BOY IN THE BUBBLE

So where was I?

Oh. Right.

I had this little scary robot show and for whatever reason couldn't convince enough people that it was a) scary enough b) robot enough or c) in English. Add that dim sum combo of factors to a red bean paste of non-monetizable early adopters dvring the show like motherfuckers and now I'm unemployed.

Everyone says having your show cancelled is like a death but I've been dead before and at least when you're dead you don't get thrown off the Warner Bros. lot for haunting your old parking space. They probably mean it's like the death of a friend or a family member but that shit only hurts when it's YOUR friend or family member and even then it's mitigated by age, lifestyle and whether that person was a Hollywood friend or a real one and whether that family member left you money.

Losing your show is more like a surprise divorce where you get served papers in the morning and your (ex)wife is fucking Human Target by three in the afternoon using the same time slot your child was conceived in and also where she did that one thing that one time on your birthday.

People say the bright side to losing your show is gaining time to spend with your family but I'm pretty sure that waking up next to your ex-showrunner spouse whom you haven't seen for two and a half years is pretty close to waking up next to that special someone you met the night before at Carlos n' Charlie's in Cancun on Spring Break.

WIFE: Oh...It's you.
EX-SHOWRUNNER: Hey baby.
WIFE: You look...different than I remember.
EX-SHOWRUNNER: I've gone a little grey.
WIFE: Or a little fat.
EX-SHOWRUNNER: Pretty sure it's grey.
WIFE: Pretty sure...fat. Was I...drunk?
EX-SHOWRUNNER: Drunk? When?
WIFE: I don't know. The whole time?

You should own your self-inflicted wounds if for no other reason than a) they are yours and b) you inflicted them, you dumb motherfucker, but I do want to say in my own defense that it takes a special kind of someone to work seventy hours a week where it is HALLOWEEN 24FUCKING7 and not pack on a few--

WIFE: Dozen.

A dozen--

WIFE: A few dozen.

a few dozen pounds fine I get it. A few dozen pounds consisting mainly of but not limited to: Chocolate Pop Tarts, Twinkies, Ding Dongs, double-decker PB&Js, pink and white animal cookies, duck sandwiches, maricopa almonds, stinky cheese, french bread, deer in a thai curry peppercorn sauce, trail mix with the peanuts picked out, breakfast sausage, pistachios, Diet Coke, large Jamba Juices, those little Butterfingers, lox when we had Zvi the Israeli P.A., and sushi.

And I'm willing to own that. Especially the sushi part.

One of the hardest parts of having your show cancelled is the part BEFORE it's cancelled, when it's "on the bubble". The absolute hardest part of that, besides the phrase "on the bubble," is everyone gets it in their head that you actually know what's happening with your show and you're just not telling them. No one believes the show's fate is in the air, they believe the fate's been decided, you know the fate, but you're just not sharing it with anybody. Now understand this: at any one time on a show there are over TWO HUNDRED people working on a show. OVER TWO HUNDRED FAMILIES DERIVING THEIR INCOME FROM YOUR LITTLE CREATIVE ENDEAVOR.

What kind of fucking asshole would I be if I knew they were all going to be out of work in a month but just didn't feel it was politically expedient to tell them?

CONSCIENCE: Hey. Buddy. That grip's wife is having a baby in two months. He's thinking of leaving to work on a feature.

ASSHOLE ME: We're cancelled in two weeks.

CONSCIENCE: We gotta tell him.

ASSHOLE ME: Nah. People leaving. Bad for morale. Not politically expedient.

Who but a heartless cocksucker would stop someone from getting other work knowing they had no future at their current job? (Other than William Morris and Endeavor, that is.)

But I progress.

I guess there were signs that the show was in trouble (other than the 1.3 rating and the four share). First there was the day I was in my office and looked up to see Chuck Lorre and a Warner Bros. facilities manager standing in my doorway pointing to various features and using their hands to take "air measurements." (Chuck tried to play it off like waving to me God Bless him, but I know an air measurement when I see it.)

I know what you're all thinking: Chuck Lorre needs office space? What the fuck for? Doesn't he already have office space spread out all over half the fucking studio? Isn't it enough that Charlie Sheen's trailer is the size of Waylon Jennings' tour bus and it blocks the best way to ride a golf cart from a certain scary robot writer's office to a particular scary robot sound stage? There's only 2 and half men for fuck's sake, and one of them's like, six years old or something.

You think MR. CHUCK FUCKING LORRE that just because you've pimped my show on Big Bang that you can stand out in my hallway with a basket waiting for the guillotine to fall and my head to roll right to you? Do you think you can do that? Air measurer?

Damn right you can. You're Chuck fucking Lorre and you own my ass.

