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, Marty Supreme sledgehammers me awake me from a holiday stupor.

I metamorphosed into a slug over the holidays and appreciated a swift kick in the ass by Marty Supreme.

It’s my experience that no one really works in December. “Contact me after the New Year” is the standard refrain from people who use the holidays as an excuse to blow you off.

So I marked the indeterminate days that blended together in a sludgey fugue state of watching football, drinking beer, eating too much and sleeping too little.

My American metric — productivity — receded into a slovenly state of abysmal holiday “cheer.”

On page six of the film’s screenplay, written by Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein, an ovum egg is conceived and branded by the protagonist’s name “‘MARTY SUPREME - MADE IN AMERICA’”.

It is a truly American story of an upstart trampling anything in his way to become a ping-pong world champion in the years after World War II.

We have seen the likes of Marty before in American culture: Jay Gatsby, Sammy Glick, Tracy Flick…

In Act II of the screenplay, Marty abandons his married neighbor and lover, who he impregnated, in his mythic quest to expand west, colonize the natives and beat a Japanese player who has a newfangled foam-backed ping pong paddle that drops opposing players in an early grave.

After blowing off his lover, Marty hustles ping pong games to raise money for a chance to fly to Tokyo and face the Japanese Destroyah.

The screenwriters set up Marty’s game and the narrative structure: “MARTY plays table tennis with great ferocity. SMASH after SMASH after SMASH.”

Reading the script is a frenetic series of smash smash smash events to raise money and get to Tokyo.

An aging starlet is seduced, a dog is abducted and a scrawny ass is paddled in humiliation.

That is about one iota of the narrative maelstrom of Marty Supreme. The screenwriters later describe Marty’s table tennis defensive game as a “relentless, almost mechanized undercuts.”

The story is a high “muzzle velocity” flood-the-zone onslaught of grifts, scams and hustles to make it to Tokyo.

The “mechanized” overplotting becomes a liability, in my opinion. At the end, when Marty finally breaks, we’re too exhausted to appreciate the character’s awakening.

But Marty Supreme’s SMASH SMASH SMASH did awaken me from my holiday coma, and here I am writing my own personal American hustle…sorry…dream.

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