The Pioneer Newsletter #19

Long overdue....long in general.

On Running

I am not a runner. 

I am a problem solver. A process addict. A 25 year old chronic leg shaker in constant search of presence. If I could gift my newly awarded Los Angeles Marathon medal to one person, it’d be my 10th grade cross-county coach, Mr. Pool, as Mr. Pool once witnessed me fake an ankle injury 1 mile into the first meet of the season before promptly quitting the cross-country team a week later. It took 7 years before I took up running again. I got back in the saddle to solve a problem, to chase process, and miraculously find a source of presence. This was just about 2 years ago - give or take a couple of weeks. I had just celebrated my 23^rd birthday with some friends at a Santa Monica pool bar aptly titled Q’s. There was an almost reflexive quality about that birthday. While pool seemed like a great way to spend it, once we got there, drunk off cheap beer and our future plans, the line was far too long. We never even got on the table.

That was a lot of my year. Slowly becoming disillusioned and sobered to the fact that I was at the back of the line. So far back, I was unsure just what exactly I was waiting for. The practices and methods I used to go about my life throughout college had become increasingly defective. My confidence and identity as a film student who was just about to be a writer was slowly stripped away by the insecurity and desperation of unemployment.  I had spent the past year trying to become a writer’s production assistant, or agent assistant, or podcast producer, or anything else that could justify my college degree in screenwriting. I was qualified for none of these positions yet confused just what exactly I was supposed to do with a degree in screenwriting. I spent four years studying what most believe, comes from the eccentric minds of video store clerks and baristas, hammering out some boom or bust script, before magically floating it into the virtuosic hands of Steven Spielberg. It’s not the craziest belief. After all, most kids in my first classes wanted to fly before walking - writing plotless arthouse movies and tightly wound psychological thrillers. But this wasn’t a coffee shop. We went to film school. Two words that sound more like an oxymoron than a form of higher education. We wanted access, guidance, and direction. The inside track on just how to succeed in a line of work where William Goldman, one of our most prolific screenwriters, famously proclaimed that nobody, including William Goldman, knows anything. Professors first taught us the rigors and mathematics of a three-act structure. Then, told us to change the world with it. But their final lesson was like a bucket of cold water - told with pain behind their eyes. Screenwriters are big wave surfers in shark-infested waters. If you’re crazy enough, go ahead and try to catch a couple of waves. But most likely, you’re no auteur. So tread water and just keep breathing. Scared off by risk, thus begins the shedding of our naïve 18-year-old film school identities. By senior year, the most militantly Lolita-loving freshman was giving notes on a Transformers script at their coveted senior internship. The most unbearable Nolan-head film bro was supplying Cheez-Itz and Dasani for a Bhad Bhabie music video. Most of us were no longer writers or filmmakers. We were interns, PAs, and mailroom-hopefuls beginning our quest for a door to put our foot in rather than a story to put our mark on. I was somewhere in the middle of this. Well, I guess not the actual middle as I distanced myself from the film school crowd for the most part. I spent more time on the sticky floors of a frat house than on the sets of short films or at coffee houses with CAA assistants. I still did well in class, asking just enough questions, writing just enough scripts, and handing in my work just enough around its due date. But it didn’t take too long before I made my priority college over an intense film education. In retrospect, it was quite a privileged if not spoiled decision to prioritize consequence-free fun over an education that barely warranted its own major. But education is wasted on the youth and I’m quite sure whoever said this was referring to Intro to Irish Cinema.

