2006-11-06 - 3:46 a.m.
Yesterday, the union of script readers met in Hollywood to argue and debate about what we all can do to create more jobs. The end consensus of the meeting was that we must all go and find other kinds of work.
It was a depressing meeting, frankly, and not merely because I found myself in one room with not only my mother, but also with my colleagues from every place I have worked for over the last 15 years. There was a reader or two from Wormwood, a whole pack from Megalith, and several from Pathetica. And how old they looked! My dears, they are such an elderly crew.
If I had to be kind, I’d say only two of the many women were still capable of suffering menstral cramps, while the guys were all needing Grecian Formula, Geritol, and Viagra just to get them through the day. My gosh – you want to know old? Looking out upon the crowd of union story analysts, sitting there, some of them nodding off in their dotage, others babbling about the election or the weather, you would be forgiven if you had mistaken the meeting for the waiting room of the Shady Acres Old Age Home for Idiots Suffering from Alzheimers Syndrome.
I wish I could communicate to you the graying of the folks who do my job for a living. I swear that I am the youngest – or maybe the second or third youngest – in the entire union. And that is a scary thing to see. If you want to know proof that these jobs are going the way of the dinosaur, you have only to look at the other readers, most of whom are so elderly they’re sitting there having to read screenplays while eating pureed corn so their false teeth won’t fall out.
And what is wackier still is that, as evidenced by the Union representative at the meeting, no one gets the fact that the movie business is changing. No one wants to hire people to do jobs like this any more. They are a vestige of the Droit De Signeur era of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Today, kids are hired, given a Creative Executive title and $20,000 less, to do the same job we do. And, really, they’re probably better at it, too, since they’ve grown up as a generation of kids with computers and access to video games. None of em think there were any movies before Star Wars or Jaws.
The union readers, meanwhile, are those who have just sat in their rooms, reading thousands and thousands of scripts, year in year out. The world of popular culture has simply passed them by. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing I leave to you. Some do think that “experience” has some worth in this trade – but those are not the folks who make movies, who like a young sensibility and attitude.
“By cracky,” one old guff who was sitting next to me said as the Union Representative blathered on and on, earning the dues we pay her. “Are you going to eat that tapioca? It’s just that I can’t have the peanuts, m’gums won’t stand it.”
I passed him the complimentary bowl of goodies we had all been given, and the elderly reader wheezed with pleasure.
“Thanky! Thanky!” he croaked, taking the bowl with his slate white skeletal fingers and smacking his lips together with wet ghoulish snapping sounds. “Say, there, didn’t ya work at Metro back in the day?”
“You old goat,” I sneered, “It hasn’t been known as ‘Metro’ since 1940s. Now shut up and gum your gruel!”
The other various reader sand the union representative bustled about in varying degrees of denial and the enabling of it. The union rep in particular, gushed over the “efforts” to which she was going to find us work. She was an olive-colored young Italian woman with a stocky body and the manner of a good bulldog – unimaginative, but forceful. I could easily believe that she would be a formidable opponent in some negotiating process. However, she was out of her depth with the inert legions of the Murder of Readers.
“Well, we have lots of irons in the fire!” the rep told us, seated at the head of the massive conference table. “Why, look at this – we’ve printed up this snazzy new brochure, which we’re sending out to the studios, telling them why they should use story analysts!”
She held up the brochure, a tacky flier of the sort you’d stick under the windshield wiper of a car. “Ten Good Things About Story Analysts!” the flier’s headline read. “Number One! We Will Read Your Script! Number Two, We Shall Make Helpful Suggestions!”
“The most important thing we must do,” the union rep insisted, “is that we must show precisely how indispensable union story analysts are. We have to show them that they should not hire those young, hot, hip urchins from the film schools and should instead stick with the jaded, burnt out, embittered veterans who have been reading scripts since Jesus was a Movie of the Week!”
The room erupted in bitter cackles and howls. The readers rolled in the aisles, jeering and sputtering. Tears ran from our eyes, and snot from our noses. There was gibbering and snickering – it was like the monkey’s tea party cage at the zoo. At last one Alter Kocher reader, currently employed at Wormwood, raised his hand to address a question to the representative.
