California Drivin'

DSRGRD 4 HMN LIFE... Wait, how many spaces do I have, again?

I was driving somewhere for my internship today, and while sitting at an intersection waiting to turn left I tried to think of what to write an update about, seeing as I was already a day late.

Hey, maybe you should do that update you’ve been meaning to write about how California drivers are terrible! I thought. You’d just need to spend a little time pulling together some good examples of the awful driving you’ve seen.

And just as I thought that, the light turned to a green arrow, and the car in front of me idled there for a good five seconds before I leaned on my horn hard enough for the driver to hear me. He floored it and zipped through the intersection just as the arrow turned red, narrowly avoiding getting T-boned by oncoming traffic, and then I was trapped in the intersection for another cycle.

So be honest now – what’s going on, California drivers? Are you guys doing okay? Did Good Driving touch you inappropriately in your childhood, and ever since then you’ve been driving like shit out of some combination of spite and self loathing? If so, you can tell me. This is a safe place. It’s not your fault.

If not, then come on, people. This is ridiculous.

After first discovering the true extent of Californians’ distaste for competent driving last summer, I mentioned it to some of my California friends at school. The conversation would usually go like this:

Me: Hey, so I’ve noticed that California drivers are kind of the worst ever. What’s up with that?

California Friends: What the hell are you talking about? California has great drivers. Oregonians are shitty drivers.

And this used to make me mad, but after six weeks here, I realize that it may just be a culture clash. Here is the Oregonian attitude on a few things I see pretty regularly on the road down here:

In Oregon, when a person has his blinker on and is trying to change lanes, the generally accepted practice is to let them in as opposed to pulling up alongside them as quickly as possible to prevent them from changing lanes. This was cool in Smokey And The Bandit when the truckers pulled into all the lanes around the truckload of Coors to shield it from Sheriff Justice’s line of sight; it’s not cool when I want to get off the fucking freeway.

In Oregon, we check where we’re going before changing lanes instead of just jerking the steering wheel to the left and hoping for the best. Yes, it’s okay to change lanes if you don’t see any cars, but the catch is you have to be looking at the lane you’re moving into to properly make that assessment.

In Oregon, we drive our cars between the lines, not completely straddling them. You don’t get a power-up if you drive over all the lines; you just endanger twice as many people with your monumentally shitty driving.

In Oregon, when somebody is driving ten miles per hour above the speed limit in the right lane on an uncongested freeway, it’s considered rude to speed up behind him, pull into the exit lane on his right, blaze past him, and then blast up the shoulder and speed away into the night. Fun fact: If you die in a horrible car accident while hotdogging it in your dad’s Mitsubishi Galant, you’ve still got a tiny penis.

In Oregon, we don’t weave back and forth through multiple lanes of traffic as fast as possible, squeezing haphazardly into the tiny spaces between cars and semis only to drift into another lane and blaze on ahead. That sort of behavior is only acceptable if somebody in your car is either about to have a baby or about to shit himself.

I’m well aware that I recently went on a tirade about how unfair it is to assume something about a person’s character based on the year they were born; I can see how it would look hypocritical for me to say that people born in California are inherently shitty drivers.

At the same time, though, in six years of driving in Oregon I didn’t have to employ defensive driving tactics, use of the horn, or my Emergency Profanity anywhere near as much as I’ve had to in the past six weeks. I take that to assume that there are simply far more horrifyingly bad drivers here than there are in Oregon – and that’s not me talking; that’s science.

And I don’t get why that is, because at least in LA you’ve really got no excuse to be a shitty driver. You can be a treacherous, backstabbing drug addict and still be a huge success in this town, but driving is something that you have to do virtually every day for a long period of time – I don’t get how so many people down here suck so badly at it.

When I was in high school I practiced the trumpet every day – I was never great, but thanks to the constant practice I was at least good, and certainly never as bad at it as California drivers are at driving. The musical equivalent of California drivers is me using my trumpet to club baby harp seals.*

*That, or Dubstep.

Does that image make you both angry and sad at the same time? Now you know how I feel whenever I have to drive somewhere.

The really scary part for me is that a lot of people in LA moved here from someplace else, like I did. That means either:

1) Oregon is the only place in the world where people know how to drive, or
2) Exposure to California gradually erodes your driving abilities.

So if I undergo some sort of Flowers For Algernon regression to the sort of driver I was at the age of 15, please use this update to remember me as I once was – a person capable of using his fucking turn signal.

Truman Capps wants to let his Mom know that he hasn’t flipped anybody off on the road because he remembers how you told him at an early age that you should never make rude gestures at other drivers because they probably have guns in their cars.

Celebrity

"We love your bodily functions! All of them!"

People ask me sometimes how many famous people I’ve seen since moving to LA – and by “people ask me sometimes” I mean “not a single person has asked me that, but pretending that they have makes it way easier for me to start this update.” And since you ask, to be honest, I couldn’t tell you; not because I’ve seen so many famous people that I’ve lost count, but because I really can’t tell if a lot of the people I’m seeing are famous or not.

I tend to assume that exquisitely attractive, glamorously dressed people are famous – what other lifestyle would allow you to spend that much money on clothes as impractical as loafers or a fedora or some kind of weird knit wraparound shawl thing that you wear over a bikini? Plus, dressing like that draws attention, and attention is like cocaine for celebrities (along with actual cocaine, which doesn’t care how you’re dressed.)

