The Road to Amazing Read Online Free PDF Page B

but as my best friend? The whole idea of a
best friend was really kind of stupid — something from grade
school, like wanting to be an astronaut when you grew up. But I
still wondered who it would be. Min? She was definitely the person
I confided in the most, even now that I lived in Los Angeles, and I
think she probably understood me better than anyone. But Gunnar was
the kind of guy you could count on for absolutely anything, no
questions asked, and Min and I joked a lot about how he understood
more than he sometimes let on. Otto and I had once been boyfriends,
which gave you a special kind of intimacy (you'll note that he was
the only person I hugged at the front door). Now that we lived in
the same city, he and I had ended up becoming really close — at
least before his career had taken off. And there was Vernie, the
person who had helped me find meaning in my life by getting me to
realize I wanted to be a screenwriter, and who was now the world's
greatest mentor.
    Then there was Kevin, the
guy I was marrying. The instant I thought of it, I realized
that he was my
best friend, no matter how you sliced it.
    The best man is also the
groom , I thought. Who knew?
    All of which made me realize (again)
what a lucky guy I was, and that I'd pretty much have to have blue
broccoli for brains to complain about anything in my
life.
     
    * * *
     
    After dinner, we all cleaned up, and
Vernie helped me load the dishwater.
    "So what's new in Hollywood?" she
asked me.
    "Well, A Cup of Joe is officially dead," I
said. A Cup of Joe was an indie movie project I'd written that some friends and
I had been trying to set up in Los Angeles. We'd come really close
to getting financing a couple of times, but it had always fallen
through. In the end, everyone had given up and moved on to other
projects.
    "Just dead or truly dead?"
    Everyone in Hollywood knows that
nothing is ever really dead — that there's always one more place to
try, one more hustle to play, or maybe an unexpected change in the
marketplace. But it's somehow also true that sometimes a project
finally seems truly dead, and you have to learn to let it
go.
    "Truly dead, I think," I
said.
    "Well, I'm really sorry to
hear that. It was a damn good script. But they're all spins at the
roulette wheel. You know that, right? There's a huge element of luck in all this,
just flat-out random chance. That's why you can't get bogged down
with any one project. You need to have at least five scripts always
ready to go. Do you have five scripts ready to go?"
    "Ma'am, yes, ma'am !" I said, saluting
like a soldier.
    Vernie laughed.
    "I've decided I need a new strategy,"
I said.
    "I'm intrigued. Go on."
    "Well, with A Cup of Joe , it all
boiled down to money. Everyone wants to make a feature film, but no
one has any money. So I've decided to write a single-location
script. Something completely bare-bones that can be produced for a
hundred thousand dollars or less."
    Single-location scripts were suddenly
all the rage among aspiring screenwriters in Hollywood. The idea
was that the whole story is set in a single location (or two), so
the movie can be filmed fast and inexpensively.
    Vernie thought about it, then nodded.
"I guess that makes sense."
    "You know," I said,
"movies like Buried , or Devil ,
or Moon ,
or Wrecked ,
or ATM , or Locke ? All those writers got lots of
attention for good scripts that could be filmed really
cheap."
    " Twelve Angry Men ," Vernie
said.
    "Yeah!"
    "What are they about?"
    "Well," I said,
" Buried is about
someone trapped in a coffin. Moon is about someone trapped in a moon
station, Devil is
about people trapped in an elevator, Wrecked is about someone trapped in
the wreckage of a car, ATM is—"
    "Okay, okay, I get the idea. Do they
have to have one-word titles?"
    "No, that's just a
coincidence."
    "There's just one problem," Vernie
said.
    "What's that?"
    "Movies are an inherently visual
medium. And also a medium that depends on movement."
    "What's your point? That no one