This is a series detailing the strange, sometimes traumatic experiences I've had in the entertainment industry -- run-ins with celebrities, development execs, and douchebags of all shapes and sizes -- since I moved to LA 11 years ago. A link to the previous installments can be found on the right hand side of the page, and also here.
I’ve thought long and hard about writing this story. While, I spoken about this before to most of my friends, I’ve never put the whole thing down in writing, and certainly not on the Internet. Considering the only party it might offend is owned by a global media conglomerate worth billions of dollars, that fact deserved a lot of thought.
But here’s the thing: Everything I’m going to write here really happened. Yes, I’m making one leap, one assumption, but it is based on so much evidence, I think anyone reading will agree it’s a reasonable leap to make. That makes me feel a little better. So does the fact I once heard the best legal defense for slander is truth (it’s not libelous if it’s true). Lastly, I’m also calmed by the fact I don’t think many people actually read this blog.
The story began a few years back when my friend (and now writing partner) Barry came up with the idea of a parody of Cameron Crowe’s ’Almost Famous’, re-imagined in modern times, centered around a kid obsessed not with classic rock, but hip-hop. The title: ’Almost Gangsta’. I thought it was a great idea, and we ended up writing a script together. Later, we produced a short film out of it. The film didn’t turn out as well as we had hoped, and Barry didn’t want the idea to die.
Eventually, he came upon the idea to turn the concept into a reality show: Young aspiring writers who loved hip-hop would write sample essays to The Source magazine, who we had worked with a bit on the making of the short, and the finalists would do pieces, which would appear in the magazine. The winner would receive a one-year internship as a reporter for the mag.
However, we couldn’t get the bigwigs at the Source to sign on, so we broadened the pitch to include another take – the show could, like the original movie, could center around Rolling Stone Magazine. We called this version, ’Rock Journalism 101’. This take probably had the broader appeal, but because MTV was the obvious place to pitch the idea, and their programming was becoming almost exclusively hip-hop-related, we decided to keep ’Almost Gangsta’ on the title page of our treatment.
I was worried about pitching MTV because a former lawyer of mine had cautioned me about their pitch meeting practices. She had multiple friends who had pitched them and were told the network already had something similar in development, only to later see their exact show hit the air. When I relayed this to my manager, who had a friend in development there he wanted us to meet, he admitted that was MTV’s reputation within the industry, but advised they were still our best bet.
We met with this high-level development exec and pitched our idea. She seemed to like it, and peppered us with questions for more details. At the end, she asked for our treatment so she’d have something to show her superiors, and complimented the idea. But she left us with one haunting last remark: “Let me just make sure we don’t have anything similar in development.” The thing that has always bothered me about this: How could a highly-placed exec not already know what their company has in development?
You can probably guess the rest. A couple of weeks later, we heard back from the exec via our manager – they were passing because…(drum roll please) they had something similar in development. I was furious because I knew what was really going on, but both Barry and my manager played it pretty cool, saying, essentially, it probably wouldn’t come to anything anyway.
Then, a couple of months later, Variety ran a story announcing a deal between MTV and Rolling Stone for a new reality show based on ’Almost Famous’, titled, ’I’m With Rolling Stone’. Though the concept of the show was almost identical to our alternate take, which was registered with the Writer’s Guild of America, our manager saw no real reason to pursue the matter yet. “Wait until they get pregnant with the show” was the general advice – once the show is in production, the network is more committed to the idea, and might consider a “payoff” just to avoid any legal entanglements from delaying production.
But by the time ’I’m With Rolling Stone’ got into production, we were with a different manager. His reaction: “I know how that feels, dude. I used to work in development at MTV, and they stole two ideas of mine, too.” So could we do? “Not much, dude.”
But we weren’t going to take this sitting down. The parents of Barry’s then-girlfriend, now wife live is Pacific Palisades, next door a top notch lawyer specializing in intellectual property. Barry’s future father-in-law got him a face-to-face with the lawyer, who quickly told him it was a good news bad news situation. The good news: The good news was he knew that MTV had a reputation for this and had quite a bit of litigation against them. The bad news: they had top notch lawyers to battle this and it was almost impossible to beat them, and he knew this because… (another drum roll please) they had him on retainer -- and used his services often.
So there we were, with no real recourse but to spend money we didn’t have to pursue a case we couldn’t win. Sure, I dashed off a strongly-worded e-mail to said exec, calling her out for exactly what she did. I never heard back, of course. And that was it. Or, that was it until the show actually aired. I tried to watch, but it made me sick to my stomach. In fact, I could barely watch the one MTV show I actually like, ’The Real World’.
But, thankfully, the show’s ratings stunk, and it quickly disappeared. I don’t know what I would’ve done if it had been a hit. Something bad, I’m sure. But it still hurt – much worse than I had ever imagined it might. It’s something akin to intellectual rape. You feel angry at the perpetrator, but also at yourself for letting yourself be taken advantage of. And there’s the innocence lost.
I’ve written before about how my love for screenwriting has dimmed due to effect of peripheral parts of the industry. This episode with MTV might have been the first slide down that slippery slope.
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