“How are we REALLY going to make more job opportunities in this union?” he asked.
Quoth the union rep, “Well, as I said, we’re working on it. But let’s face it – the national climate isn’t good for sort of thing right now. We’re thinking that when Bush leaves office and the Republicans lose the election, and when the next Democratic president appoints different people to the National Labor Relations Board, we will be able to shake things up and get us some more job positions.”
Now, I don’t know much – but I know that if one is waiting for the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES to personally intercede in the activities of the Union of Story Analysts, well – that is delusional. And you might as well be waiting for Santa Claus to hire you to work in the North Pole Story Department. I never heard such codswallop.
Anyway, I am over it all. We should not let ourselves be defined by our jobs anyway. We should be defined by… other things. What we do for love, for instance. And our hobbies and projects. The truth is, though, I have none of these distractions. I keep starting on projects, such as this short story or that play, but I quickly become disheartened and let them fall by the wayside. Someone had the gall the other day to suggest that I become a paralegal. I found the notion quite queasy-making, but I asked a couple of folks in the trade what they thought about the idea. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that it’s not a bad life “if you don’t mind being yelled at and treated like shit by asshole lawyers all the time.”
But something will turn up. It always does. Hell, perhaps Pathetica will start amping itself up like the newspapers are saying it is going to, and I won’t have to worry about any of this nonsense any more. Who knows? Maybe I’ll wind up being a desk clerk at a bathhouse. Or the cum-scrubber at The Zone: Now that’s a job I’d do pretty well, I must say.
Meanwhile, I have found myself beguiled by a charming new e-mail correspondent, a quite adorable and suspiciously well spoken 20 year old college sophomore and comic book artist who is attending a University downstate. What a charming and delightful young fellow he is! He does my poor heart proud – and not just because he is cute as a button and modestly self deprecatory to a fault, but also because he seems to harbor a genuine case of gerontophilia, meaning he is totally into goofy oldsters just as myself.
And, my goodness, he seems so clever – I mean, he has such good taste! He’s said my blog reminds him of David Sedaris! Now how can you not groove to someone like that? I have a feeling that our paths have crossed at least once – and not like that, you unbelievably filthy pervert. And, no, I didn’t babysit him when he was six and I was twenty nine, either. No, it turns out he used to work at a comic book store I have been into once in a while, and where I seem to recall having bought a copy of the graphic novel PERSEOPOLIS from him.
Mind you, as I have chatted with him, I have discovered that he has been brought up here in Santa Monica, and we have had a number of similar experiences, albeit separated by perhaps a generation of time – if not more. For instance, when I found out he had attended Samohi, I could not help but ask him about Mr. X, who, in the early 80s, was the most gay teacher in all of the school, known for attempting to seduce all his favorite students in his Latin Class.
“Mr. X!” squeaked my little pet when I asked him about it. “He retired a year or two ago. He was gay? No way! He was just a senile old goat! Who knew?” He similarly had no idea of who my old theater arts teacher, Mr. Felch, was – you remember, he was the terror of the Samohi locker room shower stalls.
Anyway, over the course of our few conversations, chat with this young fellow became increasingly torrid. And, finally, he mentioned that he was also coming to town for a weekend. The purpose of his visit was ostensibly to visit his mother – who I suspect is a few years younger than I am – and to hook up with Daddy Warbucks, a gentleman whom he said he dated off and on for some time. The way young folks think is always quite amazing to me.
Here was his plan. You see, the chap was intending to drive down to meet up with this fellow at around seven in the evening, at which point he was fully expecting the chap to propose becoming the child’s steady and monogamous romantic partner. However, up until seven, the young man was still legally a bachelor, so it was quite possible to hook up if he wanted. Up until the strike of seven, he was a single boy. So he proposed a quickie, literally on his way to his beloved’s apartment.
Really, I was rather speechless at the idea. Quite astounding! But, perhaps fortunately, he ultimately got caught in traffic – and I decided to head out to the Novel shortly before the time he was fixing to phone me anyway. But, honestly, what is not to find amusing about such a clever, steel trap, and pragmatic mind?
