Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain

A conversation with the “Hunter S. Thompson with ovaries”

Cintra Wilson and I first met in the early ’90s, when she was already a well established playwright on the rise, and the San Francisco Chronicle was calling her “the Dorothy Parker of the cyber age.” The Cyber Age? What the hell did that even mean? Let’s revise that a bit. “Hunter S. Thompson with ovaries” is much more apt.

She grew up in Marin County and lived on a houseboat in Sausalito, the daughter of a high-society pianist and a university art professor. She started writing plays while at San Francisco State, moonlighting, as so many theater kids did, with gigs writing 976-phone sex scripts. After a stint with the beer-punk Dude Theater group, she found her own early success with plays like “Juvee,” “Arbuckle,” and “XXX Love Act.” 

What followed were many years as a cultural critic and essayist, both in San Francisco and eventually in New York. Somewhere in there, she fired out four books which showcase her hilarious, caustic voice, and I’m just going to list all the titles here, because they’re like perfect little Zen koans: A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque Crippling Disease; Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny; Colors Insulting to Nature; and Fear and Clothing: Unbuckling American Style.

Cintra currently lives in Marin County, where she describes the typical Marin woman: “From the back, she looks like an 11-year-old boy, and from the front, she looks like a member of Aerosmith.” She writes the Substack newsletter “Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain,” and contributes to the New York Review of Books. Among other projects, she also paints, and offers manuscript editing. We know scads of people in common, and it was very cool to reconnect. This interview took place over a combination of coffee, bagels, tobacco, and cans of White Claw.

So tell me about the genesis of your play “XXX Love Act.” Why choose the local porn kingpins Jim and Artie Mitchell, and journalists Warren Hinckle and Hunter Thompson, as subjects of a play?

Because I loved them so much. I mean, look, everything I am really, the ur-point, the origin of me writing anything, is fairly obviously Hunter S. Thompson. I didn’t know that I was also the brainchild of Lester Bangs. Years after I already had a career, and then discovered Lester Bangs, I was just like, “This is the stuff!” He was dead, and for ten years I couldn’t think about Lester Bangs without crying. ’Cause I missed him so much. There’s gotta be a rocker out there somewhere, who knows what I’m feeling. 

Where’s his biopic, you know? Philip Seymour Hoffman did a brilliant job playing him in Almost Famous.

Oh, Philip Seymour Hoffman was incredible.

Right. Where the kid is nervous about writing for Rolling Stone, and he gets Lester Bangs on the phone, and Lester advises him: “Tell him it’s a think piece about a mid-level band struggling with their own limitations in the harsh face of stardom.”

That is so hilarious! I’m gonna have to watch Almost Famous again now.

So “XXX Love Act” premiered at the Magic Theater in San Francisco, famous for debuting new works by Michael McClure and Sam Shepard. Did you approach them with the idea?

I actually was awarded a grant to have that at the Magic, and the Magic got the other half of the money. The main reason I wanted to do that play, apart from the fact that one Mitchell brother shot the other Mitchell brother, it struck me as a very Biblical tale. It was a pretty dumb play. Not dumb, but silly. It’s funny, and I really got into it. Especially writing monologues for Hunter Thompson and Warren Hinckle. They were like the Roman chorus.

Right, right, they were up on a platform and they were narrating the scenes, in their ridiculous crazy prose. The actor playing Warren Hinckle was my roommate at the time, so I heard a fair amount of the language in my house. I do remember walking in the theater, and seeing these letters attached to the walls of the lobby.

Oh, where the strippers were complaining? Yeah, they picketed the first few nights, and nothing could have been better for the play. Because Herb Caen found out and wrote that strippers were picketing my play at the Magic. The whole reason I wanted to write it and call it “XXX Love Act,” I thought it would be so hilarious to have the marquee say “XXX Love Act.” The Magic artistic director at the time, he was a real dirtbag, and so that was my little joke, you know.

It did have a big success, didn’t it?

You know, I saw many productions of that play all over the country. I saw one in Kentucky, and in Tennessee, and in Seattle. The Actors’ Gang did it in L.A. The Tim Robbins and Jack Black crew. And then John Cameron Mitchell, I got to see some amazing people do it. Really incredible actors. 

