wilderworks

The first MP3 that I remember downloading was Julian Lennon's "Too Late for Goodbyes." My gray NEC laptop could play it, sure, almost always without skipping, but it could do nothing else at the same time. The 1GB hard-drive eventually squeezed almost 25 other songs onto it, and that was about all it could hold. Since I'm in the middle of moving from Van Nuys to Los Angeles, while simultaneously meeting with two different producers and writing two different screenplays, Keely stepped up and wrote a blog post about me for me. (She did not actually do that for me at all). And now I'm going to violate her copyright and use it as my own blog for this week. click here

Character Misleads. I want more. I heard a great story on This American Life . A small-time Lawyer is trying to free an Innocent Man from prison. The Lawyer invites a paroled, convicted Murderer into his office (actually, his meager apartment home), so he can interview the Murderer and maybe learn something that might help exonerate the Innocent Man. You see, the Innocent Man is in prison for the same killing that the Murderer committed. When the Murderer arrives, he's dressed like a hip-hop star or perhaps a successful drug dealer, wearing in an extravagant suit, hair perfect, fingering a firearm, driving a Mercedes. He comes shouting up the stairs an hour early, "Yo! Where's the lawyer!" When interviewed, he boldly tells his tale, acting-out how he shot the man in the back of the head, using his pointer-finger on the back of the Lawyer's neck to demonstrate the way it was done. But then -- when the Lawyer asks the Murderer why he let the Innocent Man do time ...

Playing Doctor MAGGIE There are better ways to play doctor. Ways that might actually make me feel better. JON Oh. You mean like Dr. Feel-Good. MAGGIE Yeah. JON I love that song. MAGGIE Yeah. And that “Sexual Healing” song is pretty good too. JON Is that Barry White? Barry White’s music makes me feel sexually inadequate. MAGGIE No, I think it’s Marvin Gaye. JON Oh. Well that’s not a very intimidating name.

We're All Sherman Oaks Adjacent, Now Last night, I waited much longer than usual to walk the dog. When I finally went out, it was dark. I don't generally care about that sort of thing. I lived happily in Harlem, and now I live in the similarly regarded Van Nuys. Luckily, I don't believe the local news represents the world, and neither do cop shows, so I've never acquired any appreciable fear of city streets or dark alleyways. Instead, I've found for myself that “bad” neighborhoods are full of nice people. No, it's the well-off places that you gotta worry about. Those people are monsters. My particular sliver of Van Nuys is a little, densely-populated cityscape hemmed in by post-industrial-wasteland sprawl to the north, and suburbanized-hipster-family sprawl to the south. I'm right on the border of Sherman Oaks, which used to be the southern part of Van Nuys, until the brown people started moving in, which encouraged the white people to flee. They hi...

Running Long, or Short on Gags? I'm running a page over again. I hope I can cut a page from the next segment to compensate, but I have my doubts. As usual, there will be a long phase of painful trimming at the end of this road. Here's the hard thing about writing a comedy alone: there is nothing more nerve-wracking and doubt-inducing than trying to guess which jokes to cut, having almost no feedback from an audience (and apparently, it's very hard to force detailed, joke-by-joke feedback from one's readership). Nobody, no writer, no one, can ever guess what joke will play - only readers and viewers - only the sharp reality of an audience - can say for sure. But you have to make a thousand Sophie's choices all the same, without a shred of useful input from experience or fact or any sort of guidelines. It's a time when self-delusion can be beneficial. You call it instinct, and you go with it. But it's a sickening sensation all the same. You may be...

Yeah, coffee shops, I'm talking to you. Particularly coffee shops in the vicinity of Century City. It's swell that so many of you are open at 7AM. It's fantastic that you have nice furniture with comfortable workspaces and free wifi. But this is Los Angeles. If you put a sign in your tiny parking lot that says parking is limited to, say, 20 minutes, or hell, even 45 minutes, then I can't spend my morning there, working and buying your coffee and snacks, now can I? And thus, I end up at Norm's. Where the spoon is a different length every day. You'd think they'd have bought the spoons in bulk.

Here's how I spent my morning - writing another scene that will never make it into the screenplay, another scene that I find quite charming. I simply have no reason to spend this long introducing a character we don't need to meet at all. At present, we'll never see him again. Regular States INT. DOCTOR'S OFFICE - BREAK ROOM - DAY Maggie sits on the counter by the sink, eating a yogurt. Her employer, DR. PUGLISI, has his foot up on a chair, putting a penny in his penny loafer. He's an older man, short, balding, powerful. PUGLISI So, it's his parents' house you're moving into? You'll be living on his turf? MAGGIE Nah, they bought it when he was in high school. He never lived there. When they retired to North Carolina, they transferred the remaining mortgage to him. PUGLISI Ridiculous! Why would anyone retire to NORTH Carolina? If you're gonna pick a state to live in, you should pick one of the regular ones. MAGGIE Regular? ...