Unfortunately for the far better film students than myself, COVID, leveled the playing field. That just get your foot in the door mantra we all followed religiously became nearly impossible once the door became a Zoom link. Any old Hollywood story about gumption or being in the right place at the right time seemed as useful as a producer, whose last credit was Lethal Weapon II, telling you to just go out and shoot a movie on your phone. Once ejected from my zoom-only education into the zoom-only world of entertainment, my lack of proper direction left me pursuing just about everything in entertainment as well as nothing at all. I landed at odd jobs, working at a restaurant for a week, cutting WNBA and pre-season NFL highlights for another. I spent two days in the desert working on an EDM music video with a guy named Dr. Midnight. A few days each month, I produced Zoom press junkets for various cable television shows. Somewhere there’s a photo of me on a conference call with four contestants from Ru-Paul’s Drag Race, in their apartments in their full hair and makeup, walking them through a wifi router reboot. In between these sporadic and fleeting brushes with employment, came weeks of dormancy. I passed the time half-writing scripts, doom scrolling through job boards, and clocking hours of “research” rewatching John Woo movies. Due to my community being built in a frat house, just about everyone around me had real jobs. They worked in banking, real estate, or tech sales. They’d complain about the repetition of emails and weekly check-ins. They’d blow money on the weekend as a right of passage. And I believed, unlike myself, they’d earned every dumb decision they made. As each month passed, my self-prophesied identity as a writer slowly began to wane. I craved, more than any accomplishment of creativity, the feeling of self-reliance. I was in no community of starving artistry. I was in West LA, where for every 1 independent book store there’re 15 Sweetgreens and just like my four years of easy grades and good times, I had no interest in struggle. I just wanted a Harvest Bowl like everyone else. It was time to start treading water. But without an offer sheet to sign, I needed to begin re-wiring through habit forming. I needed to reinforce the practice of an activity completely unorthodox to my way of living. A new form of process to solve the problem in front of me. So in true Forest Gump logic - I just started running.

At first, the distance was unsurprisingly short. I wouldn’t answer a what have you been up to lately? with well…I actually just started running a mile every other day. Because that’s all it was. 1 mile. I couldn’t even listen to music or I’d start moving too quickly for my own stamina. Soon, however, that one mile became quite routine. I dug deep and found the will to make it 1 and a half. Music, at a very slow tempo, was then introduced to the routine. I still didn’t have a job but I COULD run 1.5 miles to Jack Johnson without going into cardiac arrest. Safe to say, things were looking up. My search for work then intensified and my methods became either more clever or desperate - depending on your current employment status. I left hard copies of my resumes with security guards at office buildings. I made fake email accounts for free months of LinkedIn Premium. But none of that worked. It was instead a single voicemail that finally broke through the iron curtain of Hollywood. Okay, it wasn’t really Hollywood. It was a studio tour department - Hollywood adjacent - a term I’d get great use out of over the next two years. I’m a good public speaker, fairly knowledgeable on the history of film, and figured if I couldn’t get hired off a Zoom interview, maybe some Brian Grazer-style face-to-face encounters could change my luck. So I decided to just give each of them a call. I got through to one studio tour department. The only one that didn’t require a headshot and acting credentials for an interview. In fact, I left that voicemail on an extension designated to book deluxe tours. I figured this was what they checked the most frequently. They called back later that day and one week later, I was hired off a 15 minute Zoom call. The only real question I remember being asked was about my availability. I could sense, unlike every other Zoom interview I had suffered through, mainly at the mercy of talent agents, that they needed bodies quickly. That was exactly the case. This particular studio, in March of ’22, was a ghost town. Us and maintenance were just about the only two departments I can remember actually seeing every day. Productions were still on hiatus until COVID regulations became more lenient and attendance for office jobs was merely a suggestion. We were this historic movie lot’s essential workers - unclogging toilets and peddling tourists -  and I couldn’t be more excited to be there. 

Well, I was at least excited to be behind the gates of a real studio and at the very least, have a steady paycheck along with work each day of the week. My running quickly intensified and I was now up to 3 miles almost every day after work. But I wasn’t writing anymore or even thinking about it very much. As more executives, showrunners, and assistants slowly trickled in that spring, I was far more focused on pitching myself. I believed my near-constant presence walking about the grounds, even with 25 tourists in tow, would be known. That my charm and acumen would lead to the next rung on whatever ladder I had just begun to climb. Running became closely associated with this - such as a physical manifestation of my maturation. It also brought along a routine feeling of presence each night out on the road. I wanted to take advantage of this. Log and record the sense of accomplishment I felt as a dilettante finally turned sort of professional. Smack in the middle of my 3 miles, I’d usually stop to catch my breath. Let me remind you, I was never a runner. Usually, this time was spent on my phone or people watching. But that’s where I began stacking an even newer habit on my newfound habit of running. I began listing everything I was grateful for, aloud, to absolutely nobody but myself. It would always include my family, friends, a new opportunity, and that I was exactly who I was, whoever that may be.

