The Loser Ex-Boyfriend
Or
Achievement Unlocked

“What is this place?” she asked.

“It’s the Dungeons & Dragons mansion. I’m doing a couple projects here.”

“I thought you were working at Lucasfilm.”

“I am. I’m doing both things.”

“So you’re working on Star Wars and Dungeons & Dragons?”

“Yeah.”

Somewhere in the summer of 1984, an ex-girlfriend of mine drove up the long and winding road to the D&D mansion to drop something off or pick something up. The reason for the visit is lost in time. I hadn’t seen her for a while, but we were in loose touch. It was what we call magic hour in the film business—the moment when the light is just a little softer than when the sun is at full pitch. She looked beautiful. She was the optimized version of what you expected to get as a girlfriend when you moved to California: blonde, brilliant teeth, bikini worthy. But there was no “bimbo” component. I remember seeing Mosquito Coast in that period and thinking that she was kind of like a younger version of Helen Mirren.

We’d both been aspiring writers. It had been that relationship you have when you don’t know if all of your efforts are going to pay off. You don’t know whether you’re going to make it or slink off to become whatever the eighties equivalent of a barista was. She got her break first as a stringer for a big-time magazine.

She’d been with me for a couple years of snipe hunts and schnook chases and eventually concluded, and not without ample evidence, that her boyfriend was a loser and it was time to move on. Starting out is a dicey time. And when the dice are rolling, you have to place bets, and frankly, I looked like a losing bet in this period. So she met somebody else and moved on.

You can’t blame her.

She was the physical manifestation of the “Ordinary World” before this story started. The world where I lived with a bunch of deadbeats in a rundown house, had agents tell me not to quit my day job, was going nowhere, and where time was running out. And I probably would have run out, too, but I had nowhere to run to. That was all less than two years earlier. It was a marker. In a movie, it’s called a “matching shot.” The shot of her standing there, it advances the story, but it also reminds the viewer of what has changed in the story.

Now she’s standing at the D&D mansion noticing/not noticing that Donna, Penny, and Peggy are wandering around looking like Bond girls. I’m hoping it kind of bugs her. We had no unfinished business and no future. It wasn’t about getting her back. It was about vindication. Maybe her loser ex-boyfriend wasn’t such a loser anymore. At least, that’s what I wanted her to be thinking, and it’s hard to imagine that she was thinking something much different.

It was a moment when I thought I’d made it. It was a moment when it looked like I’d made it. And in that moment, I had made it. The whole time Kipling was rolling around in my head—something about treating victory and defeat as the impostors that they are. Kipling is right, but, face to face with the “loser” period, I felt like I was checking a big box in life.

Of course, this was only a small boon in the adventure, but you need those. You need those moments when you realize where you are and where you’ve been. You never know where you’re going. Right then, at that moment, I also realized how far I’d come. And it was a good feeling. You have to take those moments when they come. They’re rare. They’re incredibly private, playing out in your own personal universe and the real world at the same time.

It was also a moment of closing off the past. It was one of those moments that felt like it had already receded into history even as it was happening. I feel like that even now, at my kids’ graduations. It feels like the actual moment only exists for the photograph it will produce. It’s a moment of pure ego exhilaration. And it’s not all illusion, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing to have moments like that. They make a lot of other not-so-stellar moments worth living.

There are also about fifty lessons in moments like that.

The one I’ll extract right now is that almost everybody I know who went on to have an interesting life had long periods of looking stupid. We live in a culture where you never want to look stupid. You script out this life of effortless victories and one long ramp-up. No dips. No problems. You get the right grades, get into the right college, choose the right career, move quickly and effortlessly up the ladders, and your mother is constantly proud.

You then have the right spouse, buy the right house, have the right number of kids, and eventually retire to the right private island. The ultimate end state is hard to haul up in your mind in an exact way, and nobody wants to see the elderly version of themselves smiling weakly and shaking as somebody helps them back to their seat at a dinner in their honor.

But real life doesn’t work that way.

Anybody who is anybody spends a considerable amount of time looking stupid or looking lost or looking like they haven’t hit the mark they should have hit. We construct elaborate illusions to mask these moments, because being in life arrears is a bad feeling, and thinking that other people think you’re in life arrears makes it even worse. We are pinned to a timeline like life is a script template where you’ve got to get to the half-hour act break, but we never know how it is going to play out. The great thing about writing about a period thirty years ago is that you know how that whole period played out.

As the sun was setting, she got back into the yellow VW bug that a couple years earlier we’d taken into Earl Scheib for the $29.95 paint job (that wasn’t really the price, but I remember thinking it was the price of an expensive car wash), and the moment was over.

Achievement unlocked.

I can count moments like that on one hand.

In the meantime, while we were awaiting the verdict on the show bible, the Star Wars team moved into a building called the Egg Company just across the street from Universal Studios. It was not all that far from Ruby-Spears, interestingly, but it felt like a million miles away. It was a cushy luxury office building that Lucasfilm owned, but other people rented. I used to run into Ed Asner in the bathroom. At that point, I was so cool that it didn’t seem out of the ordinary to be running into famous stars at the urinal. The Egg Company was highly decorated and had a kitchen area that was not unlike the Google office I’d be in years later, except smaller. I remember Paul and I opening up all of the Star Wars action figures one day. A whole set.

Then the bad news came. Miki called to say that George’s reaction wasn’t good. I was stunned. How could anybody not like it? It was John Ford, Joseph Campbell, and Bruno Bettelheim all rolled into Star Wars.

Heaven turned into hell in an instant. It wasn’t like I was fired, but there wasn’t a clear direction to go in. I didn’t know whether to put in more cavalry, or Hansel and Gretel, or Odysseus. But we needed to fix it, and we needed to fix it fast.