It felt like that was the biggest theater success you had in the Bay Area.

I felt like the press was starting to hate me. Like they’d really blown me up for awhile, I was on the cover of everything for a hot moment. 

Oh that’s right, you were a cover model! Mondo 2000, Frisko, these glossy San Francisco magazines, you were like the It Girl.

For a flash in the pan kind of moment, yeah. 

This was simultaneous with you starting to write columns, commentary.

David Talbot and Gary Kamiya kidnapped me from being a playwright to be in Salon. The S.F. Examiner, that was “Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain.” The ur-text of the Substack that I have now. That was an advice column. I wanted a Dear Abby picture of my head, but it had to be on fire. And the Examiner let me do it.

Love that idea. So you were getting published every week and having fun. But as we know, it’s a small town, small market. So what happens?

I think people got sick of me. I got a little over-exposed. Critics were starting to hold me to a higher standard than I thought was totally necessary. 

So you stopped doing theater entirely?

I was really sick of all the egos in theater, to tell you the truth. There was so much. Every play, there was some kind of interpersonal backstage meltdown, because you’ve got all these narcissists working together. I just got so bored of it. I just wanted to be in control. 

I moved to L.A. for a year, and moved into this house, which was the epicenter of everything going on. The people hanging out at the house were the whole comedy posse of L.A. Bob Odenkirk, David Cross, Jack Black, Kathi Griffin, so many people. You name it, there was this whole cabaret scene going on, which I got stuck right in the middle of. And I remember thinking, “these people are going nowhere.” I’m gonna go to New York and write books. And then all 34 of them became incredibly famous household names. 

Were people aware of your previous success in San Francisco? 

You know, I didn’t ever feel, once I left San Francisco, like any of that publicity currency transferred over to any other city. It was like being really famous in Ukiah. It just didn’t matter. Nobody outside of San Francisco knew who I was.

Did you think, I’d rather go to New York, I’m not comfortable in L.A.? What propelled the move?

Well, you know, I had this boyfriend, it’s kind of a famous story now, he was one of the musicians on the first Sheryl Crow album. He was in Tuesday Night Music Club, with Bill Botrell and David Baerwald, and a number of other people. And Sheryl had been his girlfriend. And he said, “Why don’t you make your album with my band?” And that’s how that album was born. 

It made her career.

Made her career, absolutely. She always hated that album. They hated her. Everybody had a bad taste in their mouth, even at the Grammys, when we went. Nobody was happy. There was just bad vibes everywhere, you know. There was none of the spirit that I would have wished for, with my band going, “Get another one, Sheryl, yay!” There was none of that. I think they were all happy they were going to make more money. But she scorched earth when she left that band. Nobody liked her. I can’t remember why. 

So your boyfriend was Kevin Gilbert. 

Kevin and I were together for a year. Brilliant, brilliant musician. We were in our 20s, we were like 28. We wanted to be together but there was too much fucking shit going on. And so he said, “Oh let’s break up temporarily,” and “grow as people,” you know.

Kids in their twenties!

Within three months he was dead. Of autoerotic asphyxiation. Which really knocked my fucking world sideways. Thankfully I was in New York. If I had been in L.A., I might have taken myself out. I find L.A. is utterly depressing. Because nobody is where they want to be. And they’ve always got their mind fixated on somebody who’s got the job they want. You know?

Friends are always asking me to go out to L.A., and my immediate impulse is, I don’t have anything to pitch. If I’m not peddling something, why would I go there, and be around this mileau of people going, “How did you get that gig? Can you introduce me to–”

Netflix, right?

[laughter]

I feel a pervasive level of malaise in L.A. It’s because people are fucking bummed out. The collective energetic level of people, it’s never enough. It’s the bardo of hungry ghosts. 

You got to New York in 1995, did you have options? Were people waiting for you?

