John August

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So you’re moving to Hollywood

First Person, Los Angeles

Because this site is largely aimed at aspiring screenwriters, I like to include their first-person perspective on those early steps, beginning with the move to Los Angeles. Over the last few years, we’ve had guest blog posts from [Adam Davis](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2007/starting-out-in-hollywood), [Kris Galuska](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2007/moving-to-la), [Jerome Schwartz](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/jerome-schwartz-first-person) and [Jonny Summers](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/showrunner-asst) — all of whom are due for an update.

George Sloan is a writers’ assistant on “How I Met Your Mother.” He graciously agreed to write up a primer for recent college grads considering making the move to Hollywood.

—

first personHi. I’m George. You probably don’t know me. But that’s okay. We’re friends now.

Below is some information I’ve compiled over the last four-and-a-half years, based on my experience as a PA in the industry, as well as questions I’ve been asked by people considering the move to Los Angeles. Keep in mind, this is an unofficial and relatively shitty guide to working in Hollywood.

#The Big Move

Every year, thousands of 20-something guys and girls pack up their cars, leave their beloved suburban towns and head west to Los Angeles. And with good reason. LA is the international capital of television and motion pictures. Argue all you want about other places — Ne w York, New Orleans, Vancouver and Eastern Europe — but when all is said and done, LA is where you need to be. Granted, that may change over the next ten years, but as of 2010, LA is still the place.

Leaving home and saying goodbye to my family and friends, though incredibly difficult, was a necessity. But before I packed my ’98 Accord to the roof, I asked myself a question. It’s the same question that I pose to anyone considering the move to LA. “Aside from film and television, is there anything else you can see yourself doing with your life?” If the answer is no, pack your stuff and get out here.

George Sloan

##The Drive
Recruit a friend to drive with you, if possible. I drove alone, however, and loved every minute of it. Those five days in the car, thinking and listening to music, allowed me to prepare myself mentally for the enormous change I was about to experience.

##Saving Up
I moved to Los Angeles with $1,200 in savings. Dumb idea. I would suggest moving with no less than $5,000 in savings. LA is one of the more expensive cities in the country and you probably won’t have a job for the first few weeks. You’ll need enough to cover gas (about 50 cents more per gallon in LA than on the east coast), food, monthly bills (student loans, car loans, etc.), as well as your first/last month of rent and security deposit. You’ll also need money for furniture if you didn’t come out here with any. I moved in with a few guys I met on Craigslist who already had a fully-furnished house. That worked out well, but if you want to live alone, prepare to drop some cash at Ikea.

##The First Job
Finding a job in LA is not that hard. Finding a good-paying job that you enjoy is very hard. I did freelance PA (production assistant) work for my first year out here (additionally, I had worked as a PA back in Boston for over a year), working on some embarrassing low-budget feature films, as well as some embarrassing big-budget reality shows. The hours were impossibly long and the pay was hilariously low. The tasks I was asked to complete were menial and beneath anybody with a high school diploma. My friends like to refer to some of the jobs I had as “pride-swallowing.” I prefer the term “soul-crushing.”

##The Long and Winding Road
After a year or so, I got a job as an office PA on a big-budget studio feature. It was thrilling, but eight months later, I felt like I wasn’t learning anything new and decided to leave. I scored an internship at a well-respected production company, eventually transitioning into a full-time job as an executive assistant. But after a year, I again grew restless. I thought about why I moved to LA in the first place: to pursue my dream of writing and directing. My two years in LA had certainly not been a waste (I had fun, I learned a lot and I made some great connections), but I didn’t feel any closer to my dream of writing and directing. So I set what I considered to be a realistic goal for myself: I would become a writers’ assistant on a TV show. I had heard there was a “ladder” to climb in television writing (start as an office PA, get promoted to writers’ PA, then get promoted to writers’ assistant), and was growing increasingly frustrated by the fact that no such ladder exists in the feature world.

Luckily, around this time, I received a call from a former employer who said “How I Met Your Mother” was looking for a new office PA. It seemed destined, so I started there over the summer, and busted my ass. When shooting began in the fall, a writers’ assistant position opened up and I made it clear that I was interested and prepared to do the job. I got the promotion. It took me two and a half years to find a job that I didn’t consider “soul-crushing,” but it finally happened. I still consider myself “just starting out” in the industry, but I now feel more confident in my future.

##A Necessary Evil
The best advice I can give to anyone starting out in Hollywood is to find a job as a production assistant. It sucks hard, but it’s a necessary evil. Working as a PA is thankless. Truly. But it’s the nature of the beast. You must pay your dues. You’ll make shitty money, work long hours and be forced to swallow every ounce of pride that you have, but you’ll learn more in one day than you would in a lifetime of sitting in a classroom. You’ll also learn what you do and don’t want to do.

