From striker to Kiev darling
Screenwriters are famous for trading stories from their professional lives that are too ridiculous to be invented. But during the writers strike, it's been hard to find anyone telling even a bleakly amusing story, let alone an upbeat one.
Then there's Billy Frolick, a 48-year-old screenwriter from the animation trenches ("Madagascar") who may have the most ridiculously smile-inducing story of the strike. As he says, "No example of professional screenwriting's emotional undulations could be more vivid or surreal than my last two months."
In the frantic weeks before the strike began on Nov. 5 -- when everyone was scrambling to finish jobs and gird themselves for a possible prolonged absence of income -- Frolick received a mysterious offer to work on a 3-D animated film.
After some back and forth with the WGA about whether it would be considered struck work, Frolick's manager got the assignment cleared, and he quickly negotiated a deal with the hiring company that, unlike most studio agreements, miraculously included gross participation for Frolick.
To enter a work stoppage with an approved, paid assignment -- let alone a blind, over-the-transom offer that required no pitch or meeting -- was an incredible stroke of good fortune. That it would also involve a promised "high-end, unforgettable, and luxurious trip" was a mystifying bonus.
"While my closest friends were worrying about foreclosure and bankruptcy," Frolick says, "I was starting to feel like the only Jew being hidden in Nazi Germany."
So Frolick spent the first week of the strike dutifully picketing with his guild brothers and sisters before packing his bags and boarding an Aerosvit plane.
To Kiev.
It turned out that Frolick had been hired to write the first computer-animated feature produced in Ukraine (not "the Ukraine," as he was quickly corrected), tentatively titled "Paws & Wires."
The Ukrainians apparently considered this a momentous occasion. When he finally stepped onto the tarmac in Kiev, Frolick was greeted with a dozen roses and a row of shivering reporters who had been waiting two hours to shove microphones in his face.
"What will feelm be about?" one asked.
"About 80 minutes long," Frolick said to mute stares.
In a way that dramatically upended the skewed hierarchy of the Hollywood system so embedded in the subtext of the current contract deadlock, Frolick was suddenly in the flopped position of being a big fish in a small, frozen pond. And the star treatment reflected that.
