I never in a million years thought I'd hear myself say those words. But lately I've been saying just that. Even more amazing: I'm not lying. It's true. I wrote the screenplay adaptation of Willie Morris's memoir My Dog Skip. It premiered January 12 in New York and Los Angeles, and has platformed to other markets, as they say in Hollywood, in the weeks since.
These days, I love talking about my work, but it wasn't always so. For years, as a freelance screenwriter, I'd dreaded the innocuous cocktail-party question, "So, what do you do?"
If I said, "I write movies," the next question was inevitably: "Anything I've seen?" To which the answer was sadly, "No. Not even anything I've been paid for."
So usually I responded to the query with a little shuffle of my little feet and some disingenuous, self-deprecating line about being an underachiever. Or sometimes I responded with a story about a woman I'd once met who'd described herself as a dancer. "How interesting," I had said. "Where do you dance? And for whom?" With total self-assurance, she had replied, "In my apartment, for myself." I'd go on to explain that I wrote movies in much the same way.
To tell the truth, I made that story up, pulled it out of nowhere. I figured offering it in exchange for drinks and canapés was about as close as I'd come to making a literary sale in Hollywood. I began to avoid parties or any social situation where the conversation might drift around to my pitiful lack of professional accomplishment.
But that was then. Today I crave invitations and questions about what I do. These days once I explain that I write movies, the next question becomes, "How'd you get into that?"
Well, I'm glad you asked.
For several years I wrote a column under the pseudonym Charlene for The Houston Post Sunday magazine. When the paper was sold, the new owners decided to ax my column and offer me a job writing features. I found, however, that I enjoyed the camaraderie of the newsroom (translation: eating candy and flirting) more than the actual reporting. So I began writing nonfiction books from home, stopping by The Post now and then when I needed a fix of human contact.
I published two trade paperbacks, The Cowgirl Companion and Bubbas & Beaus, before finally coming to understand that fiction writing might better suit my particular, uh, skill set. Journalism and nonfiction required an adherence to fact that I found stifling. The facts seemed to obscure the truth of the stories I wanted to tell. I presented this revelation to my agent, outlining for her an idea for a novel. She suggested that my idea might make a better movie. That sounded just fine to me.
Without much debate, I put all my Houston stuff into storage and went to New York. I enrolled in an NYU film-writing class and cranked out a screenplay over the course of a summer. With my credit cards maxed out and my script finished, I headed to Hollywood, ready to make it in showbiz. I figured it would happen like this: I'd show my script (a romantic comedy, still available at a reasonable price) to a few suits at a studio, and they'd cut me a check. I'd be back in Houston by Christmas, and the movie would be in theaters by summertime. I mean, how hard could it be?
Pretty dang hard, as it turned out. I didn't see any studio suits, and I didn't see any checks. I saw overdraft notices.
On the boulevard of broken dreams, I got myself a grunt job answering the phone at a cable company with the lofty goal of scraping together enough cash to get back to Houston. As I served out my sentence in la-la land, I had one friend, John Lee Hancock. He'd been a lawyer in Houston when we first got acquainted. Like me, he had left home and a good job to make his mark in movies. Unlike me, he'd done just that. After Clint Eastwood directed his second feature, A Perfect World starring Kevin Costner, Hancock emerged as a major player in the screenwriting business. Sometimes, when I was really broke, he and his wife, Holly, would have me over for dinner.
At the Hancocks' one night, I met a documentary filmmaker named Jay Russell. A native of Arkansas, Russell told a funny story at dinner about a man he'd once interviewed who held the world record for eating collard greens. Incredibly, I knew the man's name (C. Mort Hurst of Ayden, North Carolina) and the approximate poundage he'd consumed (a number I've since forgotten). This arcane knowledge earned me Russell's immediate attention and later his friendship.