As a new PA on “How I Met Your Mother,” I was responsible for buying groceries and keeping the refrigerator stocked. Although it sounds silly, I took this job very seriously. Within a few days, the writers were telling me I was doing way better than the last guy and were offering to read any scripts I might be working on. Even the little things count. People notice.

##The Giant Whirlpool
I think of Hollywood as a giant, freezing-cold, bacteria-ridden whirlpool. On the outside of the whirlpool, closest to the shore (and financial security), are the executives, the studio heads, the big-name actors, writers and directors. As you move towards the center, you come upon the lower-level employees. And moving further inwards still, you come to the PA’s. There’s thousands of them, all clamoring and clawing, trying desperately not to get sucked into the deep, dark hole of anonymity and sadness. *Continues →*

Fake tears

Psych 101, Writing Process

My four-year old daughter has entered a phase I’m labeling “emotional scientist.”

“I’m mad!” she’ll declare, pursing her lips and scrunching her eyes. Most times, she’s not the least bit angry, but rather curious whether her simulation of anger is close enough to the real thing to elicit the desired response. The adults in her life are essentially lab rats. We run through her mazes as she tests her hypotheses.

Currently, the bulk of her experiments involve fake tears. Every parent knows exactly what real crying sounds like, be it a scraped knee or a crushed hope: plaintive, gasping, desperate. Real tears show up uninvited and unwelcome.

Fake crying is a caterwaul, a siren parked three feet away. It’s a performance. Lacking the ability to summon tears, children rub or cover their eyes, pausing every now and then to survey the room to see whether it’s working.

*Nope? All right. Back to the wailing.*

As a parent, I endure these episodes with a measured response, knowing it’s just a phase.

But as a writer, I watch her with fascination, secretly hoping she gets better at faking it.

While it doesn’t rank up there with math and reading, the ability to simulate an emotion you’re not actually feeling is a fundamental skill, one that’s served me particularly well.

This is an essay in defense of fake tears.

Writing as acting
—-

I had lunch yesterday with a former child actor who has gone on to have a big career. I knew he got his first roles when he was four years old, but I was curious at what age he started “acting” — that is, when did he become aware of craft and technique?

His answer: at four. His father taught him to maintain eye contact with the other actors in the scene, and listen carefully to what they were saying. He wasn’t allowed to perform. He simply had to experience the moment and follow along.

Experiencing the moment is what writers do, too.

Screenwriters are basically actors who do their work on the page rather than the stage. Both professions earn their keep by pretending things are much different than they are. Actors ignore the lights and cameras and missing walls. Writers ignore the missing everything, summoning locations and characters to enact scenes which they can later transcribe.

Actors and writers are trying to create moments that feel true, despite being completely invented.

Read a good book on acting, and you’ll find many techniques that can help you as a screenwriter. Sense memory — the ability to experience a sensation that is not actually present — lets you feel the rumble of approaching tanks. Other exercises have you substituting your experiences for the character’s, letting the broken arm you got in fifth grade be the gunshot in your hero’s leg.

Once you become aware of the techniques, you find yourself pressing your brain’s RECORD button whenever you experience something remarkable or intense. The middle section of The Nines documents my disassociative disorder during production on the TV show D.C. in 2000. Even in my fugue state, I realized it was fascinating and worth recording. That red light was blinking in the corner a lot.

When my dog of 14 years passed away this summer, I was a wreck. I wasn’t faking any tears, but I was keenly aware of them. I kept mental notes on how it felt to feel that way; rather than push past the experience, I pushed into it.

My dog was a huge part of my life. He was my kid before I had my kid. In losing him, one thing I gained was that experience of profound loss. I’ll have it to use for the rest of my life.

Feeling your way through
—

Here’s how I wrote the last ten pages of Big Fish.

Sitting in front of a full-length mirror, I brought myself to tears. Then I started writing Will’s dialogue. I looped over and over until I got a piece of it finished, then started on the next section. It was three solid days of crying, but it was cathartic and productive.

These were fake tears, in the sense that I wasn’t actually guiding my Southern father through his last moments on Earth. But they were true in the context of writing the story. I was creating in myself the experience I was hoping to create in the reader.

One basic goal of creative writing is to evoke a desired response. That sounds clinical and scientific, but the process is squishy and exhausting. I don’t hear other screenwriters talking much about it, probably because it’s uncomfortably personal. At least writers get to do it alone, without a crew and cameras watching.

My daughter’s fake tears are writing practice, just as much as her wobbly uppercase letters. I’m hesitant to offer her much coaching on how to cry more convincingly; it’s like arming your opponent.

But as I watch her perform an ersatz lament, I find myself pressing the RECORD button. And hoping she’s doing the same.

10 hints for index cards

Story and Plot, Writing Process

I’m outlining a project right now, and thought it would be a good time to review best practices for [index cards](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2003/index-cards).

