Roast Pork Tenderloin with Bing Cherry Glaze

I have not had the most fantastic week. It's not like sock-you-in-the-gut-with-shock terrible, more the slow and steady unpleasant death of hope. Or at least illness of hope. Hope has gone to bed with the swine flu. Maybe Obama will come by and help it recover.

The primary suspect in this week's displeasure is the Nicholl Fellowships. For those of you not in the 'I Want To Be A Screenwriter' business, the Nicholl is a competition put on by the Academy (i.e. AMPAS, i.e. the people who do the Oscars) for up-and-coming screenwriters. The winners get a big fellowship (enough to live on while they write more), but the big reward is the doors it opens. Instead of trying to persuade some assistant that they might want to read your script, the agents/managers/producers/whatevs call you and ask for it. Not so bad.

In short, the Nicholl is easily THE most prestigious screenwriting competition out there for those of us who aren't earning our living at it yet. As one of my teachers @ UCLA extension said to me, 'There's the Nicholl and then there's everything else.'

I discovered this first-hand when I placed in the quarterfinals of the Nicholl with my first screenplay a couple of years ago. Having no idea I'd applied to the end-all-be-all screenplay competition, when I got the congratulations letter in the mail I was like, 'Oh, that's nice,' and put it aside. A few months later my phone started ringing one day and my email inbox filled up with 'Congratulations! Can I see your script?' inquiries.

Now of course, none of those inquiries panned out 100%, but there are several reasons behind that, including the fact that I was very green, had no other material, didn't live in LA, etc. But at the same time, as a somewhat indirect result of it I did wind up with a kickass job for a couple of years and moving to LA, amongst other things.

Fast forward to this year, where I've devoted all my post-layoff time to working on screenplays, teleplays, etc. - the reason we moved to LA in the first place. Megan and I hustled like maniacs to get our script done in time for the Nicholl deadline, and what do you know, we placed. Around 6500 scripts sent in, only about 300 made the quarterfinals, and we were in that cut. That's the top 5%, and we made that cut with a broad romantic comedy - in a competition that favors indie dramas. Not so bad.

Tracie, who was visiting from Boston the day I got the email saying we made it, can attest to the fact that I lost my mind. This time when the letter came I didn't toss it aside, I started crying. I called Megan screaming - and everyone else for that matter. I stopped everything, drove to the ghetto grocery, bought champagne, and made Tracie drink it with me. Because this time I lived in LA, this time I've actually taken classes on how to get ready for this sort of thing, this time I have other material coming out of my yin-yang (don't worry, I have a doctor's appointment to get that checked out).

Megan and I spent the intervening time honing our stuff. Making tiny tweaks to the script thanks to some great feedback from some smart friends, getting our logline perfect, doing our treatment, and coming up with other pitches for any meetings we would get. I like to call that 'The Month of September.'

We knew the list would come out in October sometime, but there's no hard and fast date. Just when they're ready. Then Thursday it hit, and the first email arrived. 'Congratulations on making it into the quarterfinals of the Nicholl! I would love to read your script...'

'Here we go!' I told Megan. And then: nothing. I checked our joint email account set up for this purpose to make sure it was forwarding things appropriately. It was. There was just nothing to forward.

I watched, I watched, I watched and the pot (predictably?) would not boil. Perhaps I am being slightly dramatic, we have certainly gotten a couple of emails, but the difference between this year and my previous Nicholl experience is very palpable. Where before there was a deluge, now there is a drip. Before my contact info made it clear I lived in Chicago, and in this industry you are immediately 1000 times less appealing if you don't live in LA or NY. Now the contact info is clearly LA; I thought for sure this would increase the number of calls. I was: wrong.

Is it the title? Would more people have called were our script called Tits, Tits and More Tits? Probably. Is it the economy? My industry friends think it is the economy -- studios are firing people, cutting back on the number of movies they release per year, and everyone is more afraid than ever to take a risk.

Whatever it is, I suppose it doesn't really matter because either way I'm pissed. Or disheartened. Or whatever. I will say that the people who have contacted us are quite good ones, and that is extremely comforting. And all we need is one of them to like it/us/whatever. But still, in my mind, the more people who call, the better our chances.

