I’m sitting at a red light. To my right is a video store. In this day of the download, those old brick-and-mortars don’t look so hot. Oh, they try — but so do the trannies in fishnets back on Santa Monica boulevard.
Still no green. I look at a very large poster for a movie I’ve never heard of.
The design elements are:
* a whole lot of white space
* a title I don’t remember
* a tagline in a font too small to read from the street despite the poster’s window filling acreage
* a man
* a woman who is Beyoncé
* another woman
* the arrangement of man-woman-woman to imply a love triangle of menacing nature
So, an awful poster for what looks like an awful movie.
I grew up in this neighborhood. I know this is the longest red light in town, but still — get me out of here.
Then everything that is on my right resonates with everything that is off in my life:
What if I write a movie like that? What if I write a screenplay and I think its really good because its the best I can do but then I see the poster and its something like that because frankly the marketing guys just don’t have a lot to work with? And the movie is awful and uninteresting and even I want to change the channel because I caught it on TV — didn’t even bother to DVR it — because frankly the director and actors and even the art department didn’t have anything more to work with than the marketing guys?
What if I write a bad movie?
I relate this story over sushi to my friend, a business director in her position and a novelist in her soul. The sun is now disappearing outside. “Well,” she says, handing the black check presenter back to our server with her credit card inside, “At least you’d get paid.”
My friend is very clever, and she’s right: I should be so lucky.
Back in the car, and now I’m looking out at the morning sun in the rearview mirror.
You should be so lucky, to write a terrible movie. If your first draft is coherent at all, it would be a happy accident.
I think of a screenplay sitting in my closet at home: a copy of an early draft of The Last Samurai. Its radically different than the story that Edward Zwick actually filmed, and not nearly as satisfying. Captain Algren isn’t a drunken soldier of fortune haunted by memories of genocide — he’s the darling of West Point. Katsumoto is the enemy and he stays the enemy. Algren is married, and his wife dies — predictably. All in all, rather bland.
“I’m like that too,” my friend says between sips of water. “I want it to be perfect the first time.”
“I guess it’s like what Hemingway said about first drafts,” I reply.
We smile at each other. We’re both writers; we know the quote. No need to curse during dinner.
The light turns green, and I pass through the intersection and continue towards the onramp. Time to go home and write something awful.