But Chuck didn't take my office--I believe he said something about my private bathroom having a non-platinum sink--and what I thought was good news soon became anything but. Because while you may be a bubble show to your family and your fans, as far as the studio goes the minute your show wraps you are a deadbeat renter who's already forfeited his cleaning deposit.

It was Open Season on the Sarah Connor Suite as My Room of Ones Own soon became the Potential Room of Any Jackass Pilot Producer who Thought His Show was getting Picked Up. And believe me, there's a lot of those assholes. Poking their heads in, hopped up on good test scores in the key demos, power-drunk and showing off their spanking new laminated Warner Bros. ID card hanging off a lanyard like a slutty USC freshman and her Spring Weekend mug.

And yet. No one took it.

I was starting to feel like Grandma's hand-knit afghan at the garage sale that starts out a keepsake you couldn't part with but ends up as the substitute for styrofoam peanuts when you need to wrap up the six matching sunflower pattern kitchen glasses your mother gave you when you left for college.

Eventually I cracked and started taking the whole thing personally. I'd hear them coming and start screaming "Vultures! Vultures! Come in vultures!" It was that John Irving novel with the orphans and the older ones just know they're fucked and they start rejecting the parents before they can be rejected--

(It's here that I just want to note that I haven't read "that John Irving novel" but I'm pretty sure I saw a movie based on "a John Irving novel" and I feel like that scene was in the movie and should've been if it wasn't.)

--I really did this. Forget the John Irving thing. I really did yell this at people. No one thought it was funny. Well. I did.

I also considered renting the office back from Warner Bros., myself. It was a romantic gesture, or a lazy one, as I had a huge stuffed cow and a Lego Tower of Babel that I couldn't fit into the back of my Chrysler. As it turns out, the studio will rent you back their offices, but at THE SAME RATE THE PRODUCTION PAYS, which, while I can't remember the exact amount, worked out to something around $450,000 a month. But that did include the private bathroom with the non-platinum sink.

Eventually the day came when I was evicted from the room I'd written thirty episodes of my very first television show. I packed a very large SUV with a very large amount of computer equipment, scripts, DVDs, Sarah Connor memorabilia, something that may or may not have been many half-empty tequila bottles, some office supplies I don't want to talk about, and possibly some gum and trail mix. Despite the show NOT yet being cancelled, I was the last person to leave the empty building and would've turned the lights out if I was paying for the electricity.

I drove up to the security gate and prepared to be waved through, knowing there was a good chance this was the last time I'd be on this lot in my capacity as Executive Producer of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. It was after 8:00 and that meant I was guaranteed a "trunk check," a phenomenal Hellerian ritual by which the guards checked your trunk and NO MATTER WHAT WAS IN THERE let you leave the lot. I had never known ANYONE to EVER explain themselves regarding the contents of their trunk during the trunk check ritual. I think this has even happened:

GUARD: Trunk please.
ANONYMOUS TV PRODUCER: Sure, Frank. How's the kids?
GUARD/FRANK: Good. Good. (Checks trunk) Is that Bugs Bunny in there?
ANONYMOUS TV PRODUCER: Yeah. I roofied him.
GUARD/FRANK: Sure. Yeah. Looks that way.
ANONYMOUS TV PRODUCER: I'll probably bring him back tomorrow.
GUARD/FRANK: All righty. Make sure to call him a drive on, though. Otherwise we can't let him on.
ANONYMOUS TV PRODUCER: Of course. I'm no rookie, Frank.

So on my final official day on the lot I pull to the guard shack with my SUV full of EVERYTHING.

GUARD: Hey. How're you tonight?
ME: Last night, Frank. Last night on the lot.
GUARD: Looks that way. That your whole office in there?
ME: Pretty much.

As I start to pull away--

GUARD: You got your property sheet?
ME: Excuse me?
GUARD: Your property sheet. Like an inventory sheet. With all of this inventoried and signed off on by the production.
ME: What?
GUARD: I'm gonna have to ask you to turn around and return to the lot, go to your production offices, and get an executive to inventory all of this, certify it as yours, and then sign the sheet. Then you can leave.
ME: Frank. Let me explain something. There is nobody else. I'm it.
GUARD: Well someone is going to have to list, certify, and sign.
ME: Someone? Like who someone?
GUARD: Someone. A producer. Someone.

And then it hit me.

ME: Frank! I'm that someone! It's my show! I am the someone that I'm looking for!
GUARD: Wait. Who are you?
ME: I'm Josh Friedman, Frank! And until I drive past this guard shack I am the Executive Producer of this tv show! I am the someone! Can't I give myself permission to leave?

At which point Frank went to the guard shack. A line of cars had formed behind me, wondering what kind of fuck up was holding up the line at nine o' clock at night. Frank returned with a form, in triplicate.

