The phone rang, mom answered.
It was in the morning, exactly what time I couldn’t rememeber. After all, it was 24 years ago. I took the receiver from her.
“Hello?”
“Is this Richard?” he asked, his voice sounding familiar.
“This is him.”
“Richard, my name is Michael Schoeffling, I’m an actor, I live in Pennsylvania. You had sent a screenplay to my manager a couple of weeks ago.”
I managed to get a smile out of him.
“Kuch!” Kuch was the character he played in Vision Quest, a movie that he had starred in a year earlier, alongside Matthew Modine and Linda Fiorentino.
Two weeks later, on the Friday morning of Labor Day Weeekend, 1986, I found myself alone, on an Amtrak train headed for NYC.
I was seventeen years old and it was the first time that I’d ever been away from home alone. Hell, it was the first time I’d ever been inside of a cab.
The next day I was greeted by Michael and his manager Davien Littlefield.
Davien and I making the most of a photo op (why I never asked her to take a picture of Michael and I together, I'll never know).
Davien lived in Manhattan, one of her other clients at the time was an up and coming model/actress named Andie McDowell, who had just recently been seen in St. Elmo’s Fire.
Outside of Penn Station, the three of us jumped into his red pickup truck. They had booked me a room for just one night at The Excelsior Hotel on West 81st Street in Manhattan.
After checking in, through the window of Michael’s truck, I was given a quick tour of the city, or at least of Manhattan.
I no doubt felt (and looked) like a tourist, stopping inside FAO Schwarz, the world famous toy store, Bloomingdale’s, and finally a nice lunch at a tiny, family-owned Mexican restaurant.
Intermittently, the three of us talked about my screenplay On the Edge of a Cloud, after all, that was the reason I had received my all-expense paid trip to to New York City.
They both made it clear that they loved the idea for the movie but that the screenplay itself needed some work.
When the discussion of money finally came up, I was hoping for a WGA (Writers Guild of America) minimum deal.
Back in 1986, for a legitimate deal to purchase a feature-film original screenplay, the minimum price was just under $20,000.
So you can imagine my disappointment when I was offered just five percent of that or one thousand dollars.
I told them I’d think about it (and in truth I did for about thirty seconds), but I knew the answer even before I got on the train to head back home the following morning.
I couldn’t sell ‘my baby’ for a thousand bucks no more than any mother could sell their only child for a hundred times more.
At the time (of course) I thought my debut screenplay was perfect. Besides, I truly felt like they were asking me to become some kind of sellout.
So I did what any confident, albeit newbie screenwriter would do.
I decided to dig in my heels and decided to play hardball, in other words, I was going to wait for them to call back, for them to give me a real offer.
Right. How’d that work out for you?
The phone never rang or, more accurately, I never heard from Jake Ryan or Davien Littlefield again.
But looking back, after returning home I was able to become more and more objective with each passing week, and soon realized that, okay, perhaps my debut screenplay wasn’t a complete piece of shit but it was pretty damn close.
Michael Schoeffling retired from the film business just five years later, with nearly a dozen films under his belt. He retired in his hometown–actually he’d never left–to pursue his true passion of crafting handmade furniture.
Davien Littlefield is still at it, in the trenches each day, trying to make a better world for herself as well as her clients. And I admire her for that.
But I had received my first real, honest-to-goodness, bonafide rejection from someone in the business.
And as time went on, the more I thought about it, the better I felt because after all, I was actually in the game.
I was now the tiniest of players in the largest of arenas but I had arrived.
I had at least found the courage somehow to take that crucial first step and make my way out onto the field. . .
And in some ways, I feel as though I’ve never left.
Even today, nearly a quarter of a century later, I know that as long as I keep on playing (writing) each day with passion and persistence, I know that one day, someday, I’ll get my big break.
Someday is coming. And coming soon.
Because I deserve it.