Are people like my late friend, Blake Snyder and me - who write books about breaking into show biz, who teach TV and screen writing classes (as I have done occasionally at UCLA Extension and at UNLV,) who appear at script writing expos to sell our books and ourselves (I’ve done it once,) who offer seminars, workshops, or private consulting (I don’t,) and sell software to wannabe screen and TV writers (I don’t do that either) - offering false hope?  Are we doing little more than hawking the latest hair growth tonic, weight loss miracle, or ab flattener to people who will never actually benefit from what we are peddling?

In the ten days since Blake died, I’ve thought about a lot of things.  I’ve remembered the good times that Blake and I had collaborating on four spec screenplays, and lingering over long lunches at Jerry’s Deli in the Valley while we chatted about our careers and swapped show biz stories.  I’ve also remembered the frustration of attending meeting after meeting after meeting with Blake at what seemed like every studio and production company in Hollywood trying to drum up a movie writing assignment.  These endless and usually fruitless meetings are the screen writers’ Bataan Death March.  I remembered the hours, days, weeks, sometimes months that Blake and I spent working out movie stories for producers - who never paid us for any of our time or effort - and then pitching those ideas to extremely unreceptive studio executives.  We sold nothing, and stopped trying. 

Were Blake and I filled with our own false hope about our potential for success as a screen writing team?  Probably.  We were too old by the time we started collaborating – I was fifty, he was forty-five - to ever get past the Hollywood gate keepers.

When we wrote our books – Save the Cat and Elephant Bucks – were we passing our false hope on to you?

If we were, it wasn’t what either of us had in mind.

Blake was a warm-hearted and generous guy with a “sunshine on Maui” disposition.  He was also one of the most eccentric people I have ever met, but that’s another story that won’t be published in this blog.  (See traceyjackson.online.com.)  I was one of a number of people who urged Blake to write Save the Cat.  I don’t think my urging played any role in his writing the book.  He was working on it already without actually telling me about it.  I knew Blake pretty well, and when I read Save the Cat, I was reading words that I had heard Blake speak many times privately to me before he committed those words to print.  Blake genuinely believed he was on to something with his Blake Snyder Beat Sheet.  Well, he was.  I still think it is the best formula for how to structure a movie script that I have ever seen.

Blake was the eternal optimist.  He always thought that the script he was working on by himself, or the script he was working on with me, or the script he was working on with someone else, was going to be the next huge spec sale.  If, through his books, through his workshops, through his blog, through his charisma and his contagious enthusiasm, he passed his eternal optimism on to others, and therefore inadvertently offered false hope to people who were never going to make a dime writing movie scripts, well, I know that wasn’t what he was trying to accomplish. 

I also know that the Save the Cat mini-phenomenon was a huge surprise to Blake.  He thought he was just going to sell a few books.  I remember how shocked he was when he started getting invited to speak.  He was delighted and flattered to go anywhere that anyone wanted to hear him.  Save the Cat turned into a second career for Blake, but it was never part of a master plan.  It just happened. 

After Elephant Bucks was published, I attended just one of the many screen writing expos that are held in places like Los Angeles and New York City.  I wasn’t supposed to be there.  I was a last-minute substitute for a TV writer who couldn’t make it.  I didn’t like the experience.  I felt that the wannabe writers who attended my seminar were mostly too old to be starting a career as a TV writer, and too many of them were, to put it uncharitably, whackos, who were never going to make it as a writer in Hollywood.  I felt these people were wasting their money and living on false hope, and I didn’t want to be one of their many enablers.  I have never gone back to one of those expos.

Blake was at the same expo that I attended.  I ran into him in the lobby.  He was a rock star at this thing.  He was Elvis.  He was surrounded by fans.  He already had a following.  This was the first time I came face-to-face with the Save the Cat whirlwind.  It was like being at a comic book convention.  Lots of eccentric people who don’t fit into the mainstream find each other at some sort of shared-interest event.  It was exciting in a way, but it was also a little creepy.  The people who had paid money to attend this expo were kidding themselves.  This expo wasn’t going to do anything except take their money.  None of the authors, experts, and so-called insiders offering guidance, advice, books and software at the expo were ever going to help any of the attendees get their big break in Hollywood.  It felt a lot like a New Age convention that I once attended – on a dare – at which spiritualists, gurus, quacks and crazies were all selling their phony supernatural powers.  The New Age convention was pure hokum, and I’m sad to say that the one script writing expo I went to felt a little too similar.

