What does Hollywood want? Damned if I know!
Those uppity Hollywood bigwigs have once again rejected my screenplay, Give Me Back My Poop, a harrowing tale of an unwed mother’s battle against a tyrannical poop-stealing landlord. That the story is based on true events doesn’t seem to interest them in the slightest, nor does the fact that the lady it happened to kind of resembles late Hollywood screen legend Bette Davis.
When I first took on the thankless mission of adapting Ms. Clarissa Jenkins’ terrifying life story, I promised her that no matter what, somehow, some way, the world would know her pain. Spreading pain and emotional trauma is a screenwriter’s number one function in society, or at least it should be.
I don’t understand the modern trends in Hollywood. They seem to care nothing for craft or original storytelling anymore, content to keep pooping out the same superhero schlock we’ve all gorged ourselves upon a hundred times over. It’s almost like they’re punishing us for going to the movies!
Did they even shed a tear in scene twenty-seven, when our heroine has grown so bereft of her own poop that she takes to hiding what little poop she has left in plastic baggies around her kitchen? Or the extremes she must go to conceal the smell of said poop from her greedy landlord? The landlord’s name is Doug.
Were they affected at all reading scene forty, when Ms. Jenkins just straight up eats her own poop, in a misguided attempt to keep the poop inside her forever? Does Hollywood even remember metaphors?
Or what about in scene one hundred seventeen when Mrs. Jenkins’ son, Brutus, accosts me in a Caldor’s parking lot and threatens to kill me with a knife if I ever sold the screenplay? That’s right, I’m in the movie!
And does it mean anything to Hollywood that I have received three separate cease and desist letters attempting to bully me into submission, or that Mrs. Jenkins’ own daughter believes me to have fabricated her mother’s entire life story in order to take advantage of an elderly dementia patient? I don’t know what producers these days care about storytelling, but where I come from that’s good drama!
I have a Zoom call scheduled with Ms. Jenkins in fifteen minutes, where I will once again have to make up excuses for Hollywood’s lack of vision, and vainly convince the aging septuagenarian that there is still hope her story will be told. But as for now, the studios (looking at you, Amazon) seem perfectly content to crush the dreams of an old lady who I will probably have to placate with oral sex.
I don’t even care what Hollywood wants anymore. I don’t care about lots of stuff.
Words fail me.
More like HollyWEIRD, amirite?
Lovely
thanks!
I read this on my device
I like device