The silent treatment

I was riding on the bus yesterday when one of my classmates took up the seat next to me. I don't know him too well personally, but we made small talk about our screenwriting course and then out of the blue he triggered a memory I had almost let slip away.

So you got any film internships goin' on or anything?

It's not a weird thing to be asked by any means, but in that moment I realized my brain had suppressed the only experience I had with that evil word.

Last summer I applied for the whole enchilada. Disney, Warner Bros, Viacom, Paramount, Universal, any production internship that I qualified for. After no word for a few months, I was blown away when my phone read "Burbank, CA" and it turned out to be the internship coordinator for MTV. Salvation! She liked my resume, gave me a quick phone interview, and left me with a promise that the production department I applied to would give me a call with all the details in a week or two. Congrats.

Guess what? No phone call. If there ever were a time in my life where I had really gotten my hopes up, this was it. I gave a nudge phone call here, a nudge email there. ANOTHER nudge phone call. Nothing.

I suppose, in a way, I'm thankful to have learned this lesson quick and dirty, just to get it over with. That's the big fat "NO" stamp in Hollywood and it sucks. I still get lectured about it now in my seminar. Unless someone hands you a check for your script, you've got nothing but a pat on the back. They'll never tell you no, but they will kill you with encouragement.

My classmate on the bus thought it was worth something to get a call in the first place, and I have to agree. Even their acknowledgment felt like an affirmation that I must be doing something right. The experience bummed me out at the time, but I learned to just be cool. Let it go. It's the first and surely not the last time I'll be given the silent treatment.

Dinner with parents

I turned 22 last week *shivers*

So my parents roll into town and take me out to a classy dinner and, just like every birthday of my college career, they assault me with the barrage of questions I always hate to be asked.

What's your plan? Where are you gonna live? Do you have a job lined up?

FUCK. They're on to me... You mean I can't continue to just live off of your own dwindling savings and sweep my $120,000 student loans under the rug? Rats.

It's such an awful situation. What do I say when I have no real answers? I simply told them the truth, but I told it in a way that sounded like I might have thought about this once or twice. Anything to combat their doubt and salvage their morale.

Yeah, um, I want to move to LA. I want to get any job that will feed and house me so I can write screenplays... I'd like to land a production assistant job, but it'll be close to impossible and everyone else will be doing the same thing. I don't really know what's going to happen.

Imagine! You're a parent who will be in debt until you kick the bucket. Your kid is graduating with an arts degree and is condemned to wait tables for all eternity. This is exactly what you want to hear, right?

Not surprisingly, the spirit of our dinner declined severely when I hinted at the realities of the situation. There is no job or internship and, although I'm scouring the earth, I doubt there will be one when I graduate. I will need A LOT more money from them no matter what. Even if something miraculously pops up, nothing happens overnight and getting set up in a new city will be anything but cheap.

Honestly, I'm working my ass off trying to figure things out. I'm desperate, and have been since day one. Once June comes around it won't come down to effort, it'll be luck.

I think it's time for some dessert, you guys look like you need it.

Life isn't a movie, but it's not far off

I started writing this post as a big grumpy list of complaints, dreaded tasks and reasons for why I haven't come up with anything new to blog about lately. After reading it over however, something changed. My shitty mood flipped, I deleted the entire thing, and then thought about how stupid I was for considering such a lame attempt at communicating with the outside world.

On the one hand, yes, I am stressed. I am burnt out. I am in deep water, just like everybody else around me. This isn't anything new and nobody wants to hear it.
On the other hand, one thought keeps me afloat. One idea keeps me from breaking down, giving up, and spiraling into the gutter.

I'm not exactly where I want to be, but in my eyes, I'm doing what I need to get there.

I feel lucky to be so busy right now -- to have my plate so full that I can't even begin to hope for an end. I read so many blogs posted by miserable people with a career I'd kill for, but not much else to say besides "poor me..."

See, a funny thing happened when I started to study storytelling in film. For lack of a better word, it's almost become a religion for me; something to live my life by. I honestly feel like an absolute moron for not understanding this up until now, but the films I've watched, the games I've played, the books I've read, they're not about people sitting on their asses talking about whatever floats through their little heads. Stories are about people who do things. THEY ACT.

This is rule numero uno. It's drilled into my head every week by my professor. Screenwriting is built upon characters who do things. You can't see them think on screen. That's where books come in. We aren't entertained by heaps of dialogue. That's where plays come in. I study film and all I care about is what people do!

Naturally, my new interest has rubbed off on me more that I had ever expected. I think about this so much that, like I said before, it's transformed into a religious belief. A lifestyle. It has transformed me into a proactive human being.

If you want one take away, one thing to know about who I am now, know this: I don't just talk about things, I go out in the world and I do them.

Telling stories in film is how I learned to live this way. For my entire life I've watched people do things on screen and for the most part saw it as mere entertainment. Now, just into my twenties, I get that it's way more than that. By writing about characters who must work extremely hard to get what they desperately want, even when faced with every imaginable obstacle, I get inspired to do the same.