In LA, we have no weather. It's sunny and warm almost all of the time. For the most part, the weather is predictable and reliable. It's so agreeable, I've mostly forgotten that weather is a thing that happens. And thus, having been denied that outlet to deliver its reminders, here, it is instead through the traffic that the Universe makes its indifferent and chaotic nature known. The weather is almost always nice, so the Universe orchestrates the traffic to shout: "I'm still capricious and cruel, folks - and don't you forget about it!"  What a lousy drive. How much longer can I tolerate a life that it this bare-faced random, this boldly arbitrary? A person deserves the illusion of meaning and sense! If the traffic can't even bother to put on a show of making sense, well, then ... I'll do something, I tell you. I will do one hell of a something.

Bored It drizzled on the drive down, but not even enough to wash away the dry white smear on my windshield. It's another overcast day, but this one has less charm than the first one, somehow. Perhaps this is all becoming routine, and the small daily variations are losing their power to excite. On that theme,I had pancakes today. They're always fantastic. But the coffee is a little weak, and the crowd is a little noisy. For a couple days, I've been constructing the movie in outline form on a website called checkvist . And now, having worked on it for another morning, I can say for confidently: it is tedious, and not helpful. I'm losing information, and I'm wasting time encoding the story into an outline form. I'm too methodical to make a sloppy outline, and I'm too bored to finish a thorough one. The only realization I've come to while doing it? I probably don't need Jon to go to work on the first day. And that means Maggie's poo-fli...

Left 7:13 AM | Arrived 7:38 AM This morning the 405 flew, and I arrived about the same time I always do. I can't explain either part of that statement. The ease of travel may have been due to a six-car pile-up, just north of my entrance, that choked back the usual overflow passing through the Galleria corridor. It may have been due to increasing amounts of spring break being observed by colleges in the area. It may have been because Passover begins tonight at sundown, according to my calendar, but not according to my Jewish friends. I'm not sure. As to how I arrived at the same time, despite traffic being non-existent? I can't even begin to guess. Like advanced branches of quantum theory, Los Angeles traffic will never make intuitive sense to the human mind. Our species simply wasn't evolved to interact with systems this foreign and complex. Even with mathematics and metaphors, we can barely bridge the gap. We can't predict it. We can't explain...

Left 7:06 AM | Arrived 7:42 AM I was stupid and lazy last night and neglected to plug in my Asus Linux netbook, and so I'm on this vastly over-sized Apple laptop, which reduces my focus and - still, after almost a year of using it almost daily - feels like I'm typing with my thumbs tied to my wrist. Let's be honest here, folks, Apple spaces their keyboard keys too far apart, and their text navigation hot-keys are insufficient for intense writing and revision. There's no question that their keyboards look good. The question is, why don't they type good? Why must I suffer? My roommate has a new Apple laptop, and the keys are spaced so far apart that I can't rest my fingers comfortably on all the home-keys at once - and I have relatively longish fingers. I have similar feelings about the operating system itself. I find it clumsy in many complicated multitasking situations, particular with any software that utilizes multiple windows. In particular, it is vastly ove...

It's Sunday. It's almost 1 PM, and I'm out at Grounded Cafe , a coffee shop and internet cafe on Ventura Blvd. I found it with the Yelp application on my cell-a-ma-phone , and I decided to give it a try. There is another place with free wifi and pay coffee recommended by the program: it's called Crave . I drove past it. It looks very busy and bohemian, and there wasn't any street parking within five blocks. So, maybe next weekend. Maybe never. I am trying to reduce the cost of these writing expeditions by making them coffee-only, or snack-only, instead of full-meal. Perhaps I could do that at Norm's, but it feels wrong. It feels like I'm taking up a profitable booth. This is likely ridiculous, since the booths are rarely even close to filled. But coffee shops are places where you are supposed to do this sort of work. I guess this is who I've become. My binary opposite. Someone who writes in public. Necessity makes for strange bedfellows, even when we...

The term "space madness" keeps coming up while I'm working on  Sick day . It first appeared because, at 8 AM, I couldn't remember the phrase "cabin fever." And then I remembered the episode of Ren & Stimpy . And that's why I capitalized it. Space Madness . I don't know how universal an experience Ren & Stimpy was. I remember vividly watching the first seasons as they aired, sometimes with groups other boys at a friend's house. I was 11 or 12. A few years later, they were off the air. People younger than I was may have missed them entirely. Research , and the memory of a friend who was a few years older in 1991, and thus more savvy to how these things worked, reveals that Nickelodeon fired the creator John K after the second season. By coincidence, reviewing the episode summaries, I only recall episodes from seasons one and two, which are where all the classics reside. Anyone who saw seasons after those would've had a completely dif...

