INT. AIRPORT - DAY
As I stood in the slow moving queue inching towards the fast check in desk, I pondered on the chain of events that started me on my journey across the Atlantic to the enchanted Kingdom of Hollywood.
FLASHBACK – INT. CAR – TRAVELING – DAY
Traveling back from a job with a Camera Operator friend of mine, the conversation soon turned to the perennial problem of actually getting a script into the right hands. Ah she said, my husband’s cousin is an executive producer at Aardman, the biggest Animation company in the UK. Which is when I realised I didn’t have an animation script. But pretty soon and idea popped into my caffeine fuelled brain and Rose’s War AKA “The St Valentine’s Day Flower Massacre” was born. Within a day the script was done, the idea had been very clear and passion did the rest – the story of a rose fighting against her human persecutors on St Valentine’s Day was a sure fire hit! Or so I thought.
TWO YEARS LATER
Having nagged and wheedled my friend into to actually making contact with her Aardmen connection, I was rewarded by the great man replying that he couldn’t open the attachment for legal reasons. It was then that I realised that even though you may only be one contact removed from a connection…you are at the end of the day, still removed.
In a moment of blind optimism, and with nothing to lose I entered Rose’s War into a film festival based in Long Beach. To my surprise it was a winner…even more surprising cash was involved, and free accommodation over the three-day festival. Could this be the excuse I needed to combine it with a trip to L.A and try and whip up some enthusiasm for my many other projects.
While I was weighing up the decision, my Script LOUISIANA BLOOD placed in a screenplay contest run by Carson Reeves on his SCRIPTSHADOW website. Carson is known in the business for spotting up and coming writing talent. The contest started with a logline, and progressed to a sample ten pages and then onto a full script. So out of a thousand entries Louisiana Blood had done well to survive. I knew that the premise of the script was solid, as the logline had attracted nearly six hundred viewings on the Moviebytes site within months. What I didn’t expect was the huge amount of interest that was to follow.
Within a few hours of the announcement requests to read Louisiana Blood were pouring in…and they weren’t just from Hollywood, but from France, Singapore, Australia and beyond. After replying to their queries, faxing release forms and attaching scripts I was exhausted…was it a sign that I should go to L.A?
THE INCITING INCIDENT
Over the St Valentine’s weekend Rose’s War and my action thriller Shadow Trade, both won their genres in the 7th I.P Screenplay competition. Three awards, an offer to produce Rose’s War and an option from a Hollywood Producer on Shadow Trade…my mind was made up, I was off to La La Land!
INT. AIRCRAFT – TRAVELING - SLEEPLESS NIGHT
I had pondered long and hard about whether I should gear up to use my MAC on board, and after exhaustive research into plugs, power supplies and elbow room I had decided to risk the withdrawal symptoms and opt for a Macless journey. What a great decision, I didn’t even have room to open a paperback! I was reduced to watching five films back to back on the expansive 5 inch screen with the special sound through a sock option that British Airways provide at no extra cost.
As the plane droned on and the films failed to impress I promised myself I’d book a window seat on the way back, at least that way I’d skip the pleasure of getting up and down for two unrelated bladders. Further entertainment was provided by the three passengers in front who looked as if they were casting for a group part in Gangbangers III “The wasted years”. If the leader of the gang, wearing either the very latest in shabby chic, or a pair of hand me down tracksuit bottoms and a forty-year-old unwashed T-Shirt, had pushed his seat back any further, we’d have been dating. When he stood up his arms bulged with veins like tramlines and I was sure he had a Masters degree in gym-work. The effect was somewhat diluted when they all put on their pink velour neck pillows and fancy headphones, but I was in no position to mock, the bones in my neck and spine had fused together somewhere over the Atlantic.
INT. LAX AIRPORT – SECURITY
As expected, there did seem to be an air of nervousness in the land of the free. After an hour of restless progression towards the line over which you stepped at your peril, I finally got to display my passport. Having taken advantage of the high quality passport booth in my local post office I sported an over lit picture which added an extra twenty years onto my age by giving me white hair. The official looked at me and grunted something incomprehensible. I’d been warned not to try humour, and to make absolutely sure to stress that I was in L.A for pleasure and not business. There seemed to be more paranoia about me working in the US than any security issues. I smiled benignly; he barked something else at me, clearly getting annoyed.
His name was an acronym, his nationality an enigma and I’d been awake 20 hours. My head ached with an overdose of in flight entertainment, a smorgasbord of “He’s just not that into your world of lying surrogates in 27 dresses warring with the brides law abiding citizen.” So I’d failed to realise he wanted me to put my hand on the scanner. I looked around and saw other people placing their hands on the small screens at the desk. I tried to put my five fingers onto the screen and discovered what I perceived as a design fault; there was only room for four fingers…what to do with the thumb? Had I inadvertently blundered into the Yakuza line? This would certainly explain his impenetrable accent. Eventually, just before we reached a point where I thought they would shoot me to save themselves any more trouble, I placed my thumb onto the screen, squinted into the biometric eye scanner and I was through. My trip to L.A had already proved bumpy, but it soon turned out that I was really going to have to fasten my seatbelt once I got into the rental depot!
EXT. LAX AIRPORT - CAR HIRE DEPOT – NIGHT
Being a typical anal writer I’d hired a Satnav with a US map chip to take over with me. An actor friend of mine had assured me he went everywhere by bike and metro. But after studying the vast and complicated map of bus and train routes I decided it was too steep a learning curve. I took an airport bus to the car hire company depot. No Ford Magnolia anonymity for me, a feisty blue Hyundai compact was to be my mode of transport. I’d booked into the Holiday Inn two minutes away from the airport to make sure my sleep-deprived brain had the minimum to cope with upon arrival. I fired up the Satnav, started the car and snail like, headed for the exit.
