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Guest Column - Christopher Schlerf
Truth & Consequence Of
The Greenlight Top 10
It is an invariably turbulent act to have any profound change occur in your life over the short course of 48 hours. I mean, realistically, it only happens for anyone so many times over the course of their days, and when it does, there's a degree of unreality associated with it that takes a long time to make sense of. Now imagine having that moment recorded for posterity by a television crew, and you'll have some idea where my memories of the Greenlight Top 10 event start.
I can say, without a shred of doubt, that the Top 10 event will forever live as one of the happiest times of my life. Though strangely, I don't think my excitement over being included in the Greenlight gathering really became tangible until I got to the baggage area at LAX and saw the first camera crew. What struck me most was not so much that I was being shot as the fact that this footage was going to serve as a Recorded Document of a history that was actively happening. Win, lose, or something in the middle - those moments, those emotions, were going to have some sort of a life of their own beyond what was going on in my head.
My first impressions of the other Top 10 contestants are hugely colored by the fact that a lot of us are friends now. How often can you pinpoint the moment you met the people you actively hang out with? Brendan Murphy, Matt Burch and I met first; we all arrived at LAX at the same time, and shared the van ride to the hotel. The idea that, months later, we'd be bumming around LA together never even crossed my mind. And even my liberally overactive imagination would never in a million years have humored the idea of Katie Fetting and my kid sister becoming roommates. I imagined all sorts of things coming out of the PGL contest - but a new social circle wasn't one of them.
There are so many individual moments over those few days that are really special to me, and not necessarily the ones you might think. Things like talking shop with the TV crew during my one-on-one interview while the hotel tried to shut down a noisy power washer outside. Being in traffic on a bus ride back from the Event Rehearsal, and the Top 10 (or 12, as the case was) making small talk, trying to avoid whatever jitters we might have been going through. Or sitting in Pete's room the morning after the Top 3 were announced, and the two of us just trying to break down everything that had happened the night before. I think it's still surprising to me how much it was a time of small moments, given the stakes that were involved for us all.
The evening of the Top 10 screenings is, to this day, a blur of image and emotion, as well as an education in the nature of Hollywood that even now, over half a year later, I am still trying to figure out. If there had been no contest, if everything had taken place in a void, just hearing the crowd's reaction when my scene was shown would have made every day I've spent dreaming of making movies for the past 25 years worth the wait. Luckily for me, it didn't happen in a void; it happened in Hollywood, and yeah, things DID change.
Has the reality lived up to the dream? It's hard to say. Sometimes I feel like my Greenlight experience hasn't so much opened doors as it's given me a set of keys, and I've spent the intervening months trying to find out which doors they go to, or if they go to any at all. Other times, I feel really thankful and humbled at how lucky I have been to be a part of something so special, regardless of whether that luck helps take me further in the industry or not. But no matter how you cut it, the fact is this: I am far better off than I was before, and that's more than I ever had any right to ask or hope for from any contest.
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