I’m trying to accumulate twenty pitchable script ideas for the new year. I’ve always had three or four within reach, but I’m making a determined effort to pour every ounce of creative strength I have into a long list of ideas. I don’t want toss-away notions. I want twenty ideas that speak to me, that interest me, that I’d love to spend a thousand hours developing. I want to walk into meetings with a stack of cards, each bearing a potential movie.

I’m almost there. Yesterday I spend my dinner break sitting at Groundwork, the brand new coffee joint on Cahuenga and Sunset, a pebble’s throw away from my work. In that hour I came up with Number Eighteen. It involves an odd gentleman named Jacob “Jigsaw” Johnson, soft spoken and carrying a beat-up duffel bag containing well-guarded secrets. It also involves a girl named Tina, age ten, who tags along with him after their initial chance meeting. And it involves an abandoned, shuttered building whose secrets are as deep and as dark as Jacob’s, and where Jacob expects to die.

…ooooh. Spooky.

This is me, writing:

Sprawled on the floor, blue pen, thick notebook. I write about how I’m unable to write. KUSC 91.5 plays and I wonder, does life have four movements like a symphony, three movements like a concerto or multiple, phasing movements like a John Digweed set? I begin a list of partial ideas. I worry on paper about all my smoking friends, for I feel there will come a day when I have buried them all. Is there a story in that?

I hear Elgar’s Enigma Variations, each of them purportedly written for a different friend, the enigma being that the theme of the variations is never actually played within the piece. I wonder, is there an idea in that? To my list I add, “idea about a killer who encases his victims within a teeny-tiny space inside a large block of concrete.” I’m not sure how I get from Elgar to Claustrophobia but I don’t question it.

Then after some daydreaming I write, “What if a Private Investigator is visited by a man who suspects his wife of cheating and then learns that he’s right, and that the other man is, in fact the P.I.?” It’s not a whole script, it’s just an idea for an opening scene. But I’m picturing the film to follow. It’s a nuanced, grown-up film–Chinatown meets The Big Chill. But since I’m in Hollywood, I add, “…and one of them is a ghost,” though I’m not certain which one.

I read a Mutts cartoon in which a cat is selected by a little girl in an animal shelter. Overjoyed, the cat exclaims, “I’m a keeper! Finally, after all this time! I’m a keeper.” Tugs at the heart a little. I wonder if there’s an story in that?

I read a list of Bad Names For Professional Wrestlers dreamed up by Jeff Johnson. These include, The Tadpole, The Cuddler, The Marionette, The Wooden Marmoset and The Peppermint Rube. And again, I wonder if there’s a story in that.

I drift, I lose concentration, I write more lines about ideas, themes and notions. I stop. Three hours have passed. It’s time to play Hamsterball.

P.S. A few undone screws, a little look-see with a flashlight, a bit of poking about at a fuse and I got my monitor back.