I sometimes wonder if writing is worth all the problems that the desire to write creates. It rarely gives the writer cash or fame: if we are lucky enough to be paid, it’s all-too-quickly spent; if we get recognition (Diablo Cody who wrote Juno, for example)—well—fame’s fleeting and it can’t be deposited at the ATM. The title “screenwriter” sometimes causes a flicker of interest—anything remotely echoing of Hollywood sounds exciting. While a long resume brings a “wow” in the inner circles of movie-land, interest quickly fades if there’s nothing new on the blotter, and the only other place where “inner circles” are found is in Dante’s Inferno. Comparisons between the Inferno and Hollywood are purely coincidental.

I don’t have a long resume. I only started writing screenplays a couple of years ago which isn’t long enough for anything I’ve done with DGM to trickle trough the process of production. No one gets their first screenplay produced after it’s finished unless the writer’s uncle is the head of Paramount. It might happen if the writer has Cinderella’s magic dove (fairy godmother in the Disney version), but I don’t have any use for the glass slipper which won’t fit and no interest in the Prince (since I’m not gay) unless the Prince wants to underwrite DGM’s next screenplay. What’s the chance that Tinkerbelle will get our next screenplay green-lighted by sprinkling us with “fairy-dust, fairy-dust” as Robin Williams calls it (which, as I recall, did not manage to arouse interest from the gum-chewing dancer for the Nathan Lane character.) There is no magic in the film industry, from fairy dust or anything else.

So, what’s this all about? Well, we’re in production, or pre-production, or development or something with a new film currently entitled Call Waiting. Since this is being shot as an independent film, no one has had the decency to payoff the writers, lay hold of the script, and film the damn thing without us. We’re still in it. Everyone except Mark Gallistl’s dog, Caramel, has made script suggestions. Some of them are good; some have been just this side of rancid milk. Caramel has had the good taste to leave the writers alone unless we have cookies with our coffee in which Caramel’s interest is limited to getting her cut of the cookies.

What non-writers don’t know is how interconnected a story is: a change on page ten ripples to tidal wave proportions by page 43. Every great suggestion creates pages of agony trying to get the ramifications of the suggested change straight.

I think many screenwriters have given up trying to write a story that makes sense. Maybe it makes no difference if the story has more holes than a moth’s wool suit. I liked Zombieland for it’s nuttiness, but explain to me again why zombies don’t get eaten by other zombies. And, if a zombie is simply a person reawakened from the dead, why can it be killed by shooting it? Wouldn’t a zombie that’s been shot get up and keep going since a zombie is a person reawakened from the dead? Yeah, I was awake during the movie when they rattled off the mad cow disease mumbo-jumbo for people like me who want an explanation for something that clearly does not exist in the world. I’m not sure it helped.

Yet, that is what we do as writers, isn’t it? We spin a web of fanciful facts in the odd hope that someone will like the finished work well enough to hand us a few bucks and give the production company a wad of cash to produce it. They say there’s a thousand unread scripts for each one that manages to get filmed. Of the films made, only a few get a wide release. So, again I ask, Why do we do it?

I don’t know except to say that I’ve got to quit writing this so that I can get ready for a meeting with the director of Call Waiting so we can outline some changes to the script.