Starlog

One last L.A. trip bit. The celebrities. A quick rundown of my close encounters.

First day there, I saw Seth Rogen at a coffee house called Commissary that was within walking distance of my friends' place in West Hollywood. He walked in with a friend, getting some coffees to go. I was pacing by the entrance, on the phone with my manager, probably looking frazzled. Rogen was gawking at me more than I was gawking at him.

DJ Danger Mouse (from Gnarls Barkley) sat down next to us at the bar at Umami Burger (which I may have blogged about).

Waiting for my meeting in the Administration Building on the Paramount lot, Kate Hudson and Anna Faris walked in and had a conversation with some other people a few feet from me and my producer. They both shot me a look that seemed to say, "Who let the undocumented worker into the building?" We also saw Akiva Goldsman (who I didn't recognize until my producer pointed him out). And I think I saw Parry Shen, for those of you who care.

At Lionsgate, we ran into a lot of people who looked like they might be people. Who knows.

There was a time when I'd be nuts about this star-gazing shit—and clearly I'm not immune to it. But, with a few exceptions, I don't want to just meet most of these people unless they know who I am.  I don't want to meet them until they can appreciate me as the great big shining star that I am.

I can catch the moon in my hands.  Don't you know who I am...?

Last Night on Earth

Last day in Los Angeles, I decided to make my life more complicated.

I'd been crashing on a futon at some friends' West Hollywood apartment for the whole week. I had a fake aunt that was going to be my backup (a friend of my mom's from childhood: no blood relation, we'd met her briefly when my family visited Los Angeles in the early 80s), but it looked like it was going to be easier for me to just stay in West Hollywood. My mom had reconnected us through email a few months before the trip happened. Once the woman had my email and volunteered to be my "second mom" in L.A., she started putting me on her email forward list, sending me a bunch of Tea Party bullshit. I was avoiding her. I'd been meaning to call her since I got to L.A., but I kept putting it off and eventually figured I'd write her once the trip was over, explaining that I'd been too busy on the trip and suggesting I'd see her during my NEXT visit.

A few days before the end of the trip, she emailed me.

"Where are you?"

She contacted my mother, who contacted me. I had to deal with it.

I apologized over email. Suggested that maybe we could do dinner on my last night.

She countered by suggesting that we should have dinner AND that I should stay over at her house so that she could see me off at the airport the next day.

I gave in. I imagined her house would be bigger than my friends' apartment; maybe I could sleep on a nice bed for my final night in L.A.

I left the comfort of West Hollywood and traveled to an area that I would learn is called Lincoln Heights.

Auntie's house turned out to be a hoarder's paradise. My mother had claimed that she was wealthy from the sale of some property and hadn't needed to work for some time now, but my mother is often wrong about a lot of things. Auntie had had a business renting tents to film productions for many years. She claimed that a lot of her tents could be seen in big, famous movies. From what I gathered, business had dried up over a certain period of time. One of her sons helped pay for the house.

When I got there, she let me use the bathroom in the master bedroom:



Instead of a bed, I'd be sleeping on a narrow oriental bench that she'd set up with some beddings...


(This is not it, but it resembled this.)

She had two grown sons. The one who was a bit older was hanging out with us that night. A totally laid-back stoner-type who talked like that turtle in FINDING NEMO. He'd go off on all these nonsensical tangents, easily carrying the weight of the conversation without me.

"Money doesn't work, man. Historically, money-based societies fail. And who has all the money? THE BANKERS! We need to find something else..."

"It'd be fun to see what would happen if all the government just went away, you know? And everything stopped working! Like, the buses stopped running and the electricity just got cut off! What would people do...?"

"I love hanging out at parks, man. It's my favorite thing. I just like playing there, climbing things. I don't go on the swings as much because I'm getting too old. I'm almost 40, dude!"

He was almost 40 but between his youthful looks and his... simplified view of the world... I thought he might be in his 20s...

The younger son was in classes till midnight; Auntie told me we'd get to see him in the morning, but she showed me some pictures of him:


I just needed to make it through this trip.

After an uneventful dinner at (L.A.'s version of) Chinatown, the older son suggested that he and I could get some beers.

He drove me in my rental car.  It was an improvement over the beat-up old thing he'd been driving.  "Dude, look at your tank, it's almost full!"  He knew a bar that was nearby.

Bars in L.A. are completely different from NYC bars.  I've been to my share of NYC bars and I went to range of L.A. bars during my week there, but the lowest L.A. "dive bar" looked like a little palace compared to some NYC haunts.  The one he took me to had nice carpeting, a leather-padded bar, pretty couches.  It was like a theme park version of a bar.  We had a drink a piece.  I figured that would be it.  We'd retire back to his mom's house, watch one of her favorite conspiracy documentaries and I'd hit the oriental bench for some shut-eye.