Not at all. I got a job with HBO to rewrite Gia. About the supermodel, with Angeline Jolie. It was Jay McInerney, and I was really pissed off because I rewrote a lot of that script, and a lot of my material, and I got no credit at all. Nobody told me I wasn’t going to get any credit. So that was a pisser. But it gave me enough money to move to New York and stay on the Lower East Side, with my girlfriend Mo, and her junkie boyfriend.

There’s always a junkie boyfriend.

There’s always a junkie boyfriend. 

Were you always interested in fashion and style? The stuff you did for the Times, and the stuff you reprint in your Substack, are just incredible takedowns of the pomposity of the fashion world. Which never seems to notice that it’s like that. 

No. But they do kind of love it when somebody notices. So I became a real guilty pleasure for a lot of people around fashion.

Because you voiced things that they all talked about, but couldn’t say in public?

It’s true. It really bummed me out when the Times finally let me go.

How long did you do that?

I think it was three years. On and off for like five years.

That’s a good run though. Some tiny part of what you were doing reminded me of the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Count Marco, he was gay and his column would offer advice to the city’s women.

Fuck yeah!

With this catty, catty funny commentary. 

Bitchiness.

Yeah, yeah.

Bitchiness is a real, real rare thing these days, in print. You don’t get too much of it. You can’t get away with what I was doing at The New York Times anymore. Not at all. I’m amazed at the stuff I got away with, honestly. If there are any writers out there, first up, don’t be writers. Secondly, if you’ve gonna write for a major institution, say you’re going to write some daring, edgy shit, you have to conceal it in piles of edgier shit, that you know isn’t going to go through. Like, “pitchforks full of dead babies!” 

“Oh, we’ll have to take that out.”

“No, not the pitchfork, not the dead babies, no!” And then you fight those battles, and then there’s something you really want, stays in. I put in a lot of  red herrings. It works.

It was pretty amazing that you were able to personally witness the Fashion Week, the crazy stores like Cartier, Dolce and Gabbana. It’s almost like you were spelunking.

I felt like I was totally a spy. But I felt emboldened because I had The New York Times. Like one article, I write where the woman asks, “Who are you?” “I’m the Critical Shopper of The New York Times.” And I said, “with Batman-like importance.” To like, a shop girl. It made everybody’s sphincter tighten up.

In their mind, the Times can make or break you.

It made, and broke me.

So, when you were doing the Times you were also writing books.

Yeah, I have four books. In order, there was A Massive Swelling, which many people feel is my best book, that came from all this stuff where I look at the idea of celebrity. And then I wrote a novel, Colors Insulting to Nature. I still think it’s probably the best thing I ever did. And then, Caligula for President. And then of course my tribute to Hunter T is Fear and Clothing.

That’s the one we hosted you at Litquake, with Gary Kamiya.

I loved Litquake, man. Especially because Armistead Maupin said I had a nice ass. 

That was hilarious. A 50th anniversary tribute to the poem “Howl.” Armistead followed you onstage and said that, and then it became the joke of the show. Everybody who came out afterwards, kept complimenting the previous reader on their nice ass.

Yeah, I know!

Ever thought of moving somewhere else?

If I didn’t have my nieces and nephews here, I wouldn’t be here. I would be in Spain, hanging out. My income dropped 90% in 2008, and I’m only just now crawling out of that hole. I was in New York. All of a sudden the writing gigs that used to pay me a thousand bucks, 1200 bucks, were paying 100 bucks. Everybody was firing everybody, editors started writing all the articles, it was all in-house, at a certain point. Because they couldn’t compete with the internet.

But you have to give it to yourself, for a time, you broke into the most insular, uptight, clubby world of journalism in New York City.

I was at the apex. Have you ever actually been hired by a magazine, for anything other than a sporadic article here and there? I’ve never gotten a job at a magazine, and they won’t hire me. I don’t know why. I think it’s some reputation of being difficult, which has followed me around since I was a teenager. I don’t know why. They only hire people who go to certain schools. 

Yeah, yeah. I hear you. After The Nose magazine folded in ’95, I went to New York and met with all of the magazine editors I knew. My editor at Playboy said, look, you have to understand something. All of us who work at all of these magazines, we all interned at Harper’s together, and we all rose up through the mastheads together, and we all hire each other. So I went back to San Francisco, and I had to reinvent myself. Again.

