San Francisco Chronicle - August 13, 2004
Jean Gonick, fal@sfchronicle.com

"Flashdance" is rumored to be a very short script, 80 pages instead of the usual 110, mostly because the direction "Half-naked girl does insane sex dance" keeps appearing throughout. In the world of screenplays, an insane sex dance is just like a car crash -- the more you put in, the less pesky dialogue you have to write.

If I'd known even one thing about action, I swear I would have tried to write scripts that had some just to avoid writing actual lines. Living life as a mental, however, I'd never even experienced action; I'd always felt too imperiled to live, let alone do stuff, such as athletics or non-white-collar crime. I couldn't even follow action-filled plots unless there was some kind of narration.

No, my supposed genre was romantic comedy: lighthearted, winsome and witty. As a mental, I had experienced romance, but since it was only with men so maladjusted that they made me look saner than your dentist, the romance hadn't really been all that comedic. Horrific, yes. And if I had a true genre that would be it: romantic horror.

But if you're trying to get rich in Hooeywood, you can't tell people you've made pancakes for Satan; it makes you look too nutty to hire. Nor can you say that you're almost too mental to travel, that the Man in the Hall, a malevolent hallucination you've had since your 20s, keeps manifesting as the Man in the L.A. Hotel Room (having hopped into your suitcase when you weren't looking) or that as much as you can't sleep when you're in your own bed, you sleep even less when you're not.

And you really can't yell: "Make him spring for a &%#@-ing hotel room!" when your agent says the producer who's hiring you to "doctor" his script is putting you up in his guesthouse, which, situated just behind his house on some vast 90210 acreage, will make the work "more convenient."

There are two kinds of Hollywood hooey: the stuff that you breathe that poisons your lungs, and the stuff that you hear (flattery! hype!) that blurs every one of your personal boundaries. As a mental who'd never even had a personal boundary (hence the stack of pancakes for Satan, another for the Man in the Hall), I was a person who needed a crystal-clear road map lest my psyche decompensate into pure ooze.

Why did every business agreement have to come masked by a gesture of friendship? Were the gestures all hollow or did everybody except the limo drivers really want to be my best friend?

Other than knowing it was better to be the person being picked up in the limo than driving the limo, I had no clue. Maybe I really was the personal houseguest of my new best friend host in Beverly Hills and not just some writer whose hotel room he didn't like paying for.

More likely (to my paranoid thinking) he was planning to kill me the moment I screwed up the assignment, and didn't want to have to get dressed to do it. Intent on pretending not to be mental, I had no one to ask for clarification. So I shut up and moved into the guesthouse and did in fact turn into ooze.

It was inevitable; I was not only staying in a place with no bathtub (which meant going without Soak & Sob therapy), I was rewriting lines about meaningless sex. Literally; this is what the script was about -- not in a Mike Nichols' "Carnal Knowledge" kind of way, but in a single girls' chirpy comedy way. I would call it a Cynthia Heimel's "Sex Tips for Girls" kind of way, but I'm pretty sure Heimel would have demanded and gotten her own hotel suite plus six Jacuzzis, and I don't really like to think about that. Then again, why shouldn't she get what I didn't when she was the "sexpert" and I merely the posturing mental? I was so much more expert in meaninglessness than I'd ever been in sex or romance, it wasn't funny. Which was too bad since, this being comedy, it was either be funny or be killed by my host.

"AIDS," I kept saying every few minutes the first time we went over the script. I couldn't help it; I just couldn't see making a movie about meaningless sex without mentioning AIDS even once. It wasn't about being responsible; it was about being less than completely insane and possibly extraterrestrial.

Thus it was decided, albeit not by me, that the two main characters, best girlfriends determined to live out their fantasies at a singles' resort called, albeit only by me, Meaningless Sex by the Meaningless Sea, would bring lots of condoms along. Festive condoms of different colors and patterns, like so many party balloons, which, I guess, is what condoms are in a way, at least till they break and ruin your life. Mollified, I shut up about AIDS and moved on to the tweaking of dialogue.

My job was to snob it up slightly, to let some of the characters make cultural references ("I went to the symphony") without being specific enough ("It was Beethoven's Ninth") to make the viewer stop liking the character because she'd become too much of a classical smart-ass.

I tried tweaking the direction, too. "Joyce looks at Ralph and barfs on the bed" became "Joyce, painfully hung over, opens her eyes, sees Ralph's vast furry back, spews gin and half-masticated green olives all across the pink chenille bedspread."

The best direction I'd ever read described an early scene from "Out of Africa": privileged youth at leisure. It so knocked me out with its powerful elegance that I vowed that I, too, would learn to write short. Until I got in the guesthouse, of course, stuck all alone with the Man in the, well, Guesthouse, and made poor Joyce barf up her martinis.

In case you think this assignment sounds easy, let me explain that every morning at 9 my host sauntered from the Big House (where the real people lived) to the guesthouse (asylum) to hand me a new stack of pages to fix. It looked to be about 3 miles high, and every day it looked 1 mile higher.

"See ya at 6," he'd say, sauntering back, sidestepping gardeners, nannies and maids. And then, because my name wasn't Heimel and there wasn't a bathtub, I'd have to sit and sob in the shower until I got the courage to tweak and then I'd tweak as fast as I could before he could come back and fire me.

By the end of day four I would no longer shower, that's how convinced I'd become that the name of the folks in the Big House was Bates and that I was working for Norman.

By the end of day five I found I had added 10 minutes of screen time by inserting the following no-talking scene: EXT. BEACH -- NIGHT. Ralph looks on as half-naked Joyce does insane sex dance.

"Good stuff!" said my host. Was I finally getting it? "But could you be more specific?"

I tweaked it to: Joyce, clad in nothing but strategically placed green olives, makes sand fly as she does the pony for Ralph's sexual pleasure until she breaks her foot on an ossified crab and falls to her knees screaming, "Why?"

"Now is that not meaningless sex?" I asked.

I can't be sure, but I think he high-fived me.

My host paid me $6,000 for six days of work and five nights of terror, and I never made money that fast again. This confirmed what I'd always suspected, that the more useless you were, the more you got paid, and that work had even less meaning than sex.

My agent, thrilled by my performance, reported that my host kept more than 50 percent of my rewrites in the shooting script, which evidently broke some kind of record in the world of dialogue tweaking.

This made me think he might want to use me again, but if you think that ever happened, your head's almost as full of hooey as mine was. It's been 16 years, so I guess he forgot.

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