After the blow, I was in full flail mode. I’d like to believe that all these years and projects later I’d know how to handle it, but I doubt I would. We cobbled together another story, did every fix, and sent it in. At that point, I didn’t know whether I liked it or not—only that I’d done everything I could.

Rinse and repeat the waiting. Only this time there was that creepy edge to it. It felt bad and lonely. I just got things done. Worked on Sagard. Maybe did the last of the Visionaries. Washed the car. Just kept in motion.

The second response wasn’t much better. Miki wasn’t a very experienced producer, so she might have missed the secret sauce, or maybe I just wasn’t the guy, or maybe the show just wasn’t something that was supposed to happen.

Now I was in full panic mode. I couldn’t do anything right. To his credit, John Beebe had great advice, but I didn’t have the guts to act on it. It seemed impossible. His suggestion was to set up another meeting with Lucas. He was right, but I didn’t think it was possible. I was desperate and flailing.

At one point, I went over to Steve Gerber’s house, and he and Buzz helped me through the story. It was all new. Something completely different. I thought that maybe if I just chucked what we had, we’d hit on some-thing new.

When it was all done, we had a story that Steve, Buzz, and I thought was really good, and I sent to Miki via FedEx. Or maybe we faxed it. I can’t remember. What I do remember was her response.

It was first thing in the morning. Miki had flown down. We were in the Egg Company. It was just Paul, Miki, Bobby, and I. Miki walked in with the outline in her hand.

“What is this?” It was hard and edged and aggressive.

“It’s a new story.”

“What is this?” This was one of those moments in life that really is art directed. It was sharp spotlight.

I had no idea how to respond. “I thought maybe—”

“What is this?!”

She might not have really said it a third time. And Miki was a very nice person, but it was a moment that just froze there. It was really over then, but it would play out that I’d write another draft, as I recall, and after that draft, I was standing in my apartment and the phone rang. I knew who it was and what it was about. I didn’t answer and let my answering machine take the hit. I’m tempted to go off on a riff about answering machines and how, almost as much as computers, they changed the world in the eighties, but I won’t. I’ll just get straight to—

“Flint, this is Miki Herman from Lucasfilm. Well, George wasn’t happy…” And then something like, “I think we have to go another direction. I’m sorry.”

I wasn’t surprised. Yes, I’d hoped there as some off chance that this one would get a better response or something good would happen. But I knew it wouldn’t. Doom was in the air.

I waited a few minutes and then called her back. It’s easier to have those calls when the news is already out. She told me I could keep the printer, but I don’t think I ever wrote anything on that Mac again. It was my unlucky computer.

As it happens, Droids did go forward and get made. Counter to our high hopes, it didn’t revolutionize Saturday morning, and it only lasted one season. Ewoks lasted two. Interestingly and ironically, Cliff Ruby and Elana Lesser left Ruby-Spears to replace me on Droids.

Years later, Paul Dini mentioned in conversation that George Lucas had asked, “Whatever happened to the original story editor? He had some good ideas.” Paul was probably just trying to make me feel good. But even if he’s going to make up the story, I’m more than happy to believe it.

I saw Miki one more time a few years later. She’d finished out the show, left Lucasfilm, and had become a psychologist. She seemed very happy with the transition. I don’t think I ever saw Bobby Carrau again, though I’d hear about him now and again. In my mind, he’s still in his twenties up at the ranch, though I suspect his life has moved on. At any rate, he’s no longer in his twenties. It’s been a long time. Lucasfilm has been sold, and I have no idea whether George Lucas is still in that office at the ranch or whether the fired president’s office is still vacant at the Kerner Building.

The gate to that secret world closed right then and right there for me.

So, yeah. This was the hero’s journey for a hero who doesn’t make it. I died somewhere on the Road of Trials. There was no Master of Both Worlds. No Elixer or Boon. No Magic Flight. None of that stuff.

The thing that did change, however, was after that moment, I really was a freelancer. There was still the Sagard book, and I could return to Ruby-Spears. It wasn’t over, but I was surprised to find that I didn’t respond to things quite how I expected I would. I figured I’d feel really depressed, like my career was over. In fact, I was quite relieved. It was like I’d been handed a get-out-of-jail-free card. I was sorry I’d blown my big break with George Lucas, and I knew I was going to have some humiliating moments, but there was good news. For one, I didn’t have to think about John Ford and neckerchiefs anymore.

I remember Tom Brady’s response when Peyton Manning retired. He said something to the effect of, “He doesn’t have to think about all that stuff anymore.” He meant Manning didn’t have to puzzle out the edge blitz or how to split some seam. He was done. He’d never do that thing that he’d done ever since childhood again. Not for real. I didn’t have that luxury, but I didn’t have to work on that exact puzzle anymore, and I wouldn’t be waiting for bad responses.

Some humiliating moments came, though. There were a couple sack dances. One guy who I didn’t think hated me (and I didn’t really know) at Ruby-Spears said, “Looks like the big deal at Lucasfilm didn’t pan out.” It was impossible to miss the edge in his voice.

How can you respond to that stuff? Maybe I deserved it. Maybe I didn’t. I said something like, “You got that right.” Not much for him to shoot back at me. People can be mean, but when you see that kind of meanness, you’re really just getting feedback from some horrible drama that’s playing in their head. It has nothing to do with you. I obviously didn’t know him very well. I don’t remember his face or name.

I did wind up heading back to TSR and started finishing the Sagard books. I had outlined the second book, The Green Hydra, before going up to Lucasfilm. Just to get started, I went back through The Ice Dragon. Amazingly enough, it followed the Joseph Campbell paradigm perfectly, and I didn’t even know what the paradigm was when I wrote it.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere.