Oldest Story in Town

For all the talk about the decline of the city, Los Angeles remains, after all, Los Angeles, and across the basin today countless young and maybe not-so-young people once more will torment themselves with the same, relentless, timeless question: When? When will their break come? When will they make it?

“The thing is,” said Glen Turner, a friend who with increasing urgency has been asking himself this very question, “until you make it they consider you a nothing. You might be a good father, a good neighbor, but to them you are nothing. You don’t exist.”

It hardly seems necessary to explain what he meant by “making it.” Glen’s a screenwriter. Unfortunately, none of the several scripts he’s written has appeared on a screen of any sort. Yes, he’s made some small money writing, but nothing that would feed his family or excite the IRS. And so he writes by day, and drives airport shuttle vans by night, and sleeps when he can, but never easily.

“I go to bed,” he said, “and I hear this ‘tick, tick, tick.’ I am running out of time. The pressure is building. I am 36 years old, a guy with two kids, and I am becoming an old frustrated screenwriter, a cliche. I have got to make a decision soon. The corporate world isn’t going to wait. Either I make it in the next few years or I go out and find a real job. I can’t keep this up. The shuttle is making me crazy. When you drive a shuttle, everyone assumes you are an idiot. They assume you hang out all day with guys named Bruno. I’m starting to hate people. I’m convinced Hitler and Mussolini were both shuttle drivers when they went nuts.”

*

Glen is a huge man, a former college football player, with a strong Boston accent and an even stronger sense of humor--one of those rare people who can make you laugh out loud and mean it. He came west after graduating from Syracuse University, ostensibly to work as a cop. “I have a criminal justice degree,” he said, “like all football players.” But he quickly caught the entertainment bug. He acted in small theaters, performed stand-up comedy, joined an improv group, worked on sets and, finally, about six years ago, formed a screenwriting team with an actor named Kim Robillard. Which is about the time we met, playing YMCA basketball.

In between games, Glen would try out script ideas and talk about his prospects. Sometimes the conversations were fired with anticipation. He knew someone who knew someone else at some studio who had promised to push his comedy about the supermarket security team. Or his cousin the successful writer was going to talk up his Western pilot to some producer or another, soon, maybe even this week. The next time I’d see him, he’d be back to telling funny shuttle stories, the deals-in-waiting an abandoned topic.

When we met Thursday at a Pasadena coffee shop, the first thing he did was plop a pile of his scripts on the table. “Will you read these later,” he asked. I said I would. “No,” he said, “really read them. People always tell you they are going to read your stuff and then they never do.” So I read them. They seemed terrific to me. Which means nothing. Opinions of outsiders, as Glen knows better than anybody, don’t count much in Hollywood.

“Every year,” he said, “you feel like you are getting closer and closer. People keep telling you how good you are, how you are going to make it and all that. But it doesn’t get you anywhere. The problem is that your success depends on people who have no minds, no sense of humor. They got their jobs by birthright or something and they don’t want to let you in.

“You know what it’s like? It’s like screenwriters are little sperm, swimming like crazy, trying to be the one that gets to the egg. Only one makes it. And the rest just die off or something. Aaaahhhhhh!!!!”

*

I asked, shifting metaphors, how many people Glen figured were in the same boat as him.

“Thousands,” he said. “Tens of thousands. Who knows?”

“Enough,” he said finally with a thin smile, “to sink the boat.”

And they are out there today, all over town, tapping out screenplays, rehearsing for the next audition, dreaming of big breaks and big houses on the beach. Yearning. No one in Hollywood seems to talk much about these people. They aren’t written up in the trades or interviewed on “Entertainment Tonight.” They leave few traces when they give up and move on, and they are always replaced. Maybe somebody like Glen should try writing a movie about them. Probably somebody already is.