I want to write a fan letter to Sandra Tsing Loh. Innocent enough, you’d think. I picked up a copy of her best-selling book, Depth Takes a Holiday, at a yard sale at an Obon festival at a Buddhist temple downtown. I went for the tea ceremony demonstration, but stayed for the yard sale and the pupusa stand, and to be a tourist in the Arts District of downtown LA (try Pie Hole – it’s great!). The book is so funny and witty that I want to read it aloud, in order to create an illusion that it’s actually me that’s smart and witty (typical actor!).
But how would my letter be viewed? Would it be creepy? I mean, let’s unpack what one expects from a fan letter. First, the recipient will be charmed, and read my note once, then again because they find my turn of phrase particularly original and piquant. They’ll think about whether they should write me back. They’ll want to, of course, but don’t want to seem desperate. But then they’ll decide it’s not every day they get a note like this, what the hell – they’ll write back.
Once I wrote to Caleb Deschanel, the legendary cinematographer (and father of Zooey), who directed a movie called The Escape Artist. I watched it on TV late at night (at the dawn of cable, in the late 80s or something), and was strangely moved. I wrote him a brief note, and a few weeks later I got a letter back! It was personal and hand-written, and grateful for my having noticed his movie! I was thrilled. I had touched, if not greatness, then certainly goodness.
I had never met Caleb Deschanel, so my note was perfectly anonymous. I wrote a fan note to Jim Woodring, the incredible artist of the hallucinatory Frank comics. They are so detailed and dense with hinted-at meaning that it feels less like a comic than a window onto a wildly alien world, yet perfectly plausible on its own terms. He wrote me back, which was exciting, and even broke the veil of perfect anonymity by asking if I was related to the photographer Peter Basch (yes, I am – he was my father). So I felt we had bonded. I keep thinking I want to offer him one of my father’s photographs (perhaps a portrait of Stan Lee) in exchange for original art.
But writing a fan letter to someone I’ve actually met, but not spoken to in years, seems maybe a little weird.
Backstory: I had a brief two-year stint taking meetings in Hollywood. Chronologically, I was a youthful 40, but emotionally I was a troubled 19. Besides, I was swinishly ignorant about the industry. No fault there, we’re not born knowing how sitcoms are produced, or what a hiatus is, or when pilot season is. I certainly didn’t know that I’d have to write a kick-ass spec script every three months in order to be taken seriously. I may have a lot of virtues, but that kind of work ethic I haven’t got. That’s why ex-lawyers make good TV writers; they’re used to all-nighters. Not me. What my representation (agent + manager) should have done, if they had wanted me to have a career as a writer, was recognize that my ass and my elbow were, to me, indistinguishable, and encouraged me to get a job as a writer’s assistant. Instead, they wanted me to hit it big right away – a dicey proposition, and with a likelihood of (in retrospect) 0%. Maybe they thought I was too old to be a writer’s assistant. Maybe, but I would have been great at it. Oh, well, life paths not taken…
ANYWAY, one of the things that happened in that period was I was introduced to Jeffrey Lane, a legendary showrunner, who asked me to write a freelance script for his show, Ink, with Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen (I know, IMDB lists Diane English as the showrunner; that’s because a month after I met Jeffrey Lane, he was separated from the show, and Diane English brought on; didn’t help the show, and it certainly didn’t help me; she didn’t share Jeffrey’s interest in a NY playwright). Jeffrey’s co-executive producer was Jeffrey Klarik. He was perfectly nice to me, and when I pitched a few jokes, they got into the show (which never made it to the air; my jokes are in a vault somewhere, on 3/4″ tape, I suppose, never to be seen again).
Later, Jeffrey Klarik, along with David Crane, created Episodes, one of the funniest shows ever to be on TV, and certainly the funniest one on now (it’s about to start its fourth season). I love the show, so I wrote him a note. I reminded him that we had met, told him that I wasn’t in the business any more, that I am a tech writer at JPL, and that if he ever wanted a tour I’d be thrilled to show him around the rockets and stuff.
He never wrote back, and naturally, being an unregenerate solipsist, I assumed it was because he did remember me and was embarrassed by the whole thing; after all, in a real way I had failed – I had come to Hwood, taken meetings, and not made a career. On sober reflection, he probably doesn’t remember me, or if he does, he doesn’t care one way or the other. In fact, he may never have received the letter, because I sent it to his agent.
Back to STL (Sandra Tsing Loh; I love her idea of renaming the San Fernando Valley SFV to make it hipper, so I’ll call her STL). I met her in around 1996 at the HBO New Writers Project, when she was developing her one-woman show, and (as I remember) experimenting with different performance styles. STL is a magnetic performer – impressively tall, energetic, expressive, very pretty, and has little lightning-bolts of intelligence sparking off her head. It’s like her own micro-weather system of charisma. Yeah, okay, I got a little art-crush on her. But I was ripe for that at the time – I soon met my wife, who shares those characteristics (except for the tall part). So, as I contemplate writing STL a note, I worry that it would have to be so short and innocuous as to provoke no reaction at all, or be a little longer and make her think I was creepy. And how does it sound, to say I bought your book at a yard sale, and think that you were really funny back in 1996? Not the way to a writer’s heart. And if I add that I saw her on the Bill Maher show recently, it veers into the stalkerish.
As my kids would say, 1st world problems.