What I so often forget is that LA is full of attractive attention whores from virtually everywhere in the world, and whether they’re famous or not they’re going to dress like they are, presumably in hopes of people like me thinking they’re famous. Because of this and my uncanny ability to forget the details of what a person looks like, I can see someone who’s good looking and outlandishly dressed and not be sure whether they’re actually a celebrity or if they refinanced their house to buy those ripped up jeans.

Moreover, the definition of what a celebrity is has widened in the past few years and I really haven’t kept up. Reality television has led to an explosion of people who are now famous in spite of their lack any skill or talent beyond embarrassing themselves – something I’ve been doing my whole life for no money and virtually no recognition. People who look to me like ordinary clownish douches could, in fact, be professional douches – your Real Housewives Of…, your …Shore, your …elor/ette; people who are paid big money to act like children and let cameras film the ensuing chaos. Since I generally avoid reality TV, though, I’m as likely to recognize these people for their work as they are to recognize me for my blog.

This kind of sets up what happened to me last night.

I was having a drink with a girl at a bar in Hollywood, and since it was oppressively crowded inside, we opted to sit outside at a table in a small area separated from the sidewalk by a low gate. The upside to this is that it’s quiet enough out there that you can actually hear what people are saying; the downside is that every passing freak can hear what you’re saying too and, in many cases, will offer his opinion. For instance, this happened:

Girl: My friends are talking about doing a road trip up to Seattle, but it sounds like a lot of driving.

Me: Yeah, Seattle’s overrated anyway. Just go to Portland instead.

Passing Crackhead On The Sidewalk: Aw man, Seattle’s pretty legit – I ain’t been there in years, but I liked it a lot! They got that Space Needle, y’know?

He stood there and grinned at me with all three of his teeth, looking at me like I was the weird one for not offering a response.

”Thank you, crackhead! I appreciate your participation in this open forum discussion. We’ve all learned a lot tonight – both about Seattle, and about ourselves. No, sorry, I don’t have any crack.”

Shortly after the crackhead left, an enormously fat man and a few of his friends arrived and sat on a bench a few feet away from us, drinking some gin and tonics and generally being quiet and civilized. But after a few minutes, a bunch of drunk, raucous, pudgy girls waddled up the sidewalk, stopped right beside us, and started squealing and pointing at the fat guy.

“OHMIGOD!” One of them shrieked, about a foot from my ear, her finger pointing straight past me like I wasn’t even there. “I know you! You were on Jackass!”

We both turned and looked at the fat man, who was smiling modestly and raising his glass in silent acknowledgment.

The girls screamed and giggled some more.

“You’re, like so funny! You’re the one who always throws up!”

And immediately, all I could think about was this tremendously obese man vomiting, no matter how hard I tried not to.

“Yeah!” Another one of them chirped. “Or there was the time you drank that sweat from your butthole on the exercise bike!”

“Or when Steve-O was wearing that fart mask hooked up to your butt, and you shit in it and Steve-O totally puked!”

I was really starting to miss that crackhead and his opinions on various Pacific Northwestern cities.

And then, as the girls posed with the fat man for pictures and told more vivid stories about the things he’d puked and shit on, the waiter brought us our food.

It’s one thing to eat food after hearing a nasty story about a person shitting or throwing up. It’s another thing to sit there eating while hearing those stories with the subject of them a couple of feet away from you like some kind of visual aid. And he’s surrounded by groupies telling these stories like they’re goddamn Norse legends or something, and from these you learn that he’s apparently the Steve Nash of shitting and puking and drinking his own bodily fluids, and you’re looking at the girl across from you and thinking, I told her this was a cool bar. It was my idea to come here. Because of me, we are now having this experience.

No, of course it couldn’t be John Malkovich at the other table. ”Oh my God! You were so thought provoking in ‘The Libertine’ – both the film adaptation and the 1996 stage production at the Steppenwolf in Chicago!” No, I pick the preferred bar of a professional defecator.

What do you do, in those situations? How do you make conversation while that’s going on? Do you acknowledge the obese, shitting elephant in the room, or do you try to make small talk and pretend it’s not happening?

”So, do you want dessert?”

“Nothing with chocolate in it.”

Once the fat guy and his groupies had left, we did wind up discussing what had happened, and she mentioned that she felt sorry for that guy. I, however, was inclined to disagree.

The man shit on somebody else’s face and got paid more than I’ve made in five years to do it. And, you know, that’s the beauty of capitalism, and God bless him for making a buck, but I think there’s a certain poetic justice to him being loudly recognized on the street for that sort of behavior, if for no other reason to show the public that you can’t just go around shitting on other peoples’ faces and get away scot free. People remember that sort of thing. It follows you.

So I guess, to answer your question, I’ve seen one celebrity so far. And if there was a way to un see him – to un know that one can be so gifted in the field of solid waste that people will recognize him on the street – you bet I’d do it.

Truman Capps has now passed these lovely mental images on to you. Thanks for reading!

The Color Purple

This man will forget more about painting than I'll ever know.

