In a screed for the Village Voice, Oscar losing screenwriter Josh Olson issued what will soon be a battle cry for scribes everywhere, "I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script!"

One can't help but feel Olson's pain. The stations of a writer's cross are many and horrible — being treated like slime by your own agent; guards given orders to shoot on sight if you show up on the set of your film; security summoned when you attempt to chat with the film's starlet at the premiere. But Writer's Guild of America screenwriter goes to bed each night knowing that even if he is being abused, he is being abused by very powerful show business professionals who live in much bigger houses and drive much bigger cars than he.

But the horrifying indignity, as Olsen describes, is that once you become a screenwriter, even your oldest friends mistake you for the garbage collector.

I'll make you a deal. In return for you not asking me to read your fucking script, I will not ask you to wash my fucking car, or take my fucking picture, or represent me in fucking court, or take out my fucking gall bladder, or whatever the fuck it is that you do for a living.

You're a lovely person. Whatever time we've spent together has, I'm sure, been pleasurable for both of us. I quite enjoyed that conversation we once had about structure and theme, and why Sergio Leone is the greatest director who ever lived. Yes, we bonded, and yes, I wish you luck in all your endeavors, and it would thrill me no end to hear that you had sold your screenplay, and that it had been made into the best movie since Godfather Part II.

But I will not read your fucking script.

He continues:

You are not owed a read from a professional, even if you think you have an in, and even if you think it's not a huge imposition. It's not your choice to make. This needs to be clear—when you ask a professional for their take on your material, you're not just asking them to take an hour or two out of their life, you're asking them to give you—gratis—the acquired knowledge, insight, and skill of years of work. It is no different than asking your friend the house painter to paint your living room during his off hours.

There's a great story about Pablo Picasso. Some guy told Picasso he'd pay him to draw a picture on a napkin. Picasso whipped out a pen and banged out a sketch, handed it to the guy, and said, "One million dollars, please."

Olsen leaves out about from that story the part about how Picasso was, in fact, one the most humongous a-holes in art history.

He goes on to tell of the woes of actually trying to be helpful, and how it comes to backfire when it takes him months to read it, how his stack of script reading looms over his bed — a beast forever waiting to pounce; how friends claim they are open for criticism but really just want praise.

The trials of Job these screenwriters must endure. But we have a solution to take a little off your plate. Wait a believable eight days and then cut and paste the following phrase into an email. "I read your script and I loved it. It's just what Hollywood is looking for."

After all, they aren't applying to be William Wordsworth. This is Hollywood. Olson describes a friend's script he read:

The story described was clearly of great importance to him, but he had done nothing to convey its specifics to an impartial reader. What I was handed was, essentially, a barely coherent list of events, some connected, some not so much. Characters wander around aimlessly, do things for no reason, vanish, reappear, get arrested for unnamed crimes, and make wild, life-altering decisions for no reason. Half a paragraph is devoted to describing the smell and texture of a piece of food, but the climactic central event of the film is glossed over in a sentence.

Opening this weekend, made by Hollywood, are I Can Do Bad By Myself, Whiteout, Not Forgotten and Sorority Row. Can you really honestly look your friend in the eye and tell him he is not fit to be in this company?

The Ukrainians apparently considered this a momentous occasion. When he finally stepped onto the tarmac in Kiev, Frolick was greeted with a dozen roses and a row of shivering reporters who had been waiting two hours to shove microphones in his face.

"What will feelm be about?" one asked.

"About 80 minutes long," Frolick said to mute stares.

In a way that dramatically upended the skewed hierarchy of the Hollywood system so embedded in the subtext of the current contract deadlock, Frolick was suddenly in the flopped position of being a big fish in a small, frozen pond. And the star treatment reflected that.

Frolick was put up in the Boris Godunov Suite at the Opera, a five-star hotel. He was escorted to every great restaurant and nightclub in the city by a chauffeured Mercedes town car, from which he was frequently captured embarking and disembarking by paparazzi (yes, Frolick was an excellent American ambassador and kept his underwear on).

Over the week he was in Kiev, Frolick starred in half a dozen crowded news conferences, saw "Carmen" performed at the Kiev Opera House and dined with Richard Steffens, the U.S. Embassy's cultural attaché. He participated in a charity event for McDonald's (which has a tie-in to the movie) with the country's top athletes, politicians and celebrities.

His picture was all over the local magazines. One night he was watching the news in his hotel room and saw coverage of the Writers Guild of America strike rally at Fox that he had marched in the week before.

"The press coverage was staggering," Frolick says. "I was Chernobyl without the toxins. Billy Frolick is now to Ukraine what David Hasselhoff is to Germany."

Thankfully, the piece gives every indication that Frolick is a self-deprecating, level-headed sort likely to resist the temptations of meteoric fame that ultimately reduced Hasselhoff to a haunted, floorburger-consuming shell of the megastar with whom his Teutonic fans first fell madly in love. But while the lucky writer seems to have emerged from his Ukrainian odyssey no worse for the wear, we fear the publicity the article will bring to this once-secret Scribetopia will quickly result in its ruination. Soon, agents will flock the hotel bars of Kiev in a desperate attempt to land their idling clients the same kind of commissionable, WGA-approved dream gigs just completed by the pioneering Frolick, an unwelcome infestation that will render the onetime paradise unrecognizable from the Hollywood wasteland from whence the Armani-clad invaders came.

