Synopsis

A restless nighttime drive through Los Angeles supplies the video's central imagery. Freeway lanes, city lights, streets, and fragments of urban life pass by in a disjointed visual flow, matching Mike Doughty's spoken-word portrait of Hollywood ambition and late-night radio. The band appears within the collage rather than presenting a straightforward performance narrative. As the journey continues toward Reseda and the imagined promise of screenwriting success, the video captures Los Angeles as both seductive dream and exhausted, surreal machine.

Factoids & Trivia

• The video was released in 1995, following the song's appearance on Soul Coughing's 1994 debut album, "Ruby Vroom."

• "Screenwriter's Blues" was written while Mike Doughty was considering a move to Los Angeles and thinking about pursuing screenwriting. The song's narrator is therefore closely connected to Doughty's own ambitions at the time.

• The track became one of the band's most distinctive early pieces, built around Doughty's spoken, stream-of-consciousness delivery rather than a conventional sung lyric.

• The song's musical foundation began with a keyboard loop. Mark Degli Antoni's sampled orchestral horns became one of its defining sounds.

• The video's freeway and nighttime Los Angeles imagery reflects the song's recurring emphasis on driving, radio, Hollywood studios, and the city's promise of reinvention.

• The video is associated with Jim McKay, who also worked in independent film and television.