Picked him up at the airport. He had his iphone ear buds in but he kept talking to me as we got out of LAX to his apartment in WeHo.
He was a screenwriter and novelist who asked me if I ever considered writing about driving rideshare.
As a matter of fact, I said…
He was very encouraging and I admitted I was stuck in the middle of the worst Catch-22.
“Any story I really want to tell is so juicy or has so much detail that I am afraid I will expose the passenger even if I change the name and the places and everything,” I said.
“The heart of the story will be about THAT person, that real human being who might be horrified if they saw what they told me in confidence end up on the page, or worse in a kickass Netflix series where each of these stories gets put to life with a different celebrity driver each week talking to a new celebrity passenger, acting out the tales I have written down.”
He took out the ear buds and said, “wait, I thought you had lived in LA for a while. I thought you had been in the business.”
I have, I said, questioning my answer.
“No no, this isn’t journalism,” he continued, “where if you see a building on fire and you write about it, it gets published in the paper the next day. The odds of you writing a story that gets bought AND produced is minimal.”
He went on.
“Most stories don’t get deals. And most deals don’t get made. It doesn’t matter who you are or what the topic is. Right now in the shelves all around Hollywood is another Hollywood’s worth of unproduced screenplays.”
My stories will never make it to Netflix?
Your stories will never make it to Netflix.
Then I am free.
You are. Write it down. All of it.
I floored it.
$6.43 tip.
