Useful idiots

The last time we met, the friend-of-a-friend wanted my career advice. He had written a movie script for a low-budget adventure comedy about a diabolical female who swindles her boyfriends and then murders them and the two ex-boyfriends who manage to survive long enough to team up for revenge.

I’m sure he’d tell it better, but that’s the basic gist, and the gist is about all I can deliver because I didn’t actually read the script.

I usually do whatever I can to avoid these kinds of meetings. In the first place, a professional movie script is about 100 pages. An amateur script is usually much longer. It takes about an hour or so to read the whole thing through, and I have a rule: Anything that takes me an hour to do comes under the heading of “work,” and I get paid to work.

And nobody really wants to hear what you think of his or her script. The only reason people give anything they’ve written to anyone is to hear these exact words, in this exact order: “This is the best thing I’ve ever read.” Anything less just leads to a lot of awkward, deflating conversation.

The best I could do for this friend of a friend is a quick 10-minute flip. I leafed through the pages and got a flavor of the general area. I got what pretentious editors might call “a sense of the piece.” And it seemed pretty good, which I found surprising.

When we met for coffee, here’s what I said: “This is a funny and fast-paced movie. It seems to me that if you could get it on film, it would be a big crowd pleaser.”

“You think I should just go ahead and make it myself?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. “That’s how these things get done. That’s how big careers get launched.”

Look, I was just trying to wrap things up on a positive note. I wasn’t trying to give him practical advice. I meant “make it yourself” as a general kind of broadly encouraging statement, in the same sense that I said, “I read your script,” when the truth was, “I flipped through most of your script.” I meant it as a general indicator, not as a specific directive.

I didn’t mean he should give up his job and spend his entire savings and go into debt and lose his car and his apartment.

But that’s what he did.

Because when you’re the guy who’s written the script and you’re sitting at a coffee spot in Venice Beach with a friend of a friend who, as far as you’re concerned, is in the entertainment business — and let’s be honest, some days that’s an awfully generous way to put it — well, what he means as vaguely encouraging bromides you take as the go code.

So he did all that: He quit his job and cashed in his savings and ran up his credit cards and put it all on the line to make his movie. Over coffee last week, when we met again, he told me some gripping, harrowing tales of losing his sound guy in Spain, working on a construction site to raise enough cash to pay for postproduction, living in his car, and having the finished picture locked away in an editing house in London because one of the producers had walked away with his last few pennies.

“And through it all,” he said to me, “I kept hearing your words: Go ahead and do it. Just make the damn thing.”

“Gosh,” I said. “I’m really sorry. I meant that as a general kind of broadly encouraging statement.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “I’m not. The movie’s been a hit at the festivals. Crowds love it. At Glastonbury, they stood up and cheered. Same in Italy and in La Jolla. And I have you to thank.”

“Well, then, um, you’re welcome,” I said.

But I should have said thank you. Because he reminded me of something that’s true about the entertainment business and every other business — and probably life in general.

There are only three things you really need to be successful: a willingness to put it all on the line, an idiot to convince you to do it, and a friend to introduce you.

Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.