But my new friend was not satisfied.  "There's this other bar I should've taken you to!  They show these old horror movies on the walls, man.  I'm taking you there, dude, let's go..."  I played along.  My last night, why not?

The next bar was a little further away.  He talked about his life.  He worked at a Natural History Museum.  He had a kid who was 9 or 11 or something.  He kept repeating the fact that he's almost 40 and how he'd love to leave L.A., move somewhere else like Hamburg, Germany, where he didn't have to drive.

We arrived at the bar but there were no horror movies on the walls.  He asked the bartender about it and the bartender suggested that they probably just played horror movies for that one night because someone brought in a DVD.  We each had an beer and a half.  Talked about women.  I figured that was where the night would end.  Except now, he wanted to get a little high...

Drove back to his mom's house and he told me to wait in the car.  He went up to tell his mom that he was going to keep me out for a little longer.  Retrieved some pot from his car and brought it back to me in the rental.  I generally don't smoke pot if I can help it, but I'm trying to play along here.  I end up taking three big hits when I should've just taken one.  I get higher than fuck.  I realize that I am smoking pot with a stranger in a rental car that I have to return tomorrow morning.  And now the stranger wants to take me for one last drink.

We drive all over the place.  I have no idea where we are.  He's pointing out the different areas we're driving through, giving me the jungle tour.  Between the drinks and the pot, I'm just trying to keep my head screwed on.

We stop at some train tracks as the crossing gates lower and the bells begin ringing.  We hear a train approaching.  The stranger looks like a kid on Christmas day.  "Oh man, I've always wanted to try this...!"

Without any further explanation, he gets out of the driver's seat and walks up to the train tracks.  I have no idea what he's up to.  Is he going to lay down on the tracks?  Is he going to try to jump the train?  I'm drunk and high and I'm wondering if this is my cue to hop into the driver's seat, turn the fuck around and leave whatever this scene is about to be.

He begins climbing a ladder at the crossing.  He climbs halfway up before dropping down as the train begins to move past us.  He returns to the rental car with a giddy grin on his mug.  "If there weren't people around, I would've climbed all the way up!"

U-turn.  He takes us to Japan Town... which, like everything else around L.A. right now, is just a ghost town...



Everything is so clean and empty, it looks like a set.

We find ourselves in a bar where this weird experimental jazz band is freaking out, which does little to calm my nerves. We both get a beer and a shot. When he's not looking, I dump my shot out. I am too far gone. If I were in NYC, I'd hightail it out of there, hop a cab or a subway train. Here, there is no escape.

When we leave the bar, he says, "It's gonna be about 15 minutes before I'm straight enough to drive..." And that's how people drink and drive in L.A., ladies and gentlemen. We just start walking around the place and I have no idea where we parked the car anymore. I am increasingly aware that I've just met this guy, I'm not related to him, I don't know where I am or whether he's got a bigger plan yet to unfold.

We return to the car. He starts driving. Really fast. Down really empty roads. I begin to imagine that this would be an awfully stupid way for me to die...

And then before I know it, we're back at his mom's house. Miraculously. The lights are still on inside. It's only about 12:30 but it feels like 3am. "You know the drill. If my mom's still up, don't let on that you're high, dude..."

Thankfully, Auntie's not still up. I'm too high to conceal it at this point and not in the mood to watch a conspiracy theory doc.

Almost-40 shows me how to turn off the lights and gives me a big hug.

In the morning, I have breakfast with Auntie. Meet the younger brother of Almost-40, who isn't quite as out-there as I'd feared. He'd laid-back, but in a different way than his bro. He's going to school to become a sound engineer or something.

We get the rental car back right on time. Auntie and younger brother see me off at the airport. "Next time, you stay with us for the whole trip!" she insists.

I check in, make my way through security, settle in at the departure gate.  And for the first time in a week, I begin to relax...

Trains, Buses and Taxis: Navigating L.A. Without a Car

You can get around Los Angeles without a car. A lot of people from L.A. will advise you otherwise, but that's because: a) they've got cars; b) they've never really used the public transportation.

I rented a car for my trip but I wanted to see how much ground I could cover without using it. My biggest concern upfront was that I'd go broke taking taxis everywhere. And yes, taxis can be friggin expensive there because you're often crossing vast expanses of land. (Also, there are a lot of different taxi services -- some only service specific areas. And they're generally not as high-tech as NYC cabs, so the cabbies may grumble when you say you're paying by credit card and they have to pull out the old-school carbon papers.)

