THE BIG LEAP
There are a lot of somebodies in Hollywood, but there are even more nobodies--the workaday dreamers who give L.A. its unique texture and energy. In a town where writers want to be actors and video store clerks yearn to direct, hopefuls like Brad Burnett, Dino Pergola and Matt and Greg Bell became faces in the crowd when they moved here from the heartland. We took a closer look as they hustled valet jobs and unpaid agency internships, learned how to write screenplays and found ways to measure success one meeting at a time. This is the story of their first year in L.A.
FADE IN:
EXT: OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
Brad was the first to leave. He dropped out of Ohio State with just a few classes left on his degree and a vague plan to move to L.A. and become an actor. There weren’t any acting classes at OSU, or at least none that Brad ever took, but he made it a point to watch “Inside the Actors Studio” and figured that was a start. Besides, he’d done some research: Brad Pitt didn’t get famous until he was 28. Brad Burnett was only 22, so he had time. He got a steady gig doing lawn maintenance and saved his money until he could buy a 10-year-old GMC Safari big enough to fit a mattress in the back. And when he stopped by OSU to say goodbye to his buddies, he asked Dino Pergola to come along for the ride.
There are two routes to L.A. from Ohio--the northern one through Denver and the southern one through Texas. Brad and Dino chose the southern route. They stopped to party with Dino’s brother Rocco in Albuquerque, got caught in a dust storm in Nevada and a snowstorm in Arizona (they had to sleep in the van that night), and had their picture taken with Michael Madsen from “Reservoir Dogs” at the Bellagio in Vegas. That’s when Dino’s money ran out and he had to go home, so Brad drove the last leg alone.
When he got to L.A. he took the Hollywood Boulevard exit off the 101 just to check it out. Traffic started backing up as he neared Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. He rolled down his window and asked a cop what was going on. It turned out it was the premiere of “Ocean’s 12,” and George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta-Jones would be arriving any minute. Brad didn’t have anywhere to be, so he parked the van and made his way through the crowd until he was standing seven feet away from the biggest stars in the world. The people around him screamed, but Brad didn’t feel nervous or excited or any of that. He thought: “So that’s what my competition looks like.”
For three weeks Brad slept in his van, alternating between the parking lots of the Days Inn and the Hilton in the Valley. He considered renting a houseboat in Marina del Rey and discovered he could take a free shower there even if he didn’t have a key to the bathroom, and he got a job as a waiter at the Mountaingate Country Club. Eventually he found an apartment in Encino--one grimy room with a kitchen sink but no stove--for less than $600 a month. He didn’t know anything about the neighborhood, and for the first few nights he went to sleep clutching an air gun and a Maglite just in case.
Then he got lucky. A college friend told him to call his father, who worked in the industry. Through him, he met a woman who offered to take his head shots for free and an older male photographer who took him to some fancy parties. Brad figured that making it in Hollywood was going to be easier than he thought. Then he started to worry that the photographer was a creep, and that was the end of that.
CUT TO: OHIO, LATE SUMMER
Dino was depressed. His whole life he wanted to be a sports agent, but since that usually requires a law degree, he’d decided maybe being a talent agent was more up his alley. He knew he’d be moving to L.A. someday, and hoped to get out there by June. But at the end of spring semester, supposedly his last, he found out he needed another math credit in order to graduate, which meant he’d have to take a class over the summer.
In the meantime he looked for internships. He researched talent agencies, casting agencies and production companies online and sent out more than 60 resumes. He got a dozen calls back. One was from a guy named Marc Bass, who ran a small eponymous talent agency. Bass had grown up in Ohio and graduated from OSU too, which is why Dino’s resume jumped out at him. He told Dino to call when he got to town but never expected to hear from him again. Midwestern boys work hard, but Bass knew that unless they were in L.A. when they first contacted him, 90% of the time they never actually moved west.
