Hollywood Ending
Lance Pototschnik at his wittiest, darkest, and funniest.
The 2008 recession hits. The US economy goes belly-up and sentences a young generation to wayward lives. With nothing to lose, Lance Pototschnik and his best friend, Jackson Greenly, decide to go for their artist dreams. Lance begins a grassroots initiative to sell an original screenplay to Hollywood. He lives out of a rental car and travels the country filming strangers’ street auditions, hoping to generate enough interest on social media to dragoon a production deal. Jackson goes to art school, where he is inspired to make the perfect painting: one with the power to shoot a person dead.
Hollywood Ending is a shotgun-seat view of the awkward, hilarious places dreams can lead us. But this book is so much more than a laugh-out-loud ride beside the author. Pototschnik is a self-aware witness to his own crazy journey, and to the possessory effects dissipated art and media saturation have had on him, and on his dreams. Here, he turns his keen powers of observation on a couple of life’s deepest questions: Why do we think what we think? Why do we want what we want?
This is required reading for those who get the ineffable sense that the world is going to hell in a hilarious handbasket.
Excerpt
Virginia is for Lovers
September 2009
Hope rushed in with the wind. The sun was up an inch and already baking smells out of the land. The air smelled like trees, not grass. Autumn was on the way. My best friend, Jackson Greenly, rode shotgun, and he was inebriated. Empty, dented, black cans of alcoholic energy drinks rattled around the floorboards of my Chevy Beretta. Jackson stuck an arm out the open window and made waves through the rushing air with his hand. He looked at me, toasted our youth with one of those black cans of embalming fluid, alcohol, and asparagus pee, then grinned and gulped the drink. A red cap bearing the face of Sesame Street’s Elmo tilted on his head at a jaunty, delinquent angle, and a little silver ring that won him automatic favor with girls and suspicion or hatred from senior citizens glinted from the left side of his lower lip. His T-shirt was spray-painted with an esoteric quote. His style always hinted at a rich, libertine psyche.
Hollywood...beginning
Before Hollywood Ending, there was a Hollywood beginning. This is the original promotional video compiled during the casting journey.