and so far things are going well. and it’s friday! this morning i got an e-mail to attend dinners on thursday nights, but i said I CAN’T, I HAVE CLASS ON THURSDAY NIGHT. but i don’t feel bad about not getting to expand my social circle, becaause i’m excited about class. i can always have dinner.
here’s something i forgot to write about class last night – a woman asked the professor about people stealing other people’s work and submitting it to be produced. he assured her that this is not a concern.
i was amused by this. when i lived in LA, i took a couple of screenwriting classes at the UCLA extension program. these classes were extremely pricey, and taught by screenwriters who had actually gotten their scripts bought AND produced. it’s actually easier to get a script bought than to get it made into an actual movie that you can view, by the way, and it’s ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE to get a script sold in the first place. just in case you were thinking you were going to sell the screenplay you’re working on. FORGET ABOUT IT. not to be discouraging or anything. i could go on and on about how everybody in the world thinks it would be possible to sell a script, but it’s about the same odds as winning the lottery, pretty much.
anyway, the classes i took in LA were ok. kind of boring, and i didn’t really learn a lot. i’d already written some scripts, and the instructors were encouraging, but most of the time i remember being really reallly bored. surely i must have got something out of them.
anyway, the people in the classes also thought they were going to sell their scripts. now, they had a better chance than most people because they were actually LIVING IN LA, and many of them had connections to film industry people, which is really the way you have to have any chance at all of selling anything – BUT NONE OF THEM IS GOING TO SELL A SCRIPT. just so you know. not to discourage you.
but inevitably in these classes, somebody would be very very worried and concerned that somebody else would steal their BRILLIANT SCREENPLAY IDEA.
i just found it funny that somebody here in spfld would have this same kind of anxiety (not to DIMINISH the anxiety, just to point out that it’s kind of RETARDED).
if you have to worry about something (i wonder what life would be like without worrying about something all the time? probably very peaceful and relaxing. perhaps this will happen to me someday. about the same time i win the miss american pageant), you should worry about trying to write something good. and you can hope that you could actually DO something with it, that would be a realistic worry. and then, if you’re insane like me, you can hope that you’ll somehow get SUCCESSFUL and PUBLISHED and all of that. but life would be much, much better with no crazy hopes. FOR ANYTHING.
here’s a funny story the professor told us (will he ever find my website? should i give his name? would he mind?) – he warned against plagiarism, and said that they were reading a script in class, and somebody pointed out that the script, supposedly written by a student, was actually the movie “there’s something about mary.” The student had downloaded the script and changed all the names and tried to pass it off as her own. she was an international student, and “language challenged.”
funny but sad. mostly funny. she didn’t get an A in the class.
there’s this guy in both of my classes who hasn’t taken any notes. in the comedy class, the one that’s very intense and i wrote about 12 pages of notes, so many that my hand started hurting, this guy didn’t take one single note. hmm. was he planning on dropping the course, and didn’t want to waste his time? was he somehow secretly absorbing the information by some top secret means?
he was in my playwriting class last night, and once again didn’t take any notes.
maybe he’s brilliant and remembers everything everybody says to him.
it seems that would be a burden.
ok then. i’m going to go see “men in tights” tonight, which is a benefit by the ballet company, featuring men in town who get donations to be in the ballet, and i’ve been told by somebody in the show that it’s going to be VERY FUNNY. so i hope you have a ticket if you want to go, because it’s sold out. because who wouldn’t want to pay a measly ten bucks to see a bunch of men in tights, dancing around?
that is all for now. camping this weekend, theoretically.
have a good weekend. do something fun. do a BUNCH of fun stuff.
ok then,
grace focused.