Last week I go to a meeting with a Producer who read the movie I wrote, currently scheduled to shoot in August/September, and wants to talk about writing another one. I don’t know what the meeting is going to be like, or what’s expected of me at it, and on my walk from work to the meeting I try to gather all of my script ideas in case he asks me to present them. He tells me to meet him at a restaurant in SoHo, Cafe Gitane, and I get to the block that the restaurant is on twenty minutes early but I don’t want him to see me getting there really early (he has an earlier meeting at the same restaurant so I know he’s already there) and risk communicating that this meeting, which is likely a speck on his calendar, is the highlight of my week professionally, so I go into a supermarket and browse until I am casually seven minutes late.

I walk up to the restaurant and the Producer is sitting at a round table outside with an Executive at the agency that represents me and a dramatically tall and thin early-middle-aged woman wearing a very fashionable and expensive-looking white smock. The Producer greets me and says, “David! I completely forgot we were meeting! It’s lucky I’m still here.” Then he introduces me to the people sitting at the table and then I sit down and wait until I am spoken to to speak. The Producer pours me some wine. This is a more informal meeting than I expected. I have an itchy bug bite on my neck but I don’t want to sit here openly scratching it in front of these people.

The Producer and the Agency Executive talk about the new Terrence Malick movie Tree of Life, which the Agency Executive personally helped raise financing for, and the Producer says Tree of Life was so bad that it made him go back and reevaluate other Terrence Malick movies and wonder if he really liked them in the first place. I am surprised he is saying this in front of a guy who helped make Tree of Life but I guess they are close enough friends and the movie has garnered enough acclaim so that he can reveal how he really feels about it. I tell him that what he’s saying about reevaluating Terrence Malick reminds me of the Pitchfork review for the second Concretes record that talks about how it’s so bad it made the writer reevaluate whether he liked them in the first place.

Then the Producer looks down at his phone and responds to a text that I can see out of the corner of my eye is from Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, and the Agency Executive turns towards me and asks me if I’m gay, and I tell him I’m not, and then he asks me how old I am, and I tell him 22, and then he says I am a fucking baby and he smiles and takes a gulp of wine and gets up and goes to the bathroom. I check my phone and there are no messages so I write a text to Angelica so it looks like I also have texts or emails to respond to.

Then the Producer asks me to tell him about a script I am working on or a script idea I have. I think for a second and decide I want to tell him about an idea for a script about internet defamation, and I warn him that perhaps it is too zeitgeisty in which case I have other ideas that I can present, and he says, “Don’t say zeitgeisty, it makes people think you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I nod and then tell him about my idea. It is about a pudgy and uncomfortable high school boy who dresses up as The Joker for Halloween and someone takes a picture of him and puts it on Facebook and then somehow a massively popular anonymous blogger finds it and posts it on his blog and mocks the boy in the picture. The blog makes fun of “entry-level alts,” kids who are trying to act/look hip but haven’t figured out how to do it yet, and the post about the boy becomes a viral sensation and all the kids at his high school find out about it and taunt him about it and the boy’s already-bleak life becomes unbearable, so he does a lot of deep-digging research on the anonymous blogger and finds his real name and four pictures of him.

The boy also finds out the city and neighborhood where the blogger lives and then the boy decides to go to that city to find the blogger and confront him and tell him that writing mean things about innocent people on the internet can have disastrous real-life consequences.

Then I say, “Is this retarded? I can stop if it’s retarded and give you another idea.” The producer shakes his head and says, “Keep going.”

So the boy goes to Chicago and tries to track down the anonymous blogger, but he can’t find him and he’s about to give up, but then he finally does find him and tries to confront him but the blogger is so duplicitously slick and clever and disarmingly warm and complimentary towards the boy (and the boy is so impressionable and eager for acceptance) that the blogger wins the boy over, and the blogger realizes that he likes the boy too, and that the boy reminds him of himself. They spend an afternoon together before the boy flies home and they bond. Soon the blogger and the boy are emailing each other and then the blogger enlists the boy as his intern to help run his site remotely, and the boy winds up aiding exactly the thing he tried to tell the anonymous blogger to stop doing.

Eventually the boy has to post something virulently defamatory about another hapless entry-level alt and it spurs him to realize that the acceptance/approbation of an anonymous blogger isn’t worth the cost. And then so one night when he knows the anonymous blogger has gone to sleep, the boy deletes all of the entries on the blog and posts photos of the blogger and embarrassing email exchanges between himself and the blogger, including emails where the blogger crassly details sexual conquests and makes off-color ethnic/racial jokes, and then he changes the site’s administrative password, thereby exacting revenge on the blogger and coming of age sort of.

The producer smiles and says that story arc reminds him of Star Wars (crossing over to the Dark Side I guess? I’m not really familiar with Star Wars), and I think I must look concerned about my story fitting so neatly into a mold that he recognized it in 45 seconds, and then the producer says that there are really only a handful of story arcs and every good story fits into one of those, and then he says my outline is really the bare bones of a movie and he wants to see and read more. Then he gives me his contact information and leaves for dinner.

