Week 8: I Hate It Here. I Have to Come Back.

I have spent most of this week surrounded by people who have done more than me.

Not everybody. That would be melodramatic, and also statistically unlikely. But enough of them.

Emmy winners. People with production deals. People with agents. Television credits. Fellowships. Contest wins that actually led somewhere. Writers who can answer the question “What are you working on?” with a sentence instead of mentally opening sixteen filing cabinets and wondering which one contains the least embarrassing version of their career.

Austin has been unpleasantly educational that way.

I came here expecting something more transactional. That was partly Richmond’s fault. At Richmond, people approached me trying to sell me on their screenplay or their movie, or trying to figure out whether I could help them with something. It created a very specific picture in my head of what a film festival was supposed to be. Everybody would arrive with a thing. Everybody would pitch the thing. Everybody would be trying to get somewhere.

I prepared for that version.

Austin is not really that, at least not most of the time. There is pitching, obviously. There are business cards and meetings and people quietly trying to determine whether the person standing in front of them might be useful someday. But an enormous amount of it is just people hanging around talking about movies, work, where they came from, somebody they both know, some panel they hated, the restaurant they found last night. They vibe. Then maybe six months later something comes out of it.

This is terrible news for somebody who prepared twelve screenplays and not nearly enough small talk.

The question I have probably been asked most often is whether I have anything in the festival. The second is what I am working on. I somehow managed to arrive at a film festival with an enormous amount of work and no particularly good answer to either question.

There are scripts that advanced in competitions. There is The Battles of Birdtown, which I am actively trying to develop and finance. There are more than a dozen completed feature scripts. There are things getting read. There have been producer conversations, director conversations and talent conversations. There are scripts I think could sell, scripts I could conceivably make, and scripts that probably require somebody with significantly more money and credibility than I currently possess.

Try saying that while somebody is holding a drink and looking for the bathroom.

This has been one of the more humbling discoveries of the Revamp. I prepared the work. I did not completely prepare the person who has to represent the work.

That became painfully obvious Saturday morning.

I had a roundtable with Raquelle David, a manager and producer. It was exactly the sort of opportunity I came here wanting: a few minutes to talk about myself, talk about what I am working on and ask somebody who actually does this for a living a useful question.

Shortly before that, I had heard Peter Gamble talk about biopics doing well on the Black List, and my brain did what my brain does. I started thinking about Losing My Edge. Maybe there was something there. Maybe I should reconceive it as more of a biopic. Maybe that made it more commercial. Maybe this could be the thing I talked about.

This would have been an excellent thought to have Tuesday.

It was less useful fifteen minutes before sitting down with a manager.

So I went into the roundtable half inside an idea I had not finished thinking through and started talking about a project involving a real person whose rights I do not control. Raquelle quite reasonably asked about the rights.

And there I was.

I believe the technical industry term for what happened next is “shit the bed.”

It was not catastrophic. She did not call security. I did not accidentally sign away my house. She gave me useful information. If I do not have the rights, stop building the pitch around the biographical material. Managers are not just people you hand finished scripts to; part of the relationship is developing material together. Current references matter. Being able to explain the project quickly matters. Packaging often starts producer-first. Talent companies can be approached strategically. All useful.

But I left irritated with myself because I knew I had not represented myself very well. I had spent weeks thinking about this festival, talking about this festival, organizing this festival, packing for this festival, color-coding this festival, and when I finally had three minutes in front of somebody I specifically wanted to meet, I wandered into the room chasing a thought I had twenty minutes earlier.

There is something almost admirable about the efficiency of that failure.

The problem was not just preparation, though. Something older showed up.

The good boy.

I know that guy.

He is the version of me who does not want to bother anybody. He does not want to impose. He does not want to talk himself up too much because that might look arrogant. If there is somebody across the room he wants to meet, he can immediately manufacture a generous reason not to approach them. I’m sure they’re getting hounded all weekend. They probably just want to enjoy themselves. I don’t want to be that guy.

So he walks right past them.

Then he goes back to the hotel and wonders why he did not meet anybody.

That guy found a lot of room to operate this week because I had a badly timed depressive episode arrive right before I got here. Nothing dramatic enough to make a good movie out of. Just the familiar gravity turning up. Confidence went down. Energy got strange. Everything started requiring more negotiation than it should.

Nature hates a vacuum.

