I received my rejection for the Orb Media Group China-Hollywood Screenwriting Fellowship sometime in the night. I woke up, went to the bathroom, and read in front of the mirror the gentle, supportive, even encouraging let down. I kind of knew I hadn’t won last week, but I appreciated the certainty: I had been rejected.

I gauged my disappointment in the mirror and then started the shower. It was time to move on, time to begin my day.

I don’t, however, process rejection so easily--even though I like to imagine I am one who can wash disappointment off me with some sort of invigorating and manly soap and watch it swirl down the drain. In truth, I’d go back to reread that email many times in the day. I went back to attend to the body of the email to poke and prod, examining it for any and all meanings, apparent or otherwise. In a brutal little twist, I attended a writing workshop all day long—the most significant rejection of my screenwriting career tucked into my back pocket as I read published writers and reflected on all they do so well. What facility with language they have!

“We are keen to continue a creative dialogue with you,” said the email.

Awesome! I’m keen as well! I mean really, I was keen back before it was cool, so this dialogue should be kick-ass.

The email went on, for they were impressed with “the wonderful potential that [I] showed.”

Yes? Don’t stop!! What kind of potential? “Wonderful,” you say? You, me, and my mother are all on the exact same page! This is all good. A positive email filled with all sorts of positive signs.

But then I remember Suzanne Sullivan, dancing with me late at night at The Bell Buoy. It must’ve been twenty-five years ago now. She’s smiling and laughing: “You’re so funny!” And I remember thinking, I should kiss her right now. And in this remembrance, a wave of dejection comes over me . . .

“We are sorry to inform you that your work has not been selected for the final prize this year.”

I remember in college hearing of some of Ernest Hemingway’s first rejections, how he was told that his short stories weren’t really stories: “We don’t publish sketches.” How mad he must’ve been!! Especially Hemingway! They didn’t get it, didn’t understand or appreciate what he was trying to do. How did he then get over it, even to the point where he doubled-down and wrote an entire novel in the exact same, rejected style?

Of course, I think part of his process centered on drinking his face off. That’s an inviting way to ward off these feelings of dejection, but a little self-indulgent. I’m more interested in the “I’ll show them” attitude. Where does that come from?

We’re all familiar with the story of Michael Jordan being cut from his high school basketball team as a sophomore—the ultimate “I’ll show them” rejection story. But I love the story of Meryl Streep’s rejection even more. She lost out on the lead role in King Kong because the director deemed her too “ugly,” so it was not about a lack of skill—her rejection careened right into the personal, taking dead aim at her most vulnerable estimation of herself. It was a rejection of her as a person. That she then has the greatest acting career in the last fifty years should buoy the confidence of anyone who has felt inadequate.

Ooh. Poor verb choice. Just when the inspiring stories of others were cheering me up, I inadvertently brought up The Bell Buoy in Scituate Harbor. Twenty-five years ago.

Suzanne Sullivan.

KC and the Sunshine Band.

“You’re so funny!”

I should kiss her right now.

Sugar Ray Leonard.

Rejection.

Awkwardness.

Dejection.

*****

The Orb Media Group’s email confirmed my finish in a screenwriting contest, a classic “Dear Tim” email: “We are sorry to inform you . . .” and it goes on from there. Ugh. The contest itself, though, was remarkable. Screencraft and the Orb Media Group designed a contest to award four fellowships to screenwriters with the too-good-to-be-true end goal of making their screenplays into films. The winners will travel to Beijing and to the Shanghai International Film Festival and have meetings with producers and financiers and all sorts of folks who live and breathe the art and commerce of the movies.

But the big prize for the screenwriter: their screenplay would be optioned, which is the solemn promise that someone out there finds you worthy. Someone likes you. Despite all of your inadequacies and insecurities—all those reasons to see you as “ugly”—someone gets you and appreciates what you’re all about.

That’s the real prize.

