Eddie Kritzer: Holiday Edition, ad nauseum

Man, it’s gotten to the point where I don’t even understand what he’s trying to say anymore.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/23/nation/la-na-blogger-suits-20100823

Dearest Ashley,

Action’s bring consequences, you dont live in a vacum, and I gave you some good advise.
You put yourself in this position, and I looked at imdBPro.com and saw no (added) credits for you

You’re feeling of self importance (ego) is beyond belief, to deny our relationship and try and embarass is me is not really helping you’re delusional behaviour .
You look so dumb, bottom line, IM giving you an importance you dont deserve, and to deny is ridiculous.
Publishing our private sex notes makes you look dumber then when we (well you know what I mean)
The only good thing is not many people are goiing to read it, and most people will realize it’s true, it’s as true as everything you say about me.
You have a hard on for someone, well dear ashley remember, there are consequences for every action.
You think you’re going to moan and groan about every body, and I know IM not singled out, you have many enemy’s and some people tell the truth, and somepeople dont.

On the other hand, I wish you well, however you have to accept what happens when you bad mouth someone, just because I didn’t take on your script under my terms.
If you sold your script, congratulations, why dont you mention what company, who’s attached, director, etc..Ashley you’re an editor, and IM sure a good one, you should take my advise about your blog, or stick to your knitting.

All my lovin.

Eddie
eddiekritzer.com some details

And if you’re thinking it’s just me getting these emails, here are a bunch of links

http://accrispin.blogspot.com/2010/01/apparently-im-boring-wrinkled-self.html

http://leegoldberg.typepad.com/a_writers_life/2005/02/youd_think_anyb.html

http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/4752919-another-round-with-eddie-kritzer

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=32362

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090608123451AA80wfq

Eddie Kritzer: Holiday Edition, ad nauseum
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Road Trip

I am about to drive to South Carolina, on Friday, from LA, which will be quite the adventure.  I’m planning on being in SC for the next couple of months, working on some various projects, and hopefully getting some writing done.  Debating pursuing more screenplays or another attempt at a novel, it’s weird though, I find LA to be not a great place for writing.  Maybe that’s not that weird.

Road Trip

Advice for 2010 Grads Coming to LA; 15 things

The Bitter Script Reader posted some advice about how to survive to move to LA.  I tried to comment over there and it won’t let me, but this is what I said.

1) Get settled so that you’re as comfortable as possible — living out of boxes makes everything seem transient. Have roommates or whatever, but make sure that you’ve got a space, however small, that is yours. Spend some time driving around the city and getting to know places. Find the studios. (Have a car!)

2) I really love Glendale, it’s safe and cheapish. Frogtown is super cheap. North Hollywood is becoming a lot safer, the parts closer to the 134 are totally fine for a single girl to live in.

2) I would say you probably need at least 7k in the bank before coming out here and at least two finished scripts and some outlines for more. Basically, you need enough money that you can go several months without making much money at all and enough written that if you’re too discombobulated to write, you’ve got something to work with. I applied for internships and jobs for 6 months before I moved out and it still took me 3 months to land a part time paid gig, though I did have an internship lined up.

3) Apply to every job you can find, do things for free, take an internship in the industry if you can afford it and then work at whatever you can in the rest of the time. It doesn’t matter if it’s an industry job, making contacts of all sorts is important, life experience, all that jazz. I’m not super social and I don’t like to drink, but working on other people’s projects is a great way to meet people and learn useful skills.

4) Find something else you can do in the industry besides writing. Can you edit? Can you gaff? Find a way to make yourself useful. Pursue every avenue. Learn to script supe, that’s easy and low impact.  Find something you like to do that isn’t writing.

5) A lot of people would say find a writing group. I personally am not in one, but I have a large group of friends who I can get advice from. Writing groups are pretty useful if you don’t have that.

6) Apply selectively to contests, but do apply. I’ve definitely gotten contacts from agents and managers and earned some street cred by placing in contests people had heard of.

7) Mandy.com, realitystaff.com, and craigslist are your new friends. I personally don’t really like the UTA job list, but it’s out there too.

8) Figure out a way to make your commute worthwhile. A voice recorder is great if you can think outloud for writing purposes. I listen to a lot of audiobooks.