GUARD: List the items. Certify they're yours. Sign off.
ME: I am, in essence, authorizing myself to leave and thus no longer be the Executive Producer.
GUARD: As far as we're concerned, yes.
ME: Works for me.

And so I did. And so I had. And so I wasn't.

As I drove off I rummaged through the questionable office supplies for a piece of gum. Stuck it in my mouth, accelerating onto Barham Blvd. into the night. I blew a bubble.

It would be another month before it popped.

Hollywood Idol

So I'm trying something radical this week and in lieu of vanity-Googling four hours a day I've cut it back to damn near three and am using the savings to read a book. It's Marc Norman's "What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting." I know that's not much of a stretch but even in the best of times I'm a pretty self-absorbed motherfucker so you can only guess what I'm like when I've got nothing else to do but contemplate my own navel.

The book's well-written, well-researched, and just about all the other wells you could want out of something like this. It starts back in the silent era and paints a pretty good picture of the screenwriter through time. And by pretty good I mean colorful and informative but not always complimentary. To wit:

"...writers (in the 1930s) lived in a caste system of their own construct, along financial lines. At commissaries at lunchtime the $2,000-a-week writers like the Parker-Campbells sat with others at the same salary, the $500-a-weeks with their own, the junior writers--$50 a week, if they were lucky--off in a corner. These distinctions transferred to their social lives; a screenwriter approaching a house one night with a writer friend said he could not enter it and the party inside, they would not want him there, he was not making enough."

Reading this I flashed back ten years ago to a screenwriter dinner I was invited to where I was absolutely the youngest and least accomplished of the fifty screenwriters present. Everyone was nice to me but every conversation was some version of:

ME: Hi, I'm Josh Friedman (But that means nothing to you, does it?)
OTHER GUY: I'm ACADEMY AWARD WINNER (But you already knew that didn't you?)
ME: Great to meet you! (Of course I did.)
OTHER GUY: Likewise! (I've already forgotten your name. Oh Thank God there's Bass.) Excuse me, would you?

And I was left for the seventh time that evening holding a glass of white wine, a paper plate of pasta salad, and my rapidly shrinking dick.

Still, those monthly gatherings were always a thrill for me. People were generally polite and I would mostly shut up, get drunk, and fantasize about one day having a house big enough to host a gathering. Or at least a movie credit better than Shared Story on the Keanu Reeves Extravaganza Chain Reaction. At the time I thought it was going to be The Black Dahlia Directed by David Fincher. Huh.

Those were the glory days when we knew we'd been fucked on the DVD deal but no one really knew HOW fucked and if you were a tv writer you probably didn't think you'd been fucked at all. Those were the glory days when I was being paid less for a feature script than I currently am for a television pilot and yet felt wealthier than I could've ever imagined. In those days I knew a little of what I know a lot of now--it's not about making money, it's about making movies.

Because any jackass can get rich writing scripts; most of them won't, but any of them can. And a few of them do. Bad comedies and Bruckheimer action movies have kept any number of my friends in the business for quite a while and had I been a little looser with my special writing place I think Joel Silver would've bought me a beach house by now.

This is neither to suggest nor deny that writers are rich: a few are but almost all are not. I would never insult anyone and deny I've made more than most everybody else in the American work force, but for every writer I know that lives high on the hog I know twenty who buy their bacon at Costco.

Says Dorothy Parker in the Norman book: "I want nothing from Hollywood but money and anyone who tells you that he came here for anything else or tries to make beautiful words out of it lies in the teeth."

So let me lie in my teeth. While there is much pride in supporting my family there is little pride attached to the amassing of wealth. It was never wealth that I envied when I met my writing idols; it was those credits attached to their invisible name tag: Nice to meet you, CallieKhouriThelmaandLouise. How you doing ChrisMcQuarrieUsualSuspects? More wine SteveZaillianSearchingforBobbyFischerSchindler'sList? Lemme just get out of your way RobertTowneSeriouslyDon'tGetMeFuckingStarted.

There is no greater compliment a writer can pay another write than: "Damn. I wish I'd written that."

So I am at my core a star fucker and I only hope I've got my stars aligned correctly. I practically drooled on Ron Moore's shoes when I met him and it will probably not surprise you to know that impressing Matt Weiner has taken on a higher priority these days than making my father proud. (Probably easier, BTW.) Props from your peers are the crack hits on David Simon's Writer's Corner and I'm no better than Bubs when it comes to that.

And of course it's much more desirable to become friends with successful people than it is to have friends who suddenly BECOME successful.

God knows that sucks.

Because spreading out in front of Writer's Corner is Schadenfreude Circle, a bloody, bullet-strewn part of the city where lawless envy takes headshots at every homejew who dares try to pull himself up by his Final Draft bootstraps, jump straight to the A-list and get the fuck out of the Guild Minimum Ghetto.

