The Marginal Way (with script read on video)

On the days where I don’t feel like opening Final Draft I still make time to sit down with my journal. Sometimes, I document the day, report the facts. I do this either at home, sitting on the front porch with Ellie, or one of the coffee shops down the street. This time is all about keeping the channel open between my creative impulses and my ability to put them down on paper.

Last week, I was at Starbucks and feeling like I had wasted a stolen hour by not writing down anything of consequence. With twenty minutes before I had to leave and a Ted Talk by Anne Lamott ringing in my ear, I challenged myself to write one true thing in that twenty minutes. I asked myself, “What was the first time you remember being connected to something bigger than yourself?” This is what came out:

“The first time you felt connected to something bigger than yourself you were in the basement room at Cornerstone Christian Assembly, surrounded by adults singing, “Alleluia,” over and over again. You were only seven or eight, but you felt bigger than your body then. The adults had their hands lifted, eyes closed. Many of them were crying. You understood it to be the presence of the holy spirit, because that’s how it was explained to you.

But, then you felt it again in junior high, playing with your rock band, Lynx, and in the high school musicals. You felt it so many times in college, in the tight harmonies in “Nobody’s Side,” and your first improv classes, and in late nights rehearsing in the black box theater in Wilson Auditorium. You felt it in New York, in drum circles that took place in view of the George Washington Bridge, and Fringe shows that took place in former porn theaters. With guitars around a campfire next to a lake in Indiana, and rehearsal spaces in Kentucky and Montana. In the audience at too many concerts and movies and plays to count. In beds from New York to Chicago to California.

As you got older you started to feel it in nature, ever more present, in grand canyons and waterfalls and standing under giant sequoias, in the presence of your family, in your girlfriend’s laugh, and the wag of your dog’s tail when she sees you coming through the door.

You’re 52 years old now, and you know that it is holy and that it is of the spirit but you also know that it doesn’t belong to any religion in particular, but rather to everyone and everything, this shimmering thread of connection, and in the right moment, with the right light, or the right chord, if you’re open to it, you vibrate at just the right frequency to see it, hear it, feel it. You are that kid again, surrounded by a chorus of alleluia, and you lift up your voice to sing.”

Me, feeling part of something bigger than myself, as Barfee in THE 25th ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE, Alipine Theatre Project in Whitefish, MT

In April, I had an in person general meeting at a studio, my first time on a lot in a few years. I got there early to walk around. It was quiet. My agent’s assistant called to let me know they had to postpone. When he found out I was already on the lot he offered to call them back to see if there was someone who could still meet. I told him not to worry, I didn’t want to bother anybody. Very midwestern. He persisted — a necessary skill for agents’ assistants — made some calls, and got the meeting back on the books.

During that meeting, the conversation organically veered into a topic that allowed me to bring up an idea for a procedural I’ve had for the past three years. They seemed excited by it and asked how I wanted to proceed, if I’d like to come back and give them the full pitch. Afterward, I emailed assistant to say thanks for pushing me to do the meeting. Because of him, I was back on a zoom with them a few weeks later, not on a general, but to give them the full pitch. (They passed, it’s okay, we’re going to take a few more shots.) (Be a good person to your agents’ assistants.)

Four days before the pitch, I had an epiphany. I was bored with the pilot story I came up with three years ago, even though I’d reworked it. It made sense, it introduced the characters in the way that I intended, but the case itself wasn’t all that much fun. What DID seem fun was the first sample case I planned to pitch them. It had all the elements of what I thought the series could be week to week at its best.

My initial reaction to my own instinct was fear and exhaustion. The thought of doing it that late in the game was overwhelming. I almost ignored my instincts and went with what I had, rationalizing that it was too late to change course and besides, I’d already been rehearsing.

Because of my daily practice, because that channel is open between input and output, recognizing what I think is cool or fun or creepy and being able to communicate that on the page, I had the ability to recognize the problem, and the confidence (and skills) to take the leap and flesh out a whole new pilot in a couple of days.

Like I said, in the end, they passed, so maybe it didn’t make any difference, but it made a difference to me. The pitch was better all the way around and I was proud of myself for taking the leap. I feel like that kind of thing is a muscle and you need to work it occasionally, to remain flexible and adaptive. It happens all the time in rooms, where the studio or network asks, “So… why are we telling this particular story?”

