"All Access"

There's this quark-like organization called the Sherwood Oaks Experimental College, which simultaneously does and does not exist. It has no physical presence except in the body of its founder, Gary Shusett. This virtual school exists to serve the creative community in Los Angeles, chiefly by creating the usual sorts of seminars, but with built-in opportunities to meet the participants and/or pitch to them. (The all-important "pitch" is where you briefly describe your project, hopefully in such a way as to make the pitchee decide that it sounds like the greatest movie idea since Gunga Din and should be filmed immediately. Which, of course, almost never actually happens.) This past weekend, partly in conjunction with the Writers Guild Awards, Gary staged what was called the "Screenwriters All Access" weekend.

The basic idea was simple: he would invite Hollywood players of all stripes to participate in panel discussions, and afterward, we participants would mob the front of the room in an unholy mass and try to get some face time with whichever panelist we thought might best Make Our Dreams Come True. But sometimes this basic model was improved upon: a lunch wherein a panelist would sit at your table and you could have a conversation at length; or breakout sessions in which the mob would break into smaller groups that could sit down with an individual panelist for a while. There were also traditional pitching sessions, and sometimes these elements could combine: thus, on Saturday Marc and I pitched City of Truth to Bridget Tyler from Red Wagon, then half an hour later Bridget ended up at our lunch table.

There was a kind of Socratic dialectic happening when all the panels were considered together. On the one hand there were the agents and the executives, who were all about numbers and trends; on the other hand were the writers and the directors, the people talking about art. If you were able to reconcile these very different discussions, you might begin to construct a synthesis, a framework for navigating your way through this town where both sides of the equation are inescapable.

Just one example of the numbers-and-trends people: a production company executive who flat-out told all we young screenwriters, "Don't write what you're passionate about." This guy was only interested in the surefire thing, the movie that did not resemble some past hit but was a carbon copy of some past hit. In other words, he doesn't give a fig for the artistic side of the equation and only wants to look at properties that will make his company, and him, more money. What was worse, he was proud of his position, and clearly considered himself quite daring and bold for having the guts to Speak Truth unto us.

He is, of course, a moron. A smart moron but still a moron. When introducing himself, he made an exaggerated claim about some software he helped design that is now quite famous, and said that now that he had all that money he could turn his attentions to whatever he wanted; and this is what he's choosing to do with his time on earth. All that money, all those possibilities, everything he could be doing with wealth and power, and he chooses to make cookie-cutter movies that say nothing, and then to go sit on panels, crush the dreams of dreamers, and act all proud of himself as some kind of innovator. He is the worst that Hollywood has to offer, and I was glad when Bridget-from-Red Wagon (a company with some real movies to its credit, and good ones, like Gladiator, Jarhead and Memoirs of a Geisha) told me that this guy will almost certainly be out of the industry within three years. It's a damn shame that someone just like him will certainly move in to take his place.

But by happy chance, after this panel finally concluded (I eventually exercised my critic's prerogative, and fell asleep on them), another came up comprised of the directors Nicholas Meyer, Richard Benjamin, Pen Densham and Henry Jaglom. They proved to be an unexpectedly great combination, with some serious credits to their name: Meyer is a terrific writer/director whose work includes Star Trek II (the best of them all), The Day After and Time After Time; Benjamin, the well-known comic actor, also directed the utterly wonderful My Favorite Year, with Peter O'Toole gallavanting gloriously; Densham is probably best known as the screenwriter of Kevin Costner's Robin Hood movie (the end result was not his fault, he didn't direct it); and Jaglom is a longtime indie stalwart who is probably best known for directing Orson Welles in his last screen role. They were all very bright, with well-considered opinions about directing, about film, about art.

But it was Nick Meyer who said the most valuable thing I heard the whole weekend. It was, simply, this: "There is no formula." As he said it, I realized that every seminar of this sort is crammed full of people who are trying to find The Formula, the to-do list that will, once completed, make them into Hollywood players. They believe that this formula is a closely-guarded secret, kept in a vault somewhere in the Valley, but that every once in a rare while someone might just decide to spill the beans and reveal the formula, if only you can schmooze them well enough at an event like this one. But Meyer said it plainly and inescapably: "There is no formula." There is no single path through the Hollywood jungle, everyone's experience will be unique to him/herself, and there's really nothing he can tell anyone about how to make films or how to succeed in the film industry.

I talked to him afterward and he only reinforced the point. He came up in the biz back in 1971, and it's all so different now that his story would be meaningless to anyone today. It's exactly for this reason that he avoids ever telling personal anecdotes at events like this one (and anecdotes are the life's blood of pretty much everyone in town when he gets up in front of a crowd): because he doesn't want people to think for a second that if they just do what he did in a given circumstance, then they too will succeed like he did. But it's not true.

Eventually the "all access" part of the weekend just kinda disappears: by Sunday evening, as the Writers Guild Awards were gearing up one floor down, Gary Shusett started rounding up the Big Names and herding them in to talk to us for a few minutes. But by then there was no chance of actually talking to any of these folks: David Milch, J.J. Abrams, Oscar nominees Michael Arndt and Guillermo Arriaga, Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry, Jon Cassar from 24 and B.J. Novak from The Office, even CAA chairman Rick Nicita, they came in for a few or for several minutes, said whatever was on their minds, maybe answered a question or two, and then they were gone with the next celebrity on his/her way in. It was fun, but I had already learned everything I needed to learn two days before.

Eventually, Marc ended up as a panelist himself. As a writer/producer who actually had gotten his movie into theaters, he was one step ahead of most of the other attendees, so Gary put him on an early-Sunday directors' panel. We worked out a joke before he went up: "Yesterday I was one of you guys, sitting out there, which is an example of how fast the industry can turn." (Laugh number one.) "And in about an hour I'll be sitting with you guys again, which is also an example of how fast the industry can turn." (Laugh number two.) Funny how people were treating him just that little bit differently after he'd been one of the panelists....

Really, the most valuable part of such a weekend is networking. We met some tremendous people, such as Autumn McAlpin, a terrific columnist from the Orange County Register whose work I've been enjoying today, and Maurice Daniel Oulay, an African-born filmmaker currently working on a documentary about poverty in Africa that I'm looking forward to seeing. (To name only two of the many.) It's impossible to know which of these new contacts might prove invaluable someday; a few years ago, Marc was at a Film Independent event and happened to be seated next to someone who is now our new business partner, Monica Kim. Any chance encounter at such an event could prove to be the crucial turning point in a career; and since we now know that there is no formula, these contacts are really the best--perhaps the only--reason to go.