Honesty Is Such A Lonely Word

The strange part about blogging is that it’s a diary that anyone can read. Anyone. There are all kinds of things I want to write about, that will probably bring my career to a premature end. I don’t want to burn any bridges in front of me - I still want to do lunch in this town. But I also want to share some of the stranger experiences.

This creates a problem.

How can I tell you what *really* happened?

One of the guys from the Done Deal boards started blogging, and I linked his blog before reading it... only to discover that he’d deleted it. Seems he was a little too honest and worried about people reading his blog and discovering all of his secrets.

All of us have secrets. And all of us have different degrees of honesty and sharing depending on who we’re talking to. There are things in my life that I’ve never told *anyone*. There’s a big, life changing event in my life that I only talk about with the other people who were involved in that event - no one else knows about it. Other things are pretty well known by my friends, but I don’t discuss with strangers - usually because it would bore them, but sometimes there are things that probably would hurt whatever image I might have. And I sometimes "print the legend" - there are stories that I've told so many times that they only exist in a "mentally edited" version (all of the dull stuff cut out and some things added for flavor).

I used to not care if people knew how old I was, but as the gray begins to show in my hair, I’m starting to think that being an old screenwriter may not help me land jobs... so my age is now going to be a secret (not a very well hidden one - but it’s been erased from the resume and I'm 100 yerars old on MySpace). But most things I’m more than happy to share. I confess to all kinds of things many people would rather keep secret. The second time I lost my virginity was in the frozen food section of Safeway.... of course, it wasn’t a Safeway, then, it was a drive in movie theater... and the "second time" thing is what makes it an amusing story. This is a screenwriting blog, so you probably won’t read that story here... but I’m not shy about telling it. And I’ve never been shy about telling stories that make me look stupid - there are way too many of those. I may get into my personal life now and then, but mostly I’ll be talking movies on this blog.

And talking about all of the crazy things that happen to me while trying to continue earning a living as a screenwriter.

But the problem comes when I’m telling a story about something that happened on a film set or in a meeting. If I name names, I could be killing my career. This blog is probably going to come back to haunt me, anyway. I don’t think I’ll be invited back to Denmark, and there’s a pretty good chance I won’t work with the folks who made that Steven Seagal movie... even though what happened is their fault, not mine. Heck. I was the last to know they were remaking my script! There’s a very good chance I’m going to burn a couple of bridges when I discuss some of my films - and how they came to be so crappy - but there are other people I’d rather not offend. I may want to work with them again.

I’m about to embark on a new quest for an agent or manager... and I’m trying to put together some deals and maybe make my own movie. I want to share those experiences with you... but it’s going to be hard to be honest and name names and work in this town again.

So I’m going to change the names to protect the guilty. And I may change a detail or two, because sometimes even when you change the names, it’s still pretty obvious who you are talking about. I hope these small lies allow me to be more honest about the big stuff. There are still going to be some stories that I just can’t tell. Some of those are *great* stories! I have one on-set story that I often tell in public, but would never put in print - the people involved would be angry and offended. These are people I like, who happen to be involved in a funny event on set that they probably don’t want anyone to know about.

I’ve finally figured out the answer to the "great story that will end my career" problem, which I’ll talk about in *tomorrow’s* entry... but for today, I’m going to do my best to be honest about the big stuff while changing the names and some of the details so that I can continue this so-called career. In a couple of days I will post an entry completely trashing some people I know... and hopefully they won’t figure out I’m talking about them...

Because a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.

- Bill