the Block Busters are here and I find my ass still in Los Angeles....
A couple of days spent in Guatemala in April to top up my 90 day US Visa, has meant that I haven't left the American Continent since Jan 10.
My memory of arriving here has become faint, I even called LA home the other day, on the phone to loved ones back home.
Homesick?? I haven't got time to get homesick!
Since my last blog entry I've secured paid work from someone connected to someone very famous and an organisation with lots of famous people, oh not selling any scripts, reading them.....
The Script Reader is a strange animal, rather like a sports coach, your on the field but your not ON the field. Culled from interns, out of work screenwriters, Grad trainees and Juniors, and of course screenwriter wannabees - They act as gate keepers across Hollywood, their job to weed out the very people often just like them.
It's surreal reading through the script of someone, the days, hours, na, sometimes years spent ignoring family and friends to knock it out, and now it's been delivered to me. I have the power to lavish it with praise and pass it up the food chain, or to kill it in it''s first gentle steps into the harsh cruel world.
At time of writing, of the 6 scripts I have read, only 1 has received the thumbs up from me, the other 5 I strangled.
I have blood on my hands, dreams squashed on the bottom of my shoe.
The reader job was taken primarily to help me improve as a writer and get a bit of cash, but is this a moral way to make money?
Although I've only praised 1 out 6 scripts I've read, I find myself rooting for each script I read, I want to love it. Speaking to a reader friend of mine, I discover she's the same, we want these people to be good, we want to discover them. Like me, my reader friend is a screenwriter wannabee, we want to learn from good scripts, but so often I'm seeing bad scripts or not so bad scripts. It's all an education.