In my last update, you may recall an overwhelming sense of optimism regarding my new job in the art department for an upcoming media event. I acknowledged that there would be manual labor involved, but I was ready and eager to do the work because it was in the film industry, it was ethically okay, and it paid well. After three days on the job, I think it wise to point out that a lot of the reason I was so optimistic last week was because I wrote that the night before I went in for my first day of work.

My non-disclosure agreement prevents me from giving you any specifics about what we’re doing or why we’re doing it, but rest assured we’re trying to make things in a place look like they’re other things in another place so that people at an event will be able to pretend they’re in that other place. This is a process that requires the use of power tools, ladders, and entire aisles’ worth of materials from the Home Depot. Try to picture me in these circumstances, and then meet me in the next paragraph once you’re done laughing.

I have no right to complain about this job, and that’s not what I’m going to do. I drive along Venice Boulevard to get to my internship, and every day I pass multiple slightly scruffy but otherwise ordinary looking guys standing on the center median, holding signs and begging passers-by for money. Whenever I go to the Home Depot for this job, my car is just about swarmed by the Dawn of the Dead hordes of Hispanic day laborers lined up around the parking lot, dying to get picked up to spend a day doing the sort of hard work I’m so ill-qualified for. So I’m not complaining; I’m damn lucky to have this job and I’m giving it my all until they fire me or until the job is over.

That being said, golly, I don’t particularly relish this line of work.

The art department is not construction per se – the carpenters build things, and it’s the art department’s job to make those things look the way they’re supposed to: Color, furniture, and general ambiance are the responsibility of the art department. It didn’t occur to me before I actually started on the job, though, that color, furniture, and ambiance are created by painting, moving furniture, and generally doing far more hands on home improvement style work than I ever thought I’d have to do.

Before now, my ingrained attitude towards home improvement was that it was generally the thing you paid other people to do. For example, my room in Portland was and still is purple, because that was the color it was when we bought the house four years ago, nobody ever painted it not purple, and my parents weren’t willing to hire a painter to do it. Mind you, I hate purple due to its unfortunate ties to a university in Washington, but what could I do? I sure as hell didn’t have the money to hire a painter, and the idea of buying paint and doing it myself no more occurred to me than the idea of solving my money problems by brewing my own gold out of yeast and angel shit.

I mean, I guess I was aware that ordinary civilians did these sorts of things themselves – I saw the Home Depot and Kohl’s commercials where unsure newlyweds transform their ramshackle hovel into a dream home in 20 seconds with the help of some friendly, attractive employees. But these commercials were always followed by commercials where guys open a Coors Light and an icy train full of girls in bikinis crashes through the wall,* and I sort of assumed that both commercials were equally realistic.

*In any other circumstances, a train full of people drinking beer crashing through a wall would be a horrible tragedy followed by multiple lawsuits and government hearings.

On my first day at work, though, my boss pointed to a wall and said, “Alright, Truman – prep that wall and paint it white.” He could’ve just as well said, “Alright, Truman, land that F-16 on an aircraft carrier at night.”

I knew very little about prepping a wall to paint it: I knew that you had to put blue tape on some things, and that you had to rub a paint scraper on some other things, and then you black out and when you wake up the job is done and Gene Hackman is telling you that Lowe’s made this all possible, somehow.

I had applied some tape to the wall and was scraping fruitlessly at some loose paint when one of my supervisors walked past, stopped, and said, “Truman, you’ve never painted a wall before, have you?”

Classic Truman Capps moment.

I was given a crash course on wall painting and by the end of the day I had a solid first coat of paint on the wall. That night I looked up an Internet tutorial on the finer points of wall painting, and the next day on the job I had most of a dynamite second coat down before they notified me that professional painters had arrived and sent me to assemble some Ikea furniture instead, which was much more my speed.

In the three days that I’ve been on the job now I’ve developed bonkers amounts of pain in my legs and lower back from all the squatting, lifting, kneeling, and general lack of stillness my job requires. But I also learned how to paint, reinforce a wall, and use a pneumatic staple gun.

I do not relish this job the way I relish my internship where I get to criticize crappy screenplays all day. These are not tasks that I strictly enjoy doing, but I’ll keep doing them because the money is good and it’s a really valuable experience – for perhaps the first time in my life, I’m learning practical skills that, in the event of the apocalypse, will make me useful.*

*”No, I can’t build anti-zombie barricades – no construction experience. No, I can’t soup up that shuttle bus into a zombie-proof tank – I don’t know shit about engines. No, I can’t make napalm out of the supplies we’ve got here in the mall – I’m useless with chemistry. Look, is there anything you need written? Is there any way writing could help us kill zombies?”

Also, this job has given me a real, tangible appreciation for manmade objects. Are you in a building as you read this, or have you seen a building recently? Well, a lot of people put a lot of energy into building, painting, and decorating that building, and that’s before you turn on the lights or flush the toilet. Relish the fact that there are people out there who love building things and allow the rest of us to have jobs so sedentary that it’s possible to surf porn while we work.

Truman Capps admits that Internet-enabled phones make it possible to surf porn no matter what job you’re doing.

Updating Monday

I am very tired from my job, and tomorrow I will update about my job and why it makes me tired. If that's a problem, then...

The Good Lord Will Provide (Part 2)

Hollywood is a small town and everyone works together eventually, but it took until 1995 for this to happen?

