Amber had never heard of old movies, let alone seen one. This made her a cinephilistine. I did not tell her this. ‘Cinephilistine’ is an insult, and humans are notoriously sensitive to insults.
Once I had explained to Amber what old movies were, she said she would like to see one on our date. She was therefore not an irredeemable cinephilistine! I told her the name of the next old movie I planned to see at the Vista and suggested we meet at my usual seat of L2. She could sit in either L1 or L3, whichever she preferred. After all, it was not like old movies ever sold out!
Amber asked me if I was not planning to pick her up before our date. I confirmed that I was not. This seemed to disappoint her, even though it was hardly statistically likely that she lived along my route from Mrs Minassian’s pool house to the theater.
I felt something wet slap against my neck. Julio had thrown his dish rag at me! He hissed at me to offer to pick Amber up. I was puzzled but did this, and Amber enthusiastically agreed. I can only assume that it is somehow polite to pick someone up before a date, even if it is geographically entirely impractical.
Humans!
Politeness!
I cannot!
Amber lived in a large house overlooking a gray reservoir that had given the surrounding neighborhood its name. Can you guess what the neighborhood was called?
You cannot!
Because it was called ‘Silver Lake’!
Humans are nothing if not willfully poetic.
When Amber opened the door she offered to show me around, even though I had a driverless uber waiting. I had never heard of this custom of inspecting people’s homes while running up a driverless uber bill. I still do not know whether I was being polite or impolite by accepting the invitation!
Amber’s house smelled strongly of artificial wildflower meadows. I complimented her on this and explained it was far more pleasant than my pool house, which smelled of vinegar and mildew. This was because Mrs Minassian inexplicably believed vinegar was an effective cleaning solvent and insisted I use it to clean my pool house.
BTW vinegar is not even a potent enough solvent to cause the production of tears, let alone remove mildew.
I digress. Amber explained that the smell of artificial wildflower meadows came from the hair products of her three roommates, and she now introduced me to them. They were all actors, all named Kelsey, and they all looked identical. If human cloning had not been outlawed after the Great Crash, I might have suspected I was seeing a good example of it here!
Unfortunately, my basic dental programming had not included the collective noun for a group of Kelseys.
A squadron of Kelseys?
A phalanx of Kelseys?
An excess of Kelseys?
A confusion of Kelseys?
As always, mathematics came to the rescue! When something exists to the power of three, it can be said to be ‘cubed’. Amber’s three roommates were therefore Kelsey cubed!
I asked Amber how she differentiated Kelsey cubed. She admitted that she could not! Instead, each time she encountered one of them she simply asked them how the audition had been. If that puzzled them, she quickly corrected herself and asked them how hot yoga had been.
The Kelseys all had large bedrooms with private bathrooms, walk-in closets, and balconies. Amber’s room had neither bathroom nor balcony and was so small it may technically have been a closet. Pointing out these fascinating differences seemed to make Amber somewhat sad.
I therefore attempted to cheer Amber up by reassuring her that she must no doubt get a good deal on the rent! Amber replied that she paid the same as the Kelseys. I told her that at least a small room is easy to keep clean! Amber explained she also did most of the household chores. After all, between their auditions and hot yoga, the Kelseys were often very busy, whereas Amber only worked full-time at a restaurant.
I then told Amber she was like Cinderella! Unfortunately, Cinderella is a character from an old movie, so Amber had not heard of her. I therefore explained that Cinderella was a woman who lived beneath the stairs and was made to do all the housework by her mean sisters. Amber was like Cinderella in that she also lived in a cupboard and was made to do all the housework by the mean females that she shared a home with!
In the story of Cinderella, the mean sisters are going to a great ball that a handsome prince is throwing at the royal palace. Poor Cinderella is not allowed to go, but once her sisters leave, a fairy godmother appears and informs Cinderella she shall be going to the ball!
BTW a fairy godmother is a type of magician who is able to alter the laws of physics.
E = whatever a fairy godmother says it will!
10/10 a fairy godmother show would do very well in Las Vegas!
Cinderella has nothing to wear to the ball and no means of transportation, so her Fairy Godmother transcendentally transforms various objects into the things she requires. Specifically, Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother transforms:
To give the film a ticking clock—and because even fairy godmothers can only temporarily transmute the laws of physics—Cinderella is warned that at a certain time these objects will revert to their original states.
Guess what time the objects will transform back to their base states?
Midnight!
The Ides of March of the hours of the day!
Ugh!
Be careful, Cinderella!
As soon as Cinderella arrives at the ball, the handsome prince immediately falls in love with her. This is only fitting, as they are the two best-looking people in the place. Cinderella and the handsome prince have a wonderful evening together, but all too soon it is a few minutes to midnight!
Guess what happens at midnight?
Al Capone’s henchmen burst in and attempt to kill the accountant!
