On Living in the Nerd Lane - #32
Hello Maiyah (and friends)!
Hope all you pretty people are doing pretty good. I’m still stuck at my family’s place in Texas and the timeline of me heading back isn’t looking pretty. Haha. Ha. Anyways, let’s get into it.
On Living in the Nerd Lane
1,919 words | 07min 06sec reading time
I recently came back this past weekend from Austin, Texas. Crashed at my friend’s place, played with technology, visited friends, all that. I went to a friend’s birthday bash (that had appropriate social distancing precautions in place). It was great. I was driving back up to Waxahachie in my brother’s little Nissan while listening to Scriptnotes and a few videos of Craig Mazin discussing Chernobyl for HBO. When I got back home, I went back to my words on the page. And soon after sitting down, I had an illuminating realization. That night I pondered about it. Thinking and pacing, wondering with the sound of my internal dialogue. “That guy too? What I about her? Him? Not that dude. Actually - yeah, that dude as well,” I mumbled to myself. “No, that can’t be true… it is?”
Every friend, from classmate friends to roommate friends, I’ve ever had, from grade school through college and even still now, was, and for many still are, at least on some level, a nerd - and that through my association with such friends, I could therefore realistically, not nominally, be categorized, in its totality, as a nerd.
The Wikipedia article for Nerd (keep this tab open):
Before we go on, let’s get this out of the way. I am a nerd, but not necessarily a geek. Usually when you think of the word “geek”, you think computers, and I’m not a computer whiz like these Silicon Valley geeks. Though, I’ll admit, I’m writing my current feature script in a Fountain-based Markdown format akin to that of computer code in Notepad. All my story notes are jotted down in one big HTML web-format file stored on my Google Drive and Dropbox. That’s a geeky bunch of drivel I spouted. So I’m half-geek, okay? Dork? A few months ago, my roommate, {M}, was helping me with my Hinge profile and we got the prompt “One of the dorkiest things I do is ____”. I replied, “I don’t know, can’t think of anything.” And he said, “Really? I can name 5 things off the top of my head. Don - you write essays for fun. You… you have a newsletter.” “Alright, alright… I’m a dork.” So there you have it. I’m the Ultimate Neapolitan.
I asked the guy in the mirror this past weekend, “Every friend was a nerd?” Yeah. Every friend. 1st through 6th, I did the whole getup: big hair, goofy metal glasses, math and science were my sh*t. I wasn’t really popular, but so weren’t my friends. Rather than play with the other kids on the playground, I passed the time in 4th grade by making math quizzes for my 3 friends. Aahh, reading Magic Tree House in the corner and trading Pokemon cards. Exhilarating times. In 6th and 7th grade, I wanted to be popular among my Christian charter school classmates, especially the ones that played sports and talked about girls. So I went to my local Renfest that year and hatched the idea - “I’ll do magic tricks!” I thought I was sooo cool when I slowly turned the card over saying, “Is this your card?” “Oh my gosh!” Samantha said with surprise. “That was sooo cool!” “Thanks,” I said as she quietly went back to her friend group. With all the confidence of an explosion happening in the background, I slow-mo walked back to my friends, who’ve waited in bated breath; a single nod of my head - we all knew: Mission Accomplished. Samantha in History thought I was cool. And we went back to our Nintendo DS.
8th grade hit me and I stopped the magic, but still hung out with the nerds. Sometimes I would encounter the non-nerds and talk about how “the immune system is a great deterrent even without the 5-second rule.” A girl laughed really hard, pointing at me, and said, “You are such a nerd!” Then for high school, I had the choice: 1) normal high school, or 2) the “Nerd Academy” where I could learn engineering and science and be with my fellow nerds. Of course I chose the latter, however I had to test the waters. It was 9th grade. Kid dropped his grape. He picks it up. One of us mentions the 5-second rule. I go, “You know, the immune system is a great deterrent even without the 5-second rule.” He replied, “It’ll actually get better; when I introduce this new, harmless bacteria, my body will naturally create more antibodies.” For 4 years, I was home.