1. Keep it short. Maximum seven words per card.

2. A card represents a story point, be it a scene or a sequence. You don’t need a card for every little thing.

3. Keep cards general enough that they can be rearranged. (“Battle in swamp” rather than “Final showdown”)

4. Horizontal (a table or counter) often works better than a vertical (a corkboard).

5. Post-It notes make good alternative index cards.

6. Consider a letter code for which characters are featured in the sequence. Helpful for figuring out who’s missing.

7. Most movies can be summarized in less than 50 cards.

8. Cards are cheap. Don’t hesitate to rework them.

9. Consider a second color for action sequences. Helps show the pacing.

10. Write big. You want to be able to read them from a distance.

Sitting in on the Prop 8 trial

First Person, Follow Up, News

The federal lawsuit [challenging Proposition 8](http://www.equalrightsfoundation.org/our-work/perry-v-schwarzenegger/) began last week in San Francisco. I have a direct and obvious interest in the outcome; I like being married.

I have one of the 18,000 California same-sex marriages that remained in effect after the proposition passed in 2008. But it’s a piecemeal situation: the State of California considers me married, but Illinois doesn’t. Iowa does; Idaho doesn’t.

And as far as the U.S. government, I’m a single man.

This lawsuit challenges Proposition 8 on grounds that it violates the equal protection and due process protections of the U.S. Constitution. And if it turns out right, it could be a game changer like Loving v. Virginia, which struck down state laws on interracial marriage.

When the U.S. Supreme Court decided last week to block video from the trial, I lost my chance to see what was happening in the courtroom. Sure, I could [follow the updates on Twitter](https://twitter.com/#/list/johnaugust/prop-8-trial-updates), but the fortune cookie-length summaries didn’t feel like enough connection to a landmark case.

So I flew up to San Francisco to watch the trial.

The proceedings are open to the public. All that’s required is a civic interest and a photo ID.

There’s already ample [online](http://nclrights.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/nclr’s-legal-director-shannon-minter-on-perry-v-schwarzenegger-proceedings-day-7/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NationalCenterForLesbianRights+%28National+Center+for+Lesbian+Rights%29) [coverage](http://www.law.com/jsp/ca/PubArticleCA.jsp?id=1202439304299&Trial_Airs_Mormon_Churchs_Role_in_Prop_) about what’s happening, and what’s being said. But none of them put me in the room. With that goal, I want to provide a sketch of what it feels like to be there, since most Americans will never sit inside a federal district court.

Setting
—–

The 17th-floor courtroom is impressive, both in appointment and scale; you could fit a basketball court snuggly in its footprint. Grooved planks of cappuccino-colored wood stretch up to a barrel-vaulted ceiling. At the front of the room, a massive wall of pale polished stone backs the judge’s bench. A single, undersized judicial seal hangs above. To the right of the judge, an American flag drapes around its pole, making it seem like the cloth is simply tacked to the wall by the brass eagle on top.

The court clerk and reporter sit on an elevated platform directly in front of the judge, a tangle of cables dripping over the edge. ((The court reporter’s transcript shows up in real-time on attorney’s laptops. I found myself reading it at times, amazed at her ability to keep up.)) The witness sits to the judge’s left. A single podium faces the judge, and it’s from this spot that attorneys must direct their questions to the bench or the witness. There’s no pacing around. There’s also no way to physically approach the judge for a sidebar conversation.

Every courtroom drama you’ve seen has long tables for the prosecution and defense teams. Take those tables and rotate them 90 degrees. Place twelve chairs around each and you have room for a lot more lawyers, each working off a laptop or a black flat-panel monitor. The plaintiffs’ team fills every seat at their table, while the defense has between five and seven staffers at work, with additional support staff at side chairs or tables. Wire shelves hold rows of binders. It’s all very tightly packed. Any attempt to approach the podium means stepping around others.

There is no jury in this trial. The space where a jury box would be has consumer-grade videocameras on tripods ((The video is carried via closed circuit to a spillover courtroom for the public.)) and two sketch artists. One of them, a man who looks like actor Richard Jenkins, keeps raising binoculars to get a closer look at his subject.

Roughly a third of the floor space is devoted to six divided rows of benches for observers at the back of the courtroom. They’re pews, really, which adds to the churchy feel of the chamber. The first two rows are devoted to counsel and badge-wearing media. The back rows are open to the public. Altogether, maybe 100 observers can watch.

Unlike a conventional trial, the plaintiffs (a gay couple and a lesbian couple) sit with the crowd. There is really no other place to put them.

The chamber has no windows. Occasionally, you can hear thunder from the storms, but the room otherwise seems detached from the outside world.