A day after that pitch, I got a call from my reps about another studio passing on my pitch for an adaptation of a novel. It was a heartbreaker. We took a beat to reassess, and they asked me to send them some loglines or short paragraphs for new original stuff I was interested in writing.

I mentioned a rough draft of a pilot called INSIGHT that I’d written in 2019, during the agency split. It had only ever been seen by one producer. They asked to read it and I spent a week doing an updated pass before I sent it to them.

Again, because I’ve been writing nearly every day, the channel was open. I’m a better writer now than I was seven years ago. I had the confidence to pull it apart, knowing I was going to make it better. I think this new pilot is really fucking cool. Here’s the description I sent them:

“DYLAN is a troubled young woman with a unique ability: she can see twenty-four hours into the future.

When a dangerous mobster on the run discovers her gift and extorts her into using it for personal gain, she finds herself drawn into the deadly underworld of organized crime in Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley. At first, Dylan is just trying to stay alive and one step ahead of the dogged FBI agent hot on their trail. But soon, Dylan starts to see this partnership as an opportunity to have a life she could only dream of.

Of course, everything comes with a cost…

This is a story about choices, consequences, and what it truly means to own your power.

INSIGHT is a grounded, propulsive one-hour crime thriller in the vein of things like BREAKING BAD, and KILLING EVE.”

Back to Anne Lamott… I listened to a podcast interview with her and her husband, who is also a writer. They pointed out that, for a lot of people, impostor syndrome fades away by their fifties. I do feel like that now. I may not always get it right on the first or second try, but I know that I have the tools and a process to get where I want to be, because day after day, week after week, I pull out my pen and keep going.

It’s more than a practice now. This the life I chose thirty plus years ago. This is my way of staying open to that shimmering thread of connection between all of us and everything. It’s my way of putting myself at just the right vibration to see it, feel it, hear it. To sing my own alleluia.

After I wrote that earlier bit, I wondered, “Why haven’t I ever written a movie about this feeling?” Then, I remembered, oh wait, I did! It’s called THE MARGINAL WAY.

I wrote it back in 2012, shortly before I broke in with EXTANT, for a contest run by The Writer’s Store (RIP). They gave contestants a logline from an established screenwriter, in my round it was Susannah Grant, and had you write 10-15 pages, any genre you want, based on that logline. In my year, it was, “A dying widow pledges her vast fortune to anyone who can make her final wish come true.”

I wrote a love letter to summer stock theater and that feeling when a bunch of people come together to create something bigger than themselves. THE MARGINAL WAY is about the transformative power of art and creativity, and how sometimes you need to be reminded that it’s not about the end result, it’s about the doing.

It’s named after a path in Ogonquit, Maine, that runs along a rocky outcropping by the ocean. I had gone to see Julie do a show there at a theater called The Oqonquit Playhouse. It’s only an inspiration for this script due to its location. The Playhouse is a well-known, thriving theater company, not the ramshackle operation in my movie. But I loved the name “the marginal way” as a metaphor for the life of an artist, that we are constantly living on the edges and exploring the outer limits.

On The Marginal Way in 2010, wearing a t-shirt from my day job, selling merch at Broadway shows.

Thanks to help from my Writer’s Store mentor, Kay Tuxford, I won the contest and got to have lunch with Susannah Grant at The Ivy, one table away from Gene Simmons. By that time, I’d just signed with WME and was waiting to hear back from Amblin about EXTANT. It was a fun time. Once EXTANT hit, I was in a sci-fi box, and THE MARGINAL WAY sat on the shelf. I said goodbye to comedy like it was a friend who had moved overseas. I would see it from time to time and always wish we lived closer.

I read it the other night after seeing my friends Ben Acker and Ben Blacker do a live read of their pilot, SPECTACULAR, about the making of the Spider-Man musical. (Which you can stream for a limited time here!) It was so much fun and it inspired me to put this out in some form this year. I’m still really proud of this script and what it has to say.

Here’s the first little bit, on video…

Before I go, I watched the Netflix documentary, MARTY, LIFE IS SHORT, about Martin Short. There’s an interview where John Mulaney talks about a piece of advice Marty gave him, shortly after Mulaney’s sitcom was canceled. He said:

“98% of the job is failure. Nothing works, then something works.”

To my fellow writers and people working in the industry, keep going.

Nothing works, then something works.