Your friends in your writing group, people from your film school class, that ex-partner you wrote that one comedy with when you were just "experimenting" at USC Film School...They will try to drag you back down faster than Purnell Peace and Quanis Phillips flipped on Mike Vick.

As you would them.

Because you can rise up my friend, just do not for a second think that it's cool to rise up above ME.

Hollywood is a fetish store for lists and labels and screenwriters are nothing if not for sale. Autistics obsess less than a D-girl does over a writer list for her empty assignment. There are good lists (A) and bad lists (black) and you don't have to be Dalton Trumbo to fall from the former and end up on some version of the latter. The lists are fluid like mercury and that shit flows up down and sideways without signalling first.

We've all been away from the game for three months now and you'd think the strike would be a chance to shirk the labels and the lists we've been yoked to and forge a more perfect writer union. No one should give a shit whose credit is what when you're all standing in the rain at Paramount and it's still dark. (Not my shift, by the way. John August's.)

And to some extent I think this is true, I've seen a mix-and-match on the strike lines which one could easily read as encouraging and I've heard a lot of sweet anecdotes about younger (read: less successful) writers picking the brains of more established (read: those who live in Malibu) writers.

And it warms my grinchy motherfucking heart.

And then my heart is flash frozen when I return home to this:

FIFTY A-LIST SCREENWRITERS RUMORED TO BE GOING FI-CORE!

Or this: FORTY SHOWRUNNERS WANT THE DGA DEAL...NOW!

Or any version of a rumor involving A-List writers, influential members, powerful showrunners, fi-core, petitions, trade ads, chain e-mails, back-channel grumbling, etc.

And I'm a big believer in rumors because I know many of them are true and for a second I get all crazy poppins and then I remember something:

Who the fuck cares?

Why do I care what a bunch of "A-listers" think? Not that their opinion is any less valid, but why should it be more? Of course fifty rich successful writers are pissed. So are fifty poor ones, and probably a group of semi-successful fifty, and also a few subsets of any Ven diagram you want to find for me. We're not ten thousand clones...dissent is to be expected...democracy's a messy business...blah blah blah and fuck kumbayah...

But we cannot ascribe to someone a worthier opinion just because his credits are impressive. Some dude writes a couple movies that made the studios a billion dollars? Good for him. He should be commended and given a chance to do that again. Doesn't mean he knows jack shit about internet streaming just because he's got studio presidents on his speed dial. Big showrunner's got a hit show on a major network? Give him another show. Doesn't make him the go to guy on ESTs just because he hires and fires other writers.

But there are those who will argue thusly: "Those of us who actually WORK in this business should have a weighted voice here. We have the most to lose, we employ the most people, we've lost more than we'll ever make back with those fucking residuals anyway so we've made more sacrifice..."

LISTEN TO US. WE EARN.

Because when you have a strike for the middle class it's that upper class that feels left out. And they're not used to being left out. Or remembering what it was like not be who they are now--preferring to believe they were dropped fully-formed into their current position like a perfect angel made man.

Which is why its usually good to wait until you're dead to meet your gods.

Our negotiating committee is packed with A-listers and there seems to be two reasons why this happened. First, the belief (probably incorrect) that the AMPTP would be less likely to stare down our captains of industry and screw with writers they actually KNOW, and secondly (probably true), that we would feel more confident knowing that we have an all-star team working for us and not some WGA Committee lifer who may know every issue backwards and forwards but doesn't have a career we envy.

The first idea was a nice try if a little pollyanna, the second a little more cynical and thus probably more effective.

Of course, by now even the most dilettantish of the negcomm members is functioning at a higher level than all but the most wonky of us, so they've graduated from celebrity chess set to actual role playing characters with their own AI.

A few weeks ago Paul Haggis wrote an essay ostensibly debunking the "thirty A-list screenwriter cabal" theory which I found more hopeful than accurate. I know there are groups of prominent writers who are pissed about the strike. Have been since before we struck. Again, I'm not at all surprised by it and couldn't care less if there are. Like gathers like and as Britney would say about the voices in her head: it's a rainbow coalition, y'all.

At one point in his essay Haggis lists a number of writers as examples of A-list--amongst them the oh so fresh to the scene Diablo Cody, writer of Juno (this was before her Oscar nomination). I was listening as a few writers discussed the Haggis essay--mainly disagreeing with him--and a few focusing in on the inclusion of first-timer Diablo on the A-list as reason enough to discount everything Haggis said. She hadn't put in her time, her movie was overrated, she's got a fake name...could this fresh-faced little cherub from the Heartland fleshfarms truly be considered A-list after one screenplay?

Exactly the fuck yes.

Because whatever else the A-list is, it's written with disappearing ink. And all that matters at any given moment is: when they make today's list (and remember, THEY make the list, we DO NOT)...are you on it? It is nothing more than a snapshot--today's Dow Jones number--reflecting THEIR want of YOU.

