‘LA?! Ugh! Such a concrete jungle. All those vapid, botoxed freaks, and you have to drive everywhere!’

‘Ha ha, yes. Have you been recently?’

‘Nope. I’ve never been to that shithole ... ’

That’s an excerpt from a real conversation I had just before my most recent stretch in Los Angeles – though I’ve heard it many more times than once. For reasons of work I spend a few months a year here, and I used to live here, and to be fair, a large part of that preconception is true. LA is an enormous city, it is made of concrete and Botox, and if you live in Echo Park and need to get across to Santa Monica, driving is the best way to cover those 25-or-so miles. But if you live in Echo Park or Atwater Village (as I have done) and you need to buy milk, have a cocktail, do yoga or some banking, you don’t. To those and other neighbourhood places, you can walk.

If you are here for what is known as ‘pilot season’, though, that’s a different matter. Around February annually, many thousands of actors descend upon the greater metropolitan area for a cattle call of auditions, for the many hundreds (possibly thousands?) of TV pilots that are being cast and which may or may not get picked up by networks and see the light of day. If generalisations can be permitted, actors are bad drivers (nearly as bad as writers), but for pilot season, one must learn. Not only do you need to learn to drive but you need to learn to love it, too, because if you’re in town ‘doing meetings’, what you’re really doing is driving. That’s the game.

And I bloody love the game. The night before you’re forking kale in some LA restaurant, or (more likely) artisanally fashioning a toasted cheese sandwich in the kitchenette of your Airbnb rental when the phone pings, an email from your agent’s assistant landing with your list of ‘general meetings’ for the next day. That pinging? That’s the sound of a gauntlet being dropped. You, reared in a sleepy Irish exurb, release the sandwich from your grip, swipe finger-grease across the screen and begin to contemplate tomorrow’s game: 9am WeHo. 11am Studio City, 1pm Culver City, 3pm Santa Monica. 4.30pm Venice, 7pm Beverly Hills. Six meetings, in six different ‘cities’, governed by the overall megalopolis of ‘Los Angeles’, population sixteen million souls. Can it be done?

Morning time. Showered and walking out your door into the sunshine, in your hand, the app Waze has already begun talking to you and the game is underway. Waze has detected traffic on your usual route, and Robot Lady suggests that you ‘turn left on Perlita Avenue.’ Lowering yourself in on the driver’s side, the seat leather in your borrowed Volvo is already warm. We are in the arena of the general meeting – a day ‘to get your face out there’, and no more. Optimism doesn’t enter into this scenario. For this, your focus must rest on the practicalities; the journey is the destination. At the end of Perlita Ave you can see the freeways already teeming, and the worry of being late or getting lost has begun tugging at your subconscious. But! Look at the palm trees! Also, the guy out of his gourd on crystal meth on Hyperion Avenue, gyrating, shoeless, in a tutu!

This morning, Waze lady on Waze is talking to you, by nine ‘Morning Becomes Eclectic’ is playing sweet music, you’re less than two blocks away and you’re almost relaxed! Oh, that’s fatal. You see, you could be on the block where the building is, but where do you park? More often than not, these companies have private parking, usually in a parking ‘structure’ adjacent to the building you’re meeting in, and if you’re lucky your GPS will bring you to the ‘structure’. Not this place. In the email last night, someone mentioned a ‘structure’ for this place but which ‘structure’ is it? Right now, there are three ‘structures’ in view. Is it that hulking grey monstrosity over there? Nope, and it’s not the one behind you either, and the other ‘structure’ is at the far end of a one-way street, so you round the block and drive up the ramp, where a Salvadorian valet dolefully explains to you that this ‘structure’ is connected to a hotel, and to park here as a non-resident member of the public costs 15 dollars an hour.

Who are you looking for, he asks? ‘RazorBun!’, you shriek. Or LightHammer, or CineWand, or RogueMonkeys, or any of the portmanteau names trading hypothetical scenarios that might or might not ever become film treatments, let alone scripts for films. ‘RazorBun’, the valet repeats, stroking his moustache, while behind him, the clock drips past 9.05. Now, trapped in a spin cycle of sweating, apologizing, reversing and texting, you reverse blind back into the street, and a Maserati driver leans on the horn, swerving to avoid you. ‘I see you, I see you!’, you lie to yourself, sweat beading on your forehead as you locate the correct ‘structure’ and park. In this meeting, nothing is at stake, but we are who we are, and being late sends out a message that, at this juncture, you’re not inclined to stand over. At 9.08 you learn that the elevator is broken so you run, your shirt dampening visibly and now, you’re the doomed, perspiring loser of a Coen Brothers farce. Are you inclined to stand over that message?

The 9 o’clock meeting goes well – a little too well, actually. Buddhists might want to stop reading here, but you have sat in conference rooms discussing promising, non-hypothetical projects, and while that actual real concrete project was being discussed in that very room, your mind has become entirely occupied with the logistics involved in getting to the next meeting. At this 9 o’clock, they had this idea for which you were briefly perfect, and not until your validated parking ticket released you from the ‘structure’ and back on the road, did you realize that perhaps that might have been something real, something worth talking about a little longer. Too late now. Now, because the 9 o’clock ran over by ten minutes, Waze Lady says you have twenty minutes to get north of Sunset and over into the valley. Late, late again.