Honey, that is what I have had to do since I got spit out of New York like a peach pit. I have been back here going, what the fuck is next. I really don’t know how to do anything. Except writing. And then along came Substack, and now it’s starting to–

Let’s get to that. The New York thing. Was it one final column where they said, you’ve gone too far?

They said I went too far with the J.C. Penney column. I don’t know if you were aware of that shitshow. I was cancelled. Before they called it cancelling.

What happened?

I wrote an article about J.C. Penney. You don’t know about this? This is literally the thing I’m most famous for in the world. It’ll be in every obituary. As a lark, my editor at The New York Times said, they’ve opened a J.C. Penney in Herald Square. And I’ve been reviewing Gucci, I’ve been reviewing Prada, Louis Vuitton, all of the highest, highest shit. And I said, well, how do I cover it? She said, cover it as you would anything else. And I said, ha ha ha, okay.

Did you approach it like shooting fish in a barrel kind of a thing?

Well, I mean, I was factual about it. The thing that everybody took offense at, was that they had these really obese mannequins. I said, “I’ve never seen obese mannequins before. These mannequins are so fat, they look like they need special epoxy injections to keep their limbs on.”

Oh wow! (Here’s a link to the original article.)

It got all mixed up, because Jezebel did an article about the article, and then Jezebel inflamed thousands upon thousands of overweight women, and they flooded The New York Times with hate mail about it. 

I could see that. Weightist. Fat shaming.

I got like five death threats, including one from a nurse who said, “If you ever check into my emergency room, I’m going to kill you.” People were so creepy. I’m pretty sure they were all Republicans, because that’s the reactionary bullshit that we get from them now. No sense of humor, waiting to take anything out of context and kick the shit out of you. That was my big disaster. The public editor wrote, on a Sunday morning, “the insult was extra large,” about how it was a teachable moment for me. They apologized for the article, they blamed my editor, they pilloried me.

I grew up around those people, and I’m always amazed when I go to visit those parts of the U.S., how wide all of the restaurant chairs are. A lot of room. You go to other countries, and you’re at an outdoor cafe, sitting on a chair the size of a postage stamp. So after this happened, did you move out of New York?

No, no, I stuck around. It was like the biggest shaming of my life. I got spanked by about a million people. I was so freaked out, I went with my boyfriend to Istanbul to the Biennale, and I came back home, and when I opened my mailbox all these fashion invitations flooded out. Because they loved me for that J.C. Penney column. The fashion world loved me for it. 

It was like, yes, we are elitist. That was delicious!

Exactly. 

So how did you stumble upon Substack?

A friend of mine, Dan. About two and a half years ago, I was like, Dan, I’m so fucked, I’m not making any money, I don’t know what to do, I’m gonna lose everything. He was like, what about Substack? I was like, huh? He told me about it. So now I’ve been doing it for two years. 

I am in awe of what you do, already.

What?

I signed up for it because I was in a similar spot after Litquake ended for me. Didn’t know what I was going to fucking do.

I like what you’ve been doing, by the way.

Thank you. A few people I knew were on it. I’d consulted with Substack, and Susie Bright, and then I launched. I was like, okay, I don’t know what I’m doing but I’m going live, with four stories. And then immediately I got a subscriber. You.

It was me?

You were the first one.

Oh, fuck yeah.

I was honored. 

You know who was my first subscriber? Lucy Sante.

Whoah.

Yeah, Lucy just came out with her memoir, about her transition. I’ve been friends with Lucy before Lucy was Lucy. 

I love that Lower East Side book that she did. 

Oh my god. Low Life. One of my favorite books ever.

Okay, so Substack, two years ago… 

I was like, okay, I’m starting over. With nothing. I was thinking of the quote of the Queen of England. Even if I am turned out of the realm with nothing but my petticoats, I am still a queen. 

How long did you sit here in Marin before you launched that Substack?

Four years, maybe. I was doing other things. I was pitching stuff for Hollywood that didn’t go anywhere, writing scripts for that. I wrote half a play that Tony Taccone was helping me out with. And then Covid hit. And now I have 5,000 subscribers.