That summer Brad and Dino tried to persuade their buddies the Bell twins--Matt and Greg--to move to L.A. too. They’d all become friends their sophomore year, when they lived together in a huge house that was famous on campus for its three-story beer bong. The Bells got interested in writing screenplays in high school, but their only official screenwriting training was a free one-day seminar offered by OSU. After graduating they planned on heading for Boca Raton and jobs at a liquor distribution company, but they were getting more and more excited about this screenplay idea they had, “Elevation.” It was based on a trip they had taken in their senior year of high school and how Matt had learned to face his fear of heights and elevators when their friends booked the penthouse in a high-rise hotel. They worked on it every day, and even bought the screenwriting program Sophocles because it was listed first on a handout from that free seminar. How could they have known that Final Draft was the industry standard?
The plan was to finish the script by the end of the summer and send it to L.A. with Dino. Then one night Matt told Greg that if they really wanted to make it as screenwriters they probably had to move to L.A. themselves. Three weeks later, Matt and Greg and Dino all piled into Dino’s white Pontiac Grand Prix with nothing but their clothes, Dino’s Xbox and a George Foreman Grill.
INT: THE ARCHSTONE, STUDIO CITY
When they got to L.A. they bought a map and drove around until they found an apartment complex in Studio City called the Archstone. It was big and safe and had a website, three pools, two gyms and a pool table in one of the lobbies, and because it catered to young adults looking to find a way into the entertainment industry there were a lot of cute girls around. It wasn’t cheap--a two-bedroom cost $2,096 a month--but it came with a special deal that allowed tenants to break their lease in the first month if something went wrong and they had to go back home. Brad had bought a real bed for his place in Encino, so he gave them the mattress from his van. They took turns sleeping on it.
Soon after they moved in, Matt landed a job as a valet at the Hilton Universal City. It was a 15-minute walk from the Archstone, which was convenient since they were all sharing Dino’s car. Dino called Marc Bass, who was surprised but happy to hear from him, and scored a three-day-a-week unpaid internship at Bass’ agency. For money he worked nights at the local Blockbuster.
Greg was determined to put his marketing degree to use. For the first few weeks he dropped Dino off at the agency in the mornings and then drove himself to interviews for jobs that sounded good but turned out to be in door-to-door sales. By the end of his first month in L.A. he was running out of money and talking about going back to Ohio for a while.
Matt felt like he should go with him. They were a writing team, and what would be the point of making it if they didn’t make it together? But Matt didn’t want to go home. Before he left he’d landed in jail for punching some guy who was fighting with his brother at a street festival in Cleveland. The charges were eventually dropped, but he spent three nights in a downtown cell with nothing to do but think about how he’d ruined his chance to go to Hollywood. It was the absolute worst thing that ever happened to him. He’ll probably write a book about it someday.
So that fall the Bells had a long talk. They used words like “dreams” and “passion” and said things like “I don’t want to give up.” In the end, Matt floated his brother $200 for the rent and Greg got the other $500 from their mom. The next week Greg took a job valeting at the Hilton too.
BRAD (OFF-SCREEN)
Now Brad was depressed. He’d met his friends in Vegas on their drive out and lost $2,000 when he split a double ace hand at blackjack and the dealer got 21 on a 5. Plus he’d racked up more than $1,000 in parking and traffic tickets and quit his job at the country club. With $45 left in his bank account, he wondered for the first time in his life if he was in a hole so deep he couldn’t get out of it by himself. Pretty much all he had going for him was the semi-comforting thought that his friends would let him crash on their floor if he couldn’t come up with his rent. For Brad, at least, going home was never an option.