Characters
—

Everyone springs to their feet when Judge Vaughn Walker enters. Now in his mid-60s, his Cronkite-ish voice would make him a good narrator for a History Channel documentary. Beyond an opening conversation with the opposing attorneys about newly-filed motions, he says little during the day. Based on recaps of previous days’ events, I expect him to be asking more questions directly of witnesses and counsel, but he mostly seems content to listen. ((Except this: Judge Walker admonishes San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera for an underling’s poorly-executed deposition, saying that the aide needed a “woodshedding.” It’s a really uncomfortable moment, like a professor announcing a student’s failing grade while passing back exams.))

You see little visible difference between the two legal teams. They are both predominately white, predominately men, and invariably dressed in dark suits. ((After a careful census, I decided the men on the plaintiff’s team had slightly longer, shaggier hair.)) Crossing paths at the bathroom, you are never sure who is on which side. But everyone is polite, holding doors and squeezing tight in the elevator.

For each witness on the stand, one member of each legal team is empowered to speak. Everyone else keeps to leaning-in whispers or silently mouthed words as binders are passed. Post-It notes are passed back and forth, with additional staffers squeezing in through a side door that’s partially blocked by a large monitor.

Witness testimony is often accompanied by demonstratives, PowerPoint slides that show a graph or related text excerpt. Both teams have staffers assigned to getting these on-screen, along with other pieces of evidence such as video clips. The defendants had brief trouble getting video to play with a clip from the Yes on 8 campaign, but the day was otherwise free of technical issues.

Structure
—-

For each witness, there’s a direct questioning, a cross-examination, and a redirect. During each phase, everything is more or less locked down. Attorneys and observers can (quietly) enter or exit the room, but everyone is expected to sit down and shut up. Judge Walker permits laptops and cell phones for email and tweeting, but beyond the light tapping of fingers on keyboards, it’s library-quiet in the room. ((I had forgotten my iPhone charging cable, so I kept my phone switched off to save the battery. This e-chastity ended up being a good thing, as it forced me to pay attention and take notes on paper, which became this sketch. A kind-hearted woman let me borrow her cable to charge up before my flight home.))

That all changes the moment it moves from direct to cross, or cross to redirect. Suddenly, it’s a flurry of pent-up action and re-setting. It reminds me most of film production, with crews swarming the set the moment the director yells cut. Staffers bring new binders and huddle for quick conversations.

The judge calls a ten-minute break in the morning, and another one later in the afternoon. At lunch, everyone heads downstairs to the commissary on the second floor. I have lunch with the plaintiffs. It’s a small world; Jeffrey Zarrillo manages the same movie theaters in Burbank my husband used to run, and we know some of the same people.

While there is a lot of trial coverage online, I don’t see any traditional media all day. No cameras, no tape recorders, nothing.

The day’s work ends at 4 p.m., after the plaintiff’s redirect of Professor Lee Badgett.

Dialogue
—-

In a trial without a jury, attorneys are not trying to elicit sympathy. That’s not say there are not emotional moments; several witnesses have teared up on the stand. But feelings are not as important as facts. Both sides are trying to get things on the record, which means getting witnesses on the stand to say what they need to say.

For direct testimony, this is pretty straightforward. The attorney asks a structured series of questions that allows the witness to make the required points.

During the cross-examination, the opposing attorney tries to make his case, either by presenting contrary evidence or drilling into a something the witness said. As an observer, this often feels like hearing the setup to a joke, trying to anticipate the punchline. The attorney asks a series of questions, and you wonder, “Where is he going with this?”

A few years ago, I had to give a deposition in a civil trial. I started the day giving very detailed answers, treating it like an EPK interview for a movie I’d written. Then I realized that every new thing I said introduced four more questions. By the fifth hour, I’d figured out the advice generally given to witnesses: listen, evaluate, formulate, talk. And then shut up.

We have a natural instinct to move things along and fill awkward silences, but the best witnesses take their time, unhurried and unflappable. When asked, “Would you also agree..,” they don’t. They restate their points in simple terms.

It’s nothing like movie or TV courtrooms with their zippy rhetorical boxing. Rather, it’s slow and calculated, like a chess match. During one particularly soporific stretch, the defense asked Professor Badgett to work through a lot of hypothetical math. Written figures are dry; spoken figures are numbing. To her credit as a witness, she cooperated without ever indulging his conclusions. But the audience thinned noticeably as the cross-examination reached its third hour.

The verdict
—-

The trial is expected to wrap up as early as next week, so anyone hoping to see it in person should plan on getting there soon.

Depending on the testimony, it can be riveting or dull. Like church, you may find yourself squirming, trying to find new ways to sit on the benches without your tailbones breaking through your flesh.

But no matter how strongly you feel on the issue of same-sex marriage, it’s a fascinating opportunity to see a part of government that otherwise functions off-screen. I’d recommend a day in court to any interested citizen.

For a broader overview of the issues in this case, I’d point you to an excellent piece in the [New Yorker](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/18/100118fa_fact_talbot).