Some Real Therapy for Writers’ Block

Screenwriters are a wretched lot. Ask any screenwriter.

Someone is always messing with your work--if you are fortunate enough to get work. You are vilified when the film you have written opens to bad reviews and all but forgotten when the notices are favorable. Producers don’t want you sharing their profits, directors don’t want you visiting their sets, and actresses (or actors) don’t want you. Period.

Oh, for somebody to talk to, to listen supportively and say, “You’re not a talentless fraud who really should be selling real estate. Hang in there.”

Dennis Palumbo is that somebody.

A former screenwriter-turned-licensed-psychotherapist, Palumbo’s bread and butter is addressing the mental health of those who write for the movies and TV. If you are a hack in Hollywood traumatized by network pitch meetings, mired in the death march of script development or contemplating suicide because Joe Eszterhas got $2.5 million for “Jade” while your spec, “Bosnia, the Musical,” was rejected by every studio in town, Palumbo is the man to see.

“There’s nothing more meaningful than the creative act,” said Palumbo, 48. “Unfortunately, if you’re a writer, Hollywood is just about the worst place in the world to find an approving theme.”

Which is where Palumbo steps in. Once a week, on average, writers venture to Palumbo’s modest office overlooking the Sherman Oaks Galleria, where, at $150 a session, they tackle the vagaries and emotional implications of toiling in a business in which everyone’s a critic.

The bearded, avuncular Palumbo offers his patients generous shots of compassion and Zen-like insight: The ultimate rewards of a writing career in Hollywood, he tells them, are neither the money nor seeing one’s name on screen. True happiness can only be found in the process of writing: creating your own world on paper and executing it well.

Palumbo often reiterates the same theme in “The Writer’s Life,” the overwhelmingly popular monthly advice column he has penned over the past three years for Written By, the monthly journal of the Writers Guild of America, West.

“People respond to Dennis,” said Written By’s editor, Lisa Chambers. “His column addresses problems all writers face. He lets them know that, sitting there, alone in their rooms, trying to do good work, they’re really not alone, that every writer has the same problems.”

Palumbo’s empathy with writers comes honestly; he evolved in 1990 from screenwriter to ex-screenwriter who treats screenwriters. His practice has since grown to include more than 30 full-time clients, including Oscar winners and other “A-list” writers, sitcom specialists, even a novelist or two.

He won’t identify any of his patients, for reasons of confidentiality. But others close to Palumbo are quick to laud him as a rare commodity.

“Dennis genuinely cares about writers,” said a friend, screenwriter Hoyt Hilsman. “And in this town, that’s saying a lot.”

William Goldman once said there are no happy writers in Hollywood. Palumbo would have to agree--though some, by his experience, are happier than others. As a rule, the happiest of his clients, he says, are those who work in television. Why? Because TV writers perceive themselves to have power--they often produce the shows they write for--unlike their counterparts in feature films, whom studio heads typically regard as dispensable.

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A product of Pittsburgh, Palumbo entered college with ambitions of a career in engineering. A stint on the student daily newspaper at the University of Pittsburgh changed that. Graduation found Palumbo with a degree in writing and a job in Louisville, Ky., churning out television and radio spots for an advertising agency where his co-workers were all “frustrated movie makers.”

Bitten by talk of the entertainment industry, Palumbo decided to take his shot at Hollywood. He set out for Los Angeles in 1975. He didn’t exactly set the town on fire; nary a producer was willing to read Palumbo’s material, let alone buy any of it. He took a day job selling school supplies over the phone while attempting stand-up comedy at night. Palumbo’s shtick--”dating, commercials, growing up Catholic”--was, by his own admission, hardly a yuk-fest. But sitting in the audience one night at a club on Sunset Boulevard, watching Palumbo perform, was comedian Gabe Kaplan of “Welcome Back, Kotter” fame. Kaplan liked Palumbo’s routine enough to hire him to pen jokes for his own stand-up act.

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After touring with Kaplan, Palumbo and his writing partner Mark Evanier landed a staff job on “Kotter.” Palumbo would write for other shows as well, including “The Love Boat,” for which he co-scripted the first series episode. He soon branched into movies. His first on-screen credit came in 1982 with the critically acclaimed Peter O’Toole comedy “My Favorite Year.” Other feature writing assignments followed.

Life was sweet--or so it seemed. It was while living in Nepal that Palumbo decided all was not right. He had traveled to the Himalayas at Robert Redford’s behest to research a movie on the life and death of a renowned mountain climber. But in studying the Nepalese, for whom his being a big-time screenwriter meant nothing, Palumbo came to realize that his existence had become depressingly hollow, entwined in his ambitions and the artifice of Hollywood.

“There was,” he said, “something missing.”

Back in Los Angeles, Palumbo began volunteering his time at a private psychiatric hospital, interacting with schizophrenics. “I’d already had great training,” he said, “because I had worked with studio executives.”

Amid writing assignments, volunteering at the hospital and teaching screenwriting through UCLA’s Extension program, Palumbo began working on a master’s degree in counseling psychology at Pepperdine. The more he studied, the more he felt drawn away from the unsettled world of screenwriting and toward the world of the unsettled mind. The epiphany came at a power lunch one day at Le Dome.

“I’m sitting there with this producer. He’s talking about movies, and I keep looking at my watch because I don’t want to be late for my meeting with the schizophrenics at the hospital,” Palumbo said. “I realized, ‘This is what I want to do.’ ”

Palumbo noticed that other of his UCLA students would approach him after class, seeking his counsel on personal issues obstructing their professional growth as writers. Virtually every issue they complained about Palumbo had experienced himself.

“I knew procrastination, writer’s block, fear of failure, all of the creative problems,” Palumbo said. “I knew what it was like to get nervous pitching at NBC because I have pitched there a thousand times.”

While his heart bleeds for the wordsmiths in Hollywood whose mental health he helps buoy, Palumbo is not about to jump back into the arena. Not that the compulsion to write fiction has abandoned him altogether. He’s working on a novel.

And if some studio exec comes along wanting to turn his book into a movie? Palumbo would prefer that someone else write the screenplay. He can do without the angst.