As six feet shortened to no feet and chin diapers became pocket litter, tourism in town picked up and we hired more tour guides. A timely promotion then came my way and I began an office job in the tour department as a coordinator. I still had to give a few tours each week, however, they were mostly for high-profile guests such as my afternoon with the Governor of New Mexico, Michelle Lujan Grisham. If the Hollywood Reporter put together a list of the 50 Most Influential Tour Guides in Hollywood - I’d surely have cracked it. But my days were now mostly spent in front of a dual monitor set up - dutifully coordinating for the first employer ever to provide me health and dental. So I increased my miles each evening. Three soon became five. My 10 minute pace dropped to a breakneck 9. Friends I hadn’t seen in months began asking why I looked different. I hadn’t even realized it. Though never particularly heavy, the college husk I carried, built on Chipotle, beer, and the irregular use of an outdoor bench press, began to shed away. If running was a physical manifestation of my newfound practice of structure, the 20 pounds I shed that summer put this metamorphosis on display, each and every weekend, as I celebrated the menial work now I had the privilege of accomplishing. I was no longer insecure about my lack of self-reliance or constantly ashamed of the inherent privilege that allowed me to get away with it. I was a Sweetgreen-eating, rent-paying adult, working at a movie studio. All I hoped, was for you to not ask what I did there.

I really really hoped you didn’t ask me. Because the more time I spent in the proximity of real decision makers, the further away they seemed. Six months in, I was growing impatient with the repetition of my position and terrified I was planting my feet firm in it. One afternoon, I waited in a particularly significant lobby on the lot, staring at the Best Picture Oscars that lined the walls encased in glass. I was waiting to give a tour to India’s Secretary of Commerce. Please don’t fault me if India does not actually have a Secretary of Commerce. I remember he had something to do with commerce in regard to India. A studio assistant then arrived and asked for my name without introducing herself. She disappeared as quickly as she entered and soon after, the CEO of the studio emerged from the elevators with the Secretary. They headed straight towards me. “This is The Pioneer. He’s one of our best tour guides and will show you around the lot today” said the CEO. He didn’t actually say The Pioneer. But he might as well have. It wouldn’t have mattered. I realized I was there to give tours and no matter who that tour was for, whether it be the CEO or Indian Czar of Commerce, nobody remembered my name once it was over.

I needed to separate myself from this role as no amount of charm or acumen would separate me from the low-skill job I inhabited. I needed to be known as a writer who happens to tour, not a tour guide who, well tours. So I decreased my running. That winter, I spent more nights at my college library, a glass and marble behemoth that doubled as Apple’s HQ for a Steve Jobs movie, writing a new screenplay. It was about immature post-grads confronting the existential dread of privilege. I didn’t want to set my expectations too high, but each evening as I left the tour office, I felt that my only way out was to write the second coming of Chinatown. Inevitably, it was not. As you can guess from my particular creative space, it lacked a good amount of self-awareness. But I was now aware that no one fell swoop would elevate me out of a situation I felt above. I didn’t know what would. But writing became too painful because of it.

My running as well as my professional outlook that year were wildly inconsistent. However, socially, my constant presence out and about those grounds began finally paying off in the form of great friendships. Assistant opportunities in writers rooms and development offices suddenly came next. I landed none of them, but felt momentum just as I did the year prior. That was until the Writers Guild went pencils down and out on strike. It’s a strange feeling to hold a job you’ve grown tired of whilst those you want to work with are holding picket signs outside your parking garage. You’re as thankful to be working as you are powerless over a situation that scrapes you whilst scarring others. I also just missed my friends. I hadn’t seen the place so empty since I got there. When the actors then walked off set, I began coming to terms with my best laid plans maybe not working out. I had willingly put myself on a studio tour island and no amount of coffee chats or first drafts would get me off it. I needed to start completing something. The feeling of self-reliance, I craved so eagerly 18 months prior, grew once again and became almost addictive. In the same week, I impulsively started this newsletter and signed up for the L.A. Marathon. My runs each night were accompanied by self-help audiobooks and the idea of stopping for an exercise in gratitude was long forgotten. Just when the strikes finally ended, the actors agreeing to terms in November, I was rejected again for another job. By this point, running and writing became near manic endeavors. Such as the claustrophobia I felt at work, the endeavors consumed me. And I was improving at both - simultaneously rediscovering and refining my chops while also running distances my middle school cross-country teacher would not believe (I’m certain he stays awake thinking about my wasted high school running career).

