Hey! I’m that guy trying to sell my latest screenplay, publish it as a novel or die trying.

In DIE TRYING, you will get an unvarnished look at a bitterly honest writer struggling to make it. No name-dropping or Hollywood phoniness. Just the facts ma’am on what the media landscape really is like behind the curtain.

In TODAY’S ISSUE, we discuss whether emerging screenwriters can supply Viagra to a limp Hollywood.

This week, The Blacklist came out. It’s a list of Hollywood’s best unproduced scripts.

As an emerging screenwriter, I am rewriting my script based on one of their reader’s feedback. I hope to make the list next year.

On screenwriting subreddits, writers asked questions about the competition and Blacklist CEO Franklin Leonard even chimed in with advice. Writers trafficked hope, and there was a buzz of excitement (at least in the posts published before the official announcement).

Yesterday, I woke up to a New York Times article with the opposite sentiment. Brooks Barnes chronicled sad Hollywood studio tours where the lots are empty because no one makes movies in Los Angeles anymore.

Barnes describes a limp industry.

Cruising the Paramount backlot, “the tours have largely become the equivalent of those kitschy foldout maps to celebrity homes: melancholy reminders that Hollywood stopped being the Hollywood of popular imagination a very long time ago.”

Barnes writes of one visitor describing the guided tours as a metaphor for Hollywood’s “‘fading relevancy.’”

Ouch.

As this newsletter is my journey as an emerging writer, the mission seems like a doomed Quijotesque tilting at windmills.

Comparing screenwriters’ excitement about the Blacklist with the sad state of the industry in Barnes’ piece, I get the feeling that we’re trapped in a failing marriage.

Screenwriter wannabes like me are the blessed children, still clinging to the hope of keeping Mom and Dad together. The people at the top are the parents, aware of the inevitable split and secretly planning post-divorce sexual tourism escapades.

A fling in a Dominican “car wash” might fit the bill to cap off the bitter end.

In one Reddit post, a screenwriter vented his frustration about writing personal drama scripts and not getting any real traction.

A produced writer counseled that “at the end of the day, most people in the industry pipeline just want to work, not engage with the deep secrets of the universe.”

At the end of the day, in Hollywood, work supercedes art. 

The kids retreat into shells as Mom and Dad sign the papers and secretly go shopping for prophylactics and sunscreen.

Am I being too negative or realistic?

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