Dear Reader Panni and Dear Reader Charles Pogue: Will be interested to hear your respective takes on the authenticity of today's L.A. Times Calendar section articles on the life of the Hollywood screenwriter today.
For those of you who do not have LA Times placed on your breakfast tray:
Calendar![](http://images.calendarlive.com/media/photo/2004-02/11561629.jpg)
Quiet! Script in progress
By Robert Masello
Special to The Times
February 26 2004
(excerpts)
The trades are Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, and some super-successful screen and TV writers, I'm told, actually get them delivered right to their homes. The rest of us usually meander down to the nearest Barnes & Noble, where we wait in line to read a copy without having to buy it. Professional courtesy dictates that you try not to leave coffee or cinnamon stains on it.
![](http://www.haineshisway.com/community/images/header_02.jpg)
Spotting us is easy. That's us there, in the baseball cap and loose-fit Dockers, grinding our teeth as we read about the latest monster script sale — "Paramount Antes Up $2 Million for Spec Feature by 14-Year-Old Vons Bagger!" Last year alone, the guild registered 50,000 treatments, scripts and ideas — and 182 movies were produced under guild jurisdiction. You figure the odds.
...
And dignity, especially at this awards-crazy time of the year, is never far from a screenwriter's mind. The Writers Guild Awards were last week, and the Oscars are coming up, so there's still a bumper crop of bitterness out there waiting to be harvested. When all of those around you are being nominated and celebrated, you just want to say, "Hold on one darn minute here! You want to know what I could have done if I'd (a) been asked, (b) was self-motivated or (c) had talent?" Speaking for myself, I wasn't up for anything, but that doesn't mean I don't feel robbed. The screenwriter's sense of personal injury is as finely tuned as a bat's radar.
[A BK vs DTS and PayPal Scam reference]...
The one thing we don't like to talk about is our work;
it would be unseemly. If you're actually employed, on a paying job, your friends don't want to hear about it. (And for all you know, you're rewriting the script your lunch mate was fired from the week before.)
[A CP reference - bolding a BK homage]...
And now, there's also the big question: Who's going to win what on Sunday night? A decidedly informal poll of the writers I found dining at Jerry's Famous Deli in Westwood voted this way. Best adapted screenplay? "Mystic River." A solid piece of work by a veteran pro, Brian Helgeland. Best original screenplay, the big kahuna? "Lost in Translation," though there was some reluctance to heap any more blessings on Sofia Coppola, a young woman whose life seems too good already. Writers like to rectify, not reinforce, a cosmic imbalance wherever they see it.
[A Panni reference?]...
If you're a screenwriter in L.A., and you play your cards right, you never have to grow up.
Michael Jackson may have moved out of Neverland ... but we're not budging.
der Brucer (full transcript available on request)