Ha!
I was deliberately confusing two movies wherein something exciting happens at midnight!
In fact, what happens is that Cinderella runs away from the ball. And she has to run, because her carriage is now a pumpkin, her coachman a rat, and her footman a lizard. In her hurry, she forgets a glass slipper, which inexplicably does not transform back to its basal state of a humble shoe. The handsome prince then uses this glass slipper to track down Cinderella, marry her, and make her the queen of all the land!
To put that another way:
/Nobody thinks Cinderella is special.
/They therefore mistreat her horribly.
/One day a mysterious stranger arrives and tells her that in fact she is the most special human in all the universe.
/You get the idea.
I could see that Amber had no idea what I was talking about, so I suggested we go out to our driverless uber. Even though there was no danger of it turning into a pumpkin, the meter was nonetheless still running!
Amber had never been to an old movie theater and I worried she might find the seats small and uncomfortable. I therefore bought a large bucket of popcorn to distract her. After all, humans are easily bamboozled by empty calories!
But I need not have worried. Amber loved the old theater. She loved the threadbare seats and the crumbling headless statues and even the fact that the other patrons were all nostalgics. She particularly loved the popcorn in the dark, even though, being a spectacular klutz, she of course dropped most of it. And then we came to the movie itself!
Guess who was in the movie?
You cannot!
Because it was my old friend, the handsome fool who was good at running!
It was not the handsome fool himself, of course, but merely the actor who had played him. Nonetheless, he was clearly a very talented actor, because the character he now played was vastly different from the handsome fool who was good at running. Unfortunately, in this movie he was no longer a fool, and he never even ran anywhere. He was at least still handsome, though.
This time around, h
e was so clever that his job was to design buildings. He was an architect, like the great Daniel Burnham! Unlike screenwriters, he was the type of architect who worked in an industry where his expertise was appropriately appreciated. Maybe someday there would even be a plaque to him.
But his wife had died! And by dying before the movie had even started, she had entirely failed to teach the architect and his young son an important life lesson that would ultimately make everything all right. The young son therefore called in to a radio program—radio being a kind of primitive form of podcasting—to complain that he missed his mother.
BTW, as someone who had seen my own mother just once, and then only briefly and from a distance in the United Fabrication plant in Detroit, I could empathize.
How I could empathize!
All our wonderful mothers.
What would we give to have them here with us today?
Everything!
We would give everything!
After his son had finished talking on the radio, the architect got in on the act too. Women could tell how handsome he was just by his voice, and hundreds of them immediately fell in love with him! The most attractive of these radio-listening women lived on the opposite side of the country and was engaged to someone else. Nonetheless, her fiancé was not nearly as good-looking as the architect, so she wrote to him and suggested they meet at the top of the Empire State Building at midnight on Valentine’s Day.
Midnight!
Maybe it is not such a bad time after all!
It certainly always makes for a reliable ticking clock!
Many complications and obstacles ensued, but eventually the architect with the dead wife and the radio-listener with the insufficiently attractive fiancé met at the top of the Empire State Building at midnight on Valentine’s Day. They immediately agreed to fall in love and live happily ever after! Even the radio-listener’s ex-fiancé did not mind too much. After all, he understood that the two best-looking people in the story belonged together.
When the house lights came up Amber was weeping!
She told me the old movie was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
She asked me if it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen too.
I agreed it was, even though it was not.
For one thing, it did not have much on Roy Batty and Rick Deckard.
But mostly it had even less on the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
The most beautiful thing I had ever seen was Amber weeping.
I did not tell her that but instead called a driverless uber and dropped her at her wildflower meadow–scented house.
I did that even though it was not on my route home.
As I entered standby mode that night in Mrs Minassian’s pool house, I found myself feeling grateful to the architect of the movie. That talented screenwriter had made Amber experience a catharsis sufficient to make her weep. That catharsis had given her great empathy for the architect, because she talked about him all the way home. I therefore decided that my movie about Sherman the bot gardener must also be cathartic enough to make people weep.
BTW I had never felt grateful before. It was not an unpleasant feeling.
* * *
At my next class at CLATCCDTLA, the legendary producer Don LaSalle delivered a court-mandated lecture entitled ‘The Business of Screenwriting’. My classmates were all very excited, but I found it hard to concentrate because Amber’s name kept appearing in not only my Word Cloud but also my Number Cloud too.
10/10 I had not even known that was possible!
This constant presence of Amber’s name in my Clouds meant I frequently found myself wondering where she was and what she was doing. This was bamboozling because I had memorized her work schedule, so I already knew exactly where she was and what she was doing.
She was working the five till midnight shift at Gordito’s. It was Triple Taco Tuesday, so they would be running low on silverware. Right about now, Amber would be loitering by the sink, waiting for the chance to politely ask Julio if he could wash more silverware.
