WA-HOO! I JUST RECEIVED A GAG ORDER!
Oopsie. Am I allowed to tell you that?
So I guess someone important must be reading his, eh? Hello, “someone important.” Your gag order can kiss a character named Harry Ball.
It says I am not permitted to share certain pieces of information. Let’s see how close I can get, shall we?
I’ll start at the beginning and tell you how the hell I sold a show in the first place.
I was teaching creative writing when one of my students came to a play I co-wrote with my wife. That student happened to be the daughter of an executive at XXX (GAG ORDER!), a very prominent cable television network. He saw the play, met with us, drank two bottles of expensive vodka, and sexually harassed my wife. Three meetings with our attorneys later, we agreed that he should produce our show.
GAG ORDER says I can’t tell you the name of the network executive, but his name rhymes with Vermon Grundle. I also cannot tell you the name of his daughter and my former student but her name rhymes with Malice Grundle.
I can also tell you that when they greenlit our pilot, I could not have been happier.
I had a ‘beautiful’ wife named Nancy and we had just sold a show together. We did all the dumb Hollywood things like buying two new cars.
We even started sleeping with each other again, which wasn’t as awful as I expected.
I even started exercising and lost a small (but unrecognizable) amount of weight. All of these things are symptoms of a disease I had contracted called “Hope.”
I was soon to be cured.
We got busy with production and things moved quickly. Then a bomb dropped on us.
It should have been over that moment, but it wasn’t. We were told the “good news”, and then we were introduced to our new best friend:
The Conferbot 2000- A multi-functioned, multimedia, full resolution, digital video, super surround sound conferencing cam.
I would come to hate this little black machine. I dreamed of fighting it with a laser-powered sword (but feared it might also be my father). It became the symbol of all that is dark in the world. It worked really well though. I’ll give it that.
Through this device, we would communicate with our new sponsor from the dark side.
So the show was still alive, but would move to another network and would be sponsored by a “great brand.”
I couldn’t really fight it. I had stumbled into my dream due to the wandering hands of Vermon Grundle, and I wasn’t going to kill myself just because we had a sponsor. But I should have.
And I even tried their product. I was only embarrassed and self-conscious about my ‘asymmetrical’ hairdo with a ‘matte finish’ for a little while. Because I looked pretty damn good - like I actually cared about my appearance or something. And it lasted for a freakishly long time.
Dare I say that my life was going all right, even with the sponsor news?
Looking back now, would it have been better if the show just died that day before the sponsor entered the picture? Do I regret that I allowed any of this to happen? Has this experience destroyed my ability to trust another human being? Have I showered the past two weeks? Yes, yes, yes, and no.
I hate myself for believing in something and will never believe in anything again. Maybe unicorns.
I should have seen the warning signs. They were everywhere.
