THE TREATMENT

You would think that a writer, in L.A., would have written at least one treatment after three decades so close to Hollywood. However, the women's arts community and a radical social life after college in New York didn't predispose me to such ends. Next, fleeing from the intellectual and refined life of "the arts", I was a street counselor for teen hustlers on the mean Sunset, Hollywood and Santa Monica Blvds. After watching too many kids die from AIDS and a too real run-in with a serial killer, I fled back to academia. I didn't want to write about what I was trying to forget. Writing can be "re-living"--if done well. Instead, I became a teacher of special programs at UCI--rose to Head Teacher and then butted heads with the Powers that Be. However, while esconced there, I did manage to publish several novels, short stories, some articles and a few poems. I even tried a stage play of one of my unpublished works. (But that's a whole nother story!) There simply was no pull towards screenwriting. Until...

Fast forward five years. Back in LaLaLand Proper,smack dab in the Miracle Mile,knocking my knees against Hollywood. The agency I ran back to do "real world stuff" (this time MESHING art and education and disenfranchised teens...) folds and I'm left looking for "the next thing". Well, so is half the country. A disproportionate number have settled in warmer parts of CA. We are all unemployed. Time to go back to my roots while I'm looking for new work...I write, in white heat. I finish three new novels. I begin two new blogs. I update my profile on Facebook. I keep in almost daily contact with family and very old friends...then, one of those very oldest friends hits me with a challenge. To do a treatment AND a screenplay, with her as collaborator, about her dead life partner. (Sounds of brakes squealing...)

Now, she's never done this kind of thing in the past, but she is a published writer . She's got the computer software to cover "form" and feels that I have the qualities to make this somewhat tame biography juiced up, while retaining the dignity it deserves. She and the life partner are well known figures in several communities--not the least of which is the political arena. They are also well known lesbians. It seems, no other screenwriter friends want to touch this project. Too volatile. Too complicated. And in some ways, maybe, too sweet? I mean, middle aged white women activists who have been partnered for several decades sweet. Take any two of these adjectives and the demographics of the movie-going American audience fall away like leaves in New England autumn. One screenwriter friend of mine, who knows the story, told me, over lunch, "Minns, this is an impossible task...remarkable women, but, where's the action? Where's the arc ? This isn't Paris in the 20's..."

Ignoring him, I finished my French Onion soup and looked to the future. The immediate future. I adore the friend who is my collaborator. I applaud the life she built with her now deceased. Their contributions to a very select part of U.S. history deserves to be recorded. Noted. Understood. Now, whether it makes for good cinematic entertainment...well...I guess part of that falls on me. Still unemployed. Still working "on spec". Still feeling that there is some Big Reason I've been pulled to L.A. (of all places) and keep rolling back into it, like the other lost souls of this Depression. So, maybe it IS this opportunity. God knows, I've never attempted a screenplay before. And while there are no explosions (so far in the treatment), there is a great car chase scene through the Hollywood Hills. There is sex. There is death. There are riots and laughs and at the core, a great love story of the twentieth and twenty-first century.

So now, having just finished the first draft of "the treatment", I await its judgement from my collaborator, whose life is wrapped up in those lines. I guess I am the ultimate cliche--bar none.

At least my rent is paid.