THE POOP IS BANANAS

So my wife recently introduced biodegradable dog poop bags to our household and I can't say it doesn't vex me just a little bit. First, it's called "The Business Bag," and while I understand where the name comes from I can't say I like it. I've always taught the dog that pooping falls under the rubric of "play" and not "work"--so this whole "business" thing seems to be sending the wrong message. I'd secretly been hoping that the dog was going to take the lead in potty-training my son, but if she's going to take all the fun out of it for him I may have to do it myself.

Secondly, and correct me if I'm wrong because my personal expertise is in differentiating mouse shit from rat shit, it's my understanding that dog poop is, by its very nature, biodegradable. I'm sort of vamping here, but after spending six hours this morning on GoogleEarth I was unable to find a single mountain over 1000 feet high made completely of petrified dog crap.

So nature intended dog poop to sit out on the lawn unattended. But man would have none of it. Fair enough. It's our job to fuck with the natural order of things until the world cooks like one big poached egg. I've stepped in enough dog poop (real and metaphorical) to appreciate the need for some sort of poop isolation system. So here's where we're at now: the biodegradable chihuahua poops out her biodegradable poop and I'm supposed to pick it up with the biodegradable bag. I guess I'm willing to accept the chain of command up to this point--but here's my question:

Shouldn't it be perfectly acceptable for me to LEAVE THE BAG ON THE LAWN? Wouldn't that most closely approximate what nature intended while also giving my neighbor what he fairly has come to expect--namely, not to track my dog's poop onto the floormats of his Lexus 470? Granted, the bag probably won't dissolve in his lifetime, but that's a bit selfish and shortsighted, isn't it? Surely harboring a few hundred biodegradable "Business Bags" on your lawn for a few years is preferable to the intellectual dishonesty required to throw a biodegradable material containing another biodegradable material into a non-biodegradable plastic trash can until it's picked up by an enormous garbage truck burning our last drips of fossil fuel in order to dump it on someone else's (only sometimes metaphorical) lawn.

And yet that is exactly what I'm required to do. And frankly, little pisses me off more than when I'm required to overcomplicate an idea which, in its original form, is almost perfect. Of course, the reverse is equally upsetting. Namely, to be required to simplify and perfect an idea, which, in its original and best form, is both complicated and imperfect.

Which is why Hollywood is the greatest purveyor and consumer of biodegradable poop bags in the civilized world. No other community is so determined to take a good idea, be it simple or complex, wrap it in earnest intentions and, in doing so, completely suffocate whatever was special and strange about that idea in the first place.

Hollywood is truly terrified of its own poop and they have created an entire class of people (the development executive) who function as biodegradable poop bags. Now obviously in this metaphor the screenwriter and/or his script is the poop. And I'm okay with that. The monkey is a dirty animal, nothing like a cat or even my very anal-retentive dog. So I embrace the very poopiness of what I do and who I am. I didn't make myself this thing. I was just a writer looking for a way to do what I love to do and not starve doing it.

I didn't grow up loving movies, I grew up loving books. I didn't grow up making little 8mm films starring my brother and the local apple dumpling gang in my neighborhood. I grew up writing stories and practicing my alphabet and handing out self-published pamphlets to my babysitters so they could get to know me better. I got a video camera in high school and my friend and I tried making claymation shorts. You wanna know what? They sucked.

So I've always felt screenwriters should be writers first and screenwriters second. It's an important distinction because writers respect their own voices and speak them for a purpose. Writers think words are important, not simply as ideas, or expositional tools, but as powerful totems to be carefully protected and shared.

Most screenwriters, on the other hand, especially screenwriters who never really wrote until they were screenwriters, use words as tools to service the film story they (and others) are trying to tell. And it's the "and others" part which is problematic. Because the script development process strips the writer of his specialness--the power structure requires him to accept the premise that anybody is qualified to have a good idea. Some think this creates an atmosphere which reinforces the (bad) idea that "anyone can be a writer." Nothing can be further from the truth. Instead, it creates a (worse) dynamic where NOBODY is a writer. Not the development executive. Not the producer. And once he's ceded his artistic authority, not the writer.

And here's why it really matters:

Last year I wrote and sold a spec screenplay called "Orphan's Dawn" to Fox. It was the first spec feature I had sold since "Dead Drop" (aka The Keanu Reeves MegaHit Chain Reaction). For those of you who read this blog regularly you'll recall the joy I had selling "Dead Drop" while simultaneously being dumped by a completely insane actress. Ten years later, having pretty much recovered from that excess amount of joy, I wrote another one. The script is a very dense and complicated science fiction story set in a very dense and complicated non-Earth future world. I like to believe that it is a very detailed and well-realized vision of a very particular future. Nothing was left to the imagination. It was also the first in a trilogy.

I sent the script out and it was met with resounding...curiosity. Unlike ten years ago when I sold the script in six hours, the spec market had changed significantly and studios are much more circumspect about spending high six figures for material which doesn't end in the word "Hazzard."

So I took meetings. And conference calls. And more meetings. I talked about the other two movies. And whether or not there were aliens. And what they might look like. People were earnestly interested in my "vision" for the film. I was encouraged.

But then I had this conversation. AND THEN I HAD IT MORE THAN ONCE.

STUDIO EXECUTIVE: So. Josh. Really interesting script.
ME: Thanks.
STUDIO EXECUTIVE: Very detailed and well-realized vision of a very particular future. Nothing is left to the imagination.
ME: Thanks.
STUDIO EXECUTIVE: So what's the source material?
ME: Huh?
STUDIO EXECUTIVE: What's it based on? Is it a book? A comic book? Who wrote it?
ME: Who WROTE it?
STUDIO EXECUTIVE: Yeah. Who's the author?
ME: I am.
STUDIO EXECUTIVE: You wrote what? A novel?
ME: I WROTE THE SCREENPLAY. THAT'S ALL THERE IS.
STUDIO EXECUTIVE: Really? Wow. Because it feels like it's based on something.
ME: It's not.
STUDIO EXECUTIVE: Huh. Strange. And what did you say the aliens looked like again?

Not one conversation like this. Not two. At least three. Sure, I guess I could feel good that people thought the world was so detailed and imaginative that I COULDN'T HAVE WRITTEN IT MYSELF. But the reality was that three different studio executives could not imagine I COULD ACTUALLY WRITE.

Which probably says less about who they are and more about what I've allowed myself to become.

Disposable.