The key is that the L.A. bus system is actually pretty good. Click on "Trip Planner" and they'll offer you the best route to your destination. At $1.50 a ride, it's a lot cheaper than a $45 taxi trip. You just have to know where you're going and give yourself the extra time.

All in all, I just took two taxis during my weeklong stay, mainly exploiting the buses and the quaint L.A. subway. (I used Checker Cab Co. because they seemed to go all over and could arrive within 5-15 minutes of a call.) Adding up the receipts, exclusively using public transpo for the trip would've been less expensive than the car rental. Something I should remember, especially if I'm there for a shorter trip with just a few key meetings. If you're really tight on cash, you can get by without the car rental.

Since I was there through Labor Day weekend, I had plenty of time to goof around and attempting the get around while using the car as little as possible did not hinder me.

During the trip, I hit up: Universal Studios Hollywood theme park, caught an Arc Light movie, got a tattoo on Sunset Blvd, scored an In & Out Burger fix, wandered around the Sherman Oaks Galleria (there's NOTHING there). All through public transportation. I was hanging out with friends so I did more things by hitching rides.

Who's riding the buses in L.A.? Tourists, undocumented workers, the elderly, the handicapped, drunks. It's not nearly the freak-show that you might imagine, especially if you've got some experience riding the NYC subways.

Grudge Dinner

One of my basic expectations for my L.A. trip was that I'd have a slew of meetings scheduled. Beyond the big pitch meeting, I thought I'd have general meetings with producers, executives. People I should know, people I'd only met over the phone before, people who were fans of my work.

But since the trip overlapped with Labor Day weekend—and not planned very far ahead—we couldn't lock down any general meets. Which made the trip even more peculiar because I was suddenly stranded in a strange land where I didn't have many friends and, aside from two days of pitching, I didn't have a whole lot to do.

Thankfully, Stephen Susco reached out to me through Facebook. We'd made contact at the beginning of the year. He'd been hired on to do a rewrite of my BUTCHERHOUSE screenplay and he was a big fan of my original stage play. I was looking forward to meeting with him because he's further along in his career: he's got a few produced films, he's been busier than ever the past year or two. We share a manager which facilitated the connection.

The Tuesday after Labor Day, I met Susco for dinner at Panzanella in the San Fernando Valley. He was the nicest guy ever. It sounds like a cliché but you meet a lot of *fake* people in Hollywood. Let me clarify my use of "fake" here: I'm not talking flat-out lying scum, or people who are completely two-faced. There is a subtlety to the level of fake that you see in a lot of people. A level of friendliness/politeness that seems to be there to mask more honest appraisals. I think politeness is a GOOD thing... but when you meet so many people who are wearing that mask, it's like the weather being sunny and beautiful every day for the entire year... I imagine it could get numbing...

All of that is a long way of saying that Susco just seemed real. He wasn't trying to get anything out of me. He respected my work and was open to telling me about his own experiences with the business over the years. I broke into the business four years ago and this is the conversation I'd been wanting to have with someone for all that time.

He's the one who started to convince me that it might be a good idea to relocate to L.A. The conversation wasn't like, "You've GOT to move to L.A. if you want to be taken seriously..." or any kind of ultimatum like that. I've heard that before and it just makes me want to defiantly stick it out in NYC. Susco was more inviting than that. He talked about the possibilities that could open up if I were there. It was a very persuasive pitch...

... and the idea of moving out West has been haunting me ever since...

Pitch Man

Pitching is part of the career of a screenwriter.

Walking into a conference room with executives and selling them on a story. Painting a picture of a movie they'll want to invest in.

I'd pitched over the phone a number of times. It can be awkward over the phone because you can't see their faces. If they have you on a speaker, it's often difficult to hear their questions afterwards, especially if they ramble.

My L.A. trip was scheduled around me going to Lionsgate and pitching in the room. Thursday, 3pm, the day after I landed in L.A.

11am, went to a coffee house and met with a producer who I'd been working with for the better part of the year. Meeting people in person, they rarely look like what you imagine them to look like.

This guy was some classic Hollywood producer archetype. Lean, skin like tanned leather from the California sun. Super friendly and enthusiastic but, almost simultaneously, far away. He was present but he was distracted.

My manager and this producer would be in the conference room with me that afternoon. They would do a little setup and then I would pitch the broad strokes of the story for "about 10 minutes".

