Not Coming Soon to a Movie Theater Near You

How one man attempted to build his family into a media brand--and failed at every turn.

After an encouraging call from a film and TV agent in Los Angeles, semi-successful author Neal Pollack seizes upon the slightest of openings to pursue the modern American Dream: Fame. He uproots his family--his wife, Regina, a painter with whom he shares "the Pact" to always honor each other's artistic pursuits, and his young boy--and moves from Texas to Southern California. Immediately upon arriving, Pollack accidentally sells his life rights to Warner Brothers Pictures for several thousand dollars, and is forced to watch from afar as his new hipster-daddy memoir, Alternadad, is published to--more than yawns--actual vitriol in the pages of the New York Times. He will attempt to write TV shows that never go anywhere because of the Writer's Guild strike that he seems to cause to happen by his mere presence; he will start digital parenting verticals that never straighten up; and he will find himself in the deepest sanctums of HBO, with the head of comedy development and her entire executive team focused exclusively on his pitch, and he will forget what he has to say. Not Coming Soon to a Theater Near You is a light-hearted story of very real failure, but it is also a portrait of a darn good, battle-tested marriage and one man’s ill-fated worming into the heart of the New Hollywood.