The Water Bottle Tour: Why Unicornland Season Two Will Never Happen, P.II
Unicornland launched in February 2017, kicking of my adventures in La-La-Land. My New York credits as an experienced writer, producer and independent filmmaker were meaningless now; I was a baby writer.
This is the second installment of a three-part series on what happened after Unicornland launched, and why there will never be a Season Two.
In post-meeting calls, my rep confirmed things were going well; I was good in a room, connected well with executives, and everyone raved about Unicornland. It was a question of when, not if.The next day, I’d email the exec to thank them for their time, recap our conversation, and attach requested materials. Within minutes, I’d get a warm response promising to circle back in a week or so. A week or so later, I would circle back. Then again after another week. Crickets. At first, I took the silence personally. Was it something I said? Were my chuck taylors a little too casual? Maybe I shouldn’t have taken that entire fistful of mini candy bars...When silence became a pattern, I got curious. Perhaps it was email syntax; I beta-tested different voices from formal to business-casual to super fangirl excited. No dice. Perhaps it was timing; August was dead, September/October were slammed, and any emails sent before 10am or after 3pm got buried. But so did emails sent between 10am and 3pm. It’s hard to draw conclusions with no data points. But that wouldn't stop me!Up my sleeve was some geni magic: old friends from the NYC indie playwriting circuit who were now accomplished playwrights, TV staffers, screenwriters, even showrunners. They'd been through the tunnel of silence and come out the other side. They reassured me this was normal. In fact, what was unusual was that after only months in LA I was being sent out as a creator/showrunner with my own intellectual property (IP). My writer friends were unanimous here: the hierarchy was sacrosanct, and baby writers like me (uncredited in Hollywood) were rarely considered for anything beyond entry-level staffing. That Unicornland was being read was a huge accomplishment. It was reassuring to know I was ahead of the game, and that I could trust my reps. Still, the fact that the process was slow and operated on an internal logic that, to the untrained eye, appeared chaotic was cold comfort. It was a question of when, not if…but if when takes long enough, isn’t when also if? Getting meetings in Hollywood is a privilege. It’s also a lot of work. Between pre-gaming (this is LA; looking less than selfie-ready is career death), commuting (timed to avoid rush hour), the event (always a military hour), and getting stuck in traffic on the way home, each snatched three hours out of my writing day. By the time I got home, I’d be so strung out on the ghost-fantasy of returning to that movie-set office with my own parking spot, office, and Deadline-announced project in play. To cut off my brain’s manic looping of our conversation, I’d head to Sycamore Kitchen where, over a tuscan rosemary latte, I’d feverishly type out every talking point, every joke, and every idea that had been casually tossed around. Any one of these could be gold.It had become clear that the idea of Unicornland as a half-hour was warm-up conversation. A foot in the door. What most executives really cared about was; “what are you working on next?” My Google Doc of Pitch Ideas grew rapidly; the page-count was soon neck-and-neck with my car mileage. Every week, my rep would review this list and bookmark ideas to build out “on spec” (as in, written speculatively for free). I began to include these ideas in follow-up emails. This, apparently, was the secret to getting a second response. Sometimes–rarely, but sometimes–a second meeting or writing assignment*. It wasn’t a job, but it was data points. Coming up with pitches and writing on spec now took up the majority of my writing time. By the end of 2017, I’d written two pilots, a screenplay, a play, and three extensive treatments. All were sent out, several got me more generals which resulted in requests for new ideas. The purpose of a script, I now knew, was to get meetings to talk about what script I was working on next. Before, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Now I did, and it seemed more important than ever to focus. But my attention was divided by a small problem: In the absence of a writing job–and having spent my savings on Unicornland–I needed to make money. Having been an elite tutor/homeschool teacher in NYC for ten years, I was optimistic about my prospects in LA, but a city full of emerging writers equals an oversaturation of tutors. An hourly session that paid $200 in NYC paid $25 in LA. This rate did not include commute time, but it did include a non-monetary perk: I was now on first name terms with some of the biggest, most