LAJ ARTICLES

Sleaze Disease

Dear Artist, your relief from the daily trauma of being an artist

All right. We live in Los Angeles. We knew when we moved out here that this was the land of “fruits and nuts,” where BMWs, unlike porcupines,wear their pricks on the inside and where everyone has a screenplay in their closet along with their lover. We accepted this when we drove down the 101 to our first crap hole of an apartment, and we feel it every morning when we pull up to our favorite anti-Starbucks establishment and every night at the parties all over town where we want to know how everyone else is failing so we can feel better about our own misery.

The machine that is Los Angeles is ego driven. No one is arguing that fact. I’m not insinuating that there are not genuine articles out her – good people with good attitudes who have a sense of integrity and understand the ethical boundaries of business – I’m just saying that I haven’t met any of them yet.

Okay, that’s not true. I’ve met one.

And I was smart enough to make him my business partner. But then again in all of his integrity and loyalty to me, he pissed off my wife by revealing a birthday surprise I was not supposed to be privy to in an effort to clear up a miscommunication he knew we were having. Not really any of his business,though I appreciated his efforts and enjoyed the result of a screaming match with the love of my life. So now I back-pedal to refer to my earlier assessment-I haven’t met any of them yet.

The most humorous part of the equation is that we welcome our anxiety. We adore our frustration.

Competition is ugly , but can be very effective. Entertainment is a tough business and there is literally no way to not let it affect us. On our journey to fame and fortune, we all have to accept the sacrifice we are making. Thankfully it’s only our souls we have to give up. Our innocence we have to flush down the toilet. Our ignorance that will be shoved in our faces to repeatedly humiliate point is,we have to get burned to learn how not to get burned. We have to get screwed to learn the value of good agent.we have to get bent over the barrel to understand what a loyal producer does.

The most humorous part of the equation is that we welcome our anxiety. We adore our frustration. We would take our anger out to dinner if we could afford to because we love the emotion of life. Without our skeletons we would have nothing to pull our art from. Without our pain there would be no angst. Without our fear there would be no passion!

So we carry on as sons and daughters of the artistic revolution. Enjoying the time we have left, before we become the miserable old Norma Desmonds who lived out our dreams yet still remain unsatisfied. If LA teaches us anything, it teaches us that we’ll never be happy enough, successful enough, rich enough, or clever enough. But damn if we won’t spend our entire lifetimes trying to prove her wrong. Silly artists.

Corey Blake is the Development Director for LA Film Lab Entertainment (www.lafilmlab.com) and owner of Writers of the Round Table. Corey is Currently juggling five screenplays, two manuscripts and half a dozen regular article for magazines.

cover april 2006

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