Cure for HPV

No, not the human papillomavirus. Geesh get your head out of STI Alley... and Double Entendre Avenue, if you please ;)

Anyways, my lowbrow bloggies, I thought I'd open up with something sincere today. No Britney Spears mad gabs. No Beyonce. No Pokemon. No placenta. A few pornstars, maybe, but no bathroom peeper.

As most of you know, I'm a writer keen on pursuing the entertainment world. Mostly I write screenplays in hopes of making a sale (having currently completed five feature specs) or at least clenching an option. It is an unfortunate fact, however, that Hollywood is as impenetrable as The Virgin Mary. More unknown writers wilt and die than wannabe actors, directors, and gaffers combined.

I, however, know how to beat the system.

A few months ago I stumbled upon a revelating fact. Los Angeles does not only have one billion dollar entertainment industry; it has three:

H - ollywood
P - ornography
V - ideo games

HPV. At least if my top choice falls through, I have two interesting backups. Better odds, right? Wrong. Why waste my time on one of these stupid ventures only to fail and have to start back at square (or frame or bed or pixel) one?

So what's better than scaling to the top of the Hollywood world? Or Pornography Planet? Or the Video Game Universe? How about climbing all three -- the whole galaxy of entertainment -- at once?! Oh yes, bloggies, take notes. Donald Trump once said: "Be ruthless to ruthless people you meet on your way up if you don't intend on coming back down". The entertainment industries are infested with these people, these sharks. The only way to deal with them is fight. The only way to win is to have power. And the only way to get power? Combine all available resources.

Eureka!

Film pornstars playing videogames.

...

Now isn't that the most AWFUL, gut-wrenching, jaw-grinding idea ever thought up?

Good. Those ideas seem to sell.

But I'm not actually being serious, am I? Well no. The main point of this post is to probe one scary question: what's your selling-out point? At what price can the Hollywood sharks skewer the meat strips off your bones?

If you answer "I would never sell myself out!", you're either a fool or a liar. If your answer is anything under $10, please get tested.

Temptation lures the best of us. We have a tendency to romanticize instead of rationalize (whether it's "I'll wait tables until I land that Broadway lead", or "Once I'm done school, I'll start work and meet the man of my dreams"). As you know, these circumstances don't "just happen", and it leads to everyone developing their own unique case of HPV: fall-backs to brace yourselves if you don't accomplish what you really want. The truth about life is that almost anything you set your mind to is possible. The painful question is 'what cost will it come at?' I could throw out a million examples involving surgery, sacrifice, sexual favors, monetary transactions, and/or illegal acts, but you already have a pretty good idea what those entail. This is not to say you should never take risks; rather, what I'm getting at, is that you must take smart risks.

Think about JK Rowling -- a classic rags to riches story. She was a giant failure right up until adulthood, having suffered an exteremely short lived marriage and was practically homeless. In a commencement address to Harvard university, she said:

Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

JK's cure for HPV was hitting rock bottom. She had no other option, so she was forced to succeed or fail. Thankfully most of us won't ever know such extreme hardship, but that is not to say we won't be aquainted with common failure.

I'm not going to Hollywood because I wish I were a screenwriter. I'm going because I've put thousands of hours into writing screenplays and I believe, with more work, I can make it. Groundwork's required -- confidence's foundation is aptitude, not arrogance.

So the cure for HPV is simple. Be prepared. Fling harpoons at the sharks instead of throwing yourselves. I'm not guaranteeing you'll survive the waters, but at least you'll have gone out fighting.