I've certainly said it probably a half dozen times. I said it after getting dumped by a girl, on a day with a particularly bad hangover and probably at some point during the Colts 4th quarter meltdown in Super Bowl 44. But the truth is none of those days were that bad. It's far more likely that the worst day of my life is yet to come. I haven't had to deal with the death of a parent, a sick child or even a divorce.
What follows is not a story about the worst day of my life, but something fairly shitty nonetheless.
It all started back in November, I was wrapping up season 5 on The Mindy Project and I got a call from an old friend who had been my first boss ever in Los Angeles. He was working on a pitch and just wanted to know if I could help him with some research.
Of course, I'm always happy to help.
However, what started as some research quickly turned into me and my boss writing an entire pilot in two weeks, selling it and filming a week later.
For those in the know, that schedule is preposterous. People will spend months maybe years writing a pilot and even once it is sold there is an exhaustive pre-production process before any cameras start rolling. The fact that we turned in a draft on a Friday and filmed on a Monday is simply unheard of, but as this was considered a non-union 'alternative programming' show, the rules were slightly different. The entire experience was a hurricane that I have trouble even remembering.
When it was over, my boss looked at me and said 'how about that, you got your first writing credit?'
Huh? How about that. I was finally making some sort of progress in my writing career. This entire LA experiment wasn't quite the fool's errand I had long thought it was.
"They're never going to pick it up, but hey, if they do, you've got a job."
I spent the next couple months looking for work, eating ramen noodles and watching my bank account dwindle. I had earned a pretty penny for writing the pilot, but money has a funny way of evaporating in Los Angeles.
In that time I interviewed for five jobs, going 0 for 5. I started to wonder if I would ever work again. Could I go back to The Mindy Project? Maybe, but that probably wouldn't return until July. Could I really sit on my ass for 6 months? Would I really be fulfilled just writing and going to the gym every day?
I was pulled out of my existential funk by a phone call one day bearing great news.
"They're gonna pick it up."
'What? No way!'
"Ya man, the network president loves it. Some things need to be ironed out but we're looking good."
I didn't think much of it because things have a way of going wrong for me. The other shoe always drops eventually. In the mean time I was able to jump onto a pilot working in post to at least grab a few paychecks. My dire circumstances were starting to turn around, and then one day while at my desk at Universal I got a short email.
May 1st, 1500 a week. You in?
Holy shit. It was like a real written offer...and $1500 a week? While fairly modest for a 30 year old was going to be almost double what I had ever made. I started thinking about all the ways in which my life was about to change. I was going to be a professional writer. Everything I did along the way, every mistake I made, every mistake I didn't make, well it had apparently worked out.
I started thinking about the phone call to my parents as I held back tears of joy. How to tell my dad that maybe I could pay my own cell phone bill now, how I could take him to dinner some time. I planned trips, Vegas for a birthday, Burning Man for a week. I was going to go to Spain with my mom at the end of the summer. My luck had changed and in an industry where everyone has always played a game that I refuse to play; my underlying theory of 'be a cool guy and things will work out' had proven true.
While some people may think it's incredibly hard to be a writer, I would argue it is incredibly hard to get a job as a writer. The skillset of a low level writer is negligible. Many TV staff writers don't even write, they get paid to sit around and educate the adults in the room about some Millenial slang. But I was going to be like the number 2 guy writing a weekly show on a major American network.
And it was a kids show! After years of writing this blog about hard living and poor decision making, I was going to be writing a show aimed largely at the 8-14 demo. This irony was not lost on me.
Today is May 1st. It was supposed to be the first day of my new writing career. I was going to write a really earnest Facebook status thanking everyone that helped me get here. There would have been comments from my writer friends saying things like 'I knew you would make it." "You deserve this." and maybe some jokes about how they will be working for me some day.
Alas that was not to be.
Last Friday, 10 days before my start date the other shoe dropped.
I got a call at 5 o clock telling me the show was 'delayed indefinitely.'
I didn't understand how I could be on emails from the studio asking me if I wanted them to bank some content at the ACM Awards and then have the show essentially pre-cancelled less than a month later. I heard the pain in my boss's voice from the other end of the phone. Not only had something that he had worked on every day for the last 6 months been taken away from him, I couldn't help but get the feeling that he thought he had let me down.
The day was a disaster. I ended up drinking every thing I could get my hands on and returning to my house some time around 8am on Saturday morning and then staying in bed for two days. It was like that montage in (500) Days of Summer, I refused to confront reality.
All the people I had told about my exciting new opportunity I would have to now share my pitiful tragedy with. There was denial. hey maybe it's just going to be a few weeks. There was anger man fuck these guys for waiting until a week before my start date to pull the rug out from under me and then there was acceptance. I'm not a TV writer, I'm still a shithead that gets people lunch.
I've had ups and downs before certainly, but never had I gotten this close. To compound matters, someone that I love was in the hospital with Meningitis at the time and I didn't think things could get much worse. I spent a week in my room bingeing 13 Reasons Why trying to convince myself that things weren't that bad. I mean I didn't get raped in a hot tub! But then I thought, you know, maybe I would take a hot tub raping if it would get my show on the air.
I thought about what I would do next. I considered quitting the film industry and joining the Army. I considered asking my Australian cousins if I could live with them for a year and pick berries for a year. I even thought about going back to Indiana, swallowing my pride and asking my dad to train me in the family business.
But in the end I decided to just press on.
Shitty things happen to people all the time and having my non union basic cable show taken away from me is far from the worse thing that will happen in the world today. It's annoying, I would prefer it not to have happened but it did and that's the reality that I live in. I'll work another week or so on this pilot and then I'll attempt to figure everything out, I usually do. I've always told myself that success in LA is a war of attrition, you just have to ride it out until you're the only one left standing. And in a long game like that you have to expect to take some L's along the way. And as soul crushing as this has been, I will use it to learn and hopefully grow as a person.
Yesterday was my brother's birthday and we went to the Clipper game. He's had a tough year and it was important for him to get to spend some time with his brother, even if the Clippers did completely shit the bed.
(Side note: Gordon Hayward used to be my brother's tennis doubles partner and my brother told him 'You're an idiot if you play basketball instead of tennis in college. It's not like you will ever make the NBA.' LOLLLLLLLLL)
But riding the train home with my brother after the game yesterday I realized THAT is what's important in life. Like obviously I want to make a ton of money, I want to tell people I meet at parties what cool show I'm writing on. I want to have my own apartment and drive a car that works (my axle snapped on the way to work this morning...it was just icing on the cake) but none of that matters if I don't have a great support system of friends and family with whom to share my success.
I haven't been the best person this year. I've viewed some people close to me as burdens, I've only thought about myself, I've been a pretty bad son, brother and friend. And while there isn't a whole lot I can do about my professional career at the moment, I can focus on just being a better dude. And hopefully, everything else will fall into place.
As usual my future is uncertain. Hell, there might be a writer's strike tomorrow and if that happens I may have to start selling body parts to survive. But in spite of all of this and perhaps to a fault, I remain optimistic that the future is bright. My car will get fixed, I'll probably get another job some day and my friends and family will likely still love me and that's all that really matters at the end of the day.
And you know what? Maybe I'll get into one of the writer's workshops next month and this will be the best thing that ever happened to me. But if not? Fuck it, if I'm going to struggle well into my 30s, at least I'm doing it at the beach.
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