I have written an odd kind of screenplay. One of a few of such like. But this one, The Panjiayuan Diary, is about an eleven-year old child of divorce. She lies all the time. How else is a kid supposed to process her father’s infidelities and her mother’s broken heart? She invents a magic diary and convinces her cousin of its authenticity, but then her hastily-constructed world begins to fall apart. At some point, she has to face the Truth.

Who, exactly, is the audience for such a film? Kids? Maybe. But it’s not animated and the magic of the diary is all a trick, so . . .

What about adults? Maybe. But the parents very much inhabit the background. The world of the film is the eleven-year old girl’s, so . . .

I wrote a script about a kid who keeps deluding herself, who has to face the Truth at some point. I mean, maybe I’m the only real audience.

I like to think I’ve created a film that’s a kind of My Girl meets Kramer v. Kramer. But what if all I created was bad dialogue and obvious structure meets 108 pages of clichés? Man, I suck.

Of course my screenplay wasn’t going to win! Of course Suzanne Sullivan wasn’t going to kiss me! I wouldn’t have to sit here and process my rejections if I weren’t so stupidly deluded in the first place. Hemingway didn’t even finish college, and yet he stupidly thought he could be a writer. Delusional Midwesterner. He should have just stayed at home and every so often simply fish some big Two-Hearted River. That’s a challenge he could handle, one where he knew where to draw the line. And we’d be spared The Old Man and the Sea.

My dad hailed from the Midwest. Iowa. Like any Catholic boy growing up in the Midwest, he was enamored of Notre Dame. He thought about Notre Dame football all day long, and he could hardly wait to get there. Unfortunately, he never had the grades for such a school. They rejected him, and he joined the Air Force. No Rudy-like tale for dad.

However, my dad would eventually reimagine his dream in his youngest son. Growing up the son of an A.C. Nielsen executive, I enjoyed a great many opportunities he never had. Perhaps he knew, that since my upbringing and education and parental support would be so different than his, that I could make it to the college of his dreams. He started calling me “Timmy Plaehn from Notre Dame,” and I actually thought it was my name until I was about five years old: “Timmy Plaehn from Notre Dame.” I became a HUGE fan of the football team and the basketball team, and just as he had reimagined me, I reimagined myself. So strongly did his dream capture my imagination that I became Kelly Tripucka playing hoops in our driveway. I became Rick Mirer in our backyard. My dream was his dream.He died a month before my fourteenth birthday. Notre Dame rejected me four years later.

That’s what most of us do; we chase our dream, come up short, and adjust our sights. We always hear about success stories, those who overcame the odds, persisted, and made the seemingly impossible happen. However, millions upon millions of stories exist, but are never told, of those who failed. Millions of them. Billions even!

We talk about Steve Jobs all the time, but we never talk about Frank Lugwrench. You never heard of him? He was a ballet dancer from Abilene. His dream was to dance with the Joffrey Ballet, and he trained every day after his janitorial shift at Dyess. All his friends mocked him mercilessly, and his wife ended up leaving him, thinking he was delusional because the Joffrey Ballet does not normally pluck 230 pound Texans out of their well-worn obscurity. His kids? They had to endure the teasing as well—middle school classmates are not the most understanding of dreams. But you know what? Do you want to know what ended up happening?!

Nothing. He grew old and died, wondering why he hadn’t spent more time with his wife and kids, just enjoying life’s simple pleasures. He simply died a rejected and dejected old man. You’ve never heard of Frank Lugwrench because he failed--plus, I just made him up, but that's besides the point. Millions of us are Frank Lugwrench. Billions even!

I think this is why so many of us golf. This is why when I get on Facebook I see someone is either training for a marathon or has just finished one. Why are we willingly running twenty-six plus miles unless we’re running from our original plan? Okay, physical fitness and the challenge, okay, but still!! We realize the Joffrey Ballet is impossible, and we shift gears and get on a different highway: redoing the basement, coaching Little League, traveling, Netflixing. We hang the tutu in the closet and distract ourselves with more realistic aims because only a nut would keep on keeping on.

Vivas, I suppose, to us. We tried, but we’re not delusional.

