Freshman screenwriter
He half-ran, half-walked back to his dorm room with the beginnings of the Best Idea He’d Ever Had forming in his brain. It would be a movie unlike any other. None of this Garden State bull shit that got Zach Braff laughed out of town, and it wouldn’t be like that mumbly bumbly Lena Dunham movie either. No, this was going to really strike home for those of his generation, a movie they’d be talking about for ages, something to go in the canon. “See, here,” future film professors would say, “He was only nineteen when he penned his first opus. Just watching the opening scene reminds me of the first time I felt someone really understood what it was like to be a young person at the crux of humanity and adulthood…” Sure, something like that.
It took him a weekend to race through the first draft. No need for significant plotting or outlining, no, he knew what this story would be. His roommate may have come and gone from their room, but he didn’t notice or care. With the strains of alt-pop-folk music thrumming through his head phones, he went from FADE IN to FADE OUT, pleased with what he wrought.
The following week, when his friends asked where he’d been that weekend, how he’d missed Jeremy black out and run through campus naked, he responded that he’d been… busy. He wanted to play coy, not be a dick about it, and only let them know once he’d made it into Sundance. He could see it now….
He’d be up on the stage, sitting in a director’s folding chair as hundreds of unmistakably jealous eyes bored holes into him. He’d share a secret smile with those eyes, “I did something you’ll never do.” But he’d be modest as he answered the moderator — someone like Scorsese or a famous film critic or someone, he hadn’t decided yet — the moderator’s questions.
“I really just wanted to tell the story of a young kid fresh from a small town, eager to make his dreams come true."
“And do his dreams come true?"
Slight smirk. “I guess it’s up to you as the audience to decide.” Uproarus applause.
Every night, he’d go home and tweak his script; it was in really good shape for a first draft, so it didn’t need much noodling. Each line of dialogue sounded like him, like what he wanted to say. And man, that second act speech by the love interest — of course he gave her lines, he wasn’t a caveman — when she tries to convince the main character that only by finishing his novel will he fulfill his destiny. Damn. You can’t make this stuff up. Except he did.
He waited a month to show it to anyone. He’d teased his project to his friends, not so much that they’d get annoyed with him, but enough that they were clamoring to read it. He’d also emailed the head MFA Screenwriting professor and requested a meeting. It was all very legit.
On the day of his meeting, he sent his friends manila envelopes with his script printed and bradded. It cost a small fortune at the dorm printer, but it was worth it. this shit would be sitting in museums one day and his friends would tell their children stories of reading the first draft of what became the Defining Movie of a Generation.
Walking to Professor Burke’s office, he quelled his nerves with thoughts of what Burke would say — “Great Scott!” maybe if he was trying to be cute, or more likely, “Damn, I really haven’t seen work like this from an undergraduate, let alone a freshman! Let’s see what we can do about early admission into the MFA program for you…” Maybe Burke would insist he submit it to contests or festivals. Maybe he’d get an agent! Can you imagine?! Going to meetings with Spielberg and JJ Abrams and Tarantino fighting over his script. And it would all start here, today.
He marched up to Burke’s door, one last manila envelope under his arm. Knocking expectantly, he couldn’t help but hum a little nondescript tune, bouncing on his toes and tapping his fingers. “Come in.”
He sat down across from Burke, eyeing the professor’s office piled high with marked up scripts and books on movies and screenwriting. Posters hung haphazardly behind the bespectacled and crisp older woman, who had yet to look away from her computer screen. Burke’s chair was at a higher angle and it was a struggle to look her in the eye.
“Hi Professor Burke, I’m the student who contacted you a few days ago about meeting?"
“Are you in my class?”
“Well no, but I — see I wrote this script, and I thought with your expertise and experience you could —"
“God dammit. You’re the fifteenth fucking freshman dick flicker I’ve had in my office this semester. Did you print up your script? Christ.” Burke held out her hand. “Let’s see it."
He tentatively passes the manila envelope over, trying to remember what his dad told him about looking tough in the face of the enemy. “It’s a coming-of-age dramedy about a —"
“Shut up.” Burke scanned the first few pages. Flipped to the middle.
“It actually should be read all the way through before skipping around —"
Burke just looked at him. Reading, “Your words are what you have to give the world, Foster. They are what make you you. And to think that you would just take them away from the rest of us like that, well, I don’t want to know the man to do such a disservice to the entirety of humanity forever.” He smiled a little as she read the line. It was good.
Burke took off her glasses as she set the script down. “Kid, I’m gonna give you a valuable piece of advice and I want you to listen because in your lily white life no one has probably ever told you this: You are one of many. Take whatever ‘many’ means to you and multiply it by ten thousand. Every little prick with a keyboard thinks that he’s the guy, and I’ll tell you what, only one of those guys is the guy, and that guy might even be a chick. So toss this out, don’t show it to anyone, and spend a few years realizing how vastly unimportant you are. Then write something, if you still have something to say. But don’t just write shit because you like the sound of your own voice."
They sat there a minute in silence, at an impasse. Burke gestured to the door as she went back to whatever she’d been doing.
Outside, he walked in silence, out the building, across the street, up the hill, in his dorm, up the elevator, down the hall, into his room, to his bed.
“What does she know, she’s just a professor."
Fin.
