statistics in 2005, I might not have applied to USC. The sheer improbability of my success would have scared me away from trying to write. But the truth is I never once thought about how hard it might be to become a successful professional screenwriter, which is probably why I’ve spent the last 10 years not becoming one. 

I wanted to be a Big Deal. I didn’t know what that meant, exactly. It’s not like I arrived at USC with a bunch of ideas for series or scripts, or even a clear image of my future in the industry, or even any semblance of any plan at all. I just knew screenwriting was glamorous and I’d been accepted to the most prestigious screenwriting program in the world so things will take of themselves. I’m talented and reasonably charming. I honestly thought it would be easy.

I wrote dark, comedic shorts, a broad comedic heist feature (KNOCKING OFF), a HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER spec and a spec of THE OFFICE. I was very interested in being funny and thought I could get paid doing it. Then two things happened: I took Jeff Melvoin's one-hour drama class my second year and I joined a Writer's Group. Melvoin's class was the best course I've ever taken and he's my favorite screenwriting professor I ever had. When I teach writing classes now, Jeff is the man I try to emulate. It had never occurred to me to do one-hour drama, but in Jeff Melvoin, I saw the type of writer I wanted to become. He was Harvard-educated yet had worked on REMINGTON STEELE. There were not many people in our USC class doing one-hour drama. The only people I remember with that specific goal at the time were Katie, Ryan, the guy I almost got in a fight with the first night we met who has gone on to have a great career, and a woman who has since gone on to be nominated for a WGA writing award for RECTIFY. Given my short story and playwright experience from college, one-hour drama seemed like something I could do. Plus, I wrote an SVU for Melvoin’s class and really understood the logic of a procedural. I liked the idea of having to go into work every day working in TV (as opposed to writing from home with features) and the money was good. There was less competition at the time in one-hour and I could modify my skills to fit the form. One-hour drama made sense.
     It was in this same Semester I was asked to join a Writer’s Group. Seven of the most talented white men in our program were forming a group and I couldn’t believe they wanted me as the eighth. As it turned out, not all of them did want me. “Conscientious Mike” Maloney was a vocal opponent of my inclusion. We’d never really spoken and we’re similarly-inclined to disdain, so I get it. Despite the way our friendship began, Ryan vehemently argued for my inclusion in the group. “He’s sharp and gives great notes. You need a guy like that,” I was later told he said. I love that dude. Anyway, I couldn’t believe these guys wanted me in their group. I was (and remain) awed by their fucking talents. Because of my writer’s group, I tell all my students they should form writers’ groups with the people who intimidate them. Wanting to live up to the abilities of those writers made me work harder, made me learn to be a sharper reader and giver of notes and made me a much better writer. (Just good enough to teach, it turns out). But those guys also scared the shit out of me because they were (are) WAY fucking funnier than I ever thought I could be, and I thought I was plenty funny. But their comedic minds were quicker, I felt out of sync and their jokes were always so much sharper and more creative than mine that I just gave up on trying to compete. Sometimes I think I made the right choice giving up writing sitcoms because I'm not really that funny and sometimes I think this was the biggest chicken-shit move of my entire fucking life. In my more narcissistic moments I feel like the Pete Best of sitcom writing. But that's bullshit. It was a conscious choice to focus on drama because I thought it was a faster track to the Big Time. Like Dexter on the drums, Ryan was always a much better writer than I was (am), but I knew he respected my talent (and I his) and was thrilled to have an identity in my writer’s group that didn't bring with it the burden of having to be funny around much funnier people. I buckled down.  I wrote a lot. I worked hard. My writing improved. It turned out Maloney and I were much too similar to ever like each other upon first meeting, but we became close friends and eventually writing partners.  

I didn’t attend my graduation from USC because the academics were never a challenge for me and graduating from the program was not my goal in having attended. Simply being awarded the MFA was not the reason I’d packed up and come out West. There were people at USC who made it look easy. One of my closest friends and writer’s group members left the program early because he and his writing partner got work with NBC; he just sold a show to Fox. Another friend sold the script he wrote his first year of film school a couple days after graduation; a few years later I heard he turned down the job rewriting THE NEVERENDING STORY. After graduation, the competition among USC grads really heated up, at least in my head. Rumors swirled about who had landed representation and who was closing deals. Jealousy reared its ugly head, particularly in those early days after graduation when people were signing with managers and I wasn’t and I still thought having a manager meant anything about a person’s career prospects, abilities or value to the industry. At the time, I’d say my peers’ success filled me with a mix of 25% jealousy and 75% white hot panic. This jealousy was somewhat diminished by the fact that everyone I know who had success from USC was obscenely talented, worked hard and absolutely deserved it. And the panic was good motivation. Angst and envy kept me working, hoping I could write something good enough to get noticed. The fast track was up ahead, if only I could find the exit. Everything I wanted, which again was nothing specific, felt like it was two or three good phone calls away. Write on. This is your year! Good work always gets noticed. All it takes is the right script and the right reps. “I’m a driver, I’m a winner.  Things are gonna change, I can feel it!”

