You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Revisiting something great.
I wake up this morning to a ding in my in box.
It hammers my frontal lobe like a gay jack hammer dancing the Paso Doble on Dancing with the stars.
Wow, that’s loud I think to myself as I fumble for the mouse, trying to steady a jittery cursor floating around the screen like a helium balloon pricked with a pin.
I gather my wits, concentrating on the blinking test of sobriety.
Why is this so hard, I think to myself, gathering the strength of an inebriated Ernest Hemmingway.
“Blast you Santiago, and your 84 days of fish-lessness,” I mutter to myself incoherently, as I close one eye, focus, and hit click.
I feel a sense of accomplishment as the little hour glass from the internet begins to twirl.
Suddenly GMAIL opens. There in heavy black print is the latest addendum. It’s from my cousin in L.A. The title: I Felt Inspired.
Inspired?
I shut my eyes as the couch begins to undulate slightly.
Inspired? I am inspired to get up and vomit.
But I steady myself and hold on to the side of the futon that is trying to gallop away like a pulsating pony driven by Clint Eastwood over the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
I feel my stomach dip and I suddenly realize that my eyebrows are throbbing. How’s that even possible, I wonder.
I open my gaze and steady the blinking little cursor over his email. It’s like bobbing for magnetic apples with the opposite polarity pushing the cursor away from the topic line. The cursor goes left as my hand trembles right.
Gotta find me a 12 step program I think as I steady my shaky grip on the internet.
Click.
Felt Inpsired!
What the hell does that mean?, I wonder, looking at the dark headline in the subject line.
Inspired? Did he go out looking for girls? Did he test drive an F type jag? Did he drive to Perhsing Drive and watch the jets take off over the Pacific?
Inspired can mean a lot of things to a lot of people.
Just then his email with the gigantic attachment begins to open.
I rub my eyes. They are surely blood shot. They feel like someone sprinkled sand on top of two raw eggs cracked into a receptacle of broken glass.
Ouch!
How many margaritas did I have last night? I ponder as the little white screen comes into focus.
I suddenly see what inspiration in Los Angeles on a Saturday night is.
CAMEO #24 emerges before my eyes.
I wipe the cobwebs from my memory and manage a satisfied nod of my head.
“Well God Damn….”
I’m staring at a collaborative project my cousin and I began damn near a 1000 days ago.
In 2015, this was the essence of my literary focus. I would write a chapter and send it to him. He would re-write that chapter and send it back to me.
24 times over the course of several months we wrote and re-wrote and edited and re-edited our television pilot.
And when it was done?
We were both very satisfied.
“That’s a good God Damned Story,” I would tell him over and over.
He knew it was too. We were both happy and felt the excitement that comes with hope.
But that was hundreds and hundreds of days ago. That was a bunch of unreturned emails and phone calls ago. That was a place where hope sinks into the abyss of screw them. What do they know?
I blink and stare at the page. Why am I staring at this new version of Cameo inspiration? What is the Catalyst for this weekend burst of creative thought?
That’s a question only my cousin can answer. But for me, Cameo reemerged in my brain on June 9th 2017, the day that Batman legend Adam West died.
“What are we gonna do now?” I texted him half sad – half jokingly.
His response?
I was inspired last night.
My cousin and I started writing a television pilot in 2015.
CAMEO: A fictitious Hollywood Agency that finds acting jobs for real life TV legends, who make Cameos on the sitcom, playing themselves, as unemployed actors seeking work.
This is the query letter I wrote a million years ago: Stan Cameo is a Hollywood maverick, a super agent, who finds commercial work for TV actors whose stars have lost their luster.
He’s done shots with Robert Conrad, played poker with Chuck Norris and was best man at Adam West’s wedding.
Cameo represents older stars like Mr. T of the A Team, Fred Savage of the Wonder Years, Chuck Norris of Walker Texas Ranger and Jamie Farr of M*A*S*H.
These actors were once television icons, working on hit TV shows, starring in commercials, doing the rounds on morning TV.
But their time has come and gone. Hollywood has replaced them with younger, newer, brighter stars.
Cameo is a boutique agency that rekindles the commercial fire and finds these venerable television stars new work in a new Hollywood.
Cameo is a fictitious agency with zany agents and crazy office staff who interact with real life veteran actors who play themselves, making real life cameos in a sit com.
Cameo is a fresh idea, integrating a comedic office dynamic that sprinkles in cameos with some of the greatest TV actors to ever grace the small screen.
If you are interested in reading the Pilot Episode, contact me.
FADE IN: CRICKETS CHIRPING
Nobody every contacted us about this idea, this labor of love.
I slurp down the first sips of morning coffee, hoping to fight back the tequila that is clinging to my insides like fuzz to Velcro.
My eyes hurt, my hands are trembling, my stomach doing the next morning walk of shame.
I remember back to the beginning. I sat at the key board and let loose a furry of words. I remember one day fondly writing a segment for Jonathan Harris, who played Dr. Zachary Smith on Lost In Space. I remember creating funny scenes in the office where he is referencing the robot and screaming danger Will Robinson.