• Striking writer heads to the Ukraine for work [LAT]

"I feel like I'm on 'American Idol,' and I'm crushing people's dreams," said a talent agent from Endeavor after having swiftly nixed six hicks' pix. Citing her company's policy, she insisted on anonymity.

To be fair, for every couple of hundred writers who've been on the receiving end of an essence-leeching, too-toothy souljob, there is a success story or two:

Garth Meyer, an advertising copywriter shopping a modern-day Christmas fable, was turned down early in the day, reworked his pitch, then drew a nibble from Paramount before sitting down opposite a producer he had met at a pitchfest in February. She was interested then, he said, but left her company soon after hearing his pitch, and he had been unable to find her to follow up.

"Anyhow, it's back on," Mr. Meyer said. The woman and her new partner asked for his script and gave him contact information for their company. "She said something about thinking she could sell it and get it made by this Christmas," he added. "That's Hollywood."

Hopefully, this lucky scribe won't buy too deeply into the over-promising of an executive who may have as many as five new gigs by the projected Christmas start of production on his screenplay and do something rash like quit his day job or sell one of his children to fund a speculative stint in development of his surefire project; at the end of the day, the advertising copywriter probably realizes that he's got a statisically better chance at having one of his commercials bought by ABC and adapted into a sitcom than in ever seeing his recently pitched vision appear on the big screen.

• Hollywood Hopefuls (Dream On) at Pitchfest [NY Times]

"They're really excited about it," says the source. [...]

Now the screen idols have spent two weeks getting their creative juices flowing in a $13,000-a-week house in Kauai, Hawaii.

"Ben and Matt keep taking breaks to go surfing and hang out with their families," adds the source. "But for the most part, they've been writing together on this trip."

Even those who question the team's bonafides and uncharitably suspect that the duo might have had a little help with their award-winning script should recognize the telltale signs of real professionals in the process of creating: the elaborate labor-avoidance tactics that guarantee that no actual work will get done. Still, noticeable progress is being made; in between their shared family time and restorative surfing sessions, Affleck and Damon have periodically stopped in front of a laptop with an open Final Draft document reading, "FADE IN: INT. BEACH HOUSE—DAY. FUCK THIS. HAVE ENDEAVOR CALL WILLIAM GOLDMAN AND GET QUOTE FOR GOOD WILL 2" to obsessively tinker with the exact wording of their inevitable distress call.

• Ben & Matt's Next Movie [UsMagazine.com]
• Previously: But How Is This Strike Situation Affecting Matt Damon? [Defamer]

In any event, McMillan can't be a worse hire than WGA mole George "Scab Writer" Ellis, whom the Guild hopes will be snapped up during a studio's MySpace hunt for cheap, strike-insurance labor, and whose shoddy, non-union workmanship will doom any stockpiled project to instant failure. His video resume follows:

• David McMillan's TV Staffing Video [YouTube]
• Hollywood job wanted; an ad, the YouTube way [LAT]
• Scab Writer [MySpace]

• Writing pair fights studio over release of 'Wieners' [LAT]

I'm about to give all the Hollywood moguls indigestion before they've even taken a bite of their Thanksgiving meal. That's because I'm told that Akiva Goldsman, who adapted Dan Brown's worldwide bestseller into a $755.6 mil hit pic, is receiving $4 million for the Da Vinci Code sequel in the works by both Imagine Entertainment and Sony Pictures. Not only is that major moola, but agents are telling me this represents a new $$$ high for hiring a screenwriter. And, no, Goldsman isn't getting a producer credit, so this is for straight scribbling. "That would be a lot for a pure writer's credit," one agent gushed. "It puts Akiva in the absolute top of his profession." (Actually, the first rumor I heard was an astounding $6 mil, but the truth is $2 mil less than that. As for whether the deal also includes gross points, dunno.)

If this deal is going to set a new market for screenwriter salaries, we sincerely hope that Charlie Kaufman's agent is on the phone right now, letting everyone in town know that if "that hack Goldsman is getting four mil a script to cut-and-paste shitty Dan Brown dialogue into Final Draft, my guy isn't getting out of bed for less than five."

• EXCLUSIVE: New $ High for Screenwriter [Deadline Hollywood Daily]

The complaint dedicates more than half of its 26-pages to allegations of substantial similarities between Aiello's screenplay and the Fox picture, including plot, theme, mood, specific dialogue, settings, sequences of events and pace.

Among the alleged similarities:

In both works, the center of the idyllic small community's celebration is an annual Christmas lighting competition that the lead character has won several times and the new neighbor competes to win. The antagonist is a new male neighbor across the street, who is competitive and territorial. The protagonist's wife is named "Kelley" in the screenplay and "Kelly" in the film, and the antagonist's wife wears tight-fitting clothes. Among several "cartoonishly violent, comic set-pieces" are scenes of the lead character being hurled into the sky on Santa's sleigh and a small boy mistaking him for Santa; reconnaissance missions by the battling neighbors trying to disrupt the decorating; and astronauts in the International Space Station seeing the extravagant lights from space.

