A few years back, I retrieved this message from a fortune cookie: “You will become an accomplished writer.” Since none of my other Liberal Arts qualifications were paying off, I figured, “Sure, why the hell not?” Now that a little time has passed, I could probably give you a hundred reasons why the hell not, but this is the career path I’ve arbitrarily chosen, and I’m sticking to it… unless it gets to that really sad point where people just start to feel embarrassed for me and it bums them out. Hollywood, here I come!

In late summer of 2011, my former colleague and future collaborator Dorian Innes asks me how I’d feel about co-authoring a children’s book with him. I’ve never even considered penning a children’s book before, but knowing Dorian to be a shrewd marketer and entrepreneur—two things I most certainly am not—it sounds like a promising endeavor. Lately, I’m trying to take on more challenges that lure me outside of my comfort zone, and writing a kids’ book definitely fits the bill. Now, just a few months later, we’re officially in cahoots on Carl’s Odyssey, a series (gulp!) of children’s books about a bulb of garlic who gets lost in the grocery store and has to make his way back home. The first book in the series takes place in the frozen foods aisle.  We’ve locked-in a very talented artist to do the illustrations, and book one is set for release in the first half of 2012!

A few years after writing speeches for Nixon, a few weeks before delivering the ubiquitous line “Bueller?… Bueller?…,” and long before you can win “his” money on Comedy Central, gander-voiced intellectual Ben Stein is just another struggling screenwriter in Hollywood. Toward the end of 1985, GQ magazine commissions Stein to publish his diary entries detailing the good, bad and ugly (mostly the bad and ugly) of life in Tinseltown. Keep in mind, this is the slick, slimy, shoulder-padded, cocaine-fueled era just preceding Michael Tolkin and Robert Altman’s cinematic mile marker The Player… and Stein’s poison of choice is the occasional Diet Coke.

Later collected into a single volume, Hollywood Days, Hollywood Nights: The Diary of A Mad Screenwriter, the diaries are critically panned for the author’s inability to see that his own shallowness runs just as deep as that of the celebrities and moguls around him—he obviously lives a luxurious lifestyle but complains of being just another poor, unknown screenwriter.  Discovering them for myself—although two decades after the fact—I find that Stein’s droll journals make for one fascinating time capsule/cautionary tale from a bygone era.

My favorite entry occurs on that fateful day when John Hughes (may he rest in peace) plucked Stein out of relative obscurity, planted him at the front of a classroom filled with vacant-eyed teenage extras, and crafted one of the most remarkable moments in ’80s American cinema.  Yes, I’m frickin’ talking about Ferris Bueller’s Day Off!

“It’s great,” John Hughes said.  ”Your voice is so boring.  It’s like every teacher we’ve ever had and hated.  It’s fantastic.  How would you like to be on camera?”

I have no idea whether my scene will stay in the movie.  I have no realistic hope that the afternoon on Stage 16 will change my life.  This is what I do know: on most days I wonder what I’m doing in Los Angeles, why classmates from college who cannot add and subtract are making ten million dollars a year in junk bonds… and why I have wasted my one and only life.  Today was different.  (11-12)

Critics of 1988 deride the following passage for its mawkishness, but I find it quite uplifting.

The American frontier ended on the ground when the pioneers and the Hawkeyes reached the Pacific Ocean.  But Americans needed a frontier, a place beyond the reach of convention and the ordinary.  By a miracle of technological coincidence, the frontier went up onto a screen almost immediately after the terra firma frontier closed.

I am only a tiny player in the game.  I have been beating my brains out against a cement wall here for ten years when I had lifetime job security in the East.  But that was a job.  My work here, sporadic as it is, is pioneering on the frontier.  In a small way, but still in a way, I am part of the enterprise which builds commensurate with man’s imagination.  (40-41)

Stein’s summation of Hollywood is equally starry-eyed:

[H]ere you can earn the paycheck of an adult and live the life of a child.  …  This is a dream life.  Like any dream life, it also has its nightmares, like broken deals, story standards that simply cannot be met, a wildly unpredictable, random way of earning a living.  But I could not expect it to be otherwise: I asked for a life beyond the bounds of the probable.

If I am not really successful here—and I assure you, I am not—it’s my own fault.  It is a business.  I may treat it like a dream state, but it is a business, and the people who see it as such make the big dollar.  …  The picture business may be a business and not a dream, but it still needs dreamers to put fuel into its belly.  I am ready, should the call ever come.  (165)

And finally, accredited to Stein’s friend Lucinda DeMott, the single best piece of advice I’ve heard in a long time:

The only qualification for any job in Hollywood is to get the job.  (65)

Truer words were never spoken.

In 1980, [award-winning writer and producer Stephen J. Cannell] left Universal and formed his own production company, whose memorable logo featured Cannell himself tearing a sheet of paper out of his typewriter and tossing it into the air.  Cannell would eventually create or co-create over 40 television series.

“I’m very disciplined about the way I go about it,” Cannell said.  Rising at 3:30 a.m., Cannell would write through the early morning hours seven days a week.  ”You know, when you say ‘He created 42 prime-time television series—how did he do that?’  Well, you’d be surprised at what you can do if you get up and write for five hours a day every day for 35 years… I’m not special.  I’m really not.  I’m a hard-working guy with some talent.  I just work every day to try to do the best work I possibly can.  And over a period of a career, that pays off.”

—Ray Morton, “In Memorium: Stephen J. Cannell,”
Script magazine, January/February 2011