How Annie Hall helps me cope with rejection

Doggieane Keaton

Yesterday I posted about the fear most of us share that we will never reach our lofty goals. I got a lot of support, and I thank you all for that.

So as a sort of follow-up, I thought I'd add something that helps me sometimes when I face another round of rejections:

I hate Annie Hall.

I'm sure a lot of you are judging me right now. Maybe you're thinking you were too hasty in your support of me yesterday. How can I hate Annie Hall? Everybody loves that movie for a thousand amazing reasons. You're probably questioning my taste level.

This isn't an opportunity for me to explain why I hate Annie Hall. I have my reasons. It's not an opportunity for you to convince me to like Annie Hall or give it another chance.

The point is, it's a mantra I repeat whenever rejection gets me down.

I hate Annie Hall. Everyone else loves it.

So every time I put a script out into the world and someone doesn't like it, I remember how much I hate Annie Hall. Just because one person doesn't love something I create, that doesn't mean it's not a valid creation. That doesn't mean someone else won't come along and get it right away.

You have an Annie Hall. There is some movie that everyone raves about and you can't fucking stand. If that script had come across your desk you would have set it on fire, but somebody read it and believed in it and made it and the world loved it. You may not get it, but a lot of people did.

So if one person doesn't love your work, that's okay. Maybe it's Annie Hall.

Screw the odds

When I first started sending pages around, people told me over and over that nobody would make an action movie with a female lead. It was pointless, they said. Write about men. Forget women.

But I've never been one to listen to odds of failure. I'm pretty convinced that I can do any goddamn thing I want to. Except calculus. Because fuck limits and shit.

Anyway, I wrote action scripts with female leads. And after Salt came out, a lot of people started talking about how they were going to try an action movie with a female lead. I bet some of those same people who told me not to bother were now trying it out.

Salt didn't exactly blast the market open, though. Other attempts barely made back their money. So the lesson became, only write a female-lead action movie if it stars Angelina.

Piffle, I say.

The day will come. So I keep writing. I get meetings. Eventually I'll get a deal. A movie will be made. It will fail or succeed or break even. I will keep writing. A movie will get made.

And one day, either from my work or that of someone else, a film will break through that will silence every asshole who ever said women couldn't be action stars. I'm looking at you, Chloe Moretz. Oh yes, I've got plans for you.

There will always be a thousand reasons you could fail, and there will always be plenty of people ready to tell you how. They'll shout it at you from the rooftops. They'll whisper doubt in your ear in quiet corners. They'll gleefully plant the evidence in front of you, happy to "just be realistic" in your face.

You can listen to them and doubt everything. You can quit, or you can change your ways, or you can analyze your odds or you can figure out how to game the system.

Or you can nod and smile and get back to work. Write your best screenplay. Be the one who proves everybody wrong.

Don't get me wrong, I write scripts with male leads too. The majority of action scripts are written with men in the lead; I'd be doing myself a disservice to stick to one gender, and I am certainly capable of writing great parts for men. But I still write the movie I want to see - the type of film that will take advantage of the Gina Caranos of the world.

Breaking into the movie industry is tough. People come out here every year armed with a script or two, convinced that all they need is a year to become Diablo Cody, and that's just not how it works. Most likely, it will take a lot of work and a lot of time.

So accept that. It will be tough. It will take years. It will take several scripts. You will have a few false starts. Once you just accept that as part of the cost, it's not that big a deal. If you expect it to be immediate, you're going to spend a lot of time languishing in disappointment.

So once you know what you're in for, push that aside and write. Just fucking write. Write what you want to see, write the best material you possibly can.

I never listen to the odds. I tune them out, put on my writing playlist and get back to work imagining how Emma Stone is going to kick ass in my next script.

Because there is only one thing stronger than the odds - hard fucking work.

Get to work

What are you writing right now?

I hope you have an answer. If you don't - if you hem and haw and make excuses, or if you mumble some words knowing you haven't touched your screenplay in months, stop it. Quit what you're doing and get to work.

