The longer I stay in this business, the more I think I’m ultimately not cut out for it. At least when it comes to movies.

I sold my first film script about 6 years ago, and began a feature career marked with, well, eventually being rewritten by somebody else. This is par for the course with movies — you do your contractual drafts and then they bring in a Closer, someone with a track record, as extra insurance against the weakness of their own wills, and their flibbertigibbet bosses whose taste remains a mystery to even their closest foot-soldiers while their aversion to risk only multiplies with each vertically-integrated corporate restructuring. Meanwhile, while slowly growing a TV career that would eventually steal my full attention, I was also trying to write feature specs. But because of a very commercial-minded manager and my own mounting confusion over how to navigate the studio system, I started writing worse and worse shit. The nadir coming when I found myself, somehow, writing a movie about a talking dog. (Specifically, a dog who turns into a person. I know. I hate myself too.) Around that time my TV career was hitting a good stride and I basically gave up on movies. I stopped taking meetings on assignments. Stopped writing specs. Stopped becoming excited even about seeing movies. TV captured my imagination fully. I couldn’t sit in a room anymore and be told by an executive that they were looking for the next Liar, Liar. Liar, Liar is, I assure you, a terrible thing to try to aspire to. And they know it too. They hate themselves for saying it, but they say it anyway. “We need the next Liar, Liar!” (Eventually they just said fuck it and remade it as Yes Man.) Continue reading Me, The Jonas Brothers, And The Farting Dog →