9) Do things that have nothing to do with film because people who only talk about film are boring. Read books, magazines, go do stuff that’s got seriously zero to do with film and then you’ll have something interesting to talk about. The reason Hollywood loves young blood is because they have experience outside of the Hollywood system and they haven’t quite yet been turned into normal LA people who can only talk about themselves and movies.

10) Write genre scripts that can be produced cheaply if you’re really out to make a sell.

11) Don’t ever be a douchebag. Don’t have a temper. If you talk shit online, don’t use names.  (Unless revealing scam artists!)

12) Conversely, if you’re working for free, you have the right to be treated well and to learn something from the experience. Don’t be afraid of anyone. And don’t be afraid to speak up for yourself, just don’t be aggressive. Along these lines, know how much you should be getting paid, even if you’re not being paid that. This is useful info.

13) Be on the look out for scams. Not all competitions are worthwhile. Not all agents are legit. If someone asks you for money upfront to be your agent, that guy is a scam artist. (google Eddie Kritzer)

14) If you’re a lady writer with a girly name, I’d recommend using your initials. That sounds terrible, but there’s genuine gender bias out here and I’m super lucky that all the other Ashleys out here are guys. This is especially true if you’re replying to internet ad, because internet people are super creepy.

15) Give yourself deadlines so that you’re not constantly second guessing yourself and make sure they’re reasonable. I, for example, haven’t always been totally sure LA is the place for me, but I’m only allowed to seriously think about moving during the month of August. So I don’t dwell on it in general.

(I never had a problem with the tap water, don’t know what people are talking about)

Advice for 2010 Grads Coming to LA; 15 things

Crazy Busy

Forgive the pun.

Housing situation up in the air.  Getting packed, finding a place to live.  It’s a lot of chaos, so I haven’t posted here much.

I actually wrote yesterday, which was good.  F and I wrote a parody (rip-off?) of the Greatest Commercial of All Time.

I need to spend more time writing and less time freaking out.  I imagine when there is less to freak me out that will be easier, but I’m not totally sold on that.

Crazy Busy

Real Life gets in the way; Missing Roommate

My roommate went missing.  She’s only lived in LA for about a month, and I don’t know her that well.  She graduated from the same film school I went to and we’d worked on set together, but we aren’t close.

She disappeared for 48 hours.  She left a string of incomprehensible facebook messages, texts and voicemails over the weekend.  I spent yesterday calling anyone who may have seen her, where she worked, all of that.  No one had heard from her.  Her mother flew into LA last night.  My other roommate went to the police.  The police came by where I live, asked some questions.  Whatever you may have heard about the LAPD, these two gentlemen were very nice and polite.  I was quite impressed.  Though they seemed confused as to why this house full of white MFAs was living in a poor Hispanic neighborhood.  See: Overeducated/Underpaid.

No news over night, searched some parks, though she’d posted on facebook something about a road trip.  It was all difficult to decipher, her most recent update being: Please SMS the menu. W/ the fucking whatever it is that it’s either. Yes jfkdkmenc chomp just ate electric particles.  And the other 100 or so updates in the 3 hours up to that were equally nonsensical.

Fortunately, she was found this morning.  The police had picked her up at a lake, crying, and she was taken to the emergency psych ward at the UCLA medical center.  She’s refusing to see her mother, but she’s safe.  She clearly has had a psychotic break, whether drug-induced or related to schizophrenia or bipolar disorder is not clear at this point.

I have terrible luck with roommates, I’m glad she’s safe.  But if this is the start of an intense mental disorder, she has a very long and difficult road ahead of her.  The last 24 hours have been exhausting.

Real Life gets in the way; Missing Roommate

Project Runway! Season 7

I’m very excited that there’s a new season of PR starting tonight because last season sucked.  Reasons this season will be better:

1. It’s in New York again.  LA sucked.

2. Michael Kors and Nina Garcia are in like every episode.

3. It couldn’t be worse than the last season.

4. Heidi is preggers.  This always makes it better for some reason.

5. The gays over at Project Rungay say it’s awesome and they’ve seen episode 1 already.

Quote I’m most looking forward to: “I’m sweating like a Baptist preacher!”

