Project Greenlight

So, I've decided to start writing again, at least for a few minutes every day, in the hope that a little stream-of-consciousness blather will silence legalese that rushes through my brain all day. Maybe it even will inspire me to submit that short story to The New Yorker before I turn 40 in a little more than a year. I really want to get a short story published--preferably in The New Yorker--before I turn 40.

It's not that I haven't been published before. My work was featured in an upstate NY labor union newsletter in 1986, to high praise from the Cortland Amalgamated Glass Workers; in a federal government publication on Drug Demand Reduction (don't ask); and in a couple of American Bar Association quarterlies. By "featured," I mean "included in the table of contents."

I also co-wrote, with my childhood friend Kathy G-M, a screenplay called "The Truth About Jenny Mitchell." We wrote this screenplay for "Project Greenlight," the HBO show that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck produced as an Independent Film Reality Series (isn't that ironic?) to give new writers a chance to see their work on the Big Screen. It lasted about three seasons, until HBO realized that the films it produced had launched nothing but Shia LaBoeuf off the Disney Channel. Our screenplay didn't win Project Greenlight or even make it to the final 10, largely because we first had to survive multiple rounds of reviews by our fellow competitors in order to climb the ladder to a sit-down with Ben and Matt.

As a contest condition, each participant had to read about a dozen scripts by other Greenlighters, and then rate them on a scale of 1-10 in various categories. Ours was a flick about two smart, creative women, who plotted the political downfall of this woman who was mean to them in high school (smart, creative, and, um, "vengeful"). We didn't win because we TOTALLY missed our demographic in the early rounds. What should have been a simple random sample of reviewers was largely skewed to one of two ends of the filmaker bell curve: 1) Guys who think they are Orson Welles reincarnated and who call things "Fellini-esque" without ever having seen a Fellini film; and 2) guys who look like Orson Welles: the-LaterYears and were inspired to filmmaking by Battlestar Gallactica and Smokey and the Bear. THIS was our test demographic.

One of our reviewers was a 55-year-old man from Oklahoma. We suspect he's the one who wrote that script we had to review about a truck driver who drove "through" the apocolypse on his way to a company softball game (like Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," but without the Pulitzer Prize. And with group sports. And shitty). He totally lowballed us because, in his words, the movie was a "TOTAL CHICK FLICK" that he could "BARELY FINISH." Apparently, our demographic was too busy watching "My Best Friend's Wedding" and using "When Harry met Sally" as an adjective ("Jennifer and Michael's relationship is SOOO 'whenharrymetsally,' don't you think??") to write a screenplay.

So, we didn't win. We didn't get a sitdown with Men and Batt. We didn't even meet them. At least I didn't. Because of Kathy G-M's endless moxie and willingness to cash in a bunch of favors and cut in front of a lot of people in line, that screenplay eventually was put directly into the hands of Mr. Ben Affleck himself. Sure, it was at a political fundraiser. . . and, yeah, he was talking to Alexandra Kerry at the time. But, who knows what Mr. Affleck did with the CD that Kathy slipped to him that night. Maybe the bewildered stare he gave her meant what we took it to mean; namely: "I love it already!" (although, since then, we have noticed that Ben wore the same look on his face through large portions of "Jersey Girl," leaving us to wonder whether he was, in fact, "acting," at the fundraiser.)

All we know now, three years later, is that our project was never officially Greenlighted. At least not yet. But you never know. We had that baby copyrighted. And we've got a lawyer in our back pocket if we ever read in Entertainment Weekly that Jennifer Garner is in Ottowa filming "The Truth About Veronica Mitchell."