A Limey in LA LA Land - One Writer's Gurney, Part V

by Michael Donald

(Part V. Missed part IV? Check it out!)

INT. HOTEL - LOBBY - NIGHT OF THE STARS

I joined the large and excitable collection of people that wove in a ragged line around the lobby and corridors of our Aztec themed festival venue. This was the night we were to get our thirty seconds of fame being interviewed on the red carpet followed by a few minutes of anonymity in a conference room being filmed for web content.

It was already around nine o' clock, which was 5am inside my befuddled English brain ... boy was I going to be sharp in front of those cameras. I looked around at the people that waited patiently in line. They'd made the effort to look smart for their big break. And in the most part they had succeeded. Those that failed did so with catastrophic aplomb. I've never really understood why some people assume that slipping into a garish tie will activate some sort of Klingon cloaking device that conceals the shabby shoes, egg stained shirt and creased jacket of a true creative.

As the line crept forward towards the battery of photographers, cameraman and personality interviewer, I tried to formulate a few witty one-liners and a dazzling micro pitch for my winning animation script, Rose's War. After all, you never know when Stephen Spielberg or George Lucas might find themselves at an unexpectedly loose end one evening, and decide to spend a few happy hours trawling the Internet for the next big Dreamworks project. That's the thing with an always on Utubed society, one minute you're nobody ... the next minute six million people know you're nobody.

INT. CORRIDOR OF FAME - ENDLESS NIGHT

I was nearly there; I could see the frenetic bobbing head and carelessly tossed tresses of the Hollywood star interviewer only a few feet away. The cameras flashed and the photographers shouted encouragement -- look over here, this way, smile etc. All as the victims tried to answer questions and get their pitch across. My friend Marwan stepped into the arena. Marwan is of course a young and good looking actor, whereas I looked and felt like a jetlagged Bee Gee. I edged nearer to see if I could pick up any tips. The interviewer was asking Marwan about his film. Nothing wrong about that I hear you say ... except he won the top prize for his film screenplay.

She was a trouper, and stuck to that old adage of never letting the facts stand in the way of a good interview. "You must be very proud of your film." She cooed. Marwan did a double take, but recovered, steered her back on course by saying he was surprised and delighted at winning the prize for the first script he'd ever written. It was like hitting an energiser bunny with a baseball bat ... she barely registered his reply. "So you must be enjoying the fruits of your labour now that the film's finished." She pressed on. Again Marwan recovered, told her that he was looking forward to making the film and showing it at next year's festival.

I looked around at the sixty or so people that had passed through this journalistic cookie cutter and wondered what sort of weird and wonderful interviews had been recorded for posteriors sitting in front of their "whypads." My interview duly arrived and the experience was pretty much on a par with Marwan's. I toyed with the idea of pretending I had actually made Rose's War and to start thanking her for my prize, just to see what she'd come up with. But jet lag got the better of me. And in the end I merely babbled about my script, stumbled over my alternative title "The St Valentines Day Flower Massacre" and grinned toothily for the press photographers.

INT. CONFERENCE TOMB - NIGHT

After my bruising red carpet encounter I was whisked away by the festival organiser, down the corridor of many Aztec features and into the conference room for my sit down interview. A cameraman, and what looked an actor from "Entourage" in a dinner jacket were waiting. Having spent many years on film sets covering behind the scenes interviews I was immediately confused by the scene that greeted me. Two chairs faced each other, not in the normal position with one next to the camera and one in front ... no, this defied convention and we faced each other like chat show host and guest.

I found this pretty confusing as it afforded two profile shots in a wide, or individual shots side on. Being used to interviews where the camera saw faces and they either never showed the interviewer or did cutaways, I found this a little weird. I looked at the cameraman ... "So how does this work?" Again the blank stare I was going to see a lot of during my stay in L.A. I pressed on, "I mean, how are you going to see our faces?" He looked me in the eye. "Oh, I can't do that I only have the one camera." Of course, what was I thinking, he only has one camera. Learning fast I just let that one go. We had a blast doing the interview, even though I'm sure no one really understood what I was on about. In fact after the interview finished and we started chatting informally, the cameraman started filming us again ... he said it was pure gold. I can only assume he buried it in "Them there hills" because I have no idea when it will be dug up on the web, and that's probably a very good thing.

INT. HAVING A BALL ROOM - TOO LATE

This was to be our last evening at the hotel. In fact this was the high point of the Festival. The Overtones, an acapello group managed by Clint Eastwood's wife, and who featured on the sound track of Clint's film INVICTUS were performing. But better than that, we had been told that Clint himself would probably turn up, and we would have full access to chat to him. Everybody was very excited about this.

Sadly, Clint found himself something else to do that evening and so my chance of pitching my idea for Grand Torino II wasn't going to happen. The next event was to collect our certificates for the winning scripts, and this went off without a hitch. The Overtones were terrific, and Marwan and I got chatting to the Overtone's manager who assured us he would get our various scripts directly to Clint for him to have a look at. Once again, my pesky limey pessimism kept telling me that this probably wouldn't happen quite as fast as we'd imagine. As we neared the end of our stay, we started to get a little anxious about our final outstanding prize. This prize was the sort of thing that writers don't like to talk about.

Writers, especially screenwriters, are a strange breed. Never happier than when we are writing for ourselves with no thought of personal glory, public exposure or ... whisper it soft ... MONEY. Yes, we were due prize money. It was an issue that we'd casually touched on when we arrived, and it seemed churlish to bring it up when everybody was having such a great time. Each time we'd mentioned it to the festival organiser she'd said it was all happening, and shot off into the distance.

INT. HOTEL, BAD RECEPTION DESK - VERY LATE

I wandered down to the reception desk to settle up my bill. As the festival was picking up the tab for my room, I knew I only had a few dollars to pay for an Internet printout at the hotel. When the girl behind the desk perkily told me I owed one hundred and ninety dollars I was intrigued. How so I enquired? "The phone call you made." Now in the bad old days one never used a hotel phone, that was rather like packing your trousers with gold coins and hacking holes in the pockets. But I'd made one international phone call for about twenty minutes, figuring at most it would be about twenty dollars. One hundred and ninety dollars was around 9$ a minute, a kings ransom in any country. I tried to tell her that there must be a mistake, that no one on planet Earth could possibly charge those rates ... not legally anyway.

Her tight smile never faltered. That was how much it was she said, with a finality that told me that where phone charges are concerned the customer is always wrong. The red mist swam before my eyes. I said okay, and moved away from the desk. The festival organiser slid over to me and handed me an envelope. My cash prize was inside, it didn't make me happy. As a writer, one is used to injustice, both creatively and financially ... but when it comes to a phone bill, well that's just asking for trouble. What the receptionist hadn't appreciated was that a writer has access to one of the greatest weapons known to mankind ... the INTERNET! I was going to research them into submission.

Updated: 08/19/2010