First, sorry for missing my Friday post last week. Sometimes a fella needs a little break.
Second, listen to this and the title will make more sense.
So. I’m bad about talking about myself. I would think that was pretty obvious by now, but it’s always good to name a thing when you’re talking about it.
Don’t worry, I’ve done all the therapy and mental health deep dives so I know that it comes from my fear of exposure, fear of reprisals (even when there will definitely not be any), fear of overpromising. Lots and lots of fears, really. But if there’s a time to do the scary stuff, it’s now.
I’ve talked a bit about the state of the entertainment industry these days, or at least my little sector of it in screenwriting. None of that has changed. The ongoing contraction has decimated the field. The major studios and networks and outlets feel like they’re lurching about, blind, looking for the next hit, the next frontier, the next wave. Some of them seem to be retreating to what worked in the past. Some are going on all in on what they see as the future (mostly stuff from the internet). Some are just staying the course they’ve been on for the last ten years.
One of the oldest, most repeated, most valuable pieces of Hollywood advice is William Goldman’s famous statement that “nobody knows anything.” That’s probably never been more true than it is right now. No one knows what makes a hit. No one knows what audiences want. No one knows how to keep their investors happy for very long. No one knows how this petty, self-interested and corrupt administration is going to react to, well, anything on any given day. There’s another old saw about building the plane in flight. Right now, the entertainment industry can’t decide if it’s building a plane, a zeppelin, a rocket ship, a boat or just trying to knit a parachute as it hurtles in free fall towards an uncertain landing.
That’s the 30,000 foot view (to extend the metaphor). But what does that mean on the ground? What does it mean for a writer who’s trying to write and sell some stories, keep themselves clothed and housed and maybe, just maybe, add something to the greater discourse?
It means a lot of frustration and powerlessness. It means a lot of beating your head against your keyboard, trying to find some mythical, magical string of words, that one perfect idea. The word we hear a lot is “undeniable.” A project must be undeniable. A script must be undeniable. Which is a high bar to jump over, especially when denying things is the first thing an exec does.
For me, personally, here’s what the last couple of years, the years before the strikes and the contraction and the general chaos kicked in, looked like: I was one of the lucky ones, really. I’ve staffed on TV shows pretty steadily for the last ten years. I was hired back on multiple shows. By all accounts, I acquitted myself well in writers rooms. But the pace of being in a writers room didn’t leave a lot of time for me to write my own things. I wrote a pilot about 6 years that didn’t get bought, but was a good sample.
At that point, the industry standard was to take out new ideas as a pitch. While people (like me!) were writing pilots, the conventional wisdom was that studios and networks wanted to have more influence on a project as it developed and would rather hear a 20-minute pitch than read a 60-page script. After that pilot, I worked on several other pitches, a mix of both original ideas and takes on existing IP. Only one of those pitches turned into a pilot and that one wound up not going forward.
Then the strike. And the after effects. And the mergers. And the general contraction of jobs and development. Then 2024 in all of its hellish glory. And suddenly, writing staff jobs were few and far between and the competition for the few available slots became intense. Not pointing any fingers at anyone. Things happen. When the industry goes from more than 500 scripted shows being created, developed and written in a given year to roughly 200 shows, that means there are less jobs. The market went from a seller’s market to a buyer’s one almost overnight.
Over the last couple of years, I worked on an original pitch that I was really happy with and proud of. My reps and I were all psyched for it to go out. We set up a ton of pitch meetings, I got good feedback from pretty much everyone, but it didn’t sell. That doesn’t mean it’s totally dead, but it was a pretty big kick in the gut.
Part of the thing about working on a pitch is that…it’s just a pitch. You wind up putting nearly as much thought and effort into it as you do a pilot, but in the end, you just have a few pages. Not anything that you can use in any other way. It can feel frustrating and demoralizing.
And demoralized, I very much was. Late last year, I hit a kind of rock bottom, just frustrated and feeling stuck. I didn’t know what to do, really. The jobs weren’t materializing, the work was moving forward, everything felt bad.
So I fell back on what I knew: I wrote. I sat down and wrote a new pilot. And a new feature. In the span of about two weeks. You may not want to drive angry, but sometimes, writing angry is the only way.
When I first moved from playwriting to screenwriting (and that’s a story for another day), I wanted to write both feature films and TV shows. I found more opportunities in TV, so that became my focus. But now that I had time, I went back to features. Particularly horror features. Which had a double bonus. One, as we’ve seen time and again, horror features are among the most successful genre of films out there. They can be made relatively cheaply and still reap big bucks at the box office, often without any kind of name or star or even IP. It’s one of the last places that original voices can stand out.
Two, it just happens to be one of my favorite genres. I’ve been a hardcore horror head since seeing Evil Dead II in a crumbling old movie palace in Ridgewood, Queens in 1987. I’ve been with horror from the old slashers to the weird creature features of the 80s to the slasher revival of the 90s to the wave of art house horror that started in the 2000s. The only trend I never fully got on board with was the torture porn, but even though I saw a Hostel movie.
So where does all of that leave me know? And what am I constructing this summer? I’ve hit a point in my life and my work where I just want to go all in. I don’t know how many spins at the wheel I have left, in life or work. So I’m gonna go down writing, no matter what.
In the last year, I finished one long-gestating feature script, wrote two new ones, wrote that new pilot. And I remembered how much I like writing. It’s frustrating, it’s enraging and aggravating. But it’s also what I do. To quote another sage of our time, I can’t carry a tune, I can’t shoot a basketball and my handwriting’s barely legible. But I write.
So that’s what I’m going to do this summer. Write. As often as I can. As hard as I can. Pushing myself to get things done, pushing myself to go harder. Obviously, I can’t talk too much about what I’m writing, but I do want to talk y’all through the process, if you want to listen. How I approach things, how I think about things, what it’s like to actually write something without a net.
Grab a hammer. We’re gonna build something this summer.
Oh, and also: GO NEW YORK GO NEW YORK GO!