LA Colemantary #3

Some good news this week.  Last summer I wrote and directed a short called THE DIAGNOSIS starring Lesley Anne Warren, James Urbaniak, and Emily Deschanel.  We got into the Atlanta Film Festival which is April 10 – 19.  We received 11 no’s before this glorious yes.  We’re excited.

The week:
It was my birthday week.  93 looks good on me – 68 I hesitate – no, 56 – no, 44  - no, 32 – which one is true?  I’ve lost track.
My mother and father have not.  Every year they call me and tell me the birth story.  They tell it together:

Mom: Well honey, 35 years ago today (or whatever), your father and I were watching GUNSMOKE

Dad: when your mother’s water broke and we –

Mom: that’s new.

Dad: What?

Mom:  You’ve never rhymed before.

Dad: I like it.

Mom: hmmmmmmmmmmmm

Dad:  It was a full moon and –

Mom: It was crescent.

Dad:  Ann, don’t you remember the blizzard and the moon guiding us?

Mom: Crescent Ken, and it had started to rain. Blizzard?

And so it goes every year until the VERY CERTAIN happy birthday song.

Writing workout #2:

Write 5 scenes in a LA RONDE configuration.  Invent 5 characters (wildly broad – like THE BAD BOY, THE AGENT, THE STUDIO EXECUTIVE, THE PEANUT SALESMAN – etc…)  Assign them each a code – a,b,c,d,e – then write these scenes:

Ab, bc,cd, de

They are passing something from scene to scene.  Or adding – or discovering – or…….

LA Colemantary #2

Last week I just jumped right in with an old anecdote  - so let me bring you into the present.

I made the move from Brooklyn to L.A. a year and a half ago.  My first semester teaching at USC was fall of 06.  Before arriving in LA, I had been teaching a  continuous 10 week storytelling workshop in New York in Joy Behar’s living room once a week for nine women.  I also taught at Lehman College in the Bronx – and I was a teaching artist for a program in the public high schools called CREATING ORIGINAL OPERA.

We are week #5 this week at USC.   I teach screenplay development B and writing the independent film. In SDB – my students are all writing a second draft so finding ways back in is the focus.  In writing the Independent Film they are watching Indie classics and starting their projects from scratch.

Writing workout of the week:  Who are the presidents of your lifetime?  List them and write under each a fragment of memory of your own life during their administration.  For instance when Nixon resigned I asked my mother if I could shave my legs for the first time – she said shhhhhhhhhhh, go ahead.  Try to see a pattern emerging or your own character arc.

LA Colemantary #1

INT.  RESTAURANT  NYC – NIGHT

Two friends are arguing – AMANDA and DIANE – resolving – wildy gesticulating.  POV of waitress approaching their table with the check.

WAITRESS
When you’re ready.

She puts the check in the middle of the table.  The two friends are SILENT. The waitress leaves. More SILENCE.

AMANDA
So, are we OK?

DIANE
There’s one more thing.  It’s that gift you gave me on my birthday last year.

AMANDA
What happened? Did it explode?

DIANE
It was an unusual gift for a 40 year old woman, that’s all.  Even my therapist thought it was weird.

AMANDA
You mentioned me to your therapist?

DIANE
Gift giving is an art.

And so it went – a conversation I wrote down word for word when I came home from dinner that night just to make sense of it – later becoming the scene that became the seed for what became FULL FRONTAL.

Before writing FULL FRONTAL, I was writing monologues that I’d perform at a theatre downtown in New York.  They were all about my high flying family, old boyfriends that haunted me, and bad nasty absurd jobs that I had somehow survived.

Two weeks after 9.11, I flew from New York to LA for my first “round of meetings” at the various studios.  No one sent me the manual on how to behave “in a room” or what to do when “spitballin’” starts like a food fight  - ideas flying around  like peas and  rice you didn’t cook.  Everything heightened and new.  I was a studio virgin.

My first meeting was at Warner Brothers where my rental car was frisked with mirrors on sticks and I had to get out to pop my empty trunk – holding up traffic – teetering on higher heels than I wore in NY – focusing on directions to lot G – which turned out to be an abandoned New York City street set.  During the meeting there was a bomb scare and we had to evacuate.  I did my first pitch outside  - several studio execs and me, leaning against someone’s car.