Putting a pin on this for a quick second. I was friends with nerds, but I hung out with the weird people as well. The hippie-hipster, multicolored-hair, pot-smoking offbeat kids. Video games, hot pockets, Cage the Elephant, you know the jazz. Throughout secondary school, I liked those people, oddly enough, yet I never knew why until I read Paul Graham’s essay, “Why Nerds Are Unpopular”. Paul Graham is a programmer, writer, and investor who, in 2005, founded Y Combinator. He writes:
Teenage kids, even rebels, don't like to be alone, so when kids opt out of the system, they tend to do it as a group. At the schools I went to, the focus of rebellion was drug use, specifically marijuana. The kids in this tribe wore black concert t-shirts and were called "freaks."
Freaks and nerds were allies, and there was a good deal of overlap between them. Freaks were on the whole smarter than other kids, though never studying (or at least never appearing to) was an important tribal value. I was more in the nerd camp, but I was friends with a lot of freaks.
High school nerds and freaks aside, it was time to leave home for a new one. College. I applied to 2 schools and got into UT Austin. I never visited the campus before orientation – orientation day happened and the campus clicked for me. A kingdom of nerds. Due to a housing glitch, they threw me into the Honors Dorms, a living quarters for the Liberal Arts Honor students. A castle complex of nerds, and I was in the dungeon; a basement hallway full of comp-sci and engineering nerds. People there liked me, and I liked them. But film school must be different, right? Nope. Nerds. Everywhere, as far as the 50mm lens can see. I loved being on student film sets, being there and breathing the body odor air, being the grip, key grip, 2nd AC, 1st AC, scripty, the whole shebang, I could go on but someone might have stopped me and asked, “Quick, La La Land or Moonlight?” I don’t know? The Graduate? I just wanted to go to a small party or something. “What about a Co-op party?” my alcohol prone nerd-friends enticed. “I don’t know,” I said outside the jungle gym treehouses. Posters from the 60’s. Alt-nerds abound. Slowly entering and catching the aroma of ganja, I knew a man bun was nearby. Me not smoking didn’t stop them from asking, “Quick, Capitalism or Communism?” “I don’t know,” I spitted out, “Why do I have the feeling I’ve known you people since the 6th grade?”
Of course, Hollywood MUST be different? Film school is full of writer-directors paying for Criterion DVDs. Hollywood is for the real home-run sluggers, right? It’ll be a completely different world, right? Right?
Oh, what a shocker. Let’s shoot for the stereotype: They say talent agencies are full of “bros”, frat guys, blazer boys, sorority simps; it’s a cliquey, sticky situation on who’s who and what’s what. Don’t get me wrong – a lot of my friends, even those of you reading this right now, work for agencies big and small: ICM, WME, CAA, etc. And maybe some of you guys will tell me, “Don, it’s like that. With my boss, it’s crunch time all the time. Don’t think there’ll be an ounce of nerdom accepted.” Well, well, well, I’m here to tell you my little theory based on a dozen or so visits to an agency: Deep down, everyone’s a nerd. I think you have to be if you want to be a good agent. “Emmanuel? Ovitz? Nerds?” Yeah, nerds.
Here is an excerpt from “Who is Michael Ovitz?” by Michael Ovitz. Recall the first line of the Wikipedia, then read this:
I avoided red carpets; I’d enter and leave parties through the back door; I kept the rights to almost all photos of me; I didn’t do any press for the first ten years, and very little after that. When conducting business, I was so soft-spoken I made people inch their chairs closer. I rarely lost my temper (which was an enormous strain because I’m a perfectionist, and everything—everything—bothered me if it wasn’t just so). I drank barely at all, I didn’t use drugs, I didn’t even dance. I never understood why you’d want to shower and change for a dance just so you could go get all sweaty. This set of traits made me seem freakishly composed and controlled. And you know what? I was. - [Prologue]
In my second year in college, I enrolled in the first of many art history courses, one of those slide-show surveys that range from caveman drawings to Jackson Pollock. It was the one class I’d literally run to. After we started CAA, I began going to New York regularly. In the late 1970s, before Chris was born, I’d be in the city two or three Saturdays a month. After work I’d squeeze in a few hours at the galleries and museums, often with Judy at my side, loving what I was seeing, though for the most part I had no idea what I was looking at. Minimal art in particular left me nonplussed. - [Chapter 9]
A total art nerd. I love it.
