Party Girl_ A Novel - Anna David [41]
I e-mail a girl I know who’s an assistant at UTA and ask her to send me the job list. UTA is one of the big agencies in town and for whatever reason, they have a list of the unannounced industry jobs available. In order to see it, you need to know someone who works there, and so the lack of availability of the job list to the general populace serves as its own screening process. It wasn’t announced—I just found out about it from the UTA job list, I’ve heard people say. I was, I decide, going to be one of them.
I do a line and then, in what seems like minutes, the UTA girl e-mails me back. I print up the job list and start highlighting the positions that sound appealing, taking only one break to snort up a few more lines. Even though I already did assistant duty—slaving away as an editorial assistant at a parenting magazine in San Francisco—I realize that if I’m going to take the film business by storm, I’m probably going to have to start at the bottom. And the UTA job list provides many different opportunities to do just that: Mailroom clerk at William Morris, one listing reads. Second assistant to top-notch producer with Sony deal, reads another. And then my eyes catch on a listing that seems tailor-made for me: Part-time personal assistant for Imagine executive Holly Min, it says. Ideal for writer or actor needing extra cash. I think I’ve seen Holly Min’s name in the trades before. And, as I focus in on the words “ideal for a writer,” it occurs to me that what I should probably be doing is writing screenplays of my own.
Think about it. Everyone in this town, down to the guy who bags my groceries at Gelson’s, is a “screenwriter.” They all lug their laptops to Starbucks and register their scripts at the Writer’s Guild and talk about their “second act problems,” even though none of them are actual writers. Most of them will even admit as much. Oh, I’m not really a writer, I heard a guy say at the premiere of his movie. I just had a great idea.
Well, I am really a writer. I wrote short stories from the age of about twelve on, majored in creative writing for Christ’s sake, and have logged time as a professional journalist at two different magazines. I’ll show these wannabe writers how it’s done, I think, imagining my life as an aspiring writer working for Holly Min. I would schedule her meetings—when she, Ron Howard, and Brian Grazer would meet with Russell Crowe or Tom Hanks or whomever—and read her scripts for her, and over time she’d realize that the comments I gave her about the various scripts she was developing were more intelligent than anything in the scripts. This girl’s the real thing, Holly would say one day, grabbing my hand and bringing me in to meet with Ron Howard. This is the mind we need to tap. Ron would value Holly’s opinion so much that, on her word alone, he’d beg me to write something that could inspire him. I’d hesitate for just a second, and then blushingly admit that I actually had been working on a script. Holly would wink at me from across the room because she, of course, would have already read this screenplay, declared it brilliant, and planned this reveal. I’d pull a copy of the script out of my chic Coach briefcase bag (which Holly would have given me when she realized after a few weeks of our working together that her life had never run more smoothly) and leave a copy with him. I’d go to Starbucks with Holly, where we’d smoke cigarettes and make plans to start our own company based on her producing acumen and my writing talent and by the time we’d return to the office, Ron would have finished reading, declared it a masterpiece, and offered me a million dollars—or maybe, like, $750,000.
I call Holly’s number, and speak to her assistant, Karen. “I’m actually going to be doing the interviewing