With each passing day here in LA, things I learned at that stupid filmmaking camp that I at the time wrote off as bullshit are suddenly ringing true more and more. It was like a knowledge savings bond: I invested a week with a bunch of dyed-in-the-wool doucheleopards and now, five years later, the investment has matured and I’ve reaped the reward of finding that like two of the things I learned there were actually true. Look, nobody said it was a good investment. We’re talking Bear Sterns, here.

One of the other speakers we saw – far less colorful and in-your-face red state than the other one – spoke at great length about what a small town Hollywood is. Los Angeles itself is oppressively huge, but the filmmaking community is on the smaller side, which is why it’s absolutely imperative that you watch what you say about other people or their movies, because it could easily get back to them. Everybody knows everybody because they all either work together or have worked together, they hang out together and get married to each other and have kids who go into the same line of work – it’s just as much of a drama pipeline as the Greek system or a college marching band, except that Will Smith is in the mix somewhere, so it’s infinitely better.

I discarded that piece of information too, because it sounded a lot like this woman was telling me I couldn’t talk shit about people and movies I didn’t like, which was basically the only thing I did in high school and is a major component of what I do today.

Her advice might have been slightly exaggerated – I could tell everybody I meet that Gary Busey is crazy and I doubt that word would get back to him, both because I don’t think that celebrities are quite that connected to the average person* and because thousands of other people have probably already said the same thing about Gary Busey and it’s considered old news. The idea is more that you shouldn’t shittalk other professionals or prominent union members in your field, because sooner or later you’ll be working for them or trying to work for them.

*But God help you if you talk shit about Kevin Bacon.

The upshot to this is that the relatively small and incestuous film community makes it far easier to get a job – because unlike an actual small town, there’s a lot of jobs and money to be had if you know the right people. (Also unlike a small town, Will Smith is here.)

Quitting one of my internships left me unoccupied Tuesdays and Thursdays, and when I’m already not making money on the days that I do spend working, having days in my schedule where I make no money and also do nothing is kind of disheartening.

Also disheartening was my last credit card bill, which was about twice as much as it usually is, even though in the past month I’ve done very little eating out or barhopping, which in college were my two biggest expenses by far. It’s kind of frustrating, really, because I feel like I’ve been curtailing the amount of money I spend on booze pretty well in spite of the fact that virtually every retail establishment in California seems to have a liquor aisle, right on down to Christian bookstores. The sad fact is, gas is expensive and I need to fill The Mystery Wagon every week whether I want to or not (I generally don’t).

Fortunately, I have my cousin Gene, who has lived in LA for nearly 23 years, dividing his time between working in the art department on various films and TV shows and drumming in rock bands – he was the drummer for Queens Of The Stone Age between 1999 and 2002 before being replaced by Dave Grohl, who seems like a pretty cool guy to have replace you in any capacity. Gene has been circulating my resume and advocating my abilities to virtually everybody he knows in the film industry since long before I got down here, essentially staking his reputation on my competence – risky move, that.

The night that I quit my internship, Gene called me with some good news: One of his friends and coworkers was the art director for an upcoming media event, and he had called Gene to offer him a few weeks’ work helping out on the project. Gene already had another job going, but he referred his friend to me, and less than 24 hours after quitting my internship I’d landed a paying job as an art department production assistant.

A lot of what this job entails is moving furniture around, painting walls, and driving to Home Depot to pick up large orders of mysterious home improvement type things the purpose for which I cannot imagine. No part of my job requires me to use tools – that’s construction, an entirely different department – and more importantly, no part of my job requires me to play tricks on people. Also, the money is pretty good and lunch is provided, so if it comes up that I do have to play tricks on people here, they just might have found my price.

I’m going to be working 7 days a week for the next couple of weeks until the media event which marks the end of this job – Monday, Wednesday, and Friday as an unpaid intern, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday as a paid art department PA. The last time I worked 7 days a week was after my freshman year of college, when I made milkshakes at one restaurant and bussed tables at another all summer long. That was not a terribly enjoyable summer for me, because making lactose-based products and carrying around plates full of strangers’ half eaten food weren’t my idea of a good time.

Here’s the thing, though – for how lazy I’d always thought I was, coming to LA I’ve realized that it’s fully possible for me to be a workaholic if I like the work I’m doing. I’ve been bringing multiple scripts home with me from my internship to read and cover in my spare time, and the idea of working every day doesn’t really bother me because that’s seven days a week I’ll be working in the entertainment industry, which loyal readers may have noticed is an interest of mine.

So I quit a morally dubious unpaid position and within the same day wound up with a morally agreeable paid position. Did the good Lord provide for me? As an atheist, I’m inclined to say no – the real hero in this story is my cousin Gene and his sidekick Networking.

I think there’s some truth to what that fat little Texan was telling us, though: Even if the good Lord doesn’t provide for you because he’s too busy not existing, your friends and family (and their friends and family) just might. The key is to make good impressions on people and not talk a lot of shit behind everyone’s back so that they actually want to help you when you need it – which, to my understanding, is the sort of thing the good Lord would probably appreciate anyway.

Truman Capps has not ruled out the possibility that this entire job could be a massive Inception style hidden camera prank.

