Throwing My Hands Up, I Surrender…
In the best, most positive way possible. Let me explain what I mean.
The other day, I was with a friend at a healing space in Malibu and, on a whim, she decided to take a picture of me in front of a large crystal set of angel wings. Having never been in this location before, I neither knew of its serenity nor that my outfit was so perfectly color coordinated to take the shot most influencers spend energy and, sometimes, hours to get.
Without any prompting from my friend, I threw my arms up and, something in that action, felt so therapeutic and symbolic of how I needed to navigate my writing career moving forward. It was both an act of strength and surrender. When my arms were outstretched, my mind moved like a rubber band. I could see the path moving forward and instead of lamenting, stressing, or dissecting, I could stop, take a meaningful deep breath, and see the wood for the trees for the first time in a long time. A decision was decided. I was going to take my first creative step into territory unchartered wearing the same pair of boots (now scuffed and worn) I was wearing when I first decided to pursue screenwriting as a career.
The film industry is not what I knew of it over the decades I was there. That’s clear as day. To be a writer the way I once was afforded no longer seems an option. But, another key component has changed radically, too, and that’s me and the way I see things. Maybe there has been a seismic shift in how business is done in Hollywood, sure, but there is a depth to my writing that has come with age and experience making it really resonate. And just because projects don’t get set up the way they once did doesn’t mean my projects will languish. They won’t be realized if I become negative. I can’t do that. I throw my arms up to surrender for a beat, only long enough to shake it off and start writing again…
But, symbolically, I surrender.
Sometimes, you assume things will stay the same. This is obviously the wrong assumption, especially when it comes to business. Never has this point been made more clearly to me than in the film industry.
In the decade that has passed since I stepped out of actively pursuing my writing career, things have changed so radically in Hollywood, it’s as though the landscape was a mirage, a sound stage that has been easily dismantled. Managers tell me there’s no point in taking on new clients when there isn’t enough work for the ones they already represent. Movies aren’t being made the way they were in the past. Successful screenwriters have embraced other mediums like long form fiction to make ends meet. Several working professionals have said they are still feeling the damaging ripple effects of the WGA and SAG strikes respectively and the streaming giants are painted as online Lucifers for their contractual practices, pay scales, and manners of acquiring material.
I hear the pessimism and I acknowledge without completely surrendering to it. I’ve beaten the odds before and, like a gambling addict at a craps table in a seedy hotel off The Las Vegas Strip, I keep turning up to beat the house. While surrendering, of course, that the odds are not in my favor. But, then again, when were the odds ever really in my favor?
When I got into film school, that wasn’t the case. There were 1100 applicants for a mere 22 spots and I can only imagine the expanding number of hopeful UCLA film students decades on. Even when we were admitted to my prestigious program, I was warned, of my 21 classmates, only a handful would ever enjoy enough success to consider themselves working writers or to justify the tuition spent on acquiring a UCLA MFA in Screenwriting. I got an agent and a deal within weeks of graduation, which is unlikely (I’m not suggesting either the agent or the deal were good, but those are semantics…) When I landed my position with Academy Award winning writer, Ron Bass, there were over 30 applicants for four spots, so who knows how that happened or how lucky I was to forge a lifelong friendship with the man. And I have been blessed to write or contribute to the writing of dialogue that has come out of the mouths of everybody from Kevin Hart to J Lo and that’s pretty cool too… And yet at the end of the day, I still feel like a failure.
A failure for giving up my cherished profession when the chips were down. A failure for not having an Oscar or my own movie produced based on my own original idea, only those for which I was hired. A failure for not enjoying consistent success year upon year like a lawyer or a chiropractor might. A failure for still wondering in the middle of my life why I chose the path of an artist when it was predicated on rejection and subjectivity. And then, well, then I throw up my arms…
And surrender.
And suddenly, much like those angel wings, the doubts take flight like a pack of black birds against a dark sky. I smile from the weight of those doubts being lifted and, later in the day, when I get home from Malibu, I do the only thing it seemed fitting to do.
I write. And I not only write, I write well. And that still counts for something.