MONTAGE: DAY JOBS, NIGHT WORK
With the help of some of the guys at the Marc Bass Agency, Dino found the Bells internships at small production companies, and that winter Matt and Greg worked seven days a week--five days valeting and two days interning. They answered phones and sorted mail and organized office records, but their favorite thing to do was script coverage--writing summaries of unsolicited screenplays. Before moving to L.A. the Bells had never read a script all the way through. They had a couple of how-to books that they got from friends, but they were too stubborn to read any of them except “Elements of Style for Screenwriters,” which just covers the basics of where slug lines, action and cues go. As they started to show “Elevation” to people in the industry--an actor/writer/assistant at Matt’s office and the executive assistant at Greg’s--they heard the same thing over and over: The idea is great, but the structure needs work.
So the Bells decided to learn about structure. They read “The Screenwriter’s Workbook” by Syd Field, and even though it was old, it was amazing. They also read Field’s “The Screenwriter’s Problem Solver” and downloaded some of their favorite scripts from Drewscriptorama.com. And when they watched movies they paid attention to the way they were structured.
The Bells knew that if they applied their new knowledge to “Elevation” they’d have to trim the first act and fix a few plot points and pinches--Syd Field’s term for “reminder scenes.” They started to rework it, but then Greg got another movie idea. It was a rise-and-fall story about two 18-year-old guys who become valets at a swank hotel in South Beach, Miami. They start earning extra cash by negotiating deals to send hotel guests to specific limo drivers, restaurants, strip clubs, hookers and drug dealers, all for kickbacks, of course. Everything goes great, then everything goes horribly wrong--they imagined it as “Blow” meets “Risky Business.” They called it “The Valet$.”
BRAD (OFF-SCREEN)
Brad’s friends kept nagging him to do more with the acting--take classes or send out head shots--but for him life is more about the journey than the destination. He found a new job in the stockroom of a clothing store and begged his way into a day-shift bar-back gig at the Saddle Ranch at Universal CityWalk. One of the bartenders there got him to take his photo to L.A. Casting, and almost immediately he started getting calls from low-level agents. Since he didn’t have a resume, he mostly got calls for modeling, and he couldn’t take it that seriously. He’d mention “Zoolander” at meetings, and even brought his 70-year-old wheelchair-bound neighbor a couple of times just to be weird. The calls came, but not many callbacks.
DINO (POV)
At first Dino had the best luck of them all. Two weeks into his internship, Marc Bass’ assistant quit and Dino took his spot. He was the only one of the foursome with a full-time job in the industry. The hours were long, it paid less than $500 a week and it was hard, but he was learning a ton. Bass was a fast talker and a good guy, and he let Dino sit in on his meetings and phone calls. The agency was just a couple of years old, with a small staff of hungry young men, and Bass spent time grooming Dino in hopes that someday he’d be an agent there too. The only problem was that he sort of talked like Rocky--typical of these Midwestern kids.
Dino was working his ass off, getting to the office at 9 in the morning, leaving at 7:30 or 8 in the evening and sometimes going to showcases or parties after work, but after a few months he needed financial help from his parents. By the summer he was sick of working all the time and still having no money to party. That’s when he started thinking that maybe being an agent like Ari on “Entourage” wasn’t his dream after all.
INT: HILTON, UNIVERSAL CITY
Matt and Greg wrote a four-page treatment of “The Valet$” and registered it with the Writers Guild, and about one month later the best thing ever happened. A film and television producer was staying at the hotel where they valeted, someone who could really help them. Matt tried approaching him five times before he finally got up the guts to introduce himself. He said that he and his brother were new in town and aspiring screenwriters, and they’d love to talk with him. Incredibly, the producer said OK and told them to come up to his room when they got off work.
The Bells assumed the meeting would last 20 or 30 minutes, but the producer talked with them for more than an hour and gave them the best advice they’d heard yet. He said that of the millions of writers who come to Hollywood, only a handful, like Quentin Tarantino or Oliver Stone, are so good that they’re successful early on. Everyone else has to start at the bottom, bust his ass and never give up. He said you can make it without being a genius, but you have to know for sure in a very deep and private place that you have talent--not just that you can convince people you have it. He told them if screenwriting was their dream, they could never go back to Ohio.
