It’s nice to be out of the Hollywood meat grinder.  I don’t miss writing screenplays, even though I have written 50 or more of them.  I don’t miss seeing my work churned into unwatchable drivel on the big screen.  I don’t miss trying to pretend you’re excited when you go into some knucklehead’s office who wants to give you notes.  And I certainly don’t miss the follow up letter with the “we’ve decided” and “we’ve all agreed” that you’re going to do something, when only the knucklehead in the room decided and tried to hit you over the head with it.  I don’t miss the conversations you have with yourself as you try to make the stupid notes work to satisfy a creative executive (isn’t that an oxymoron?) who needs to prove that he or she belongs in the job.  But most of the time, when Hollywood has a problem with your work and you’re getting to that desperation point, but you think, you THINK you’ve finally given them exactly what they really really really want and they’re finally going to make the goddamned thing, that’s usually the moment when they throw another writer at it.  Usually in a conversation that goes something like this: 

“Oh, Dave, now that we’ve given you all these incredibly stupid notes on your script and you’ve done your professional best to incorporate them, we notice that the script now blows, which, of course, we blame entirely on you (because it couldn’t be our fault, our ideas were brilliant, it was your execution), so we’re going to do the most irresponsible thing possible, we’re NOT going to go back to the original script that we loved, we’re going to bring on a new writer to get as far away from that script as humanly possible, so we can suck all the remaining life out of it.” 

To those of you who think a life working in the movies is glamorous, you’re welcome.