FADE IN:

INT. A GLASS OFFICE IN BEVERLY HILLS - DAY

DANIEL CHO (26), Korean-American, sits at the desk outside the glass. Headset on. Three lines blinking. He has been an agent's assistant for seven months. He makes $400 a week to work seventy hours of it. He lives in his old bedroom at his parents' place in Koreatown, which is its own screenplay. At night he reads other people's scripts and tries to finish his own.

(August is further down. Jump to August.)

I told Jenny today.

We went to the coffee place on Sixth where we had our second date, if they were dates, which is the whole problem. I'd rehearsed it in the car like a pitch. Open with something warm. Get to the point by page ten. Don't make her sit through a second act.

What I said was: "You're great, and I think my mother wants to marry you, and I don't think I do." Which is not what I rehearsed. She looked at me for a long second and then she laughed so hard the guy at the next table looked up. She said her mom picked me too, and she'd been waiting four weeks for one of us to say it. She said, "You never ask me anything, Daniel. You tell me about your boss." That one landed. She's right.

We hugged in the parking lot. It was a real hug. I think we might actually be friends now, which my mother will consider the worst possible outcome.

I haven't told Umma. She'll hear it from Jenny's mother at church before I get the chance, probably by the second hymn next Sunday.

Also the boss called four times today. Twice about a script, twice about the Ryder Cup. The Americans came back and won. I have never cared less about golf and I had to say "unbelievable" nine times.

Chuseok. Korean Thanksgiving, is how I explain it at work, which is close enough. Harvest moon, family, too much food, everybody asks when you're getting married.

I left the office at 7:30, which in agency time is a half day. The boss said "Enjoy your holiday" in a voice that meant the opposite. By the time I got to my parents' place Umma had been cooking since five in the morning, before she even opened the shop. Jeon, japchae, galbi, and songpyeon, the little half-moon rice cakes with sesame and honey inside, steamed on a bed of pine needles. The whole apartment smelled like pine and sesame oil.

And Jenny's family. Of course. Umma invited them "because they're alone here, no relatives," which is true, and also not why.

We made songpyeon at the kitchen table after dinner. There's a saying that if you make pretty songpyeon you'll have pretty daughters someday. Umma said it in Korean, looking at Jenny. Mine came out looking like ravioli that had been in a car accident. Appa said mine were "very modern." Jenny's were perfect. Of course.

Before we ate, Appa prayed. His English is fine but he prays in Korean, and I understand maybe two-thirds of it, and the part I understood was him thanking God for the shop, and for his son "who works so hard for a man who shouts." Everybody laughed. I had to look at my plate for a while.

Out on the balcony later the moon was almost full over the Wilshire buildings. Jenny stood next to me and neither of us said anything. I think that's when I knew what I'd say Sunday.

Home 11:40. Two scripts in the bag for tomorrow's coverage. Pass and pass, I already know. Bed.

So today the boss threw his phone.

Context: a client of his, not a huge one but one he'd been with since the beginning, left for another agency this morning. The client didn't call. The client's lawyer faxed. The boss read the fax standing at my desk. Then he went into his office and made three calls in a row with the door shut, and then the fourth call went badly, and his cell phone came through the open door and hit the wall about two feet from my left ear. The battery went one way and the phone went the other.

I picked up both pieces. I clicked the battery back in. I walked in and put it on his desk and said, "You have your two-thirty on line one." He said "Thank you, Daniel" in a completely normal voice, and took the call.

Marisa, who sits on the desk next to mine, slid a Twix over the partition without looking up. That's how you know it was bad. She's been here three years and she says the phone is a rite of passage. The first time it happened to her it was a stapler.

Here's the thing I can't explain to my parents or to Jenny or to anybody who doesn't work there. He's the best agent on the floor. He's also a lunatic. Both are true at the same time. When Appa was in the hospital in June for his heart, the boss sent flowers with a card he wrote out himself, in actual handwriting. Then he yelled at me for being gone a day and a half.

I drove home down Wilshire and didn't turn on the radio.

Emmy night. Some of the boss's clients are at the Shrine tonight in borrowed jewelry, and I am in my childhood bedroom in a Dodgers T-shirt with the TV on mute and the phone next to me, because if anybody wins, or anybody loses, or anybody's car doesn't show up, I get a call. Nobody's car has not shown up yet. The night is young.

In between, Pressed. Page 71. It's about a guy whose parents own a dry cleaner in Koreatown, which, yes, I know. Write what you know. Hector, my roommate from film school, read the first act and said it was "honest," which is what people say when they mean slow. He's right about the second act. There's a scene in the shop in '92 I keep rewriting. The real one was simpler than anything I can type: the front window gone, the machines ruined, customers' clothes just gone, and Appa sweeping glass with a push broom the next morning because what else do you do. He reopened that fall. There's still a photo of the burned-out front taped inside the register drawer. He says it's so he remembers. Umma says it's so he can complain.

Payday. I did the math on the back of a call sheet: $400 a week, seventy hours, comes out to less per hour than the guy who parks the boss's car. And the valet doesn't take scripts home on the weekend.

Went by the shop tonight to drop off the boss's shirts (yes, I bring the boss's shirts to my parents' dry cleaner, and yes, Appa does them for free, and no, the boss does not know). Appa was at the press. Umma was at the counter doing the tickets in her neat little Korean handwriting. They open at seven and close at seven, six days, and they've done it since I was in grade school. When I complain about my hours, Appa just raises his eyebrows. He doesn't even have to say anything.

Umma asked, in Korean, when I'm going to law school. I said, in English, never. She said, "Aigo," which is the sound a Korean mother makes when her son has personally disappointed four generations. Then she put a container of kimchi in my hands and pushed me out the door.

Labor Day weekend. The boss is in Hawaii. I have eleven scripts.

Dinner with Jenny, number one.

My mother met her mother at church in the spring and has been working on this like it's a studio merger. Jenny is a pharmacist in Torrance. She's smart. She's funny. She ordered for both of us in Korean without looking at the menu, and my Korean is the kind that gets me through Chuseok and funerals. She laughed at my boss stories. She drove her own car and paid for the tip.

So what's wrong with me? Nothing happened. Nothing in the chest. We talked for two hours and I felt like I was having a very nice lunch with a very nice development executive. I kept waiting for the part in the movie where the music comes in. No music.

Umma called before I was even home. "So?" I said she's nice. Long pause. "Nice is good," she said. "Nice is how it starts." Maybe she's right. She and Appa met twice before they got married, and they've been married twenty-eight years.

First entry. Hector keeps an online journal and says it's cheaper than therapy, and I can't afford therapy, so.

The whole agency spent this morning talking about the weekend grosses for The Sixth Sense. Nobody saw it coming. The boss came in at 8:05 and before he even had his coffee he said he wants "that." Not that movie. "That." A script nobody expects. Every writer in town is also still pitching Blair Witch-meets-something, so I got to read "Blair Witch meets Jaws" today. I wish I were joking.

My job, for anyone who doesn't know: I roll calls. I keep the boss's calendar. I get him his lunch and I get him on the phone with people who don't want to talk to him, and I get him off the phone with people who do. At night I read scripts and write a couple pages of coverage on each one so he never has to read anything he doesn't have to. Someday I'll be an agent, or a writer, or a guy who runs his parents' dry cleaners. Today I'm a headset.

FADE OUT.