After he finished the Bells didn’t leave right away, and he could tell there was something they wanted to ask him. What they wanted to know was whether he would read their treatment for “The Valet$,” which Matt had brought with him, rolled up in his back pocket. The producer said no. There were legal reasons he couldn’t read it, he said, but they could tell him about the idea if they liked. So they did, stumbling over their words at first and interrupting each other for 15 crazy, nerve-racking minutes.
The producer didn’t say a word. Then he smiled. He told them they had a great idea there and they should definitely develop it into a script.
DINO (POV)
Everyone was having a great time except Dino. Greg got a job doing sales for the same Hilton where he’d been valeting and Matt got promoted to assistant manager of parking operations, so they both had more money. They worked on “The Valet$” every weeknight and got out of the city most weekends, visiting a buddy in San Diego or partying with friends from Ohio who lived in Hermosa Beach. They loved Hermosa because the bars were always packed, but you didn’t have to wait in line or pay a cover like in Hollywood. Dino went with them, and he always had a good time, but his 70-hour workweeks were killing him.
By the end of that summer Dino was thinking about becoming a sports agent again, because what he liked about his current job was negotiating deals and signing clients. He talked to his brother’s girlfriend, who works at a sports agency, and to his cousin’s cousin, who’s a law professor. He decided maybe law school could be OK, but his friends didn’t get it. One drunken night in Newport Beach, Dino almost decked Greg for trying to persuade him to stay. They laughed it off the next morning, but, sober now, Dino laid out just how unhappy he was. Greg apologized for not letting it go the night before, because what it really came down to was Dino was his best friend and he didn’t want him to go home. He’d always believed that when one of them made it, they’d all make it.
EXT: PANERA BREAD, STUDIO CITY
Dino was the first to leave. The hardest part was telling Marc Bass, who had spent all this time training him. In the end, Bass was pretty cool about it. He said his door was always open if Dino wanted to come back--but he’d have to start at the bottom again unless, who knows, he decided to become chief counsel for the agency someday.
Before he left, Dino told Bass about Matt and Greg and how they had written this script called “The Valet$” and how they pitched it to this well-known producer, and he asked if Bass would be interested in reading it. Bass said sure, he was trying to grow his literary department anyway. He read it--and he liked it. He called the Bells to schedule a lunch. They ate outside at Panera Bread in Studio City and talked about OSU football and what it’s like to move to L.A. with nothing much besides your dreams and determination, because Bass had been there too. Two days later Bass was officially their agent. He told them he worried what would happen if their script was sold and then got rewritten or killed--if they saw how Hollywood really works--but he wasn’t sure they heard him.
EXT: BARSTOW-VEGAS ON-RAMP
And then suddenly it was September. Brad was still living in Encino, but he’d found a new job at a bar in Hermosa Beach because he needed a change of scenery. The lease at the Archstone was up, and Dino was heading home to take a Kaplan course for the LSAT. Matt and Greg were thinking of moving in with their friends in Hermosa, but none of the apartments were coming through. It was kind of far from the Hilton anyway, so they found a place in Valley Village where they could each have their own room and bathroom, and the rent was still cheaper than at the Archstone. When people asked what they thought of L.A. they said they loved the weather. They had said that when they first moved out, but now they really meant it.
Dino was sad to leave his friends, but he wasn’t sad to leave L.A.--too much traffic, and the cops gave you tickets for driving without your seat belt. He left with his clothes and his Xbox; the Bells kept the George Foreman Grill. He stopped in Vegas on his way home and lost a couple hundred bucks playing blackjack and craps. He always lost in Vegas.
FADE OUT
--- THE END ---
EPILOGUE
As of press time, the Bell twins are working on a new script, tentatively titled “Beer Pong.” Brad has a new job with an airline, which means he can travel for free. He’s hoping to get to Amsterdam. Dino has been checking out law schools. Only one is in Ohio.
