8/17
I find myself a famous screenwriter. I am known for my scripts being made by a particularly visionary young director, and we are becoming known as a sort of wunder team around town. It is an exciting time—our latest film has gotten major critical praise, and it looks like we will each win some awards from our respective guilds. My agent is even speaking of Golden Globe nominations. I am thrilled.
This afternoon, however, I am sitting in a large black room and journalists are filing in and out to interview me. Watching them sit with their notebooks, I feel bad that this is their line of work, and reflect on how happy I am it is not mine.
One reporter enthuses particularly before he starts the tape about how much he loved the movie, and I smile. He is balding and a bit sweaty, but he is sincere, and I like being flattered.
When we start the questioning, he starts with a few softballs, basic things about the movie, about my history in the business, before asking things I have not been asked before, not by anyone.
“All of your films,” he says to me, the recorder sitting awkwardly between us, big and black and outdatedly oversize, “deal with unhappy families.”
“Oh no,” I say, a little surprised. “They’re all happy.”
He shakes his head. “Maybe they seem happy, but there are always forced underneath the surface, and none of them like each other. There’s so much unspoken backstabbing and heartbreak.”
I wait for him to continue, but he looks at me, waiting for me to speak, and I reluctantly agree.
“Did your own life inspire this?” he wonders in an off-hand tone, but I can see his eyes are boring holes into me.
I let out a shaky breath, and wait a few moments. He stares at me, still, and finally I admit, “Yes.” I say nothing more.
“Can you elaborate?”
He won’t make it easy, and suddenly I feel like I am back in my many therapy sessions. I close my eyes and reminisce a little—“I felt so alone as a child, and I so often wished to find out I was adopted as an adolescent, and then later wished that I had siblings who had been adopted, or a secret set of real birth parents, former circus performers, who had to give me up because they were on the run from the mob… so many fantasies. I was very unhappy.” Still, he waits for more, and I add, “I had loved writing as a child, but then it became dificult when I was older, and I was horrified to find out it was because I was so unhappy.”
At this he laughs, and I smile. I know what is coming.
“Aren’t writers supposed to be unhappy? Drink themselves into oblivion and get out their great works? I think it’s a prerequisite for a magnum opus for its author to be unhappy.”
I laugh, but feel a little hollow. “Yes, but I can only write when I’m happy. Writers, we’re all depressed, all lonesome, and we all can write about it, get something from that unhappiness… but I can’t write if I am unhappy. I have to be happy, and then remember the bad things to write a script. It’s extraordinarily difficult,” I smile. “I was so unhappy but couldn’t do anything with it until I ran away from home. And then I could write again, but I didn’t have anything to inspire me but my old unhappiness. It seems like everything I’m trying to run away from is what brings me my happiness, my success,” I admit, my arms gesturing at the room, at this interview, at my agent mumbling into a cell phone in the corner. “It’s weird. Makes it hard to forget.”
He nods, a little confused, and I realize that the recorder hasn’t been on this whole time. We have just been talking, like friends would, and I feel very naked, suddenly. If a magazine knows your darkest secret, you can forget it. But telling one person… it’s like I’ve just confided in this man I know nothing about. I feel myself pale, and he pours me a glass of water from the pitcher on the table. I gulp it down and frown. He smiles, pats my arm—he will say nothing to anyone, he assures me with his eyes. And my stomach drops a little, because I can’t trust my fucking catsitter, I can’t trust my director, can’t trust anyone, but this guy expects me to trust him?
And then the organizer of this whole event is ushering him out and another guy in, and I sit there, feeling like a bag of stones.
“So, can you describe your new movie for me?” the next reporter asks, and I give him the formulaic answer he is expecting, and I let my mind wander, trying not to think about what I’ve done.