Like Heidi Klum says: one week you're in, the next week you are out so verflucht schnell it'll make your pencil skirt spin.

So Diablo, (Babbling Brooke as I like to call her) is in. I may not like the way she's used the strike time as her own personal publicity pole dance (I guess old habits die hard), I won't fill out a WGA ballot for her because of it, but she's paid the one script minimum and no amount of hating the playa is gonna keep her out of the player's club.

Which is all it takes, people. One script. One feature. One pilot. One credit. No one in or out of this Guild is more than 120 pages away from the A-list.

If rumors are true (and aren't they always), we may soon have a contract to vote on. When that happens there will most likely be a) people who will absolutely approve it b) people who will absolutely NOT approve it and c) people who don't know what to think about it.

And category C is what will drive categories A and B to apoplexy. I've got ten writers in my writers' room and there are those that will stab their staff brethren in the HEART if Tuesday is healthy wrap day and not Thai food day. That's writers and God bless us every wild-eyed one.

There will be lists, petitions, appeals, threats. And I don't think I have to tell you who will be on those lists, my friends.

Your gods. Your idols.

The celebrity writer culture descending from Mt. Olympus (or a couple miles further up Laurel Canyon) to convert the unwashed masses while basking in each other's reflected glow.

Ignore them. Or better yet, get your ass into the temple and smash them into clay shards.

And if I'm lucky enough to get onto one of those lists, ignore my ass, too.

FIRED WALK WITH ME

For those of you who wake up every day and think to yourself "My God my life isn't complete because I haven't been able to walk the picket lines with scribe-o-bloggers Craig Mazin, John August, Jane Espenson and Josh Friedman" here's your chance.

The four of us will be hitting the bricks together at Warner Bros. Gate 2/3 on the 8am-11am shift Wednesday.

I'll be the one wearing sweatpants.

LOST IN THE FLOOD

So my wife is on her third round of antibiotics and her first batch of steroids for what the doctors believe is a sinus infection migrated south to retire permanently in her lungs as bronchitis. My son has awakened us every night for the past two weeks complaining of a recurring nightmare involving a bad man with a tail who lives in a lamp. I have a rash that I don't want to talk about, and my dog has had a recurrence of something that requires its own special canine dermatologist.

So something's up.

Because besides the bee death cult and the devil dreams and the wife's death rattle chest, there's also now the flood.

In my previous post I believe I mentioned the possibilities for floods?

Sometime last week, possibly on Thanksgiving but who really cares, a very small pinhole leak developed in a hot water pipe in my attic. An attic, that, due to a condition I possess which I can only define as "ladder-impairedness," is hardly a place that I frequent. It's dark up there, lots of air-conditioning ducting, a creaky wood beam floor, and most likely very large furry jumping spiders from Brazil.

This leak, tiny as tiny can be, sprayed hot water continually for days and days, drenching the creaky wood floor of my attic until such wood could no longer contain all of the water and passed it along to various portions of my house. The ceiling of my office. The wall behind a built-in bookcase. A large wall along a staircase. The ceiling in my kitchen. And the wall of my basement.

It was a very ambitious little leak, an uptight little overachieving leak, the kind of leak you want to beat the shit out of in high school. One that did its dirty work under the cover of darkness until paint started bubbling off my walls and small, amber colored drops of water started landing in my King Vitamin cereal at breakfast.

So for two days now my house has been the L.A. equivalent of the Amish barn-raising scene in Witness except you take out Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis and replace them with my handyman George and four other dudes who, every time you walk by them, smile and shake their heads and say: "Mucho trabajo." Which I understand now is Spanish for "Isn't this black mold?"

It's enough to make a man pine for the Hochleitners.

Plastic hangs over my doorways like a Dexter death room and rolls of butcher paper have been spread all over my floors with such enthusiasm that I am beginning to feel like a pork loin. One wall was dried out and plastered over and six hours later that wall had turned an ugly shade of brown--suggesting that it was not actually dried out in the first place or I am living in Fucking Amityville.

In my previous post I rolled these bones and saw signs of the labor apocalypse. And given the AMPTP's recent "New Economic Partnership" proposal it's certainly possible that the latest pox on my house is simply an anaphylactic shock brought on by the Big Media Beast as it slouches towards the Ivy to eat crab cakes and Rickey's Fried Chicken.

However.

As devoted father and loving husband it is my DUTY to explore alternate explanations for whatever dark materials have found their way to my family and my hearth.

So.

If we are to eliminate:
a) nature and all naturally occurring sources
b) the Old testament and related religious explanations
c) coincidence
d) the possibility that I am a delusional paranoid hypochondriac who is so fucked up that his family, pets, and house suffer from Munchausen's by Proxy--

We are left with only one option:

Joss Whedon is very upset with me for casting Summer Glau and has somehow invoked a powerful curse and relocated the Buffy Hellmouth underneath my home.