I was supposed to make my Recipe Book dinner (you were wondering what this saga had to do with the Recipe Book, weren't you?), but the lack of inquiries had me down. I asked Josh to bring me home some food so I could sit on the sofa and pout. Like I said, things could be worse. No one's dead. The boys are all healthy. And I can get off my butt and do some hustling on my own. Still, I can't help but be pretty disappointed.

By last night I had started to get over myself, though, so I ventured into the ignored recipe: Roast Pork Tenderloin with Bing Cherry Glaze from my beloved old roommate Jane (she of the Spinach Dip). There's a note on this recipe, which tells me that I made it once before because it must have looked appealing. My note says, 'Good' and also 'Put in sauce as soon as it's ready, 170 final temp (ready to eat).' The first part is self-explanatory, the second I have no idea what I was trying to tell myself. Which is too bad, because obviously I felt like I needed to know something.

Basically this appears to be a pork roast with cherry glaze recipe, a la those hams with pineapple that they love to show in grocery store circulars. Somehow I didn't realize this when I went to the grocery store, that by 'tenderloin' Jane meant 'roast'. So I stared at all the various pork possibilities (pork strips, pork chop), and, seeing nothing that said 'tenderloin' went for a couple of boneless pork loin whatevers, which I'm sure wasn't really a big deal - I mean it's fundamentally pork avec cherry glaze, it's not like I'm putting meat in an ice cream cake as a substitute for chocolate sauce. But still, it was pretty challenging to jimmy the thermometer into a tiny pork slab, especially since our thermometer is kind of broken and when I pull it out it leaves its meat-protective metal tip in the pork, which I then forget about and either serve to someone as is ('Why does this pork come with metal in the middle?') or explode in the microwave when I heat the next day. Either way, lose-lose.

Thermometer negotiations aside, Jane's pork & glaze recipe is very easy, although I will say I seem to have been a bigger fan the first time. This time I thought the clove seemed a little overwhelming (Josh thought the cherry was a little overwhelming). Maybe that's just the taste of disappointment. Anyhow, I don't know what I did different from before as my note to myself was in Martian, but I'm betting I could do something smart like 'Use less cloves' or 'Not put as much glaze on' and then everyone would be happy.

As for me, I have to go upstairs and try to hack the dried cherry glaze off the roasting pan with a chisel and/or blowtorch because I kindly left it to set in the sink for myself over night (Note to readers: I do not recommend this). Then I will concoct a voodoo doll to pray to to make one of the producers looking at our script like it.

Oh, the husband-photographer who always thinks I look great
when I clearly do not. When will I learn to put on make up?

Jane's Crappy Week Consolation Roast Pork Tenderloin with Bing Cherry Glaze

2 pork tenderloins (i.e. roasts?)

Glaze:
10 oz bing cherry preserves
2 tbsp light corn syrup
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 cup toasted slivered almonds
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1/2 tsp ground cloves (maybe not so much?)

1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper

Go to ghetto grocery. Stare at wall of preserves, being utterly unable to find bing cherry preserves at all. Find cherry preserves and not in the prescribed size. Decide, this will have to do.

Rub tenderloin with salt and pepper. Roast uncoverd in a pan at 325 degrees approximately 25 minutes per pound (what?) or until an internal temperature of 170 degrees is reached (yes). Misread the instructions and just set the clock for 25 minutes, but figure since you're using the thin slabs of pork with your Macguyvered-in half-broken thermometer that you should check it often. Thank God.

In a sauce pan, combine all other ingredients except the almonds, which you smartly put into the toaster so as to achieve the 'toasted' part. NEARLY forget you have decided to double all the ingredients to match the cherry preserves that are just about double the size Jane specified, but remember and do it. PHEW. This makes extra sense because you are using 4 pork loins (or whatevers) instead of 2.

Cook and stir to boil, thinking, 'Good Jesus this cherry smell is strong/gross,' and 'Boy I wish I had been able to find the right type of cherry preserves.' Reduce heat and simmer 2 minutes.

Add almonds and spoon sauce over roast (aha! roast!!); continue cooking 30 minutes more. Hope that that number still stands given the thin-ness of your pork whatevers. Baste every 15 minutes. Slice (um, no) and serve with remaining sauce. Realize that if you'd used giant roasts, the glaze probably wouldn't have been over-abundant and therefore not as overwhelming. Oh well.

Jane note: This glaze also works well with turkey; use apricot preserves instead of bing cherry preserves.

Heather note: Hmmm. Sounds good.