About a month after graduation Katie and her boyfriend were out of town so I had the place to myself. I was going to get stoned and watch THE WIRE, but first I went to the gym. Back in my kitchen, stone cold sober, making a salad, I tried to use a serrated knife to remove the pit from an avocado and instead put the knife through my left middle finger. Blood poured everywhere. I pulled the knife out and, looking at the damage, quickly realized I could not stop the bleeding. I didn’t know where the hospital was and I drove a stick shift, which is impossible to drive with one hand, so I called 911. The paramedics bandaged my middle finger in thick white gauze, like a Mickey Mouse glove, and told me to go to the emergency room. Since I didn’t know where the hospital was, I asked them to take me. The paramedics had to secure me to a chair for the journey in the ambulance. Though I could walk, they strapped me into a wheelchair and rolled me downstairs, out into the courtyard in front of my building and into the ambulance, my left hand raised, middle finger extended the entire time. At the hospital, everyone had a good chuckle and I took 20 stitches. In the following days, I had shooting nerve pains in my hand. I went for a follow-up and learned I’d severed a nerve while making a salad. I needed to have surgery and physical therapy. Insurance ended up not covering either because they didn’t think the surgery was an emergency; for them to cover it, I would have had to fly home to Virginia. Even with physical therapy, my hand has never been the same. I had to re-learn to touch type with nine fingers just so I could keep writing. 

Fuse Entertainment, a management and production company located in West Hollywood, had launched the careers of several USC graduates in classes before mine so I became obsessed with becoming a Fuse client. They read two of my pilots and liked them, then read my thesis, a satirical feature comedy script about spoiled assholes (AMERICAN IDLE) and one of the head guys over there loved it so much, he talked to me about it on the phone for 45 minutes before telling me he couldn’t sell it so he wasn’t going to sign me. The script was just too mean-spirited, he said. I probably should’ve queried more representation but in trying to sell my too-mean-spirited novel in New York, I’d accumulated a hefty stack of rejection letters from queries and my ego just couldn’t take it. Plus, I had an MFA from USC. I’d gone there to be part of the USC Mafia. My network was supposed to make things happen for me.

Typing with nine fingers, I wrote a script about consultants which, through a friend in my writer’s group, got to two assistants at William Morris Endeavor who were starting a production company. Through them, I developed and wrote a one-hour drama called LOADED about stock traders who lived life to the extreme. It was AMERICAN PSYCHO meets ENTOURAGE and it’s still one of the coolest things I’ve ever written. Around this same time, my friend who sold his film school script right after graduating let me know his agent had quit ICM (or been fired, depending on who you ask) and was starting a management company and looking for clients. I sent my work over and waited to hear. Through working with the WME contacts, I had one of the head TV Lit agents at WME packaging LOADED for us, which meant he was trying to get WME actors to be in it so we could sell it to a cable channel. My buddy’s band, the one which gave us access to B-list parties, was also repped at WME, I’d been read by their mailroom and had great coverage written about me - I had a lot of people there in my corner for a hot minute. They messengered over a copy of my script with the head of TV Lit’s handwritten notes inside. A few days later, I signed with the manager. I got the phone call as I was cleaning out the apartment I shared with Katie, just before we moved out so she and her boyfriend at the time Sean, who was in my writer’s group, could get their own place. Like a movie, I was scrubbing down the windowsill in our living room when a phone call came that I thought would change my life, just like it was supposed to happen. “Are you kidding me?” my manager screamed into the phone, reacting to the ending of LOADED, where the Boy Scout hedge fund manager is revealed to be the psychopath who kidnaps women and drinks their blood, the real-life vampire everyone’s been whispering about for the previous 64 pages. “Are you fucking kidding me? This is so awesome.”