“He’s dead,” My cousin would write back.
Lesson learned. Don’t create a Cameo cameo for an older actor till you check out the obituary column.
We spent months sending the pilot episode back and forth and forth and back.
We created cameos for former stars like Fred Savage of the Wonder Years and Roseanne Barr and Chuck Norris. They pop in repeatedly to the office, utter a few lines, asking about a movie role or commercial part, and then they’re off again.
Cameo? Get it?
The backbone of the story is the four agents who run the Cameo office. Rose is the aging receptionist who has had sexual relations with just about every movie star from Hollywood’s Golden Age. She’s Edward G. Robinson with an old lady skirt. Her voice is cigarette stained, filtered through a flask of Jack Daniels.
There’s Gil, the young enthusiastic, wide eyed agent. He is a walking computer full of Hollywood trivia and hard to find facts. He is a fan of the clients he represents.
There’s Matthew. A neurotic clean freak who is meticulous and exasperating. He went through so many changes, It’s hard to remember exactly what he ended up. I believe I made him very British in the last re-write and my cousin said he’s not agenting in Manchester, he’s in Hollywood.
And then there’s Lori. She is the brains of the operation. She is young and vibrant but has an old soul. She is the glue that holds this rag-a-muffin group together.
And woven throughout the fabric of the pilot is the character of Stan Cameo, the founder of the Cameo agency. He dies in the pilot episode, but through flashbacks and cameos we see that he is an original, a legend, a fighter. He started doing deals in dark bars and signing contracts on cocktail napkins. He represented Batman and Captain Kirk and Gilligan.
Stan Cameo is to agenting what the the Hollywood sign is to L.A. A landmark.
And so it went. We wrote this 2 years ago. He wrote a version, then sent it to me. I re-wrote the version and sent it back to him. He re-wrote my version and sent it back to me. 24 times we did this. Like a wondrous tennis match where two competitors hit their best shots at one another.
Characters came and went. Lines changed and characters became British out of thin air because someone had a ham sandwich in L.A. one day.
The writing was the fun part. It was the collaboration and the spirit of creativity.
Then one day one of us wrote THE END. And the fun part was over.
Suddenly it was all the shit about writing that I hate. The non writing. The selling. The marketing. The door knocking and waiting and the hoping and talking to morons who have no vision.
As pure an idea as Cameo is, that’s how putrified a prospect of selling it was.
The business of selling writing is stomach bile churning in a cauldron of hopelessness.
My cousin has a recognizable name in L.A. He was an executive at NBC in the 80’s. He directed umpteen episodes of Zena Warrior Princess and Pacific Blue and Forever Knight, about an 800 year old vampire working as a detective in Toronto.
But much like our characters in Cameo, the luster of those projects has faded and the ability to get a meeting with the diaper wearing power brokers of Tinsel Town diminished.
So we have this fantastic premise but we have to throw rocks at the smoky glass windows of Hollywood arrogance to get anyone to notice.
Now-a-days, it takes an agent with vision to see a project and green light it. Especially if it is not a best seller, a you tube sensation featuring grumpy cats or couriered over from a super couple named Brangelina.
Read it and let me know what you think, he writes.
I pull up the Final Draft editing program I used every day.
I can see the rust on the commands. I forget how to edit, to type, to make even a single change.
It lets me read, but I can’t write.
Since I’m probably still too buzzed to do any real writing, I decide that reading only is a very good option.
So I begin to read. And I’m immediately reminded why it was so good.
In our first version, we had Adam West riding up the elevator with Gil. Gil is dying to touch the Batman’s cowl. It’s a sight gag right from the first sentence.
Now Batman is dead and our 1st sentence dead with him.
So what does my cousin do?
He replaces Batman with Capt. Kirk. Instead of a cowl to touch, Gil, the Hollywood brainiac, now wants to beam up or put William Shatner in a Vulcan Mind Meld.
I read through the story again. The characters are lively and poignant. I can imagine writing episode 2 and 3 and 4.
My cousin is inspired.
As I start on my 2nd cup of coffee, I too am inspired.
I have been here before. I have been here many many times. I have a million words in boxes. I have screenplays and novels and teleplays for TV shows that long ago were cancelled. I know what it is like to write and dream and then close a cardboard box with duct tape and move on.
Cameo was one of those projects.
Then a cousin 2,000 miles away got inspired.
He wrote a dead batman out of the first scene and replaced him with a starship captai
Bam!
Version 25!
How fun.
Now if only some of the punk ass corporate decision makers in the land of La La would be as bold as the main character of our pilot.
Take a chance. Look for the diamond in the dust. Remember that Hollywood is about the latest and greatest, but it’s also about the stars who put their hands in the cement that line a boulevard that still brings millions of fans to tinsel town each year.
Cameo. A wonderful Sunday morning inspiration!
Thanks Cuz.
Life’s Crazy™