“We all live in a little Village . . . . Your village may be different from other people's villages but we are all prisoners.”  ~ Patrick McGoohan (The Prisoner)

 

I was sitting on a gold mine. Three top movie scripts and six, really good Reality TV shows, plus one quirky, fictional crime novel that, ironically, came true two years later, a rarity among crime novels.  Ten projects in all. Plus I knew a couple of people in LA, Hollywood insiders I was assured.

 

I had come to the land of Beemers and Benzes, Hummers and Escalades to submit my work to a larger audience. Even before I arrived, all the writers went on strike.

 

“The fallout of the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) 100-day shutdown,” wrote David McCrary for Counterpunch, “cost  $2.5 billion in lost wages and production.”

 

But since I wasn’t part of the writer’s union then, the studios would still need Reality TV shows, or so I was told. For some reason, Reality producers aren’t really considered writers in Hollywood but networks would still need programs to fill the empty viewing hours on 999 channels, now that the writers had walked.

 

A friend bought me a thick, hugely expensive book ($70) called The Hollywood Creative Directory. Inside were listed all the film and TV production studios, plus their personnel.  Must have been over 50,000 names listed there, and hundreds of studios. Certainly I too, like William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald before me, could find a niche here in Hollywood.

 

“Without shmoozing, networking, or encountering some Hollywood figure, the chance of an individual breaking into the film industry is nearly impossible,” said writer Simon Rucker. “Writers are often the lowest on the totem pole.”

 

No problemo. I’d known that well beforehand, having read numerous books on the subject, from Some Time In The Sun to the excellent Adventures In The Screen Trade. Besides, like author and successful screenwriter William Goldman’s unforgettable character, Butch Cassidy uttered,  “I got vision while the rest of the world wore bifocals.”

 

I proudly registered my nine new projects at the WGA West, the writer’s guild headquarters in Los Angeles. At the guild, they politely give newcomers a pamphlet listing all the WGA agents willing to rep new writers. Must have been several dozen agencies, I thought, perhaps a few hundred agents just waiting to sign me.

 

Not.

 

“As a writer, producer and director,” wrote script consultant Jim Mercurio, “I have sent out probably a thousand screenplays and, ironically, neither of my two produced films were a result of those submissions.  I found, unlike Hollywood, other industries have a measurable and immediate need for decent writers.”

 

“Agents are there to keep people like you from gaining access to the actual people who might help you,” said an Indy filmmaker, NN. “What you have to do is build relationships to those people, yourself.”

 

The great Goldman himself advised: “Whenever I meet anyone interested in screenwriting, there is really only one question in their minds: How can I get an agent? Obviously, it’s impossible. But you can try. Intelligently. What can an agent do for you? Nothing magical. You have to think and act and, most of all, hustle . . . . Pester is the password here.”

 

Others before me, thousands of others just like myself, had to overcome the same inertia. Allegedly, famous film director David Lynch had to deliver newspaper to raise money for his first flick, Eraserhead.  At times a newcomer to Hollywood feels trapped in Lynch’s cult classic, Mulholland Drive. Said the star of that film, Naomi Watts, “I remember driving along the street many times sobbing my heart out in my car, going, 'What am I doing here?'”

 

How quickly the newcomer learns that angst and agent occupy the same adjacent space in Hollywood, like stars and paparazzi.  Hollywood, more than anywhere else, is less a meritocracy than an industry built on nepotism, charm and connections.  Hardly mattered if you had penned the next Gone With The Wind or the next The Great Gatsby in a prior life. To an agent, you were just an unknown amoeba, swimming in the muck. Heck, if you didn’t even own a Porsche or Beemer how could anyone take you seriously?