I saw how the Hellmouth operated for many years, I know its signs and symbols. And while there may not be any vampires yet to slay, I swear to God I saw Alyson Hannigan tongue-kissing a werebear in my laundry room when I was washing my strike shirt.

What kills me is I saw Joss two weeks ago at the Showrunner March. We talked about Summer. I didn't sense anything weird. Looking back I do remember seeing Shawn Ryan and the dude from the 4400 both give packages to Joss that at the time I assumed were Mrs. Beasley's muffin baskets but now I clearly believe were animal sacrifices.

(At another point during the march I saw Joss and Ron Moore huddled together but when I tried to eavesdrop on what they were saying I got this hot burning sensation in my ears and I may have blacked out and peed for a second.)

So because I think there is no other choice and also because I'm on strike with a lot of time on my hands I decide to make a donation to the Church of Joss.

I buy the Firefly boxed set (24 cents to Joss); I watched Serenity on cable (maybe .5 cents to Joss), I already own and have watched the entire Buffy series on DVD (75 cents to Joss). I have spent DAYS OF MY LIFE devoted to the works of Joss Whedon and I'm pretty sure I haven't even sent A WHOLE DOLLAR OF RESIDUALS in his direction.

Which is obviously not enough of a sacrifice to break the curse.

So I'll offer up one of the most humiliating moments for me as a professional writer:

Some years ago I am invited to a dinner party for screenwriters. There's about fifty of us there--including most of the A list people I had always wanted to call my peers. At the time the only credit I had was a shared story on Chain Reaction but I knew a couple of the people throwing the dinner and so I was invited. Terrified, but invited. At some point I am introduced to a writer/director whose work I had admired for years. He was a little older, kind of a legend. Here's how the conversation went:

ME: God, I can't tell you how great it is to meet you. I love your work. Especially (BIG MOVIE).
LEGEND: No. the pleasure is mine. I'm such a huge fan of your writing.
ME: Really?
LEGEND: Of course. It's fantastic. My kids absolutely love Buffy. Just love it.
ME: Uhmmm....
LEGEND: They're gonna be so impressed I met you. They're always going on about you...
ME: Uh, Mr. Legend? As much as I want to be Joss Whedon right now...I'm not. I'm Josh Friedman.
LEGEND: Josh Friedman?
ME: Josh Friedman.
LEGEND: Hm. Oh. Well, I'm sure you're a good writer, too.

And then he walked away.

So please, Joss. Do my family a favor. Take Back the Hellmouth. I know it's fucking huge and you might not have room for it at your place. Maybe you could donate it.

Maybe we could include it in the New Economic Partnership.

Just a thought.

BEE SEASON

Three years ago my wife and I pulled into our driveway and just as we were about to get out of the car my wife grabbed my arm and pointed. Hovering over our car some thirty feet in the air was an angry black cloud of bees, probably fifty thousand of them. We could hear them from inside the car, and it wasn't a buzzing but a deep thrumming, a low electric sound, like a power line.

I've seen that bad movie so like the pansy I am I backed my car the fuck up and drove it around to the other side of the house where my wife and I could sprint into the house squealing like the terrified children we were/are.

Three phone calls later and a man shows up, dressed in a bright yellow hazmat suit carrying some sort of vacuum cleaner type deal. He proceeds to fill a very large bag with bees, focusing on getting the queen and removing her from the premises. My wife is extremely PETA proud but at that moment if the bee guy had told her he was going to take out the queen with whatever cruel and unusual method bees hate the most, she probably would've tipped him an extra twenty bucks to do it quicker.

The vacuum cleaner did the trick, however, and afterwards we knocked open a wall in our porch and pulled out an enormous beehive which had been built inside. Free of the terrifying bees, there was an air of sadness to the whole affair, and the various pieces of broken hive reminded me that in this story I am Legend, the Omega Man who hunts and kills mercilessly and yet considers himself not monster but persecuted victim.

But I'm sensitive like that.

So we've been bee-free for years and whether or not that's a good or bad thing for the ecology of my own little biosphere I can only say what is what.

But recently I have this:

Every morning for the last few months I walk out onto my driveway and find it covered in dead bees. Not a few, or a dozen, but hundreds of them, curled up on the concrete directly under my porch light. I know they're attracted to the light at night, I see them buzzing around there when I take the dog out. But some time between then and morning something wicked this way comes and I have no idea what it is.

Of course there's a rational explanation for this, and I've heard the cell phone theory and a few others, but finding hundreds of dead bees on your doorstep every day tends to get a body feeling apocalyptic. I fear a bee death cult, and a very determined bee Marshall Applewhite leading thousands of others to their demise wearing the tiniest of black bee Nikes.