The Satnav remained ominously silent as I edged out into the traffic. There was no turning back, huge trucks hurtled past as I desperately waited for a sign, any sign as to where to go. The one good thing about driving in the US, is that nobody drives with the same reckless devotion to speed as an English tourist in a rental desperate to get some sleep. Pretty soon most of the traffic was reduced to small specks in my rear-view mirror as I put some distance between me and the pursuing trucks…luckily there didn’t appear to be speed cameras or police cars on the roads that night. I later learned that you’d be lucky to see any police at all unless it was after a crime had actually been committed. Finally, as I sped down the highway my Satnav spoke. It wasn’t good news “Go west” she said. Now unless The Village People had taken over my Satnav it appeared that this was the American way, no more left and right, just vague geographical hints.
I headed back towards LAX, this wasn’t great, but in the absence of knowing the right way, I took to relying on The Village People to tell me when I’d gone wrong, and then try and reverse engineer my way back to the Holiday Inn. It was at this point that I discovered the main difference between the UK roads and those in L.A…size. In England when you stuff up your directions it’s an easy enough matter to do a discrete U-Turn and get back on track. Not so in L.A. Over there you’re looking at scything across three or four lanes on your side and the same on the opposite side. That can be as many as eight lanes of traffic in which you are the stupid part of the metal sandwich.
Like most animals in the wild I soon discovered the art of following the herd. I found that if I tailgated a car that was turning in the direction I wanted to go, then they would sort out lane discipline and the cryptic traffic light situation. Thus by tailgating and responding to error messages from the voice of the Village People I should end up at the Holiday Inn well before dawn!
The chance that a truckload of Mexican cleaners were booking into the same hotel as me was slim, but I clung grimly to their bumper as they tried to shake me off around the freeways of L.A. After what seemed like hours, but was only a terrifying 30 minutes, I arrived at the LAX airport Holiday Inn, conveniently hidden behind a McDonalds outlet.
Luckily that was one of the few pieces of information I’d remembered from the helpful rep at the car rental desk. “It’s easy to miss” she’d said. Never a truer word spoken. I was quite confident that with practice and my Satnav I could miss a whole state!
I booked into the hotel, quietly confident that the difficult part of my journey was over. I reached my room and gratefully surveyed my new home. I went to the window and tried to draw the curtains. Once again I entered the twilight zone. There was a thin gauze curtain, either side of which hung a faux curtain approximately eighteen inches wide, surely some sort of joke, or were the residents only able to sleep bathed in the neon of downtown L.A?
I was now so lacking in sleep that small pink elephants danced across the room and cartoon Hyenas laughed at my plight. I headed down to reception; maybe someone had upped the anti and stolen not only the soap, shampoo and mandatory hairnet, but also the curtains…after all I was in America, the land where anything was possible. The receptionist was incredibly helpful and a specialist was soon dispatched to my room to assist me.
I made small talk with Pablo and he listened politely to my confused rambling. He smiled and reached behind the gauze curtain, pulling the two hanging sticks that allowed the thick nylon blackout drapes to slide into place on either side. I slipped him a few dollars to cover my shame, collapsed into bed and slept for the first time in 24 Hrs.
INT. HOLIDAY INN – RESTAURANT – DAY
A feast of sugar based food groups was spread out before me. I could eat almost anything I wanted and either squash it into a waffle or smother it in maple syrup. The waitress was cheery and helpful and took her food seriously…and rather like a long freight train seemed to be still crossing every time I looked up.
RECEPTION
After surviving breakfast I was ready to do battle with the thorny problem of Internet access. The receptionist was once again very helpful, as were numerous guests who marveled at my lack of success in acquiring Internet access on my battered old Mac.
The in house computer geek was summoned and soon brought all of his computer savvy to bear on my unique problem. Half an hour later, still baffled, he was forced to phone a friend as he delved ever deeper into the mystic world of Internet access and my computer’s inability to play ball. An hour later, the conclusion was reached that maybe my computer had suffered a fatal blow from a baggage handler and was never going to connect again. The staff very kindly allowed me free access via their business centre and I was soon back on track.
My lack of mobile Internet access was further compounded by the mobile phone situation. This was an area I had researched in depth before leaving the UK. After all how were Stephen or Jerry going to be able to reach me while I was in L.A without a US cell number? I had opted to purchase a prepaid SIM from a company who promised me easy and cheap access to not only a UK forwarding number but also a US cell number from the comfort of my own phone. Not quite as easy as that, because this presumed you’d had the foresight to unlock your phone. This little technical feat required one to plumb the dark side of the phone business and deal with shady characters that hung out in local markets and back streets who were invariably called Ali. When Ali let me down the day before I was due to fly out, I had to find another source of unlocking, which I finally managed to do at the very last moment. Now that both my current Blackberry and my standby Palm Treo were unlocked, the world was my oyster, or so I thought. I soon realised that like a patient laid up on a hospital gurney I was to be the passenger rather than the driver on that particular journey!
Screenwriter Michael Donald lives in Oxford, UK, is now prepared to swap anonymity for fame within the Hollywood community. His award winning thriller screenplay LOUISIANA BLOOD and animation script ROSE’S WAR are making waves and his action thriller SHADOW TRADE has recently attracted Kerry David (Cody Banks I & II, My Date With Drew, Like Dandelion Dust) as producer.
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