Your Substack is frequently mentioned on best-of lists. It’s a huge success story. 

Not yet, not yet. If I get 10,000 subscribers I’ll feel better.

The numbers don’t always translate into memorable writing. You look at some of the people on Substack, they have 55,000 subscribers. And you think, how can this be possible? You look at some of them, it’s all technology news.

Right, it’s like something you totally don’t care about. Some niche-y thing.

The financial advice, those things are so instantly redundant. It’s like yesterday’s post has already been disproven, it’s no longer relevant at all. And then why? Because in America, people just think they constantly need to crush it in business, or be left behind.

There’s a guy I met on Substack, DuVay Knox, who is an ex-pimp, who has decided to be a publisher of Black exploitation novels. And he wrote a book called The Pussy Detective, it’s one of the funniest things. And he’s gamed it. He’s sold over 20,000 copies of Pussy Detective. As an independent published thing. I actually tried to get him to be my agent. 

The pimp energy is not to be denied. It is a force. It provided a need, early on. The book Pimp, by Iceberg Slim.

It’s primitive psychology when you think about it. The language in that book? Fuck me. It’s exquisite. 

There was a perverse humanity to Iceberg Slim. He really understood how the world worked. What people want, versus what they say they want. It was some deep shit.

He understood motivations in people. And all good sharks understand that people have these creepy motivations. 

And it still holds up. It’s entertainment now, but I’m sure people read that at the time, and went, okay, this is my manual. This is what I need to do.

Oh yeah, like they did with The Game.

Right, right. So how did you figure out the Substack formula that works for you?

I knew I wanted to do two reprints a month. And two original pieces. And then when AI came along, I was so petrified. That bitch cannot do memoir. So I started kind of slow-cooking a memoir on my Substack. I’ve been writing about all these strange household experiences in the 1970s.

I love that. The one about your aunt and Scientology. So do you find that people read the memoir stuff more?

I think they like it a little bit more than the reprint stuff. But then the reprints do pretty well too. Marc Maron told me that it took five years for him to establish his podcast. So I’m putting five years into Substack. 

Was it all free when you launched?

Yeah.

And when did you turn the switch for paid?

Um, at the two year point. I waited a long time because I wanted to have a lot of subscribers. And I had 3 or 4,000 subscribers when I turned on the paid. 

Where do your subscribers come from? The Substack universe?

A lot of it comes from the Substack universe. A lot of it comes from recommendations from other Substacks. Thank you, whoever does that. I can never figure out how to recommend people back. It’s something I have to learn how to do. I’m not being cheap.

One of the people I follow is Jeff Maurer, “I Might be Wrong.” He used to be the head writer for John Oliver. Funny funny funny. He cranks it out. At least twice a week. I don’t know how some people can post something new every single day.

Once a week is fine. If it’s more than once a week, you’re just annoying people. Even my mom doesn’t keep up with me once a week. 

Do your words sometimes come back to bite you? Where at some point, you probably wrote something you totally forgot about, and that gets stuck in somebody’s mind?

It gets stuck in somebody’s mind. You know, it’s fun, though! It’s fun, and it’s the spirit of ’80s National Lampoon, which is the spirit I wish prevailed in all places. But mean is a little bit funny. A little bit mean is very funny. A little bit of cruelty, a little bit of brutality, in the right place. 

We can’t all just be soft and completely accepting of what everybody does everywhere in the world. That sort of ultra-sensitivity is trendy right now, but I don’t think that’s typical of all human beings.

Oh my god, I wrote an article on Substack the other day called “Why I Hate Audrey Hepburn.” Because she was starved to death in World War II, and her body didn’t grow past that of an 11-year-old girl. The messages of pedophilia have been going on since Shirley Temple. I got into that. I said that sex with Audrey Hepburn would be like fucking a Cornish game hen. I got all these angry women, you know, “Why your anger?”

That’s funny. 

It is funny. Except, you know I hate it when guys just say, “That’s funny.”

I know. If I laughed at everything you said, Cintra, it would be a terrible interview.