Why the bee death cult has picked my house is currently unclear but surely my fault. More than likely (and certainly more than once) I have not thanked the correct authority, or bent my knee to the proper idol. I cut sugar out of my diet two months ago and lost some weight, but in the last week or two certain stressors have caused me to revisit an old friend (breakfast pastries) and make a few new ones (waffles and beer). I'm sure there is a curse attending those actions, but I've been fat before and it never brought a rain of dead insects down upon my land.

If I didn't make it clear before I've always been afraid of bees; it's not just the stinging but the hive mind that freaks me out. Is it that they actually think the same thing at the same time, or is it that they communicate with the queen so quickly it's as if they're of one consciousness? Either way and with apologies to Alice Krige it scares the fuck out of me.

So it's even weirder when I consider the thousands of bees who have made their way to my home recently in order to buzz around my light one last time and die. Surely if there's something specifically deadly about my house, something murderous to bees and all bee brethren, surely if that's the case at least one or two of them could get word out to the others to stay the hell away from me. I'm sure what happened three years ago is legend in the bee community--if my bees were relocated as promised then it's certainly part of the larger Bee Diaspora; and if the guy in the hazmat suit was full of shit and he killed my fifty thousand bees then surely their names are written on some wall somewhere so the other bees will Never Forget. In any event, if the bees are harnessing the horsepower of the hive mind like I think they do, then it is inexplicable why they would ever venture near my property lines.

Still, they do. And they pay for it. Every night. So maybe something takes them by surprise and they don't have a chance, or even lures them in with some carnival barker's promise of a resurrected Queen. It's Los Angeles, after all. Shit like that happens all the time.

Our city is nothing if not dramatic. She will not be ignored or left off the front page. We have earthquake weather and droughts and storms of fire. These recent days I look through the haze to the Hollywood sign and all I see is the Statue of Liberty from Planet of the Apes and wonder if we're already living in the Forbidden Zone but nobody's told us.

Instead of pilot season it's plague season. The power-mad and the craven and the greasy quisling fat from the king's scraps huddle nightly to plot their next incantation. Perhaps the bees are just the first wave. There may be frogs next. Or locusts. I recall reading of cattle-death, and darkness. But this is ultimately a battle for the firstborn, and the concrete scar we call our River teems with orphan baskets thrown over the wall in a last desperate attempt to save our babies.

There are those who would burn our city to the ground, scorching the earth to smoke us out. They would have us believe the fire is ours, that we are the masses of our own destruction. They would have us believe this but we do not. The tremor in the city is not a tremble but a quickening, and I choose to read the bees at my doorstep as a sign and not a curse. Our numbers grow, in the streets we move as one. For this is not a planet of apes but a city of Infinite Monkeys. And if there is a hive-mind at work it creates, it honors sacrifice and does not destroy. The red you see is the bloodmark we've written on our doors, protecting our children from a wrathful God. The sound you hear is not a buzz but a thrum, like a power line, or a chant. And all the pharoahs hiding behind their walls should hear it loud and clear:

Let my motherfucking people go.

EXT. STUDIO - ALL DAY

So it's been a little while and you've all found other roadside attractions and ten months without a post is brain death for a blog so I get it if there's no one out there when the digital tree falls in the binary forest.

However.

An Infinite Fucking Monkey walking a near-infinite number of footsteps around Warner Brothers for eight hours fueled by chex mix and two burrito supremes starts to wonder if silence does truly equal death and if taking back the day means riding the blogosphere deep into the night.

Which is to say:

Hi.

Since I visited with you last I have shot a pilot and eight episodes of television on my wonderful little art house show we like to call "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles." (Those of us in the know call it "Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles" for short.) Unfortunately, I've only locked picture on the pilot and each one of those other eight precious little diamonds is now sitting uneasily in an editing bay like a toddler whose parent has passed out on the couch from too much Vicodin.

In this case, the couch is the picket line and the Vicodin is my vow that I will do NO WORK on my show until the strike is finished. No writing, no editing, no sound mixing, no casting, no notes calls, no publicity, no NOTHING.

What will happen to our work of the last year? Couldn't tell you. Ask the AMPTP. It's their show now, along with a hundred other shows whose creators and showrunners have chosen to walk the picket line instead of doing their producer duties.

(There was some confusion that I was actually doing this work due to an NPR report about my show this morning that quoted my NONWRITING producer as to his feelings about the strike. I was NOT QUOTED in this report because I had refused to be interviewed--I initially thought it was to involve promotion of my show...Still, some people thought it was me on the radio. It was not. In fact, the AMPTP would probably tell you that radio is still an immature and unknowable media, and the fact that some people could confuse me with my nonwriting producer because they didn't see my face proves that we should wait a few years before trying to figure out how radio might be used.)

