The Long and Winding Road of Mean Streak
Hi! Welcome to our weekly Fred & Dan newsletter: Why Aren’t You Famous Yet? This week is a lookback at our script Mean Streak from Dan. Enjoy and let us know your favorite memories from your early 20s!
Five years ago at 23 years old, I paid my first installment on my student loans. Gio was there! We lived together.
Seven months later, I had been paying something like $130 a month on my loans while working for minimum wage as a tour guide at Warner Bros. As I watched my meager savings dwindle and realized that my income did not match the life in Los Angeles I thought I would be living, I felt panic and resentment growing inside of me. It all accumulated one early Saturday afternoon as I drove away from the AT&T store with a new iPhone that I couldn’t afford, feeling nauseous about the state of my finances. Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain'' was playing on the radio and I had a strong visceral vision of two young women standing over a man they were about to contract kill. When he asks them why they were doing this, one of the girls responds “Some people are just mean” and the other says “And broke.” That was the first image I ever had for the story that would eventually become our script Mean Streak.
Mean Streak has taken so many forms over the past five years. I’ve written separate shorts based on the two main characters Denise and Angel. I filmed one of those in the parking lot of the post-production company where I was working. Gio and I completed our first draft of the feature in 2019. Before even finishing, our first 30 pages of the script won a contest where it was read aloud by working actors and filmed for youtube. We’ve entered into numerous contests, placed it on the Blacklist, worked with a writing consultant on our second draft, wrote and filmed a proof of concept while both living in the Bay Area, and have since watched as it has placed in very prestigious screenwriting contests and festivals. You can see all the accolades of the script here, on our Coverfly Profile.
Recently I’ve been reminiscing on writing this script and the various stories in our own lives that contributed to it. Usually one of the first things Gio and I do when starting a script is create a Google Doc and write down any and all ideas that come to us. Especially when we write something that draws from our real life experiences, like Mean Streak and our other script Star Spangled Banner. These docs tend to be pages and pages long filled with funny anecdotes, stories, memories, and notes of how we can incorporate them in the script.
For example, Giovana and I both studied abroad our junior year of college - G was in Italy and I was in Germany. It was a tumultuous time, on one hand it was the most fun I’ve ever had in my life and on the other we were both dealing with relationship problems and heartbreak (is that not the most apt definition of what it’s like to be in your early 20s?). We went to Oktoberfest on the same weekend separately and had a very… interesting time, but that’s a story for another time. We tried to find each other as best as twenty-year-olds drunk at 8am off of four steins of beer with sketch burner phones could. In other words, it was a shit show to say the least. Best weekend ever (not being sarcastic, I really mean it). We knew we had to include a traveling aspect to the movie and aspects of our Oktoberfest experience pop up in multiple places in the script.
The shenanigans only continued after we graduated from LMU and moved in together with two other friends in a duplex in North Hollywood. As I mentioned above, we were broke af but still determined to have as much fun as possible. This included going on dates when we couldn’t afford a meal, running (literally sprinting) down the street to our local bar to make it in time for happy hour (another moment that made it in the script), and taking advantage of any and all parties that our successful DJ neighbors would invite us to. Our life at the time seemed like a never ending “OverheardLA” instagram post - constantly trying to match our lives with those we saw on Instagram, lamenting on the woes of living LA, embarrassing ourselves in front of numerous celebrities (please ask Gio about her conversations at the VMAs), and running on zero hours of sleep.
In true millennial fashion, between all of these things we worked multiple jobs to #liveourbestlife, AKA make ends meet. We didn’t know a single peer who wasn’t hustling, not really surprising considering we lived in Los Angeles where everyone has a day job and a side hustle, but I would look around at my friends who were working their asses off day in and day out and think, “You know what, bitch? We deserve avocado toast.” This was before we truly understood what burnout was or how it would affect us later on. Thank god for my youthful naivete because now when I think back on that time 6 years ago in that duplex, I feel tired .
I wouldn’t change a single thing about that time in our lives… except maybe drink more water and get more sleep. Even for all the heartbreak and struggle I felt during that time I look back with a real fondness on the 22 and 23-year-old version of myself trying my best to make it in a world that at times really seemed like it didn’t want me to. I think that’s what we want to get across more than anything with this script. We want to celebrate our resilience and desire to find a way to live the lives we want. (I should probably say here we don’t think that contract killing is the correct way to do this, but hopefully you get what I mean.)
When we were writing Mean Streak in 2017, I thought “oh my god we have to get this out in front of people right away because soon student loans will actually be forgiven and this will no longer be relevant.” Well. The reality of being a millennial in the year 2022 has somehow made this script feel even more pressing and necessary than it was five years ago. Yes, we are getting $10K of our student loans forgiven… but unfortunately we’re in a seemingly never-ending pandemic that saw millions of people (including us!) lose their jobs and now a level of inflation that has basically squashed the dream of saving for the near future. As if our savings were anything to write home about before. So fuck it, let’s drink!
Every time we’ve worked on Mean Streak in the past, it has felt so amazing to take the seemingly sad and depressing aspects of life and make it humorous. Usually by the end of a writing session, Gio and I have tears of laughter running down our faces - not just from how funny we find each other but from the humor we have found in our own hopelessness.
For the next month we’ll be deep diving into all things Mean Streak! Stick around for a lot of fun things ahead.