But then the WME assistants bailed because they had a reality show about monstrous beach people in New Jersey to produce. With them gone, the WME lit agent drifted away because it had been a much easier project to champion when they were gonna do the work. What had been my dream team of representation soon became me and a manager who I started to realize signed me because he thought he could make an easy buck (which is actually the same reason most managers sign clients, I came to learn). He didn’t have the TV lit contacts to get me the meetings I needed to pursue one-hour drama. My script went from being packaged at WME to doing nothing for me. I went on one meeting based on that script through my manager and the guys I met with couldn’t believe it was the only meeting I’d taken. The manager didn’t have the network for me to get staffed and I didn’t have the clarity to see his flaws (or mine). Nor did I have the balls to fire him because I thought having a manager was a mile marker on the road to success. I think the script could have done a lot more for me, could’ve gotten me staffed, could’ve sold even, if I’d had different reps at the time, but getting a manager had been such a painful, rejection-filled process, I didn’t see it then. I just thought I was hot shit. I had a manager and that meant I was better than people who didn’t. I had someone who could sell my work. I was close, I thought, I just had to listen to my manager’s advice, write diligently and get it done. 

Through a referral from Maloney, I got a job on a web series called THE SCARY CITY that was on the front page of Variety for having $5.8 Million in funding from Sony. They had a full set in Glendale with trailers for writing, post and Producers and they’d buy us lunch everyday. My first day of work was the day Obama was elected and there was more than a little reason for hope. My boss was an ambitious, petite Japanese woman who had been behind the smash hit LONELYGIRL15 and said “namsang?” as she belittled the writing staff, taking great pride regaling me with the stupidity of my own work. It took me three weeks to realize “namsang” was her saying “Know what I’m saying?” She was abusive and horrible but so are most Hollywood bosses, right? I got to break story as part of a writing staff and this collaborative art, though not quite as free as musical collaborative expression, was extremely rewarding. For about two weeks, I was having the time of my life breaking story with the two other writers. Then, my boss took off for Japan suddenly and I was asked to help track page views for the web series and put together a report on viewership for the investors. This was in the early days of web streaming and for some reason we didn’t want to use YouTube, so we had our own video player for the series. When I looked at viewership I came to realize the show’s websites’ streaming video compression rate was off, so videos took forever to load. Because of this technical error, and because the series was run by a madwoman, after two months, we had less than 2,000 views. Sony pulled their funding. The show went bankrupt and bounced two paychecks. Our boss hadn’t ‘gone’ to Japan, she had fled to Japan. The producers remaining offered us computers from the office or furniture from the set instead of the money they owed us. My manager told me to take an iMac and a couch, but I held out for the four-grand cash, which obviously I never got. (Fun fact: one of my fellow writers on this series was nominated for an Emmy for writing on BETTER CALL SAUL, the other is one of The Fine Bros).

Through teaming up with Maloney, we got a couple hired gun positions where we were paid good, minor league money to rewrite other people’s scripts. Maloney’s personal story was going through many of the same beats as my own and he was really one of my only sources of emotional support during this time. We were both bush leaguers, practicing, dreaming, hoping for a shot at the Bigs. We didn’t ride around on a beat up old bus but we did drive around in Maloney’s Civic and eat at diners. Even though we never wrote anything personal or ‘real’ together, it was nice to collaborate with Maloney because it made writing a less lonely affair. He was also great at seeing the ridiculousness of the industry. We still laugh about the producer who told us he was working on ‘something that will revolutionize the internet.’ Still waiting on that revolution to come.

Given my manager had more contacts in feature films and given feature writing was where Maloney and I were having minor league success, I decided to write a feature, even though I thought my skill set and interests at the time were in TV and there were more jobs in that medium. I created this cartoonish adventure character named Hemingway Barnes, sort of an Indiana Jones meets Austin Powers kind of dude. All told, I wrote 19 drafts of the script about Hemingway, which was called THE ART OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY.  In the file folder for the script, there were over 270 documents of brainstorming, rejected outlines and false leads. For 10 straight months, I thought about nothing else. My manager kept me working with tales of sales. “What kind of beamer are you gonna get when we sell this thing?” “You know, this is the only script I’m taking out this year?” Eventually, we got the script ready, got an agent at a boutique agency to sign on with us and we went wide with the script.

To go wide with a script means it gets sent to everyone in town. My manager and agent sent it to like 40 production companies. Development assistants and executives then read the script and, if they like it and think they can make money from it, they can agree to take it to a studio. When a production company takes a project to a studio, they are saying they like it enough to shepherd it through the process of being produced. Knowing the production company will support the idea, the studio then determines if they are going to buy the project. Some production companies will like the script but not take it to a studio. In these instances, the writer will often meet with the production company for what’s called a general meeting. The purpose of generals is basically a meet and greet, it’s a chance for the writer to introduce him or herself and give the industry a sense of what he or she is about. The production companies are looking for new ideas, or, in some instances, looking to hire writers to develop projects. Huge production companies took us to major studios. Di Bonaventura took it to Paramount, Polymorphic took it to Warner Bros, Montecito took it to Sony, Gunn Films took it to Disney.  We also went in to New Regency and Dreamworks. This was the Big Leagues. It was basically like waiting to hear if I’d be drafted.