The Good Lord Will Provide (Part 1)

Adam turned down a role in a porno, so God gave him this legitimate role in Creation of Adam.

Five years ago I attended a weeklong summer filmmaking camp in Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. I’ve discussed it here before, but for those of you who are new to the blog or (wisely) have just been skimming my updates for the past few years, I’ll recap the experience for you: The whole camp was a bunch of rich kids from the Midwest and Florida who kind of liked movies but mainly wanted to get away from their parents for a week to do drugs and have sex. Knowing my prior stance on mind-altering substances and my perennial difficulty convincing women to sleep with me, you can imagine how much fun I had.

One aspect of the camp was presentations from “industry professionals,” which translated to listening to career extras, infomercial directors, and a guy who’d worked on the sequel to Behind Enemy Lines telling us the secrets of their success. Near the end of the week a rotund, middle aged woman who worked as a commercial videographer came in to speak to us. She was a giggly, fast talking busybody from Texas with the accompanying accent, and true to Texas form she managed to make a good chunk of her presentation be about her love of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and her support for President Bush and the War in Iraq.

At one of the rare points when she was somewhat on topic, though, she told the following story:

A few years ago, she’d been short on money after a long spell of unemployment, and on top of all that, her car broke down and needed costly repairs that she just couldn’t afford. She had a family to feed and her husband’s salary alone wasn’t going to cut it. She was seriously considering applying for a job in food service when a career opportunity came up – the Playboy channel was shooting some softcore lesbian porn version of Judge Judy,* and they’d be willing to pay her a good wage to do some of the filming.

*If any of you can find that, by the way, please let me know.

She struggled over whether to accept the offer or not – on the one hand, she really needed the money, but on the other, it was porn, which, unlike the War in Iraq, was unjust and morally reprehensible. Finally, she prayed about it and decided to turn the job down, because God would provide for her. And sure enough, two days later another job with better pay and presumably less scissorfucking came along and she was able to feed her family while preserving her morals.

The lesson we were to take from this was that if any of us moved to Hollywood to start a career, we should never compromise our morals, because, and I quote "...the good Lord will provide no matter what." Then I think she gave us the URL for her church’s website.

At the time, I wrote off what she’d said as much as I wrote off the rest of that stupid camp. That was just some fortuitous coincidence. I thought, silently congratulating myself on using the word ‘fortuitous’ in my inner monologue. If not for that, the only thing the good Lord would’ve provided her would be a couple of social workers taking her kids to a foster home with dinner on the table. Besides, that doesn’t apply to me – this camp has really opened my eyes to how much bullshit the movie industry is. I’m never working in Hollywood.

So anyway, I was working in Hollywood Sunday on a shoot for one of my two internships (hence the lateness of this update). It was a hidden camera prank show shoot, and while the NDA I signed prevents me from giving too many details, the gist of it was that people were coming to a location because they believed they’d been hired for a job, and upon their arrival they were made to do a number of embarrassing and somewhat degrading things under the auspices of on the job training, all of which was recorded on hidden cameras. Then, when the jig was up, the marks signed a release, collected $100 for their troubles, and were sent on their way.

The whole ordeal made me uncomfortable. It’s a down economy right now – money is tight for everyone, myself included, and I’d be pissed if I was told I’d received a job, only to show up for work to be humiliated on camera, told there was no job, and sent on my way with a little cash in my pocket ($100 doesn’t go very far in Los Angeles). I didn’t like the idea of getting people excited that they had a job that didn’t exist, exploiting their desperation for laughs, and then capturing their shock and disappointment on camera when they found out the job wasn’t real.

And I got more uncomfortable in the actual shooting process – after each prank was completed, the crew, myself included, came out to clean up the area and prepare for the next person to be pranked as the most recent victim signed the release forms. I couldn’t bring myself to make eye contact with the victims; they had shocked, vacant expressions on their faces as they processed what had happened and realized that when they got home they’d have to tell their friends and family that, no, the job they’d said they’d received was just an elaborate joke.

Every single person we pranked signed a release afterwards, and I guess you could argue that they don’t deserve sympathy since they were willing to waive their right to sue. I don’t necessarily agree, though – these people were shocked and disoriented, overwhelmed by the things they’d had to do and the realization that they’d been deceived about the job, and peoples’ decision making when they’re in that state isn’t so good.

When The Ex Girlfriend and I broke up, she asked if I was mad at her and I said no, which, at the time, was true. I’d been through such an emotional wringer with her over the previous couple of weeks that all I felt was relief that the roller coaster had stopped and I could get off. Only five days later did I start to realize that certain things she’d done to me could be considered war crimes worthy of UN sanctions. At the time, though, I was so overwhelmed by everything that I didn’t know what I was thinking or feeling.

These people were signing releases because we pressured them to and they were too disoriented to be anything but obliging – also, they could only get $100 if they signed the release. This made me feel horrible, and yesterday I called and quit the internship.

What we were doing was legal, and the people who were running the show that day are not bad people – they have families to support as well, and orchestrating pranks like that is how they make money. Likewise, this prank generated revenue for about 30 people on set who got paid wages for the day’s work.

That being said, tricking and humiliating people isn’t what I came down here to do. I’m not above laughing at other peoples’ misfortune, but generally those other people have done something worthy of ridicule – the only thing the people at this shoot had done was try to find a job. I didn’t like being involved in that.