All good writers are nerds. This little tidbit from the Scriptnotes podcast in last weekend’s car ride lit a little sparkler in my brain:
Craig: […] You know, it’s one of the great sad and frustrating ironies about screenwriting is that it does take a certain amount of internal nerdiness to write a screenplay. It’s very hard to write a screenplay and not on some level be a huge dork that’s steeped in words and in inner life and solitude. […] you have to fit right in this narrow channel of dorkiness. And I believe that you and I are in that channel. Every writer I know is a nerd. Even the cool ones are nerds. John Gatins, coolest writer in the world, right?
John: Yeah, nerd?
Craig: Nerd!
I wouldn’t be writing this essay if I didn’t hear this!
“But not everyone, Don! Not everyone is a nerd in Hollywood!” No, just the majority. It’s a town full of nerds. Directors? Film nerds. TV writers? Word nerds. Actors? Drama nerds. Production designers, Cinematographers, VFX? Nerds, nerds, nerds. Comedians? Holy sh*t, talk about a bunch of comedy nerds. A lot of them learned to be funny so they can avoid getting bullied in school for being such big f*cking nerds. Count me as one of those guys!
I believe you inevitably have to be, on some level, a nerd to get anywhere in this town. And I feel I’m not exiting the Nerd Lane anytime soon. Besides – I like it here.
“But… but… what about Leonardo DiCaprio!! Coolest guy in town!” Are you kidding me? Please. If Leo and I were having a coffee at the Starbucks on Sunset and King, he’d be wearing cargo shorts and chatting me up about the environment for 3 hours. And I’d love every second of it.
News.Video.Poem
How Germany Is Saving Jobs During the Pandemic - So… this whole being laid-off and “struggling-for-money-during-a-pandemic” thing is solely an American circus act not common among other Western democracies? And the… Germans figured this out 10 years ago?
tl;dr - Unemployment in the United States is now almost 15%, the highest since the end of the Great Depression. But German unemployment for 2020 is expected to hit around 4%. Why? The German “Kurzarbeit,” or “short-work” scheme. It is credited with being one of the reasons Germany recovered so quickly from the 2008–2009 recession. Employers can respond to short-term reductions in demand by simply notifying the government, which gives firms the money they need to pay most of the difference. Example: Katharina Luz is an analyst at Daimler AG. Last month, human resources informed her that her hours were being cut to zero and she would be going on Kurzarbeit. The government is paying 60.5% of her wages, and Daimler is paying another 20% (as her union contract stipulates), so she is getting 80.5% of her normal salary. It can be extended for up to 21 months, and firms are eligible if at least 10 percent of their workers had their hours cut by more than 10 percent. Kurzarbeit also allows for flexibility in the number of hours worked, so Katharina may work 16 hours (two days) in an upcoming week, to prepare a report, but stay on Kurzarbeit. When Katharina was relieved of her office duties, she and her partner left Stuttgart to hang out at her childhood home near the Black Forest.“We have been organizing our lives, doing lots of mountain biking, and having lunch with my mother every day. We just started restoring some antique furniture to put to use when the baby arrives,” Luz said on a conference call with representatives from the company. “To be honest, Kurzarbeit has been just really nice for us.”
Silly Sh*t
I went to Austin, Texas this last weekend. I hung out with my friends, attended a B-day bash, and spoke with my friend about a startup (it’s still a secret, noooobooody knooows).
I finished all of Westworld. First off: What the heck happened after Season 1? And Season 3, what was that? Secondly: I PA’d on Westworld on one overnight shoot in Downtown LA and watched the whole thing to see what scene I helped on. Welp, apparently I was on the Season 3 finale, specifically the riot scene. And I quick-paused every frame of the credits till I saw “Production Assistants”… AND I’M NOT ON IT WTF… Still getting a sick Westworld poster.
I’m starting Sopranos. I’m on S1Ep6 as of this writing.
I’m doing mindfulness meditation. Simple breathing work. It works better than Transcendental meditation, I’ll tell you that. Here’s a link to how to do it.
Still writing, still chugging along. I don’t know if I’ll be back to LA June 1st… maybe middle of June. If any of you want my place to stay at while I’m not there, and you’re willing to pay like 300 bucks to use it as a crash pad or even storage, hit me up. I’ll let you guys know when I’m flying back. You all got my number.
Best,
Don
As always, anybody can reach me at [dnrtldg@outlook.com](mailto: dnrtldg@outlook.com)
And for my friends… you all got my number.