I was concerned I wouldn't have 10 minutes of material. I had written a very detailed treatment for the CADAVERS project but the main strokes of the storyline seemed fairly simple to me.

I ran through the pitch with the producer at the coffee house. He timed it. I clocked 22 minutes. It felt awkward. I was nervous. The one advantage of pitching over the phone is that I can have a huge cheat sheet and I can merely read something that I've plotted out. Pitching in person, it's about eye contact and NOT having to search for your notes all over the place.

It seems silly because you're trying to get hired as a WRITER and not a performer. Who cares about the song and dance if I'm a really great writer? But it's one of those stupid rituals that is woven into the fabric of Hollywood.

My second run-through at the coffee house clocked in at 12 minutes.

By the afternoon meeting, I had it down. The pitch went really smoothly. I felt calm. I could see when they GOT something, could see when they responded well to something, could see when they wanted me to move along to the next thing. The producer had told me that he'd jump in if he could see I needed help, but he ended up sitting back and letting me do my thing. I had answers for all their questions without having to consult my notes.

I went really well. My manager and the producer were well impressed. There were many factors involved in whether or not Lionsgate would ultimately invest in the project, but I had done everything I could to sell this one. And I hadn't embarrassed myself.

On the day before I left, we pitched to Paramount, as a backup. It was this executive that I'd worked with on Butcherhouse, so there was a little less anxiety. That went well, too.

I'd hoped that I'd get to have more meetings done while I was in L.A. Not just pitch meetings but general meetings. But the entire trip had been so hastily assembled, and scheduled around a holiday weekend, so Lionsgate and Paramount ended up being my two major meetings. After all that hooplah.

The day after I got back to NY, I pitched the project to Universal over the phone, using my old cheat sheet method. Wasn't quite the same.

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love L.A.

Long overdue trip to Los Angeles and, after many delays, it came together so suddenly I wasn't quite ready.

I rented a car. There, I said it.

Three years ago, I was in L.A. under very different circumstances. Paramount footed the entire bill. First class flight, car service from the airports, posh hotel suite. I was only there for a few days, I was only taking meetings at Paramount and Platinum Dunes for a project I was already hired on. The executive at Paramount was insistent on not letting me rent a car. "How many years has it been since you've driven...? There's no way you're driving here. Take taxis, you'll get reimbursed: you're a New Yorker, we all get it."

This trip was different. I was gonna be there for over a week. My round-trip (coach) ticket was paid for by a producer, but I was gonna be crashing on couches and footing my own expenses. I was there to pitch a new project (CADAVERS), so I had to be in salesman mode. I'd just read this Slate article about Hollywood's perception of non-drivers as losers. So, I was all like fuck it. Fuck all the people who make fun of me for not knowing how to drive. The last time I was behind the wheel of a car might have been 2003, for a very short journey, but I drove around the suburbs growing up. I've got a valid driver's license. Drooling idiots drive all over the place, EVERYONE drives in L.A., I could suck it up and get it done. I'd get a GPS so it'd be just like Grand Theft Auto, following the arrows. I'd been meaning to take a driving refresher class beforehand, but the trip just came together before I could schedule one.  I'd just drive very carefully.

The night before my trip, I was pretty anxious about the whole affair: flying to L.A., driving, pitching, the whole magilla. So I had a few drinks to help me sleep and calm my nerves.

I ended up sleeping through my alarm. Woke up a LOT later than I wanted. Grabbed my shit, hopped a subway to JFK. Being hungover on a long cross-country flight is singularly unpleasant. I was flying Delta, which charges for everything, so all I'd had to eat was a free bag of peanuts. Wheels down at LAX, shuttle to the car rental place...

Driving off the Enterprise lot in my white Hyundai, I quickly realized how unprepared I was for this. Started the car parked in a garage, so the GPS didn't get to sync properly. I thought it would eventually just sync on its own, so I just started driving. The brakes were really sensitive so it took me a while to get acclimated to it... but I had to get acclimated to EVERY aspect of this...

Driving... in Los Angeles... with a GPS that was NOT giving me any proper directions...

I just kept driving blind because it took me a while to find an easy place to pull over and park for a spell. I drove further and further toward God Knows Where, trapped on the road.

Eventually, I found a CVS with a nice suburb-like parking lot. Parked and took a good spell appreciating the sensation of walking on steady pavement.

When I started the car again, the GPS rebooted and synced like it should have. I didn't know you had to restart the fucking Garmin in order to get it to sync.

With the GPS online, I drove to my friends' place in West Hollywood with far less drama. Found a parking space nearby. And made the decision to use the car as little as possible in the week ahead...