I should also point out that this was an unpaid position: If I’d been making a living wage to do this sort of thing, I’m pretty sure I’d still be working there, because it’s a down economy and this shoot proved how treacherous looking for a job can be. But with no paycheck in the mix, the only thing I was walking away from was a situation I didn’t want to be involved in.

The woman from filmmaking camp and Rorschach from Watchmen would argue that I should never compromise, but I can’t say that I can make that promise to myself, because I don’t believe that the good Lord will provide for me and I unfortunately cannot eat my own moral fiber.

What I can say is that in a good compromise, both parties have to feel equally screwed – so when I do sell out, it’s going to be for a lot of money.

Truman Capps will be back with Part 2 tomorrow, because that’s how committed he is to timely updates!

Millennials

Backwards baseball cap? Ear buds? A cell phone? Lying around doing nothing? Clearly, these are Millennials!

It’s not easy being an opinion columnist.

I did it for a year at the Oregon Daily Emerald - I signed up because I was under the impression that I could do the same shit that I do here (long form, tangential comedic essays that aren’t necessarily opinionated) in a college paper format as a means to draw more readers to the blog.

What I found out many megabytes of hatemail later was 1) The reason thousands of people don’t read my blog might have less to do with poor promotion and more to do with the fact that a lot of people seem to think my writing style makes me sound like a douche, and 2) It is really hard to have a new strong opinion about something important every week.

My solution to that problem was to write shitty columns about topics I didn’t understand or care about just so I could meet my deadline; nationally syndicated columnists’ solution is to talk shit about people in my age group. Sure, my journalism wasn’t good by any stretch of the imagination, but I also didn’t write off 50 million people as stupid, lazy slobs.

I hate the word ‘Millennial’ – a name better suited to a mid sized four door sedan than to my entire age group – almost as much as I hate the word ‘generation’, except when immediately preceded by the words Star Trek: The Next. It seems there’s a cottage industry of psychologists and sociologists whose sole occupation is to come up with trendy names for people born between certain dates (The Silent Generation, The Greatest Generation, Baby Boomers, Generation X) and then make assumptions about those peoples’ personalities. This work is apparently key to maintaining our civilization, because it seems like every week I’m reading a new article about how Millennials are lazy, spoiled, emotionally stunted brats.

And it’s bullshit.

I’m not here to defend my generation. I will freely admit that there are loads of entitled, self absorbed doucheburgers in my age group. That said, I think there are loads of entitled, self absorbed doucheburgers in every age group, and trying to determine which age group has more doucheburgers is a fruitless, speculative waste of time that ultimately serves no purpose.

Nobody’s going to publish a study saying that people with darker colored skin are criminals or Jewish people are greedy, because it’s wrong, inaccurate, and dickish to make assumptions about peoples’ personalities based on factors they can’t control. But somehow it’s okay to assume that people born between 1982 and 2001 will be self involved and out of touch to the point of unemployability?

I was born in 1988. I don’t have one hell of a lot in common with people who were born in 1982, and I have even less in common with people who were born in 2001. Millennials from the 90s have had the Internet for their entire lives. Millennials from the early 80s remember watching the Berlin Wall come down. To try and make assumptions about all of us, in spite of these and a billion more differences on top of our own individual upbringing, is like trying to estimate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Trying to suggest that we’re all the same because we’re ‘tech savvy’ in an age when three quarters of a billion people are on Facebook is like saying Rahm Emanuel and Carrot Top are the same person because they both have eyebrows.

And when it’s all said and done, what do we stand to gain from these assumptions that we’ve made about a given generation? Do we pass out medals to surviving members of the Greatest Generation for being alive during World War 2? Put all Baby Boomers on trial for jumping behind Reaganomics? Personally administer a spanking to every Millennial in America to make up for their parents’ coddling?

No. We just read what’s been written and add it to the list of factually dubious preconceived notions we’ve got about people based on how many wrinkles they have. These researchers could better serve humanity by working at 7-11, because then at least they’d be facilitating the delivery of taquitos to the masses.

I think what best proves my point about the worthlessness of these studies is the following comment by Ruben Navarette, who is presumably a CNN diversity hire from when they realized there weren’t enough stupid people on the payroll. In the column he wrote that inspired this blog, he had this criticism about Millennials:

[They] put family and friends before work and career…

…Millennials are in no rush to start the rat race, because they work to live and not the other way around. They saw their parents get laid off or trudge to jobs they hated. They're determined to be different.

Yes, apparently valuing our loved ones more than our jobs and wanting to earn a living doing something we actually like is a bad thing. What Ruben Navarrette is saying is that if you follow your dreams, you’re an entitled brat – you should work the first boring, dead end job you get offered no matter how miserable it makes you, because it’s wrong to not do the exact same thing your parents did.

If it’s entitled for me to have high self esteem and to want the best for myself, and to be willing to hold out for what I want to do instead of sacrificing my happiness to play it safe, then fuck it – I’ll be entitled. Being entitled was what led me to quit my job as an opinion columnist: I was ill qualified for the job and it made me miserable, so I decided that my happiness was more important than my paychecks and quit writing shitty opinion columns.