I like to imagine that people read this blog, and I like to imagine that they have two different reasons for doing so. Screenwriting Journal One group is interested in watching stories take shape. They're interested in the creative process. They want to contribute, offer support, provide thoughtful criticism. Unfortunately, these readers have not figured out how to use the comment function yet, and instead, are speaking directly to their computer screens. Nonetheless, I have faith that they exist, and that they will eventually overcome this confusion, and we will all be enriched by it. Personal Blog Another group wants to keep up with me, Wilder. They want to read anecdotes, personal reflections, and the odd flotsam of opinion that constitutes the majority party in the Blogosphere Congress. These people are sick of picking through mountains of impenetrable screenwriting stone to find a few personal gems. For a while, I've been cross-posting the traditional-blog eleme...

Is This What's Been Missing? This evening, I followed my own instruction and I scribbled down everything I knew about Sick Day. I did so in the sloppiest, most freeform manner I could muster. I put Fletch Lives on Netflix streaming, which chased away my intellect completely, and I doodled down the movie. Until that moment, I'd honestly forgotten about all the scribbling and doodling I've done on my past screenplays. But tonight, in pieces, I remembered sitting in the LA courthouse hallway, waiting through at jury duty, drawing circles around ideas for Zaniness Ensues . I remembered sitting in backseat of my car, in the rain, on break from my all-night hospital job, scribbling as quickly as I could in cursive, until I sorted out Blaring Static . I remembered laying on my stomach on the carpet, drawing lines all over dozens of notebook pages, until I cracked the third act of Storybook Park , which became Gravedigger's Son . I remembered the rush I felt each...

Chase has posted one of the below advertisements on Pico Blvd, where I am pleased to view it daily, first-thing in the morning, on my approach to the Fox gate: It says - CHASE: Almost as many ATMs as unsold screenplays! (exclamation point mine) Teehee. Well, that tickled me so much that a whole bunch of other, similar slogans came to me. I wonder if some of them are already part of the campaign. Anyway, here are a few of the slogan ideas I came up with, following the same general theme!   CHASE: Almost as many ATMs as still-born babies!  CHASE: Almost as many ATMs as elderly widowers, quietly contemplating suicide!  CHASE: Almost as many ATMs as abandoned family pets, wandering the streets alone tonight, wondering what happened, what happened, what did I do wrong?  CHASE: Almost as many ATMS as things you never took the time to tell him.  CHASE: Almost as many ATMs as middle-aged women who, sighing softly, have finally accepted the hard tr...

It happens about once a month. Someone else takes their turn at making a ground-breaking remark about my name of choice. That is, "Wilder." Their gem of wit usually implies that I could only live up to such a name by being an asshole - an unstable, irresponsible, violent, hard-drinking, hard-drugging, mass-fornicating, nincompoop, hellion, shark-kicker - or something like that. I always think, this demonstrates a lack of imagination on your part . I always think, this demonstrates the limitations of a tame mind such as your own . I always think, how dreary and routine your inner world must be . I always think, I am never buying you frozen yogurt . As best I can reason, these people must think "wild" means criminal, or rock-star, or lunatic. Or at least someone who shouts a lot. What they're describing is a fool, and wild things are not fools. A wild animal flourishes outside of domestication. They function, survive, and thrive. They find their own way. A fo...

Here's a little scene that will never make it into the final script, but which came to me while I was thinking through the possibility of a bath scene during that first night, when Jon is taking care of Maggie. Peace in Our Time, Jon... INT. BATHROOM - NIGHT Jon turns the faucet, adding more hot water to Maggie's cooling bath. She is lying back with a washcloth folded on her forehead, looking very wan. JON Do you think the hot water makes the cold water hotter, or you think the cold water makes the hot water colder? MAGGIE I think they make each other more middle temperature. JON That's the boringest possible answer. You totally science'd me. He stares at her. One would imagine he's contemplating sexy thoughts. But no. JON (CONT'D) People don't act much like they're 75% water, do they? MAGGIE I feel like I'm 99% snot. Does that count? JON Cold people make hot people even hotter, and hot people make cold people eve...

Someone posted on Facebook: "Does anyone know if you can get acupuncture if you're allergic to nickel?" I was tempted to respond, "Don't risk it unless a medical professional is present - and an acupuncturist doesn't count." The placebo effect is a big part of healing. Finding ways to trigger it is not a bad thing. But taking risks with allergies, and infections, and paying someone handsomely in the process -- that shouldn't be acceptable behavior for a thinking person. As a result of this posting, I've been reflecting on the sham triumvirate: homeopathy, chiropractic, and acupuncture. I've been searching double-blind placebo-controlled studies on all three, trying to determine how confident I should be in my disdain. So far, it looks like I should be pretty confident. Now, I'm doing a movie with a flu-stricken character who believes in alternative remedies. Should I say something about these practices? Mock them...