Did Blake ever feel that he was selling hokum?  I don’t know, but I don’t think so.  He was, in truth, offering really useful advice about how to properly write a spec screenplay.  Again, the guidance in Save the Cat is spot on.  You will never read another book that is more realistic about how to formulate a spec screenplay.  Did people walk away from a Blake Snyder workshop with false hope, with delusions that their spec screenplay was going to sell for a million dollars?  It’s likely that some of them did.  Look, in a hotel meeting room of a hundred or two hundred people who are all writing spec screenplays, how many of those specs are actually ever going to sell?  The brutally honest answer is: None.  Not one.  Not ever.

So who does sell a spec screenplay?  The brutally honest answer is:  Someone who is so smart and so talented that they don’t need to buy a book or attend an expo.

Did Blake ever read somebody’s second-rate spec screenplay and fill them with false confidence that their script did not support?  That may have happened.  Not because Blake was ever trying to fool anybody, but because Blake was so enthusiastic and so optimistic that it would have been completely in character for him to encourage everyone he ever met.  He told me that Elephant Bucks would be as huge as Save the Cat.  Well, I’ve sold a tiny fraction of the books that Blake sold.  I knew he was full of shit when he said it, but I also knew that he believed it and sincerely wanted that success for me.

Does Elephant Bucks peddle false hope?  Well, now that the book has been out for a couple of years and I’ve gotten a few hundred e-mails, I guess it probably does.  It was never my intent to offer false hope to anyone.  I wrote the book for the same reasons that Blake wrote Save the Cat.  I thought I had some good ideas to share.  I thought I could help a few people.  I was encouraged to write it, not only by Blake, the master cheerleader, but by others.  But perhaps I was a little too encouraging, especially at the top of the book.

Here was my thought about Elephant Bucks:  Say you live someplace that isn’t Los Angeles or New York City.  Say you’re dying to be a TV sitcom writer.  Say you can’t find a class on how to write for TV, or the class you took was taught by someone who has never been any closer to Hollywood than you have.  Maybe you pick up my book and thumb through it, absorb a few useful pointers, and hear about the business from someone who was actually in it, and then you decide where to go from there.  That’s all I had in mind.

Blake Snyder may have, to some extent, been in the business of peddling false hope.  But I knew him, and I can tell you that was never his intent.  He loved everybody and wanted to help anyone who asked him.  He had a wonderful time in the Save the Cat universe.  It added meaning to the last few years of his short life.  He was entitled to his little bit of celebrity.

As for me:  I don’t do seminars or workshops.  I don’t go to expos or script writing conventions.  The only money I have ever taken for teaching has been from universities where the students get college credit for my classes.  I will never publish another book about writing or breaking into show business.  Beyond the very small fee I was initially paid for delivering the Elephant Bucks manuscript, I have not made a dime off the book.  I do not offer false hope to any of my students or to the people who contact me by e-mail.  I don’t take anyone’s money.

Ultimately, friends, false hope is in the heart of the individual.   If you or someone you know is kidding himself or herself about his or her chances to be a Hollywood script writer, that’s the individual’s issue to work out.

I would never walk into a hotel meeting room in front of fifty or one hundred or two hundred people and try to convince them that they were all going to be famous Hollywood script writers someday.  As I said earlier, I appeared at one of these things in front of maybe thirty people.  Most of the people in my audience were mad at me because I was so pessimistic.  If I were ever again standing outside one of those hotel meeting rooms, the one thing about which I would be certain is that none of the people sitting inside is ever going to make it in Hollywood.

I have just finished writing a new spec screenplay that may be going on the market in the next few weeks or months – depending on whether my manager likes it and how many notes he has.  I had a big career in Hollywood.  As a professional writer who has been paid many times to write TV shows and movies, what are my chances of selling my new spec screenplay?  About a billion to one.  Why did I even bother to write it?  False hope.

False hope is not a healthy thing, but without it, there wouldn’t be any Hollywood.

Post Script:  If you want to read even more pessimism and discouragement about Hollywood, also check out Tracey Jackson’s article, The Real Ugly Truth, in The Huffington Post.  Here’s a link to the article: 

www.huffingtonpost.com/tracey-jackson/the-real-ugly-truth_b_244544.html