Follow my lead, Mr. Navarrette. Be entitled.

Truman Capps hopes that none of his token ‘old’ readers took this as a slight.

Venice Beach

This guy is probably more educated than I am.

I’m not what you’d call a ‘beach person’ – one of those people who, after a stressful week, will jump up and say, “Fuck it, guys; let’s go to the beach! It’s going to be awesome! We can play volleyball and get tan and pick up beautiful women!” It’s not that I actively dislike the beach or anything; I just don’t think of myself as a beach person because the beach isn’t my go-to vision of a perfect day.*

*For the record, I do consider myself a ‘Steakhouse in downtown Chicago’ person, as well as a ‘Breaking into the Jack Daniel’s Distillery with a straw’ person.

The beach is sort of a hassle for me, riddled with activities I’m pretty unenthusiastic about taking part in. My left toenail is ten different kinds of fucked up, so wearing sandals turns me into sort of a walking freakshow, frightening children and small dogs. My hair doesn’t do well in the water, so swimming is right out. I didn’t like volleyball in high school and my opinion of it is unlikely to change when sand is added to the equation. I’ve already got a tan. And as far as picking up beautiful women is concerned, I’ve proven inept at that in any number of surroundings – being at the beach, where I will inevitably be wearing fewer clothes than usual, can only hurt my chances.

But given my circumstances, the beach is the closest interesting thing to me that doesn’t require driving or spending money, so recently I’ve been making more and more trips out to Venice Beach, an easy 20-minute bike ride away from my apartment.

Venice Beach is the very definition of a shitshow. Everything weird or grimy or moist or stoned that you’ve never wanted to see is on full, proud display along the Venice Boardwalk: Bucket drummers, shit peddlers, enormously fat women with monstrous breasts pushed up high for all to enjoy, an army homeless people splaying in all manner of positions… There’s a couple Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museums along the boardwalk, but I don’t see how they can get people to pay $5 to be grossed out when the circumstances outside the museum are so much worse.

There’s a patch of beach a little further south – halfway between Venice Boulevard and Washington Boulevard, for those of you who know the area – that I like to frequent. There aren’t any freaks (by which I mean there’s the bare minimum of freaks, which for Los Angeles is roughly 14), the beach is less crowded, and there’s a nice grassy bluff full of palm trees where I can sit, wearing my sneakers, and read Dune without feeling like too much of a nerd – because hey! I’m at Venice Beach! Wearing Ray-Bans!

This is my beach activity – reading. You’ve got to understand, though, that I grew up vacationing in the San Juan Islands in Washington, where the beaches were rocky and the water was freezing. All you could do on those beaches was read – provided it wasn’t raining at the time.

Likewise, I was raised in Oregon, where the ocean is similarly cold and our coastline fraught with riptides and sneaker waves that frequently pulled out to sea anybody foolish enough to go swimming. Most Oregonians grew up with the knowledge that the ocean was our frigid, conniving enemy – one we would’ve nuked the bejeezus out of long ago were it not for our love of Dungeness crab. To be honest, half the reason I like to sit and read at the beach is so I can keep an eye on the ocean, just in case it tries to start some shit.

The other half is that while Venice Beach is often terrifying, it’s definitely never boring. That’s the Venice Beach guarantee: Every time you go, you’re going to see something truly fascinating, whether you want to or not. For example, take this encounter from yesterday:

I was sitting on the bluff, reading my book, when a buff, shirtless young man, glistening with sweat, jogged up and crouched beside me.

“’Allo!” He said, his smile bright and his Eastern European accent thick.

Oh, Lord. I thought. Three weeks in California and I’m being openly propositioned by homosexuals. And here I’d thought my terrible fashion sense would protect me from this sort of thing.

“Hi.” I said, returning a smile that conveyed a sense of I am happy to talk to you so long as you understand that I’m not interested in doing Maximum Cuddles.

“Do you know where is gaiem?” He asked, his eyes alight.

“Uh…” I must call my gay friends immediately and find out if “gaiem” is slang for something. “What?”

“A gaiem, you know. On beach?”

“I’m… I’m really sorry, sir, but I don’t know what a gaiem is.”

Just then, his friend – similarly buff, shirtless, and moist – ran up.

Oh God, I’m drawing a crowd. Where does it end? Yeah, you just had to leave the house today, didn’t you, Truman?

“Is gaiem!” The new arrival said with an equally big and welcoming smile. “You know gaiem?”

“I don’t know gaiem. I’m really sorry. I wish I knew gaiem, I mean, you guys make it sound so great…”

The new arrival started pumping his arms in and out and breathing heavily. “Gaiem, you know?” Soon, both of them were doing it.

Now, at first, seeing two buff shirtless men standing in front of me, pumping their arms and huffing and puffing, I was prepared to lie back and think of Portland. Then, I recognized what they were doing as miming bench pressing.

“Oh!” I said. “You’re looking for the gym!”

Their eyes lit up and they nodded. “Yes! Gaiem! On beach!”

I pointed north, towards Santa Monica. “Muscle Beach. It’s like half a mile up that way. Never been there myself, but I hear they’ve got one hell of a gaiem.”

The guys clasped their hands in front of them, grinned a bit more as a sign of their appreciation, and then jogged off together, cracking up at the ignorant, possibly retarded guy to whom they’d just spent a minute explaining what a gaiem was.