So the good boy filled it.

He was there in the Raquelle meeting too. We were given a tiny amount of time, and instead of trusting myself to use it, I became terrified of being the person who went over. I watched the clock. I compressed. I skipped things. I abandoned the plan I had walked in with because somewhere in my head being considerate of everybody else at the table became more important than taking full advantage of the thing I had flown to Texas to do.

Nobody told me to do that.

I just did it.

Peter Gamble used the phrase “whipped dog” this weekend.

I knew exactly what he meant.

There is a posture people carry when they have already decided they are asking for too much space. Shoulders in a little. Voice cautious. Everything softened so nobody can possibly accuse them of thinking too highly of themselves. They enter the room already prepared to be grateful for whatever scraps of attention they receive.

I hate recognizing that guy in myself.

Not because I want to become some asshole who corners a manager in an elevator and pitches until the doors reopen. There is a version of festival networking that is genuinely awful. People deserve to eat meals, go to the bathroom and have conversations without discovering somebody’s screenplay hidden underneath the bread basket.

But there is a lot of territory between being obnoxious and making yourself disappear.

I keep choosing disappearance and calling it manners.

That is harder to admit.

The larger problem is that it fit how I had already been feeling here. I have felt very middle-of-the-pack.

That might be the most accurate description of where I am professionally right now. I am no longer at the point where writing a screenplay feels like an accomplishment by itself. I have written a lot of them. Some are good. Some have won things, advanced, gotten reads or started conversations. I know enough now to recognize the people who are just beginning, the people walking around with one script and a dream and absolutely no idea what comes next.

I am not them anymore.

Unfortunately, there is another group here too.

They have the manager. They have the agent. They have the show credit. They have the fellowship. They have the producer who calls them back. Their introduction contains a noun that immediately explains why they belong in the conversation.

I am not them either.

So I am living in the very glamorous middle territory where I know enough to understand exactly how much I have not accomplished yet.

I have been calling it the valley of despair.

It has not helped that I am not particularly well designed for the traditional festival social experience. Loud rooms, dark rooms, too many conversations happening at once, parties where the official networking strategy seems to be standing three inches from somebody’s face and screaming your résumé directly into their mouth. There are people who thrive in that environment. I watch them do it and briefly wonder whether they were assembled from different parts.

I tend to reach a point where my social battery and whatever sensory-processing machinery I have left simply resign. Then I go back to the hotel, open my notes and start writing down what everybody said.

This makes me excellent at debriefing parties I have left.

It makes me less excellent at meeting the person who arrived twenty minutes after I did.

That bothered me this week because I was keeping score. Birdtown still needs money. I still need representation. I still want somebody to buy or option the work. Every time I went back to the hotel instead of staying out another two hours, I could hear some ugly little internal accountant asking whether the person who could change everything had just walked into the room I left.

Maybe.

That is the problem with possibility. It can be used to torture yourself indefinitely.

The Revamp was partly supposed to change this. Not turn me into somebody who loves crowded parties, but make me more willing to participate in my own life instead of designing elaborate explanations for why I could not. In that sense, Austin has been a useful test because it exposed where the improvement is real and where I am still me.

I came. I went to the panels. I sat at the tables. I introduced myself. I had the conversations. I took the meeting I was nervous about. I got embarrassed. I walked away, figured out why it went badly and went to the next thing instead of deciding I had received a message from the universe that I should return to Georgia and become an insurance adjuster.

That is progress.

It is just not the photogenic kind.

There has also been a strange amount of evidence this week that my career is moving at the exact same time I have been sitting here feeling like it is not.

I sold my first screenplay.

That sentence should probably have considerably more fireworks around it.

A European filmmaker bought something I wrote. It is not even in the genre I most want to build my career around, which somehow makes the whole thing more confusing. I have spent years imagining what the first sale might feel like, and apparently the answer is that it can happen while you are at a major screenwriting festival wondering whether you have accomplished anything.

There are other conversations happening around writing too. Some people have approached me with material. Some collaborative possibilities exist. I do not know yet what I will do with all of them, and I have not had the conversations necessary to pretend I do.

That uncertainty is useful in its own way because once people start asking you to do things, you eventually have to decide whether doing everything is still a virtue.

For a long time the rule was basically say yes until you have to say no. That made sense when nobody was asking. When you are trying to establish yourself, saying yes creates motion. You learn. You meet people. You accumulate evidence that you can work.

