A good friend who lives and writes in Mumbai, posted a substack story about her misadventures in Bollywood. I shared some parallel experiences, and I am here to share my full reply. . . .

Yes, Sukriti, we have lived a kind of parallel existence.  I am here to recount this failure of mine because it gave me strength to move on, to find new paths. . . . Don’t get me wrong.  I wish I might have succeeded.  But, as with so many things in life, it is what it is, and I am where I am. . . .

And so the story.

Once upon a time . . . a loooong time ago . . . . My very young self thought I should be an actor.  I believed that if I worked hard, took whatever roles came my way, and learned the business well, I might evolve and become a director, or, better yet, an auteur. I could make it.  Big.

It did not take long for me to realize that I was not cut out for the profession I so desired.  I did not have the right look, the right attitude, the right anything. As an actor, I realized, I was a really good writer. 

So, no problem,  I thought.  I would work on becoming a Hollywood writer.

At the same time, I was married to a person who had been non-definitive about whether we should reunite.  We had shared the Broadway dream and settled in New York, but he moved home to his mother in San Francisco when Hepatitis made a mess of his liver . . . and his stamina.  I was unclear as to whether our relationship was finished, a fact that proves again and again to me how unplugged I was, but I had the notion that it was up to me to patch us back together.  Three days after I arrived in San Francisco, I was on a bus, bound for LA, too humiliated to go back to NY and admit my abject failure. What the heck, I figured.  There was theater in LA.  And, more importantly, there were movie producers waiting for scripts to be written.

Lucky for me, my first cousin was the Great American Director Peter Bogdanovich.  He had at that time made his first – and to my mind his most profound  –film Targets, and he was gearing up for The Last Picture Show.  Unlucky for me, we were not Coppolas; cousins in my family have not been good at leaning on or propping one another up.  When I arrived in LA and called him, Peter laughed and said I should be a paperback writer.  It was a good goal to have.  That message I got.  Loud and Clear.

Peter’s wife then was the extraordinarily talented, profoundly ambitious Polly Platt.  I did not meet her on that visit.  She was busy putting together the script for which she was uncredited and was carrying the lion’s share of producing tasks, for which she got insufficient recognition at best. 

I stayed in LA for a short time, but I hated it. In the few months I stayed, I managed to dodge a few casting couches that would have been unfruitful anyway, contracted scabies without any sexual contact, interviewed with several prospective employers with no interest in me whatsoever, found a job in a coffee shop, and was fired for feeding a homeless man.   Admitting total defeat was the only choice I had. So I headed back to NY, back to college, back to a more plausible life. 

But I still wanted to be a screenwriter. 

Some years later, having just turned 40 and contemplating what path my life should take, I returned to Hollywood, this time to meet with my esteemed (former)  cousin-in-law.  I liked her, and her invitation to meet gave me hope that perhaps she might be willing to mentor me. 

We had a lovely lunch.  She listened to me as I spoke of my dreams. She read some of my work and asserted that I did indeed have talent.  She did advise me. But she did not encourage me.

Instead, she did me a kinder favor.

“Stay back East,” she said. “Raise your kids.  Write for yourself.  You’re already too old for this place.”

Then she looked at me with a distinctly kind twinkle in her eye and said,  “Besides your age, you’re at least 40 pounds too heavy. No one will even talk to you.  Don’t waste your time.”

It was sound advice.  I was not thin.  I had three kids, a husband, and a satisfying job teaching and directing educational theater.  Without malice or regret, I did as she suggested. 

Eventually, I did collaborate on a very good screenplay, and through connections I managed to make for myself, I got an appointment with people at Paramount Pictures.  Once again, I flew to LA, bypassed any meetings with family, and went directly to Robert Evans’ office. There Evans’ accolytes, assistants, staff, who had theoretically read the script and invited me to meet with them, hosted me three days in a row. We talked about the way the script would go, the possibilities, the legs it had.  Finally, they said they loved it. They would option it, and they could not wait to get it up on the screen. 

“You’ll hear from us tomorrow,” Evans’ right-hand person said to me as I left for the last time.  “We’ll email you the contract agreement first thing in the morning.”

I smiled, thanked them, and was about to leave when the assistant quickly added, “This is a great script. Really.  We are very excited.  We’re gonna walk down the aisle, across the red carpet together. This one’s a prize winner.”

That was on a Friday afternoon in 2005.  I watched for that email through the weekend, through the next week.  Perhaps even through the next month.  But I understood.

I never heard another word from any of them.