“Rise and shine! Rise and shine!”

Those iconic words, warbled by the mother of an old warehouse buddy, Tom Wingfield, began my forty-year quest to write and sell a screenplay based on my experience playing The Gentleman Caller in a community theater production of  The Glass Menagerie.

What I didn’t know then, and what I find excruciatingly hard to believe now, is that my heartfelt effort would result in a cease-and-desist letter from a Madison Avenue law firm.

I don’t drink. Never did drugs. My arrest record stands at zero. Hell, I can’t even get anyone to slap an unseemly label on me, like ‘nasty pest’ or ‘cynical grouch.’

A boring life like mine stinks for anyone who wants to be a writer. After all, doesn’t it often seem as if you can’t be successful unless there are some honest-to-goodness skeletons in your closet?

I have none.

But I do have a cease-and-desist letter from a Manhattan law firm for writing an original screenplay. Does that count? It’s not heroin, nor assault with a deadly weapon. But it’s something.

On the other hand, the entire episode is so senseless and frustrating that it almost makes me want to give up chasing my lifelong dream of being a greenlit screenwriter. What’s the point? I mean,  The Simpsons was allowed to devote an entire episode to Marge starring in a silly, mocking, musical version of A Streetcar Named Desire, but my affable and deferential story about a community theater putting on The Glass Menagerie is outlawed?

 Doh!

“Menagerie,” my screenplay, is about the fictional Bedford Avenue Playhouse in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a little theater group that literally and figuratively sits in the shadow of Broadway, just across the East River. The story follows a group of actors and crew members who work against all sorts of personal and logistical odds to put on the Tennessee Williams play, while also trying to live their lives, deal with their families, and hold onto their ambitions. In some ways, the four amateur actors who play Amanda, Tom, Laura, and The Gentleman Caller reflect the characters they portray in the show (regretful, unfulfilled, shy, ambitious). There is a sexist, foul-mouthed lighting director, a costume designer who is at the end of her rope (thanks to the foul-mouthed lighting director), a stage manager who misses rehearsals because she volunteers too much, and a house manager who, among other things, is a Randy Rainbow wannabe.      

After copywriting “Menagerie” and registering it with the Writer’s Guild, I began to send it around. A motion picture finance firm in Los Angeles agreed to discuss it, but worried that the rights would be cost-prohibitive. That baffled me; why, I wondered, would rights even be involved? It’s not the actual play, but merely a pragmatic chronicle of an amateur theater group.

 Still, as a nobody with no track record, representation, or any connections in the business, I decided to check it out. How cool would it be to report back to that L.A. company that usage rights were not an issue at all?
 Well, it turned out to be not so cool.

 Through research, I was able to eventually get the screenplay over to a law firm that represents the copyright owner. The law firm sent me the cease-and-desist letter

It appears that what troubles them is the fact that several lines from The Glass Menagerie are heard during rehearsals by the Bedford Avenue Playhouse cast. I’m convinced that no one actually read the screenplay in its entirely. I bet they merely skimmed it to count how many lines from the play were there. As I explained to them in several emails, had they absorbed the entire narrative, they would have seen that “Menagerie” is neither an adaptation nor a story based on the original play. It is the tale of a group of people who live and work in modern-day Brooklyn, and a tribute both to community stages and Mr. Williams’ canon as one of amateur theater’s most enduring literary foundations. Why is that a crime?

The law firm would not accept that justification for allowing “Menagerie” to move forward. I begged for their rationalization. They provided none. I referenced The Simpsons.

No response. I even revised the screenplay with fewer rehearsal lines. No go. Though mine represents just one small artistic endeavor out of millions, it sure put a sour taste in my mouth about arts in America. Or more specifically, business in America.

The cease-and-desist order remains. And I’m still not famous.

I haven’t started drinking, either. But at least I can now be called a cynical grouch. Maybe that will help. I’ll still rise. But I may never shine.