Yes, late, but you must NEVER panic. An enjoyable pilot season tradition involves listening to non-driving European actors and writers explaining to each other, ashen-faced, nursing drinks, how they accidentally drove up a freeway on-ramp by mistake and then, seeing that they were about to merge onto the twelve-lane 405 North, attempting to reverse back down onto the safety of the surface roads. You must never panic, even though now, you’re in the Valley, circumnavigating the high-walled Warner Brothers studio lot and regretting your confidence the night before. Warners, I’ve been to Warners, you thought, eating your toasted cheese sandwich. In the agency email confirming the meetings it definitely told you where the building was, but Warners is a big studio with many, many gates, and security guards on each. Is your building on the North or the South side? Gate four? Gate eight? Again, you’re late, so in a moment of weakness you turn on data roaming. Bang. That’s 40 euro right away and now your phone is updating Shazam on your dime! That’s 80 euro. NOOOO! But at least the email confirms – as you pass it – that yes, it’s Gate 6. You bust an illegal U-turn, safety be damned, narrowly avoiding another honking Maserati. ‘I see you, I see you!’, you lie once more.

The security guard at Gate 6 needs I.D. to let you enter. Do you have I.D.? Incredibly, you do, somewhere ... finally, you gain ingress, parking where he told you, but the guard must have thought you meant Stage 8. Actually, you meant Building 8 and not Stage 8, and stages are not buildings, and he has directed you to the wrong side of the studio. But you parked up and you’re late so now, instead of driving, you’re running, sweating, clutching phone, studio map and validation, sprinting past the golf carts full of gawping tourists, past set builders, past union guys wearing ‘Ellen’ t-shirts, past key grips devouring breakfast burritos. There’s Salma Hayek! Who the fuck cares ...

After the meeting you’re dumped back into the searing heat, parched and confused. ‘What just happened?’ you think, echoing the historical response to film meetings, as you drive. Nothing, is the answer. Nothing happened. Many of these projects won’t ever exist; many execs are real-life versions of those fictional Nigerian princes and at this meeting, without your realizing it a sliver of your soul was extracted in a non-invasive procedure known as the General Meeting. Now, the Waze lady is bleating about a traffic accident, helicopters whir overhead, and the euphoria of having heard, once again, how perfect you were, briefly, for another job drains away, seeping through the floor of the car and onto the asphalt of the road, co-mingling with the hope of everyone else who heard those very words in this very town on this very hour yesterday. Drive carefully.

The 1 o’clock goes fine and you didn’t need validation, but the 3 o’clock most assuredly will not, because you’re late. You nearly crash into a Maserati on the way but you make it on time, only for the first assistant to come out and apologise. His boss is running late. Can he get you anything? Water? Yes, water, but more importantly the wi-fi code – in this desert, that’s all that’s ever needed. In the lobby of GlassWand Productions, you cool down and everything is beginning to feel normal when the second assistant comes out to tell you that his boss is going to be another ten minutes. And that’s fine, you think, until you realize that the ten and twenty-minute delays are racking up and you have to be in Venice for three ...

Finally, the Senior VP at GlassWand Productions and you get sitting together.

‘I did not see your movie, but I hear it’s fantastic.’ A beam.

‘Thank you. That’s always nice to hear.’ A tight smile.

‘You know actually I saw ... most of it. Pretty much all of it. Great job! How’s your trip?’

‘Oh, super relaxing, thank you!’

The Senior VP of GlassWand mightn’t have given it, exactly, but the receptionist out front does validate you and now you’re on your way to Venice. When you get there, the fuel gauge is on empty because you’ve driven 80 miles today, but there just isn’t time to get gas because now you’re cruising the streets looking for parking, because the agency email informed you that there is no ‘structure’ at your 4 – but over on the Westside parking is a goddamn nightmare. In L.A., in addition to double-yellow, tickets are given for street cleaning, tickets for parking on a slope without turning in your wheels (earthquake) and tickets for facing the wrong way.

The four goes fine, you were perfect for something they have, and even better than that, it was a short meeting, so you’re beating the traffic heading west. By the time you’ve blended back onto the 10, to the 110 to the 101 to Wilshire, you realize that is your last day in town. This evening, there’s a 7, a screening of a film at your Beverly Hills talent agency. The film stars a big comedian and played to rapturous response at Sundance, and still hasn’t found a buyer. It’s one of a million indie dramedies trying to punch through the noise in this city of quartz. Everyone is looking for the same thing, and no one is naïve enough to think that these meetings represent progress, but what is the alternative? You turn on the radio and crack the window as the sun sets. Now, the smell of blooming jasmine fills the night air and Steely Dan plays on KCRW.

The film is a little slight, but good. After that day, it is nice to sit in a dark, cool room and watch a real, tangible example of the fictional product we’re all trying to make, buy and sell. When the credits roll, one hundred people clap, fire up phones, leave. There is no sale for this film. It will never see the light of day. It is hard. You have to like driving. You have to like the journey – the blending on-and-off of freeways. The challenge of getting there, rather than what happens at the destination, because nothing happens there, because the destination doesn’t exist. Outside the screening room, you’re standing behind the comedian who starred in the film as she and you wait at the back of a line looking to get their parking tickets stamped. After ten minutes, she reaches the top, hands her ticket to a Latino man in a windbreaker. He smiles, stamps it and hands it back to her. ‘Validation’, he says, his hand out. ‘Everybody looking for validation.’ You smile and nod and hand your ticket over. Validation? Yes please.