Yahoo News Anonymous Strike Diary: The Well-Known Creator on His Past and the Future
This is part of a series of frank accounts of the strike from Hollywood writers at different levels in their careers.
Confession: I am not currently on the picket line. I am on vacation in the Maldives, sitting on the deck of my above-water villa, watching a school of parrotfish zipping around the pylons below me and contemplating ordering another drink though it’s before noon.
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Okay, this is a lie. I am actually in my hometown in the middle of the emotionally and physical exhausting task of emptying my childhood home of decades worth of stuff, watching moths zipping around the now-bare walls and contemplating taking another defeat-nap though it’s before noon. Mine is a family that kept everything and thus, in going through literally every item in the house, I am being confronted with things I haven’t seen in over thirty years. And a picture has begun to take shape of how all the things I consumed, read, played with, watched, studied — how it all became the raw material for whatever it is that I am as a writer.
From things I’ve unearthed and boxed or tossed this week, it seems that if one were to create my “voice” in a lab, one would need to mix together trace amount of Garbage Pail Kids, baseball cards, Saturday Morning cartoons, toy cars, dirt bikes, Dungeons and Dragons character sheets, endless shitty sitcoms, Guinness Books of World Records, Phil Collins cassette tapes, Rubik’s Cubes, Monty Python, bouncy balls, an Atari 2600, endless Garfield, Far Side, and Calvin and Hobbes books, John Hughes movies, Premiere magazine, and the novelization of Top Gun. And later Playboy magazines and stolen cigarettes. A bra someone let me keep. Chekhov, Ibsen, and Shaw. Firecrackers. Scorsese. The Pogues. The Pixies. An illegally-made copy of my parents’ car key. e.e. cummings. Heartbreak. Weed. My writing is not purely, obviously, the sum of the above but these formative elements course through every story I tell. Every character I create. Everything I want to say.
When I hear older writers say that this strike isn’t for them, I think “fuck you, speak for yourself, this strike is for me!” But this awful, contemplative week has changed my mind, and I’m actually growing excited about the inevitability of the next generation slowly edging me out. (I said slowly.) But it is true, this strike is not, actually, for us. It is not for those old enough to bear the fortunate burden of cleaning out their childhood home. It is not for those of us who can joke about a vacation in the Maldives because it is not financially out of reach for us to one day go there. It is for those I have met on the lines who are pre-WGA. Those who have moved to L.A. and are living wherever 24-year-olds can afford to live. (In my day it was North Hollywood and Echo Park. Now where is it? Northridge? Sunland? Barstow?) The strike is for those for whom the need to create burns as bright as it did for me back then — when I would come home from a soul-numbing temp job, fire up the Compaq, open my Limewired copy of Final Draft 5, pour a glass of Two Buck Chuck, and write until I fell asleep sitting upright. The strike is for those within whom the future timeless TV shows and movies are currently percolating. And though stolen cigarettes will live forever, certainly those future voices are being forged by other things. Memes and Taylor Swift lyrics. Online porn and YouTube gamers. Rick and Morty and Abbott Elementary. Sally Rooney and Timothée Chalamet.
And perhaps in the strike of 2041, after once again being undermined by the DGA, they will trudge out to the gates of the AppleParamountPfizer (with SHOWTIME)! lot and march for the next generation of writers and dream of retiring to coastal Paraguay, the Maldives having been subsumed by the rising ocean years ago.
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