[laughter]

So my first introduction to Hunter Thompson, I was a freshman in college, and somebody handed me a book without a cover, and said, “You might like this.”

Yeah yeah yeah yeah.

And that was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. What was your first introduction to his writing?

When I was in 7th grade, this guy named Tim something, who was a stoner, and a stoner I’d never talked to, he cornered me. I walked into class early, and he was ready. He walked up to me and he said, “We were halfway to Barstow when the drugs kicked in. My attorney was pouring beer on his chest...” He just read me the first page of it. And you could tell it was kind of a romantic gesture. Like, I’m gonna make her head spin. She’s gonna love me for this. And I did.

It was like a flirtatious thing?

He’d never spoken to me before. He had game, man. He surprised me by talking to me at all, and then read me the thing, and I was like, “What is that?” I had to know more.

Wow. Did you ever meet Hunter?

I never ever did. It’s probably better, ’cause I probably would have just pawed at his clothes, and kissed him, and he probably would have hit me or something.

What do you think he contributed to the world of writing?

Urgency. He always felt urgent. It had to be said now, and it had to be said in spectacular fucking style. It would jump off the page and get into your eyeballs with hooks. It was just so exciting, when he wrote. Most people write really fucking boring. And that’s because they’re not funny. Hunter is very funny. And he also had an infrastructure which let him be funny. He was encouraged.

He was encouraged. I love the Hell’s Angels book. One of my favorites.

Exterminate all the brutes.

That was his style starting to emerge. But it’s participatory. He’s in there hanging out with the guys.

Like Tom Wolfe. The whole gonzo journalism thing was subjective. That’s what people don’t know. It’s about allowing a journalist enough of a persona to allow them for subjectivity. Which means they have to be an established character. Which is always what I did. And it’s what has gotten me in a lot of trouble, and it’s gotten me fired from a lot of jobs. I’ve taken a million kill fees. But at the end of the day, I turned out to be a writer with a recognizable voice. Because I said no to a lot of things, and I stuck to my fucking guns. Because I know if they take your voice away from you, you’re dead. You’re dead and buried. 

And you can be replaced.

Instantly. By anyone. For free.

So the appeal of Hunter and Tom Wolfe and you, is the voice. It’s a different style of writing than traditional journalism, where you have a regular beat, or you specialize in celebrity interviews.

No, it’s all shit I’m thinking about. What am I really thinking about this? What does this really mean? When I got into semiotics I was just like, [singing] “The world has opened up...the face of god.” I started to see things better on that level, which really radicalized it all for me. 

You mean, you can write about a subject, but keeping in mind the semiotics of the situation, you could then see these other clues and languages and references? Because you’re looking at it in this totality of how things are connected?

Yeah. Say, I look at Code Pink, for example. These peace activists, in Washington DC. And they’re famous for shutting down Congress by wearing little ballerina tutus, and throwing pink glitter, and wearing pink tiaras. Medea Benjamin, who’s sort of like their founder, is a really interesting intellectual, she writes a lot of white papers, and she’s smart as hell. But Code Pink was failing on so many levels. I was like, it’s because the codes are wrong. The semiotics of that are like a two-year-old girl having a tantrum. 

Even going back to the Guerrilla Girls, they had a real presence, and they stood out.

Guerrilla Girls kicked ass. Not as good as Pussy Riot, though. 

Oh yeah, Pussy Riot, that was a look.

Ski masks, I’ve always been in love with them. 

And they appropriated them. This is the thing that people wear when they commit crimes. 

Well, they were committing crimes too. They were anti-Putin. They’d been in prison.

Right, right. But the idea of it being something that traditionally a criminal would wear to avoid being recognized. A burglar, or bank robber, or the Munich ’72 terrorist with the mask. These are young women who have shit to say, and the masks are brightly colored, like they’re Easter egg colors. It’s a really unique twist. 

Oh, no I love it. That’s why I’m going to do Zapatista fashion criticism. We’ll see how it goes. It was the laziest solution to getting on camera. Because people keep telling me they want me on video. Do I have to do drag queen makeup to be even remotely comfortable? I’m much lazier than that.