Project Runway! Season 7

Hollywood: Not for the weak

I very rarely get into anything particularly personal on this blog.  One, because it’s public, and two, because it rarely seems relevant to my career, which is the focus here.  But sometimes the personal and the public are a bit intermixed, and that’s what I want to talk about.  My health versus my career.

I have for the last few months been really struggling with extreme fatigue, dizziness and nausea.  This isn’t totally out of the norm for me, I have several chronic conditions which often take the wind out of my sails: allergies, asthma, depression and hypothyroidism.  Any of those on their own is usually manageable, but they pack a bit of a wallop all together.  On top of this, I’ve been to the doctor a half-dozen times since this started and they’ve tested for everything they can think of and they can’t find anything wrong.

This last week has been totally lost.  I was so fatigued that I cannot actually remember most of it.  It is extremely frustrating.  I manage to go to work which fortunately is a very low energy sort of job, but I struggle even there.  I haven’t managed to do much editing because I stare at the project and get overwhelmingly tired or motion sick.  I basically come home and lay down.  Last night I went to bed at 10pm and got up today at 1pm; it’s not yet seven and I am barely awake.  Obviously it is quite difficult to be productive, in writing or in anything else, when you’re that exhausted.

Film and TV are not careers for people with low energy.  If your personality doesn’t naturally exude the sense that you’re on speed, it’s a really tough business to be in.  It is probably a miracle that I got through the two years of film school with as little collateral damage as I did — one broken bone, one major case of bronchitis, three total emotional breakdowns, and three months of vomiting for unknown reasons that led to my current state as a vegetarian.

I could imagine nothing worse than letting my health dictate what it was I could and could not do with my life.  But sometimes, especially after weeks like this, it’s very difficult to believe that it’s not going to do just that.  Sometimes it’s hard not to go to the dark place and wallow in self-pity.  Hard to remember that this is just my struggle, and, though it’s different for each of us, it’s never easy.  I want to be able to offer advice to others, to make it and say, “See, my health didn’t stop me, and it won’t stop you!”  But all I know is that right now it’s really hard and sometimes fighting to survive in the film business just sucks.

But here is something nice, from a fellow writer at myothercareer.wordpress.com

Hollywood: Not for the weak

InkTip: 3 months in, first Script download

My script has been up on InkTip since the beginning of September.  Today, for the first time, it was downloaded.  The logline has come up in someone’s search 94 times, 34 of those hits were from LA Feature Film Academy.

Today someone at LA Feature Film Academy actually downloaded it.  Anyone know anything about them?

Other stats: My resume has been downloaded once, the synopsis three times, the script once.  Interestingly, though one person looked at the synopsis twice, no one’s looked at any two of those, let alone all three.

InkTip: 3 months in, first Script download

Life in LA; It’s the Economy Stupid

Sorry I’ve been quiet a while, crazy couple of weeks. I went to SC this weekend. I’m trying to put together a budget and business proposal for Bible Con, with plans to shoot it in SC. I think it can be done on a low enough budget that raising the money myself is feasible. I don’t know that I’ve described the story here, so have my logline:

Bible Con — Comic Con for Christians — goes straight to hell when Jesus and Mary Magdalene fall in love, the keynote speaker turns out to be an atheist, and the event is besieged by DaVinci Code fans.

It’s Best in Show meets The Life of Brian.

Nicholl Semi-Finalist, Movie Script Contest Finalist

I’m trying to do a rewrite now, but the drama in my life is making it difficult to concentrate on. I know too many unemployed people is basically what the deal is. One of my roommates is having to give up on LA and drive back home, selling all of her possessions to afford the trip. My other roommate is also unemployed, but theoretically has something coming up. Obviously, not a happy situation. And my closest friends can’t find jobs either.

And as much as I hate logging, and as much as it doesn’t pay me enough to live off of, I guess at least it’s something. Admittedly, the idea of getting my own project off the ground is probably all that’s standing between me and the cratering depression my current economic state brings on.

I’ve gotten a couple more requests that I haven’t kept up on posting. Maybe I’ll do that at some point.

Life in LA; It’s the Economy Stupid