At some point, though, saying yes to everything becomes another way of avoiding a decision about who you actually want to be. I do not want to spend the next several years becoming the reliable unpaid rewrite guy for projects I do not particularly love because I am frightened that declining anything will cause the universe to close the window.

That is scarcity talking.

Austin has been useful for that too.

It has forced me to confront the fact that having a lot of scripts is not the same as having a clear career. In some ways, the quantity has become a liability when I talk about myself. I keep wanting to show people the whole warehouse because I am proud of how much is in it.

Nobody wants the warehouse tour.

They want to know what aisle to walk down.

That is probably the biggest practical lesson I am taking home. I need a much cleaner outward version of the career. Birdtown is the filmmaker project. It tells people what I care about and the kind of movie I am trying to build. Then there needs to be a commercial piece of writing that opens the other door. One or two things. Not twelve.

The rest of the slate can exist without entering every conversation.

This sounds almost absurdly simple. It took flying to Texas to figure it out.

The same goes for creative identity. I have spent a lot of time resisting the idea that I should be one thing because I do not want to write one kind of movie. I still do not. But there is a difference between having range and being impossible to describe. The work I care about tends to involve people under pressure, people confronting some lie they have been living inside, dark humor, moral ugliness, genre used when it helps and ignored when it does not.

There is probably a lane there.

I do not have to turn it into a prison.

That has been another interesting part of this week. I have been surrounded by advice, and I am getting better at not automatically converting advice into instructions.

Somebody says biopics are doing well, and apparently I still occasionally sprint straight into traffic.

But I am improving.

The Revamp is eight weeks old now. When I started, the most obvious problems were physical and visual. I looked tired. I felt passive. My clothes were accidental. My career consisted of a lot of private work and not enough public consequence. I had gotten very good at waiting.

A lot has changed.

The wardrobe changed. The grooming changed. The way I organize my time changed. I am exercising again. I am reading again. I am taking better care of myself. The website looks like somebody actually owns the work displayed on it. The scripts are organized. More of them are genuinely finished instead of indefinitely “almost ready.” I am sending things. People are reading them. People are responding. One of them actually bought one.

The harder changes are still happening underneath that.

I am trying to get comfortable wanting things without turning every setback into evidence that I was stupid to want them. I am trying to become ambitious without becoming completely consumed by ambition. I am trying to listen to people who know more than me without handing them control of the steering wheel.

And now I have another problem to work on.

I have to kill the good boy.

Not the decent guy. I like him. He can stay.

The guy who respects people’s time can stay. The guy who knows the difference between networking and harassment can stay. The guy who does not think every human interaction is a transaction can absolutely stay.

The one who uses politeness as camouflage for fear has to go.

The one who walks past the person he came here hoping to meet because “they probably get bothered enough.”

The one who starts apologizing for his existence before anybody has complained.

The one who gets three minutes with a manager and voluntarily turns it into ninety seconds because somebody else might be waiting.

The one who looks like a whipped dog.

Fuck that guy.

I do not need to become louder. I do not need to become fake. I do not need to invent accomplishments or monopolize conversations or start referring to myself as a filmmaker in the third person.

I need to stop behaving as though taking up the space I have actually been given is an act of aggression.

There is a difference.

Austin has made very clear that I am not especially good at all of this yet.

I hate it here.

I have to come back.

Not specifically because Austin holds some magical key. It does not. There is no secret manager hiding behind the Driskill waiting for me to complete enough panels before he materializes.

I have to come back to this kind of place because this is where my deficiencies become impossible to romanticize.

At home, I can be the guy with twelve scripts, a development plan, a website, a thousand emails sent and a movie he is trying to finance. That sounds pretty good.

Here, somebody asks what I am working on.

And I have three seconds.

That is useful.

Painful, but useful.

I need more practice talking to people without immediately trying to extract an outcome. I also need more practice talking to people when I do want an outcome. I need to stop evaluating every room based on whether Birdtown got financed inside it. I need to get better at telling people who I am before they lose interest, and then get interested in who they are.

I need to arrive better prepared and then be willing to abandon the preparation when an actual human being appears.

Mostly, I need to keep putting myself in places where I am not the most accomplished person in the room.

Because apparently I hate that.

Which is probably why I need it.