AMPTP: Wow, Ms. Prostitute. That was some great sex we just had.
PROSTITUTE: Thanks, AMPTP John. That'll be three hundred dollars.
AMPTP: You're kidding. I'm not paying you.
PROSTITUTE: What?
AMPTP: I paid you three hundred dollars for sex last week. I consider this promotional.

So Tyra was just the tip of the iceberg and now Kate Winslet's fully soaked and blue-lipped as twelve thousand of us try rowing to shore in the good ship Norma Rae. After one full day I can say with certainly that I have a particular facility for standing in one place for hours at a time but chanting while standing seems to escape me. I was asssigned to Gate 4A at Warner's--a very small gate only frequented by executives. I thought this was sort of the generic toothpaste of gates until a few fat white dudes rolled past us into the executive lot driving eighty thousand dollar cars and giving us the finger.

And while I have had many suits in many forms over the years tell me to figuratively fuck off as they mangled my screenplays, it is not til you see that actual finger from an actual person do you realize how few times in your adult life someone has actually told you, to quote the great Arnold Schwartzenegger in Terminator: FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE.

And I have to admit that it pleased me just a little because I'm tired of the polite and earnest way we get screwed by them every other day of the year and sometimes you just want someone to slap you on the ass and scream in your fucking ear.

So now it's day two and we know where they stand and they know where we stand.

And we will continue to stand there.

All day.

Shhhhhhhh.....

Are they gone yet?

It was crazy there for a little bit, what with the all the snakes and planes and depalma and tyra and cancer and killer cyborgs and the apocalypse and that one monster spammer and the fever dreams of anonymous that I should be better at what I do, more of what I was, less of who I am.

It was the rise and fall of the Infinite Monkey, loosed from his cage but unmoored from his tethers, a breakaway pop-culture Rose Bowl float cobbled together from poisoned burritos, free sushi, diet coke and used wax icarus wings bought on Ebay Right Now! for $129.99.

(From his unsteady vantagepoint the Monkey sees one writer's strike crushed without mercy but a labor tsunami at Fairfax and Third poised to swamp this town and drown its inhabitants as they cling hopelessly to the small pieces of scrap and wood that we sometimes call DVD residuals.)

The cinema-world evolved as I knew but would not say: the movie I became famous for and did not write was better reviewed and out-earned the movie I spent ten years writing (and wasn't even invited to the premiere.) Or sent a one-sheet. Or a DVD.

A great moment from the L.A. Black Dahlia Press junket, the only junket I was invited to...

ME (wandering the hallways with my pr handler on my way to my ONE press event seeing a headlining actor/ess from the film also wandering the hallway with his/her pr handler: Hey ACTOR/ESS! It's Me! Josh Friedman!
ACTOR/ESS: Right! Of course! What are you DOING here?
ME: Uhhhh. Press.
ACTOR/ESS: Oh. Right! Me, too!
ME: Yeah. I know.
ACTOR/ESS: (Gesturing maniacally towards a bank of elevators) Well...gotta go...they got me running ragged...
ME: (Ambling slowly towards my death) Yeah. Me, too.

(BTW: There were two types of Dahlia reviews: the ones that never mentioned me and the ones that mentioned Brian Helgeland. I preferred the former.)

So Saddam's dead and Michael Bay's alive and the world's a more dangerous place because of it. I haven't slept in three months and I'm living on whatever's inside the tortilla and any drink they refill except water. I found a free Chipotle Buck in my desk last week and made a special trip to the Grove for carnitas with my Ipod and a seven hundred page Alistair Reynolds novel. I wondered if this is how Mark Twain would have written Huckleberry Finn and pretty much decided he would not consider eating the same as writing. He was and is my idol and if you haven't figured it out from the url I named my son after the first truly great character in the first truly great American novel.

But certainly I would trade the inspiration I've received from his work for the reassurance of knowing that if Samuel Langhorne was alive today he'd be just as much of a fat fuckup as I am, writing in the narrow window of time between the hours spent worshiping false internet prophets and the days spent catching up on back episodes of Battlestar Galactica and Dexter.

We can't all be him and frankly, despite what many of you think of my talents, we can't all even be little old motherfucking me. Seriously. I try to be me all the time, the me I love, the inspired me, the clever boy, the cobbler elf for whom time stands still while I polish up the perfect sentence or word. I try to be that me but not too hard because the me I've perfected is too tired, his back hurting from the burden of his belly, his scar extending from the one to the other as if an arrow drawn there by God to remind me of his inescapable laws of causality.

The me I've perfected is the me I hate.

So bitch, complain, criticize, wheedle, want, love, hate, poke, prod and pimp. Just know this:

You'll never be first post.