Thankfully, I moved on from Suzanne Sullivan. After the dance floor, I didn’t then try to kiss her in the parking lot or back home on her front porch. I took my rejection that night and pulled a Hemingway. What else can you do?

*****

In graduate school at Harvard I took a fiction writing course with Rob Cohen, a novelist for whom I respect a great deal. His novel The Here and Now was kind of my introduction to living, breathing literature. There are writers among us?!! I had no idea.

In that class we workshopped a short story of mine called, “Fran Sancisco.” Now the rule in his class was that the writer can’t talk. The rest of us will dissect it right there on the Harkness table seven or eight times over, but the writer can’t say a word.

So some snooty jackass undergrad from Connecticut summed up one of my scenes in the story as “like a bad episode of Melrose Place.” What a jerk. I mean, who says something like that? How does he think that’s going to be an instructive comment for the writer?

And what’s wrong with Melrose Place after all? As Stephen King once said, “I’m a salami writer.” People like salami!

I was dejected. Devastated even. I don’t think I wrote another short story for five years after that class. But something remarkable happened to me at Harvard that year, a story so crazily apt to this reflection on rejection that you’ll think I’m making it up. But I’m not. It all happened, just as I’ll describe it. And perhaps it’s the coda to my tale of woe.

It begins, as all good stories do, with a beautiful girl who was the daughter of the Catholic writer who wrote a book that somehow convinced a young woman that the birth control pill was a sin, which led, soon thereafter, to the conception of the boy who would grow up to eventually date said beautiful girl. I’m pretty sure Aristotle covered this in Poetics.

At Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, I fell for Catherine, the daughter of a federal judge. In the world of the law and in scholarly Catholic circles, her father was a well-known and incredibly well-respected thinker. The obituaries I read upon his passing made me realize just how titanic a figure he was.

I know my mother held him in awe. When I told her that my girlfriend’s father once taught at Notre Dame, she said, “You mean Professor ______ ?! He’s the reason you’re here.” Apparently my mother read his 1968 book on contraception, and it helped her make the decision that the Pill was not for her. I was born in February of 1970. My father had no idea how closely tied I really was to Notre Dame.

On some April morning, Catherine and I went over to meet with her dad and have lunch. He had his own obligation that morning: his old friend Father Ted Hesburgh was also on campus, for he was the recently appointed Chair of the Board of Overseers. So we walked across the Yard to the Faculty Club. There I was, a kid from Scituate, a kid who had once been shot down by Suzanne Sullivan on the Bell Buoy dance floor as we enjoyed (ironically, I think) dancing to “Oh, What a Night,” and I was walking across Harvard Yard with a federal judge and his daughter so that we could have lunch with the long-time President of Notre Dame. The long-time President of Notre Dame.

You know what’s coming, right? I mean, I can’t not.

*****

Brian Koppleman talks about keeping track of every agency and production company that passed on Rounders. I love that. But he must have been so dejected! Here he quits the law to write movies and all he hears is “no,” “no,” “no.” So, to keep going, to keep sending out your screenplay, to keep calling yourself a screenwriter, is either incredibly confident or pathetically delusional. Or, I guess, both, depending on what happens next.

In Koppleman’s case, someone read it and liked it, and they got the movie made. And then he got to give a big ol’ middle finger to everyone who passed, to everyone who said he wasn’t good enough. What a delicious opportunity! If you’re a fan of comeuppance.I enjoyed Father Hesburgh’s company very much. He was 79 when we met, but he was still so quick and clearly brilliant. He had us up to his little room at the Faculty Club, and he said Mass, and it was the smallest, Eucharistic gathering I’ve ever been to. I knew at that moment that this was extraordinary. He stood before the dresser in his room and prayed over the small wafers he’d taken from his coat. I looked in the mirror to watch him, to make sure that it was me standing there, to see the miracle take place just a foot away! I had been to hundreds of Masses, but I‘d never experienced transubstantiation in a small room in an inn with the former President of Notre Dame. Touchdown Jesus came to me! That’s gotta be a good sign.

On the walk to lunch, we fell in together and he asked me where I had gone to undergrad.

“I went to Northeastern, Father.”

