I had this great meeting with this guy I met when I was 20. I'm not sure if I even just dreamed that first meeting back then but if I did I convinced him and now here we are.
In college I had written a Moonlighting script because the writing and the love affair on that show was an all consuming creation. Plus the dialogue just ripped a river through me. I get all churned up when there's funny dialogue delivered by a rogue and it ends up in kissing. I loved disaster in unrequited love.
This exec guy was working with my dad and he read my script and liked it and we met on the balcony of some person's house in 1986 and we weren't even sitting down we were just standing by a rail and he said I'm gonna give your script to Glenn Caron and that was the creator of Moonlighting, the writer whose words changed the rhythm of my own.
So now it's 40 yes 4 zero years later and I've run out of things to write about it (check backwards in this blog if you don't believe me) and my kids left for colleges and lives and I'm just training horses religiously and caring for my mostly blank mom, in other words THERE WAS SPACE here for a minute if I ignored all the cleaning and so I started writing to weird people I don't really know like Big Executives I met when I was 20 to see if anyone would take a look at my little Lewis and Clark show.
I was ready (again) (I have done this before) to try and put my writing out there in the world.
So first I wrote a letter to Batman. I was at his wedding when I was 15. It was one of the greatest memories of my life, sitting in a old barn in New Hampshire, in the rain, in the middle of a muddy field, watching this later to be superhero marry this lady my dad went to college with. Then I wrote to the exec guy from the balcony, Jordan. I wrote to my old best friend Howard from NYU who now runs the Discovery Channel. I wrote to David Witz who brought me in to interview for a job on Critters and inadvertently started my whole motherhood career. (He really owes me.) David went on from Critters to do other big movies, just like Leo DiCaprio and Angela Bassett (both from Critters). Let's not forget that big things start with low budget warehouses full of surfers and sets made out of old egg crates. That's the reality of the formation of my base. It's a solid place! If you can watch the art department build a spaceship out of things you find in a dumpster, you can do anything.
I wrote this Jordan email because he was a nice guy, and I was hoping a nice guy who liked my writing would still be a nice guy. And that he would be really into gaying up history. My email was true, funny, friendly, nostalgic, Glenn Caron-worshipping, and he wrote me back!
He said great to hear from you! Let my head of development set up a zoom call. Talk to you soon.
This was on like a regular Wednesday in late July. I went automatically out to muck the barn and I cried and I talked to the rake as I always do as I'm picking up piles of crap and horses are milling around ignoring me and I cried because I can't do any of this. I'm not a networker. I can't do a zoom call. I can barely do the microwave. I'm already holding everything together I have nothing left this is such a bad idea.
By the time I was done mucking I realized that the people in me that like to throw mud on passing cars in a thunderstorm were just flinging mud so I would think I was incapable of doing a hard thing. Just because most of the people I have talked to in the last 40 years were growing up people, and dementia patients, and four legged thousand pound animals, this doesn't mean that I CAN'T DO WHAT I'M NOT USED TO DOING. I just have to get used to it.
Calm down. One thing at a time.
I asked my friend Chris who does zooms every day to do a fake zoom with me so I could get used to it again. (I did teach zoom kindergarten during Covid. It's just been awhile since I taught math to 5 year olds without wearing pants.) I had all my notes for what I wanted to say.
I was so serious planning my fake meeting and then seeing Chris on the zoom in a white room doing what she does every day made me feel suddenly shrunken, like a drunk dwarf juggling chainsaws and feathers. She made me see that a) he doesn't care what you've been doing for 40 years, he wants to help you now. Throw out all that and 2) he wants to help you. And he did Fried Green Tomatoes. There's some gay in him.
By the time it came time for the real meeting, I had my notes down to four lines. I had no idea how to weave them into a meeting. The night before I told B I had all this I wanted to say, here's my list, but what if I couldn't say it all. He said, as he always does, very relaxed, you can't direct the meeting. You have your notes. But just have fun.
It was just like when we had just had Nathan at the hospital in Florida, and teeny Nathan was in that little clear crate beside the bed and for a second I thought oh no what if I can't do this. And he said you just have a new friend, that's all.
This is why we so rely on the baffling planet Barry. He sees no problem in the big mysteries and fears, but yet he cannot put a dish from the sink into the dishwasher or wipe a counter. That's all me, baby.
I was terrified up until the moment of the zoom and for several minutes into the call, and then --
--I had the greatest meeting of my writerly life. All heart, some nature of the industry talk by him to share his perspective as a decades long executive with how the studio system is functioning at the moment (this is where I breathed, and reassembled myself in karate gear to take on this meeting as a solid sparring partner), then lots of talk about writing, and good writing, and EB White (since he did Charlotte's Web, the movie), and we talked about how comedy is really all that matters, after family. He's gonna read my script, it will take 6 weeks (it's really long) (it's 25 pages) no they're backlogged, but he's going to read it and I made a contact a person who if he can't help me will help guide me to a few other people, and that was the first push of my little Lewis and Clark pebble. My very first.
It's not that I need to be the guy to gay up history. It's just that it won that Austin Best Comedy Pilot festival, and so even though I have other scripts and other projects I thought, let's go with this momentum. There was just that very popular gay hockey show. This has gay AND horses in it. And comedy and heartbreak and love.
When I mucked the barn next I just was busting at the guts happy. It is so fun to watch something you squeezed out of yourself from two guys talking in your head, shape it into a scene, shape it into a longer story, love your characters enough you want them to live, and then box them up and send them out into other people's eyes, hoping that someone else will get on the boat with you. It's like when they would send orphans into the old west with their names pinned onto their clothes, so they could go work on farms. You don't know where they're going, but you dressed them up as nice as you could and they have solid strong feet and we're hoping for the best.
I'm in the ring.