I think the biggest threat to most screenwriters is our own self-doubt. We all have it. You get on this high when things are good. The pages flow, the ideas seem perfect, we're already planning the Oscar speech. But then one person reads our latest work and hates it, and we are riddled with fatalism.

Or maybe you never get that far. Maybe you're so convinced that your writing sucks that you can't finish anything.

It's normal. It's also some shit you have to get over if you want to write a great script.

EVERYBODY sucks. They know they suck. Even the best writers, the people you admire and respect and want to be like some day, the people you think are natural geniuses - they are absolutely certain that they suck. But they do the work anyway.

I suck. But I figure I'll keep writing anyway because I don't know what else to do. When I get notes that tell me I have to start over from scratch because nothing works, I have a routine that keeps me working. I pitch a fit for ten minutes. I rant and rave and shout and slam shit around and kick and pout. And after I get that out of my system, I get back to work.

For me, it comes down to faith. No matter how daunting the work feels in the beginning, or after you get a particularly prickly set of notes, the solution is almost never as difficult as it sounds like it will be in that moment. So I tell myself this sucks and I'm mad and I don't wanna and boohoo, and then I remind myself that I can do this. I know I can do this. I don't know how yet, but I know I'll figure it out.

Once I've decided I'm done feeling sorry for myself, I work on figuring out the solution to my problem. Solving puzzles is way more fun than moping around feeling like suckitude. When you have a big story problem, the best solution is to go after the stuff you thought was absolute. Those scenes I just KNEW had to be in the script? What if I scrap them completely? What else could I put there? Often, the answer appears as soon as I let go of certainty.

But the main thing is, believe that the answer will present itself. Believe that you can do this. And if your script isn't working - if somehow you just feel wrong - go back to start. What's not working, and how can you make it work? Because you can. You have to know you can. If you doubt that, you'll never finish the script.

So I'll ask again, what are you writing right now? Give me an answer.

Thanks, Bruce

Many years ago I took a screenwriting class as part of my graduate degree in creative writing. It was okay. At that time I didn't really get the whole screenwriting thing. Not sure why. Maybe the story I was working on was meh. Either way, I learned the basics, then mostly forgot everything and went back to working on that novel.

A couple of years went by, and although I'd manage to plunk out several short stories, even get one published, I hadn't gotten very far on that novel.

And I never would.

That Christmas, my then-boyfriend and I both unwittingly gave each other the same present, which made for a goofy Christmas morning. It was a copy of Bruce Campbell's first book, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor. I don't know if he ever read his copy, but I flew through mine. It was the beginning of a long love for Hollywood autobiographies.

The book, if you've never read it, was basically the story of how Bruce Campbell came to have a career in this business, so it goes all the way from Sam Raimi and Evil Dead to life as Billy Zane's audition nemesis and trying to eek out a living on B movie salaries. This was before Burn Notice.

It was the Evil Dead thing that got me. They wanted to make a movie, so they did. Sam Raimi got a bunch of his friends together and they put together a story. Then they made it. It wasn't easy of course - I'm glossing over all the hard parts, but it boiled down to the idea that if you want to make a movie you make a movie.

This had never occurred to me before. You can just go write screenplays and then people make them into movies? This is a thing?

I guess it had never occurred to me before, even during my screenwriting class or all the years I'd been writing stories and watching movies. I was floored by the idea that anyone can write a movie.

First I did what every idiot like me does: I emailed Bruce Campbell and said "How do I start writing screenplays?" Thankfully, he ignored my email.

I bought a couple of format books and started reading websites. I reread the Syd Field book I'd bought for that screenwriting class, as well as the script we were required to purchase - Dead Man Walking.

Then I sat down to write. The novel I'd been working on? In a year I'd written eight pages. That day I took the same idea and I wrote TWENTY pages in the screenplay format I cranked out through Word.

I was home.

I never tried to write a novel again.