I Wonder Whatever Happened To My Pusher?

His name was Jeff, and he had good stuff.

I met him in the late 1980s, in Manhattan. The first time he saw me, he pulled me behind a corner, and showed me a sample of his wares.

He was a little scruffy, but for a few years he fed my addiction.

He sold screenplays.

Most importantly, he sold screenplays of movies that hadn't come out yet, and in late 1980s Manhattan, that was pretty rare.

I hadn't been trying to write screenplays for long, and I certainly never imagined reading them for a living. I was living in Manhattan, managing a movie theater, noodling with the screenplay format on the side.

One day, I was up at a shop, somewhere around Columbus Circle, that sold screenplays of movies that had already come out.

I didn't understand yet that they weren't allowed to sell scripts of movies that hadn't been released, so I asked the guy behind the counter if he had a copy of When Harry Met Sally which was about to open in a month or so. He explained the rule.

And then Jeff was there, behind me. Luring me into the shadows of the store.

It turns out that he had When Harry Met Sally, and he sold me a copy. I was hooked.

For a while, I bought stuff from him regularly. He had a list, a photocopied, stapled stack of sheets of every script he had squirreled away in his apartment somewhere. He must have had a deal with a local copy shop, because he certainly kept them in business.

After a while, he'd just call me, and give me huge discounts or whatever he had left over after a convention; sometimes I'd pay him $20 for 6 scripts. I was the guy he sold to to keep eating, because even in Manhattan 15 years ago, the script pusher business wasn't all that lucrative.

So I wound up with a lot of crap. What did I care? I was engorging myself on screenplays.

I've since purged a lot of the bad stuff from my collection, like Funny About Love, but I collected a lot of solid scripts along the way.

I have two different drafts of Heathers. One even had Daniel Waters' phone number on it; my roommate George called him on a dare, and chatted with him for a while.

I have Diner, Tin Men and Avalon, I have a draft of Big with some really dumb subplots about his co-workers that they wisely cut out (and in the days before DVD "deleted scenes", stuff like this was cool in and of itself).

I have two drafts of Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead that show that Scott Rosenberg must have gotten some amazing notes along the way, because whatever you think of the movie, the early drafts were a long, long way from it.

I have a copy of This Is Spinal Tap, that is indeed only 60 pages long, mostly just describing the scenes that they improvised during filming. I have a copy of Stranger Than Paradise that is only 55 pages long.

I have a copy of "Star Wars" in which Luke is named "Luke Starkiller".

But then I became a script reader (which reading all of these scripts was no little part of), and I largely stopped buying from Jeff, because now my addiction was being filled in another way.

I still saw Jeff occasionally, and he'd call me regularly. I might have bought something interesting from him here and there, but since moving out to L.A. in 1998 I've lost touch with him.

Of course, now, with the Internet, the bottom has probably completely dropped out of his business. Because if you want to read a screenplay, all you have to do is nose around the Internet long enough, and you can probably find a copy of it.

The other day, when I mentioned the script of "Stranger Than Fiction", I soon found one in my e-mail.

The problem is that, because of the Internet, security is tighter. Before, no one cared all that much about scripts; most were floating around Hollywood, most got out, but the passing-hand-to-hand distribution system of the Jeff's in the world never let it spread too much.

But now, the Internet is easy, and it's free. I can send a script to 100 people without worrying about copying fees.

So, for instance, there's not a copy of the new Charlie Kaufman script "Synecdoche, New York" to be found online anywhere, even in the shadows. And that makes sense; it's just too early for that script to be in the hands of the public.

Jeff probably doesn't even have a copy.

Of course, now that I do nothing but read screenplays all day long, I never have time to actually read anything from my collection. But I'm happy they are all there, a memory a time in which I was still getting to know the format, still learning what makes a good sequence.

In fact, when I first started reading "When Harry Met Sally", and was 5 pages in, I thought it was going to be a movie about this unlikely pair of people driving home from college. When that turned out not to be the movie, I took that premise and made it the basis of my second script.

My script sucked, but that's all part of the process too.

What's your favorite screenplay on your shelf (that you didn't write)? Where did you get it from?