His face kind of lit up at the mention of the school across town, and he said, “Oh! Northeastern’s a fine school. I like their co-op.”

“Yes,” I said, and I hesitated. But then I went for it, “Your school rejected me.”

He stopped for a moment, and Catherine and her dad walked on ahead of us.

“What?”

“Notre Dame rejected me.”

He glanced down in thought. I went on. “Actually, they rejected me twice. I applied to grad school last year. Didn’t get in.”

He looked at me and put his hand on my wrist. “Well, Tim, I’m sorry. That was our mistake.”

So I got that going for me: a personal apology from the President of the school that crushed my and my father’s dreams. It’s nice, but it’s not nearly as satisfying as Koppleman’s revenge. He still got his movie made, whereas I never went to Notre Dame.

And will probably never get a movie made.

I should change that sentence, shouldn’t I? I should remain incredibly confident. Or at least delusional. On the other hand, if I’m not confident (or even delusional), then I’m just a mopey guy working on his short game and watching the Patriots in the Thomas Edward Patrick Brady Man Cave I’d build in my basement. Which actually sounds like some kind of awesome, but it’s not my dream, not the dream I’ve held for so long. I won’t articulate it now, but I did once, and that was so long ago I can’t believe the dream still lives. It’s a little too painful to have to repeat. My point is, if I am not chasing that dream, then who the heck am I?

I see it in the mirrored wall behind Suzanne Sullivan. I pick myself out of a drunken haze and a swirl of sweaters and Bud Lights—there I am! I’m laughing and dancing and hearing her say, “You’re so funny!” I lean in to kiss Suzanne Sullivan, and it’s like she turns into Sugar Ray Leonard before my eyes, her head bobbing and weaving to avoid contact. And I’m in the mirror, a pair of lips floundering in the air, the awkward loser in a game of musical chairs. It’s not that someone stole my chair—it’s just that Suzanne Sullivan doesn’t want me to sit down.

*****

Nick Carraway’s voice bounces around my head: “His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.” It’s the Midwest again. The Midwest stretching out its arms farther to break through the obscurity, to finally grasp the green light, the gold ring, the laurel wreath, the Oscar, or whatever symbol might be handy to signify something other than the ordinary.

As Miller says, attention must be paid!

What we seek, then, is an acknowledgement that we’re on the right path. Everything else is murky and confusing in life, and we have so little to go on. Sometimes I can’t believe we’re not in constant revolt: “YOU MEAN WE WERE BORN TO FREAKING DIE AT SOME INDETERMINATE POINT IN THE FUTURE!??! THAT’S CRAP!!”

As Chayefsky puts it, I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!

The rebellion, then, pulses through our veins. A rebellion of living. It’s a ridiculous one, like making a sand castle at low tide, but the idea of overcoming all the odds and reaching an extraordinary place, a place that staves off the moment of our very last breath, that’s what keeps us alive.

Or as Shakespeare laments: when I waked, I cried to dream again.

You should know I’ve already won the lottery. I married the love of my life, an extraordinary woman who’s both the mother of my children and my teaching partner. I have four kids who are crushing it, and who are so verbal that one of them will pick up the battle flag should their father not make it to the Hollywood ramparts. I have the perfect job and even on the very night I finish this essay wallowing in rejection, I’m basking in the glow of an award my students presented to me just a few hours earlier. I have nothing to complain about.

The winners of the Orb Media China-Hollywood Fellowship (one of whom I know and like) must have felt so alive the other morning as they looked in their mirrors. To wake up and receive an email that affirms their creation, that celebrates their existence. Did they scream? Did they dance? Did they watch their faces light up in the broadest of smiles? At the end of the first chapter of Chronicles, Bob Dylan recounts his feelings after getting his first gig at the Gaslight: “I was heading for the fantastic lights. No doubt about it . . . destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.” That’s what they must’ve seen as they looked in their mirrors. Fully alive, the winners surely saw fantastic lights. And then, still smiling, they probably jumped in the shower.

But those lights! Those are the exact ones I’m heading for myself.