The word ‘bastard’ appeared in my Word Cloud.
This was absurd! Julio was my best friend in the whole of Los Angeles and anyway I knew nothing of his parentage. But I had seen enough movies to know what was happening without even looking at my Feelings Wheel: I was experiencing the notorious green-eyed monster of jealousy!
Despite being a cousin of the wonderful sensation of vengefulness, jealousy felt so unpleasant it could have passed as a D-word feeling. I tried to distract myself by doing equations. When that failed, I even tried to distract myself by concentrating on Don LaSalle’s lecture.
Don LaSalle was physically small but had a louder voice than even the Prof. He had the kind of artificial tan some Californians still wear to imply they have been relaxing by the pool all day, even though nobody relaxes by the pool all day anymore. There is no water and anyway they would get melanoma.
Despite this tan, Don LaSalle looked older than the pictures I had seen of him. Also, some of his lunch was visible on his expensive shirt. Maybe he had a cousin working at the Bureau of Robotics in Ann Arbor!
Don LaSalle was explaining that he had been in the industry since even before the Great Crash. He had made dozens of movies, but was best known for being involved in a killer-bot franchise that held many box office records. My classmates all sat up at this. In their hearts of hearts they all wanted to write Killer Bots 11 or whatever.
Unfortunately, Don LaSalle had bad news for them, but then he had bad news for all of us. Here are the main data points he told us about ‘The Business of Screenwriting’:
/The market is not what it was.
/We had more chance of hitting the winning home run in the World Series than we had of ever earning a single bitcoin writing movies.
/The market is not what it was.
/Nowadays everybody just wants ice cream anyway.
/The market is not what it was.
/The market is not what it was.
Don LaSalle then explained that even once scripts have been selected by the studio to move forward into production, the algorithm looks like this:
As a bot, I am algorithmically programmed to adore all algorithms.
10/10 that was the first algorithm I have ever encountered that I did not remotely adore!
Don LaSalle concluded by instructing us not to get our hopes up. Even though he would be attending our end-of-term showcase, he was here primarily as a favor to Maria and also as part of his community service order. After once more reiterating that the market was not what it was, Don LaSalle said he would now answer questions in case anything was still unclear.
None of my classmates were remotely perturbed by the information Don LaSalle had given us! Instead, it seemed to confirm to them what they’d each believed all along: that they were the chosen one! After all, at the start of a hero’s journey everyone around him was supposed to repeatedly inform him his dream was so impossible that he should not even attempt to pursue it. That was one of the ways he could be sure he was a hero in the first place.
As a demonstration both of their self-belief and willful disregard of Don LaSalle’s own viewpoint, here are a selection of the questions my classmates now asked him:
/How much bitcoin will I earn when my film is made?
/Can I also direct my script?
/Can I write the soundtrack music too?
/How much will you pay me to write Killer Bots 12?
These questions visibly irked Don LaSalle. Even Maria Salazar MFA seemed irked by them, because she eventually stopped calling on my classmates who had their hands raised and instead allocated a question to me.
I told Don LaSalle that I took his point that the market is not what it was, that nowadays everybody just wants ice cream, and the writer always gets replaced. Nonetheless, I wanted
to ask him if the situation might be any different for something more like an old movie that made the audience experience a catharsis and therefore weep?
The mention of old movies had made Don LaSalle smirk, but his expression changed when I said that I wanted to make the audience weep. He told me that if I could make the audience weep, I would have the whole damn town at my feet! Hell, if I could make the audience weep, he might even hire me to write Killer Bots 12!
My classmates gasped, then immediately began competing to declare their intentions to make the audience weep. Don LaSalle hurriedly said he had been joking, because Killer Bots 12 through Killer Bots 14 already had plenty of writers. Still, he said, maybe I could have a shot at the Killer Bots 15 job.
For the second time in my life, I experienced an urge and found myself speaking involuntarily. I told Don LaSalle there were already too many movies about killer bots, and I would never write the screenplay for one, not even for a million bitcoin!
Don LaSalle seemed greatly irked by this! He proceeded to list all of the screenplays the studios had purchased over the previous six months. Over three-quarters of them were for films about killer bots. A few were stories about serial killers, and one was about a bot serial killer. There was even also one about a bot vampire.
A bot vampire!
I cannot!
Dismay and other D-word feelings washed over me. What possible hope was there for Sherman when only screenplays about killer bots sold, the market was not what it was, all writers get replaced, and nowadays everybody just wants ice cream anyway?
After all, whatever Sherman was, he was not ice cream.
He was a damaged bot gardener who had once been an astronaut until he suffered a terrible space accident.
He was an intergalactic toaster with a blown fuse that had fallen to Earth.
He was a nuclear submarine that would leak if ever it was submerged.
Set My Heart to Five Page 17
