CS Daily Archive > Son of a Pitch > 04/15/04

Is a Dream a Lie That Don't Come True?

BY Jim Mercurio

Everyone tells you to "follow your dream," but no one tells you that the price tag can be a rude awakening. Jim Mercurio tells you how to avoid sleepwalking through your life (creative and otherwise).

Creative Screenwriting columnist Jim Mercurio graciously pinch-hits once again for the soon- to-return David Michael Wharton.

Living the dream.

When I moved to LA in the early nineties without a car (don't ask), I wanted to get a job -- any job -- to pay the bills while I wrote and looked for industry work. One day, I ate lunch at Pioneer Chicken, a fast food place on Laurel Canyon. I asked the manager for an application. I told him that I had a master's degree in film, I grew up in restaurants because my father was a cook, and I lived a stone's throw from the store. He asked if I spoke Spanish. I said no. He told me I wasn't qualified.

A while later, I had to meet an agent's assistant for drinks at the end of the week. He had loved my Simpsons and Home Improvement spec scripts and was going to help me get into The Agency. I had ten dollars to my name. I took a book off my shelf (well, actually, from the pile on the floor) opened it, and wedged in that ten dollar bill for safekeeping. I subsisted that week on peanut butter sandwiches and twenty-five-cents-per-gallon water in refillable plastic jugs (even the homeless don't drink LA tap water). The day before the meeting, I walked the three miles to the bar on the corner of Radford and Ventura; it's the building with the windows that reflect funky green light onto the street. I checked out the beer prices: they ranged from $3.50 to $4.00 per bottle. I made a plan.

The next night, the agent's assistant and I met. He ordered an Amstel Light. At $3.75, it was perfect. I did the same. And then I made my move. I reached into my pocket pretending to see what I could find. No surprise, I came up with a wrinkly ten dollar bill. As I handed it to the bartender, I said, "I'll get this round." As a screenwriter, note the subtext: "You get the next round." Whether I pulled a Jedi mind trick or got rewarded for concise exposition and subtext in dialogue, the assistant bought the next and final round.

I never got into The Agency.

Yep, living the dream.

Joseph Campbell said, "Follow your bliss" -- do what makes you happy. He argued that whether or not you make any money, you will always have your bliss.

Of course, when he said that, a two-bedroom in North Hollywood wasn't going for $1,200 a month.

In screenplays, meaning and emotion are created by putting characters into a clear dilemma, and making them choose between two equally good or equally bad things. What's equally good or equally bad depends on who you are. To make this point, I recited the dialogue from an imaginary remake of Indecent Proposal in my Killer Endings seminar at the last Screenwriting Expo:

PERSON 1
I will give you a million dollars to
sleep with your wife.

PERSON 2
No.

PERSON 1
I will give you ten million dollars to
sleep with your wife.

PERSON 2
No.

PERSON 1
I will give you a billion dollars to
sleep with your wife.

PERSON 2
No.

PERSON 1
Not even for a billion dollars? Really?
Why?

PERSON 2
I'm Bill Gates.

For many people, refusing a billion dollars might be equally as hard as the feeling associated with this proposal. But here, because the money is meaningless, there is no dilemma. Can we call this character noble or honorable? No. Without a difficult choice, you can't learn about the character.

And without a difficult choice, you can't learn about yourself. It's good to lead a life where you are introspective, where you question things, where you spend time learning how to turn your world view into stories. It's good to challenge yourself to create something out of nothing. But is it also good to want to pursue a career where (unlike screenwriting) if you are very talented, there's a place for you, and you will soon be paid for your work? Is it good to always be able to make your mortgage payment? Is it good to know how much money you are going to make next month?

At the risk of reducing creative types to the clichéd notion of starving artists, let's say you have a full-time job and you commit to writing two screenplays a year. Choosing to spend time pursuing a creative outlet is a good thing. But you still have a dilemma. Isn't spending your nights and weekends with your spouse, kids, or friends good, too? Isn't it good to have some free time to spend on your leisure activity of choice?

Let's say you follow your dream, and 25 years from now you have top-notch writing and storytelling skills, four great screenplays and one produced film. Would you trade that for a million bucks in the bank, a $3,000-per-month pension, and having the next 25 years of your life paid for? Would you trade it for more time with your children, the time to have children, or 600 more lazy summer nights with your spouse? And what if you had those four good screenplays, the same skills, but you never saw any of your films produced? Would you regret it? If so, maybe your dream is a lie. Maybe you need to wake up.

I have to admit that the word dream started to bug me a few years ago. "You're living your dream," a friend told me. "You spent ten years of your life the way you wanted." Ironically, she had spent the same ten years working as a pharmaceutical sales rep making six figures (how Hollywood of me) a year, and she was getting ready to clear a million dollars by cashing in her stock options. Her ten years ignoring her bliss bought her ten years or more to follow it. That's when realized what I hated about the word dream. It fails to capture the sense of loss, the flipside of the dilemma, the equally good or maybe better thing you passed up.

Part of me wishes I could have or would have thrown away my twenties getting filthy rich, instead of spending that time writing thousands of pages and reading hundreds of thousands of pages of screenplays. Heck, I didn't even have anything interesting to say until my thirties. I reread my most recently-finished screenplay the other day. If I had made different choices in my life, I would have had the exact same ideas and feelings to pour into it. So what's the problem?

If I had spent a dozen years doing something else, there is no way I would have had the craft to pull it off.

I have no regrets.

Right now, as a writer, you are caught in the horns of a dilemma. The actions you take have consequences. If you walk the path of an artist, you are going to walk past other opportunities.

Figure out what you need.

Don't follow your dream. Choose a life.

(Thanks to Bruce Springsteen and "The River" for inspiring this title.)

Next week: The return of David Michael Wharton, and the best reason in the world to write.

Jim Mercurio is a trust fund brat with several million dollars in savings. He is a horrible script consultant and doesn't want or need your business. You cannot read more of his writing at his web site.

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