Having a script out wide is the single most anxiety-producing experience I have ever endured, including the time I had a gun pulled on me buying cocaine in New York and (so far) being an expecting father with a wife in the third trimester of pregnancy (though as the due date approaches my anxiety is skyrocketing so fatherhood may yet prove to be more nervous an endeavor than screenwriting). The script went out on a Tuesday and we soon knew companies were taking it to studios, which was cause for an enormous amount of hope. We went into the weekend knowing the President of Dreamworks was reading the script and mulling it over. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t eat, except when I ate EVERYTHING IN THE FUCKING WORLD. I spent the time glued to my phone, constantly hoping for a call that would change my life. Halfway through workouts at the gym, I’d double back to the locker room to check if anyone had called or there were any updates on my script on TrackingBoard, a website which tracked the progress of spec scripts. Remember being single and meeting someone you really liked and hoping they’d contact you?  Imagine that uncertainty and anticipation, but times a million and with hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line. All my goals were a phone call away. One phone call could validate the decision to uproot my life and move to Los Angeles, one phone call could launch me into career stardom. One phone call and suddenly I wouldn’t be Nathan DeWitt, Albino failed musician and struggling screenwriter, I’d be Nathan DeWitt, Screenwriter. My entire identity and self-worth were riding on this phone call.

The extent to which Screenwriting had consumed my life at the time cannot be overstated. I didn’t have a job and when I did work, it was freelance copywriting I did from the office I set up in my kitchen. When the WGA went on strike five months after I graduated USC, I went and picketed, donating time and energy for their cause even though I wasn’t a member. I didn’t have hobbies except the band, which was in its death throes by the time my script was going out. I played golf with Maloney once a week, but that was only a couple hours. Those were valuable, fun times and it was great to have someone with whom to commiserate. But, in general, things got to a point where the industry and our lack of success in it was pretty much all I talked about with Maloney or any of my other friends. I didn’t have a love interest, so I entertained relationships with girls back in Virginia, never committing to romance out West until later, and that west coast romance would go so bad I'd almost need to be committed. I didn’t even decorate my fucking apartment. I wasn’t actively pursuing or involved in anything besides screenwriting. I thought this was focus. I’d come to LA to be a star but found myself a black hole, the light of my life consumed by the absence of my own career. On THE WIRE, Lester Freemon describes a life to the flawed protagonist Jimmy McNulty thusly: “A life, Jimmy, you know what that is? It's the shit that happens while you're waiting for moments that never come.”  I couldn’t have gotten a life-changing phone call back then because I had no life to change.    

I went on 20 or 30 general meetings, met a lot of great and interesting people and cute, smart girls, but I didn’t sell the script. Through these meetings, I did some development work, which is the industry way of saying I brainstormed with executives for long stretches of time, wrote outlines and drafts, and in exchange was paid no money. It's standard practice in the world of feature films. Even though television was becoming popular, I doubled down on feature writing because it was what my representation knew best and I had a reputation in features thanks to my script and the meetings. Though a disastrous affair began to siphon away my writing energy, I wrote three more feature scripts with the intent of quick sales. One my manager hated so much we stopped working together. The next, my agent, who had changed companies and now become my manager, took to WME but we couldn’t get any traction. The third was a total piece of shit attempt to sell out and prompted my buddy Jordan from my writer’s group to get me drunk, ply me with Arby’s and blow and try to set me straight. On July 27, 2011, he got me loaded and said I needed to stop chasing the market and write something true. It was 18 years to the day after Siamese Dream was released. And you wanna hear something even spookier? It was literally the next morning, hungover, on a bus from Jordan’s place in Santa Monica to my shithole studio on Vermont that I got an email asking if I could teach Screenwriting 101 at a college in Chicago in a month. The email was from Kristyn, a classmate and friend from USC who had left LA to teach and was having the time of her life. My network was making things happen for me, but not the way I thought it would. Then again, nothing in LA went as I thought it would. Hollywood is the only industry where someone’s “Manager” is also their employee. The beach is only 7 miles away but it takes over an hour to get there. 

Continue to The Battle of Los Angeles Part 6: LA Woman...