Upon the new year, came further rejection - this time I had actually interviewed in-person and even got to wait in that Oscar-decorated lobby I had previously only visited for tours. Unlike my previous near misses, which at this point felt like thousands (it was like 12), I somewhat expected it. Not because I was ill-prepared or unqualified. Rather, because I simply couldn’t sell to the interviewer or myself that I wanted another desk job. The rigid structures I once yearned for now felt counterintuitive to what I valued most. The pace at which I was now working, writing, and running was unsustainable. I was skipping runs, staying up all night meticulously refining important think pieces such as The Greatest Third Wheel Names in Rom-Com History, and napping during lunch breaks in my building’s designated wellness (panic) rooms. Coincidentally, our tour department began thinning, and I was back giving tours to…tourists. I know. It hurts as much to type as it does to read it. It’s something one of Hollywood Reporter's hypothetical Most Influential Tour Guides of 2023 is embarrassed to admit. Blocking out the feeling of dread as I heard the closing lines of our welcome video for the 1,000,000^th was without a doubt God’s greatest challenge for his toughest tour guide. I wanted to quit everything, badly. Run away from work and just about every impulsive project I had started to cope with it.  And as anyone who’s training for a marathon will tell you, the calendar-filling final months of training are monotonous and boring. But running is literally all about not stopping. If you’re looking for the most binary way to learn about perseverance - try it sometime. You’re either running or you're not running. There’s literally no in-between. That would just be skipping. So if I had learned just about anything these past two years in my Brooks, then my Hokas, and then finally my Asics - it was to keep going.

March 3^rd, 2024. Two years after the night we didn’t play pool at Q’s, I finally got on the table. I was turning 25 and at another Santa Monica dive, Tiny’s, with a much larger group of friends - both old and plenty new. Earlier that day, I’d run my longest distance in training, 20 miles, and wondered how I had arrived at that moment from my foray into running nearly two years prior. How I became entangled in a beautiful storm of community, creativity, and plenty of rejection all accompanied by a simple process turned 26.2 mile endeavor. There’s an inherent triteness to whatever reasoning you have for running a marathon. Much of it reminds Hilary Clinton’s 2016 campaign tune, Fight Song, or Brittany Runs A Marathon - a movie that I’ve admittedly never seen. We largely associate marathons with self-improvement, bucket lists, or annoying co-workers. But as I began my marathon run, in the pitch-dark, freezing-cold parking lot of Dodger Stadium, it didn’t feel like a test of self-worth or a milestone of self-empowerment. I was still unsure of more in my life that I was sure of. Almost as lost as I was during those mile-long runs two years prior. So instead of fixating on the pitch-dark unknown that laid ahead, I decided to recollect. I thought back on those exercises in gratitude I no longer had time to stop for. Feeling thankful for my family - whose sustained support has now evolved into long phone calls and newsletter marketing. Feeling thankful for my friends - old ones I met on vodka-soaked floors and new ones I met in far, far cleaner places. Feeling thankful for my job - its dizzying structure and the maturation that structure forced upon me. And feeling thankful for myself - your favorite tour guide’s favorite tour guide. My marathon surely did not feel like a test or milestone. It felt more like a New Orleans funeral. All that was missing was a jazz band, as I paraded through the streets in celebration. Because it was a celebration. A celebration of the imperfect and unpredictable way of life I had inhibited for those two years. A way of life that very much began with running - the process I chose to evolve and move forward - and would ceremoniously end with the same. My modes and ways of living have once again reached a point of saturation. The great problems I face need new processes to move forward.

While it feels quite fitting to announce that I’m quitting my day job on Substack - a platform populated mostly by unemployed writers - I’m not yet brave enough to do so. I’m still terrified of the insecurity and desperation of unemployment that consumed me two years prior. More so, I’m terrified it will once again chip away at the creative identity I’ve worked so hard to rediscover. Also, on a less powerful note, I need to get paid. But I’m far more callused from my time running. Far more reliant on what I work on rather than who I could potentially work for. I admittedly, have consistently failed to put my foot in many doors. Maybe I blink too much - who knows. But I’m still moving, with a life equally as unpredictable as it is exciting. Having failed at plenty I thought I’d accomplish, and accomplishing far more I never expected.

I am not a runner. But I’ll always be a problem solver. I’ll always be in search of presence no matter the process I attempt.