This part of Die Hard gains new meaning at Venice Beach.

Truman Capps is pretty sure they were a couple of wild and crazy guys.

Ninety Percent Of Everything

That's me at the bottom.

Big development since the last blog: All those emails I sent out finally paid off, and now I’ve got an internship. Two internships, actually – both part time at two different production companies.

After less than a week, both internships have warranted some truly valuable experiences; they have not, however, warranted truly valuable cash money, but I have reason to believe that my chances of getting a job through connections forged at either of these internships is pretty good. Also, my landlady seems reasonable, so maybe she’ll be willing to let me pay my rent in truly valuable experiences for a while.

My primary duty at both companies is a task called script coverage, which is often foisted off on unpaid interns or other bottom level employees because it’s an unpleasant yet important job that few people want to do, like coal mining or being President of the United States. It goes like this:

Nerdy, self-loathing writers like myself write screenplays, most of them bad, and through either talent agents or fortuitous social connections they submit those screenplays to production companies, like the ones I work at. It’s the role of the production company to look at all the scripts they’ve received and make the executive decision on which ones would be profitable and thus worthy of attention and which ones are terrible and worthy of the garbage can (or recycling, if you work at an environmentally-friendly company like I do).

There’s more nerdy, self loathing writers than there are production companies, though, so every company has a giant stack of unread scripts that grows larger by the day as more writers submit stuff. The only way to tell if any of these scripts are good is to read them, but that’s something of a time consuming process, and it’s an assured fact that the vast majority of them aren’t good (see Sturgeon’s Revelation.)

In order to weed out the gems from the shit, production companies have people like me do script coverage, in which we sit around all day reading the submitted scripts and, when we’re finished, attach a page to the cover of the script with three things on it:

1) Whether we think the studio should PASS or CONSIDER the script
2) A summary of the script’s story
3) Comments backing up our decision on whether to pass or consider

Then, I put the completed script and coverage in the producer’s inbox so he can read my comments and make a decision on the script without having to blow an hour reading it. Meanwhile, I continue reading and rating scripts.

I absolutely love this fucking job. I love it so much I’d do it for free. Which, I suppose, is why I am. Hell, I love it so much I’d do it for money.

I love it because I love Mystery Science Theater 3000, the TV show where people (and profane, low budget puppets) watch terrible movies and make fun of them the whole way through. That’s my job now – I get to read scripts, the majority of which are bad, and then explain to my boss exactly why they’re bad and shouldn’t be made into movies.

Also, as a writer it’s really just delightful to be able to crush other writers’ dreams of having their scripts made into movies. This makes me sound like an asshole, but I actually think that passing on a bad script is almost an act of sympathy to the person who wrote it.

Think about it: You’ve poured your heart and soul into something that, it turns out, is shitty – would you rather have one person read it and laugh at your shoddy work, or have it get turned into a movie so millions of people can laugh at your shoddy work? Just ask Tommy Wiseau how he feels about The Room.

If the writer in question is serious about his craft, he’ll learn from his mistakes and either change his script or write a better one, and eventually a good movie will get made. If he gets disheartened by rejection and throws in the towel entirely, that’s good too, because the world needs plenty of bartenders and accountants.

And it’s great for my own writing skills – which, for the record, I don’t think are quite good enough for me to get a script past the snide intern at a production company either just yet. Bad examples, as I’ve said before, are in some cases better than good ones, and every day I discover all kinds of new ways for a screenplay to be bad. Protip: “Fucken” is not a word – it’s spelled “fuckin.’” Other protip: When every other word in your script is “fucken” or “fuckin’”, there’s a good chance your script isn’t a winner.

Of course, there are good scripts too – so far I’ve read two scripts which really knocked my socks off, an experience the guys on Mystery Science Theater 3000 sadly never got to have. After a day of shaking your head at scripts with no conflict and one dimensional characters who blurt out exactly what’s on their minds, reading one of these scripts can really help you appreciate how much the average moviegoer takes things like pacing for granted.

What I’ve found in years of watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 is that there’s a little nugget of good movie buried in almost every shitty movie, some plot point or idea that was strong enough to get somebody to write the script and then bring a crew together to raise money and shoot the thing:

Time Chasers actually has a pretty well thought out plot once you get past the shitty acting and effects. The relationship between the disembodied head and the monster in The Brain That Wouldn’t Die is slightly engaging amid the 1950s sci fi schlock. The concept behind Hobgoblins is pretty cool when you forget literally everything else about the movie. The plot twist at the end of Monster A-Go-Go would’ve been thought provoking if the rest of the movie had been remotely comprehensible.*

*The Starfighters is terrible in every way and I want to punch all the surviving crew members square in the dick.

It’s fun to find those moments in the scripts I read every day – the one idea so good that a writer thought, “Fuck it – I’m going to build a screenplay entirely around this idea.” And it’s even more fun, in a sort of House MD way, to reconstruct what went wrong and try to figure out how the writer could make the rest of the script live up to that one idea.

Oh, and on top of all that? Free employee kitchen!

Truman Capps was late on this update because he got hired on the spot at one of his internship interviews and had to work late, which is the best excuse he’s had in a long time.