So last fall you debuted a one-person performance at the Fringe of the Woods Festival in SoCal.

The show that I’m working on for Scotland, hopefully, is “AI is a Virgin.” It’s kind of like my relationship with AI. Because now AI can now write things in my style. Like, it knows me.

So it’s going to be about AI?

Not really, it’s going to be loosely strung together with punctuations of AI. But it’s sort of like, okay, I’ve been cultivating this style. I’m going to be 57 this year, I’ve been a professional writer since I was 19. AI comes along and fucking bites my style, pretty well. On one of its first tries. It also explains me to myself, almost better than anybody else ever has. It creeped me out. I asked for a general summary of who is Cintra Wilson. And it wrote, you can see people who are on the fringe of society where it teeters over into fine art, high fashion, people like Iris Apfel. These people who are so much themselves that they look half crazy. These are the people who populate my books. It told me about the crazy people who might be billionaires or might be homeless, and you can’t tell the difference. That’s totally my world.

Wow, that’s a really weird insight.

It was a fantastic insight. It was one I never had about myself, and it was dead on. It said it so much more succinctly. So that was a really existential moment, just thinking like, the fucking robot lords know. I’m fucked. They can sell me anything now. I’m a writer dude, and like, Hollywood shut the fuck down. It is shut the fuck down. They’re waiting for AI to replace everybody.

They’re already using it on news websites. And not just the slapped-together Newsmax, Washington Post is using it. Both to write and research. It takes away jobs. Some other person had to do that. And now they don’t do that anymore.

And now they don’t get to do it anymore. I met this beautiful girl when I was in Edinburgh, this tall, Black girl, she was really, really hip. And she started talking to me, and she’s a Hollywood writer. She was on the staff of a couple shows. And she’s like, I’m going to school to learn AI now. And I went, oh, fuck. Because I’m stuck. I’m not going to school to learn AI. I’m a writer, motherfucker. Just because the economy’s collapsed on me, doesn’t mean my value has, you know.

Right. Yeah, AI scrapes the internet, and spits it back at you. It’s not creating anything new, because it’s based on previous stuff.

Yeah, it synthesizes things.

Right, it’s just a mimic. But it wasn’t your style of writing. It was an assessment of your personal style, and what you like to write about.

Yeah yeah yeah.

So none of that stuff is out there? On Wikipedia, or any interviews you’ve ever done?

No, no, no, it came up on ChatGPT, and I saved it.

But maybe that was said in an interview about you somewhere, that it found?

It wasn’t though. ’Cause I think I’ve read all the articles.

[laughter]

Let it be said!

Let it be said that the girl likes to see her name in print!

Shifting gears. Do you write with any intention of having a book adapted for film? Or are the projects you write for movies and TV, specifically for movies or TV?

When I wrote my novel, I was not writing a novel that’s going to be a movie. I’m writing a novel to be a fucking novel. You know? And that’s why it’s never been made into a movie. I’ve got this project that I’ve been flogging for awhile, we’re actually going to make a little five-minute film that I wrote, based on it. It’s an animated thing. It’s called The Unfuckables. I’ve been working on it with friends. It’s five veteran stuntwomen who are all over 40, and on opiates, and have millions of titanium screws in their heads and their knees. And they’re all starting to not get work because they’re aging out of stunt work, so they don’t know what to do. So they embark on a life of crime. Badly.

That has huge potential. Tarentino would often hire those stuntwomen to be in his movies. 

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. I did two years’ of work on The Unfuckables, and pitched it all around Hollywood. Nobody bit. Then Covid hit. And then Ru Paul called me up out of the blue, and wanted to reconnect. So now it’s sort of simmering with Ru Paul’s development company.

Why not? The empire that’s been built around Ru Paul is formidable.

I love Ru Paul. Incredible. World of Wonder, what they’ve done. In-cre-di-ble. I know those guys who invented it. They’re amazing people. Ru Paul is in every fucking country in the world! It’s stunning, what they’ve done. It’s just good clean fun, really. Drag queens are amusing, and lovely. Why would you want a world without drag queens?