It's hard to determine exactly how "substantial" the alleged similarities are from a (seemingly quite damning) summary such as this one, but we fully expect Fox and New Regency to repel this frivolous threat to their holiday box office prospects by arguing that each of the elements listed above are uncopyrightable ideas that could be independently conceived by any set of unimaginative screenwriters trying to churn out a hacky Christmas comedy.

• Writer Alleges Upcoming Fox Holiday Film Stolen [THR ESQ]

Enter Mason Novick of the management firm Benderspink. "I don't know exactly what I was doing on the Internet, but ... we'll call it what it is," he says. "I mean, yes. I was reading her dirty, dirty blog, and it was funny." Novick eventually cold-contacted her, discovered that she had a memoir lying around and got it to a literary agent, who sold "Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper" for six figures a few weeks later.

Novick then asked for some movie ideas, and by Valentine's Day 2004 Cody, who had since abandoned sex work for a job at a local newspaper, sent him a completed screenplay called "Juno" that burned with the same incredibly original voice that had made her blog such a unique read. [...]

But the real lesson here, as Novick has proven, is that surfing porn at work can no longer unilaterally be written off as unproductive. "I gotta hand it to him, because I don't know many people whose instincts would have led them in that direction," says Cody, crediting Novick's management for much of her success. "Naked women on the Internet are not usually thought of as being fonts of screenwriting talent."

Of course, Cody, who has enjoyed quite a bit of success since the fateful day that Novick discovered her, is the naked-person-exception that proves the rule. Each and every day, agents and managers all over Hollywood embark on similar online searches for prospective clients, with one hand gripping their talent-divining rods and the other tapping out, "Hey, u ever think about writing movies?" on their keyboards, but these efforts usually just yield impatient demands to input their credit card numbers for another twenty minutes of chat, not highly buzzed-about spec scripts that net them handsome commissions.

• From stripper to screenwriter (second item) [LAT]

Half a dozen other projects that Loeb has touched are actively working their way through development. He's even — contrary to his own best instincts — begun dating actresses.

Just two years ago, however, you might have spotted Loeb hunched at an L.A. bus stop contemplating the spectacular slow death of his dream. He had been a struggling screenwriter for 12 years and lost any money he made on the occasional script sale to the implosion of the tech bubble and a voracious gambling addiction that sometimes swallowed $30,000 in a weekend and left him with $150,000 in credit card debt [...]

"Literally the minute I quit gambling my writing changed," Loeb says. "It was magical. I had been giving so much emotional energy to gambling that only half of myself was out there writing. Gambling was a time suck, an energy suck, a creativity suck. I started going to GA meetings every Thursday night, and the writing flourished. It had so much more energy and passion."

Despite this recent run of enviable success, it seems that Loeb, like many recovering addicts, has merely substituted one time/energy/creativity-sucking vice for another. We hope to read in a future Scriptland feature about how the writer quickly kicked his talent-sapping actress-fucking habit and finally rode his fully actualized potential to Oscar glory.

• Former gambler now in the chips [LAT]
• Previously: Inaugural 'LA Times' Screenwriter Feature Makes Sweet, Sweet Love To Charlie Kaufman [Defamer]

"Synecdoche" nominally concerns a theater director who thinks he's dying, and how that shapes his interactions with the world, his art and the women in his life. But it is really a wrenching, searching, metaphysical epic that somehow manages to be universal in an extremely personal way. It's about death and sex and the vomit-, poop-, urine- and blood-smeared mess that life becomes physiologically, emotionally and spiritually (Page 1 features a 4-year-old girl having her butt wiped). It reliably contains Kaufman's wondrous visual inventions, complicated characters, idiosyncratic conversations and delightful plot designs, but its collective impact will kick the wind out of you. [...]

If this film gets made in any way that resembles what's on the page — and with the writer himself directing, it will likely gain even more color and potency in the translation — it will be some kind of miracle. "Synecdoche" will make "Adaptation" and "Eternal Sunshine" look like instructional industrial films. No one has ever written a screenplay like this. It's questionable whether cinema is even capable of handling the thematic, tonal and narrative weight of a story this ambitious.

It remains to be seen whether or not the film medium will be able to adequately translate the scope and vision of Kaufman's screenplay, but in the months until it goes before the camera, the miraculous script itself will be on loan to Children's Hospital, where mere exposure to its pages will push dozens of cases of low-grade leukemia into remission.

Next week in Scriptland: A stirring discussion on the relative merits of Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter software tools by John "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" August; a handy guide to local coffee shops with plentiful electrical outlets for writers looking to escape the creative stagnancy of the home office; an amusing list of "Top Ten Excuses Agents Use For Not Taking Your Calls When They've Stopped Trying to Sell Your Spec."

• Scriptland: Reading Charlie Kaufman's Next Project [LAT]