But then so anyway, yesterday I get a Google Alert that leads me to a story about the script for a movie about Pitchfork, written by the Duplass Brothers, who made The Puffy Chair, Humpday, and Cyrus and some other other movies. This is how the movie is summarized:

“Titled ‘Pitchfork,’ it’s a dramatic thriller about the middle-aged mother of an indie rocker who, after her son is killed in a car accident, seeks vengeance on an online blogger who had peddled snark about her son (on the music site Pitchfork, hence one of the title’s entendres). Things take a turn, though, when she finds out the snarker is just a teenager.”

So I forward the link to the Producer and write about how this seems like a unfortunate double coincidence for me because the story arcs in my movie idea and the Pitchfork movie seem really similar, and also I write a blog that used to be about Pitchfork. He writes back and says I will have to change my idea or come up with a new idea, and then I realize the whole thing reminds me of something someone told me outside a party one night: a man who is friendly with my agent, a middle-aged Wall Street-type guy, comes up to me and says, “You write movies, right?” I shrug and say, “I wrote one movie, why?” He says, “I got a movie idea — you wanna hear it?” I say, “Sure!”

He tells me about his movie idea, which is a family movie called First Dog: At the beginning, as credits play, the new President gets inaugurated, and then as the Presidential motorcade drives away from the inauguration, a dog runs out into the middle of the road and the President’s driver accidentally hits the dog. The dog is a mangy, smelly, stray dog, but since news cameras are all around and the President doesn’t want to appear insensitive, he gets out of the car and picks up the dog and is forced to adopt it.

So the austere, stoic President and the homeless free-spirited stray dog don’t get along, and the dog always tries to lick the President’s face and the President always tries to muzzle the dog, but the President’s wife and daughters love the dog and the White House staff likes it too. The White House Chef gives the dog big steaks, the gardener plays frisbee with it, and foreign dignitaries bring their own ethnic dogs to the White House during summits (a French poodle, one of those hypoallergenic Chinese dogs) and the First Dog falls in love with one of them. If the story needs a modern bent, it can be a gay romance. If it needs a postmodern bent, make it a gay romance that no character ever mentions or treats as out of the ordinary but is obvious because both of the dogs involved are male.

So the press loves the dog adoption story, and it softens the President’s image as hyper-rational but emotionally disconnected, but some time passes and the President’s wife and daughters realize that the President doesn’t like the dog and they accuse the President of not liking the dog because it’s ugly. They can’t see that the dog treats the President differently when they’re alone together, you know, the dog is just too playful and slobbery for the stern and germophobic President. In one scene, the dog eats the President’s legislation. In another, the First Dog jumps up into bed as the President and the First Lady are kissing before they go to sleep (family movie) and the First Lady marvels over how cute the dog is until the President loses his urge to kiss.

Soon the President decides he has had enough of the dog and hatches a plan to give him up for adoption and replace him with an identical-looking dog that appears friendlier and better-behaved but is actually sinister. The replacement dog is owned by a shady dog-trafficker with a mysterious Russian accent.

So right before the exchange is slated to go down, in the nick of time, the First Dog saves the President’s life, maybe by sniffing a bomb near the President or knocking a plate of poisoned food off the table. The plot to kill the President was hatched by the owner of the First Dog’s sinister replacement dog, by the way, the dog-trafficker, probably a nefarious ex-KGB agent. If the villain needs a modern bent, he can be a Chinese communist. If he needs a timeless bent, he can be an evil megalomaniac. And then at the end, the President and the First Dog come to a mutual understanding and they bond over steaks (one cooked, one raw to celebrate their differences and their similarities simultaneously) and then the end credits roll.

The man who tells me his idea finishes and looks at me expectantly and says, “It’s a great idea right?” I think, like, on one hand it sounds comically formulaic but I think about it for a second, and, like, aren’t all non-animated family movies comically formulaic? There are probably 500(,000?) movies about very stern men coming to mutual understandings with free-spirited dogs, women, and their sons and daughters. So I tell him I suspect it is a great idea for a family movie, although I haven’t seen a family movie since like 1993. The man says, “You should write it! I’m never gonna write it and it’s a good idea, just sitting there.” He sounds regretful for a second.

And he’s right, and it makes me think about how a workable idea isn’t actually anything until you execute it, it’s just something floating in some ether and having an idea and not executing it is like not having any idea at all (or worse), and thinking about what that guy said about his own idea makes me more motivated to follow through on the ideas I have so other people don’t coincidentally follow through them first and then I have to come up with new ones. I would try to write First Dog but I don’t think I’d be able to hit the right pitch on the dialogue and characterization: no dastardly bloggers, no marginalized teenagers/twentysomethings, and also I’ve never had a pet.

But since I’ve already written about it extensively here, if you want to try to write First Dog, and I am confident that you could do it because screenwriting isn’t exactly neurosurgery when you’ve got an A+ idea like First Dog to work from, give it a shot. Email me a draft when you’re done and we can talk about some next steps! I am serious. :)

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