might be just right for the material in some way. Once you’ve narrowed your list down to the merely implausible, rather than the ridiculous, you can begin the “pitching” process, long distance style.
I should point out that absolutely none of this is done until you have filled out the appropriate forms, printed out a copy of the opus, written a check for $35, and made sure you send all that to the Registrar of Copyrights at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Since I had just come back from said nation’s capital, I had dropped the package off on Independence Avenue personally. The truly dedicated screenwriter should also do all that stuff and send a copy to the Writers Guild of America, which registers screenplays in roughly the same way the Copyright Office does. This facilitates all sorts of nasty lawsuits should one be lucky enough to be plagiarized later on.
It took about two hours to compile the pitch list for “Minivan,” since there are a lot of production companies in Hollywood, and I am an ambitious bastard. Once I had it properly compiled, I wrote another in a distressingly long series of brilliant cover letters, which emphasized the story, and not what a swell writer I am, and urged the producers on the list to hurry the heck up and request a copy of the script this very second, before the guy in the next cubicle became a mogul by leaping on the material first. The first rule of Hollywood is: Paranoia is your friend.
After spending a good deal of time learning how to use Microsoft Word for the Mac to personalize form letters, I was ready to start printing out cover letters. But strangely, all this time, my mind had not been on the script—I’d been thinking about the stink bomb, the rock through the window, and the hair from a dead man that was found in Cherie Braxton’s bedroom.
My leased Epson printer spit out letter after letter, and I began the process of faxing the ones that could be faxed. Faxing is quick (although not as quick as email) and relatively cheap (five cents a minute, rather than 37 cents a letter), and makes me feel better, because I don’t have to wait five days for a letter to get to California from New Jersey before I can expect the bidding war to begin on my phone. Hey, we must cling tightly to our dreams.
It struck me that I hadn’t made any progress on anything. While I mindlessly faxed letter after letter, I wasn’t any closer to finding out who the stink bomber was. Preston Burke may or may not have chucked a stone through my unexpectedly expensive front window, but if he hadn’t, who had, and why? And how in the name of Sydney Greenstreet did the hair of a man who had died in the Texas electric chair seven years earlier find its way into a Washington, D.C. secretary’s (oops, administrative assistant’s) bedroom while a violent crime was being committed?
At least on the Madlyn Beckwirth story, I had been able to excuse myself because I wasn’t, and still am not, a private investigator. I could overlook the fact that I didn’t know what I was doing because I wasn’t expected to know what I was doing. I had spent so much time telling people I wasn’t a detective that I very nearly missed many of the most obvious clues in the story.
This time, though, I wasn’t being asked to do anything a good reporter shouldn’t be able to do. Yes, I was reporting in areas that were out of my normal expertise, but the technique of reporting remains the same no matter what the subject matter. I should have been able to get farther along than this.
Was Mahoney right, that I was letting 25-year-old lust for Stephanie cloud my judgment? Honestly probing my feelings, I had to say that wasn’t the case. For one thing, I had much greater lust for Abby these days, and besides, the rest of Legs’ family was so creepy that the murderer could have been any of them and not disturb my fantasy lust at all. So I discounted the Mahoney Theory.
Maybe there was just too much to think about—the knife, the stink bomb, the window—could be I was just spreading myself too thin and not doing justice to any of the things I should have been investigating.
I had to better organize my day. Then I’d see if I