high-ranking writers and producers in Hollywood. I had their numbers in my phone, spent hours at their dining tables; their kids loved me. My rep added their names to my “network” list. It was gauche to target them for generals, but their friendship could potentially fan the flame once a project was in play. Between writing pitches, taking generals, and tutoring, I had less and less time to see friends. At least, that was my excuse. The truth was, I dreaded seeing people. Somehow, without noticing, I had become an introvert. It seemed necessary to protect myself from social situations that at best drained the creative energy required to write, and at worst germinated toxic thoughts that would infect my “process” for days. But then all aspects of real life became tender, gingerly. Going to the gym, writing at a coffee shop, driving to meetings, tutoring, shopping at the farmer’s market, date night with my partner; each innocuous daily ritual short-circuited back to the absence of the main event. Envy was the concierge greeting every observation, every interaction; “wouldn’t it be nice”; “when we can finally…”; “maybe someday”. Writer friends–folks I’d come up with, nursing cheap whiskey at dive bars after lackluster play readings in cramped, cold black box theaters–were now the subjects of embittered wonder. On rare occasions when we got together, I became fawning and duplicitous, peppering catch-ups with needy questions that thinly-veiled my insecurity: Why did executives like them so much? What made their script so special? Would they take me with them? Thoughts of inadequacy and desperation began to show up in my writing; stories of ugly ambition, rags-to-riches fantasies, underdogs vs greedy gatekeepers, characters seeking revenge against haters and (even more hateful) indifference. Beneath what I intended as whip-smart banter was a barely-masked bitterness. I was aware of this shift, and of the unhealthiness of isolation. I knew that writer friends were the only ones who could truly empathize, but talking about this felt taboo. Debbie Downer. In an industry built on confidence, the acknowledgement of fear is kamikaze. Instead, I directed all that energy to the next meeting. Then, bingo.One of my pitches–Coven, about a teenage wiccan who creates a high school MLM–struck. My rep sent it out wide, and soon the calendar was filled pitch meetings at big-name studios. My amazing producer Sandra Leviton and I finessed the pitch, memorized it, then spent a small fortune buying coffees for writer/producer friends in exchange for feedback on our practice pitch. Compared to generals, these pitch meetings were night-and-day. The executives sat forward in their chairs, asked strategic questions that pivoted from story concept to production requirements. At the end of each meeting, my producer and I slid giveaways across the table–a glossy look-book and an altar candle–before being personally escorted onto the elevator and through the lobby for a lingering goodbye. Then, we waited. And waited. And waited. “No news is good news,” my rep reminding us: “It means the project is still under consideration.” We waited some more. Then, finally:Unfortunately…but we can’t wait to hear what you’re working on next!This was all normal. For each home run there are hundreds of strikes. It’s a business of attrition. Keep going. Except there was nothing left to write. Or, to write about. I was generating thousands of words a day of cereal-box copy; content derived from Deadline announcements and IMDB summaries. The subtext seethed from every line: Is this good enough? Do you like me now? It had taken two years to level up from pitching Unicornland to pitching Coven. How many more two years would it take to win this war of attrition? How many two years’ did I have left? Taking a hard look at the situation, I was astonished by how much power I’d ceded to the industry. The original goal of making Unicornland had been to launch my writing career. Yet making Unicornland had accomplished that goal; I WAS a produced writer with big advantages over writer friends who were working up the hierarchy. Unlike them, I had creative control over my work, and critical recognition. Suddenly, self-producing wasn’t a thing to escape from, it was the ANSWER. Pre-production for Unicornland Season 2 would not only allow for creative autonomy, it was the perfect activity to override this writer’s block funk.I put the deck together, and began sending it out to contacts I'd met while taking Unicornland on the film festival circuit, and cold-calls from LinkedIn.Within days–without a word to my rep–my calendar was stacked with meetings. *Writing assignments are when executives invite select writers to develop ideas for IP owned by the studio/production company. It’s a lot of work and unpaid, but a good sign in that it implies the writer has been shortlisted.