If I don't set to work hard for what I want, no one will care, nothing will be gained, and it won't mean anything at all. Since I apparently missed the boat on Sartre's nutty brainchild back in the day (freshman year seems so far away...), I'm grateful for only just now grasping the importance of creating and doing. I'm totally there. A person is defined by their actions.

It's weird how I started thinking about this post as an excuse to complain about being overworked and how I'm starting to get nagged by school about applying for graduation and commencement, and how I have to finish my screenplay in five weeks. Oh, and finishing all the books I'm assigned or forcing myself to read. Look I even took a picture of the stack. There's more but it would have fallen over...

Poor me... Boo hoo

Yet here I am, realizing how great it feels to be up to my neck in work. To be a human producing something, anything. I am busy pursuing a goal, trying a hell of a lot of new things, and making sure that if I die tomorrow, my story will be about a guy who did exactly what he wanted.

Today's Secret Word is Rewrite

Pee-wee: You all remember what to do whenever anybody says the secret word right? 
All: Scream! 
Pee-wee: That's right. For the rest of the day, whenever anybody says the secret word, scream real loud. Ready? Let's try it. 

AHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

I spent the majority of last week cranking out a hefty stack of pages for the new script I'm working on. Loglines, premises, in-depth character bios, and a lengthy treatment. These are all things we're taught to do before the screenplay itself is even started, with the idea being that once you figure out the plot, what you're personal stance is on the topic, and who the characters are, writing the screenplay is just a matter of letting these carefully planned out ideas come together in the most interesting and entertaining way possible.

 I'm proud to say that I went to town on these bad boys. I was expecting it to be a chore, but was pleasantly surprised that in some mysterious way not only had I met the weekly page requirement, I had doubled it.

Working deep into the night all week was totally satisfying. I honestly didn't mind finally tucking into bed at 4:30am because I had just brain vomited out a long first draft of my treatment. It might not have been good, but the mere act of getting it done felt like much needed mental therapy.

I know, I should have expected it. It was almost too easy. It was a lesson I had already learned, but was the farthest thing from my mind after running the gauntlet... Ben, these characters are fantastic and totally work, but this treatment is no good -- throw it out. Rewrite.

AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

I'm not mad, really. This word of the day, whether I like it or not, will prove to be the word of my life. It's a lesson I am thankful to be reminded of over and over because it is simply an undeniable truth. I really love those...

To rewrite (AHHHHHH!) is to improve. I used to take it personally and get pissed when I first started out doing this and the professor would tell me that something wasn't working, try again. Even if I don't like to admit it, this took a while to sink in. You don't just sit down, flip the on switch, and let pure gold flow from your fingertips.

I know that now. This time around it's no longer a hard pill to swallow. I have no beef with throwing out a stack of pages. In fact I'm confident they will soon be joined by even more work that I poured my heart into and lost sleep over. It's nothing personal and doing it will make me better.

It's okay. The earth still spins, and even twenty, thirty years from now, I will still rewrite.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

Better late than never

I now talk out loud to myself more than I ever have in my entire life. Am I going crazy? Am I simply beginning to like the sound of my own voice? Why has this only now started happening as I bid farewell to my 21st year?

Well, yes Ben, you just might be a little crazy, but go with it. It's a good market. As for the sound of your voice... Naaah, you kind of missed the mark on that one.

I remember being consistently frustrated as a kid in school when confronted with a writing assignment. Even now in college I hear teachers chanting the same advice we've all been told for years. "You must develop your own voice," they say. Oh yeah, let me just do that! I never understood where I could get one of those, or if there was some instruction manual that I could go pick up. I guess I just didn't care much to find out then. "It will come with time" is the only guidance we were given for this. Maybe I wasn't listening hard enough, or more likely I didn't want to accept the truth.

The truth.

It's no secret that the key is simply writing more and more -- forever. There's only one rule and that's it. An obvious concept, but my laziness kept prodding me away from it.

Well, here I am. The hesitancy and perhaps repulsion towards writing that I have maintained in all of my glorious years as a generic white kid in the suburbs of Napa California is slowly dissolving out of my brain. I don't know why it took so long, but I feel it beginning to happen. I feel a desire to have an opinion, personal taste, to participate in a dialogue, and to fucking argue like my life depends on it. I guess that's what they try to condition you to do in college, but only now is it really starting to stick and sink in. Better late than never.

A piece of wisdom that is becoming more self-evident as the days pass: nothing comes out, unless something goes in.

About 20 minutes ago I finished Breakfast of Champions and it kind of just rocked my world in a good way. I desperately needed it. Vonnegut's writing style applies directly to the type of dramatic thinking I am trying to do myself. It really does go hand in hand with developing a screenplay and I learned a lot from him. Thank you kind sir.

And with that, I hope each new book or screenplay or movie that I slip into my noggin will somehow make something click. With more stuff going in, something has to come out, right? It's quite sad really, I don't actually accomplish much unless I physically write it down as a task to be checked off on a certain day. I've literally scheduled myself two screenplays to read every week to make sure enough is going in without making excuses of being too busy or well, lazy.

I think I'm crazy, but I also want to be good. Maybe these two truths have more in common than I suspected. I'll have to talk it over with... myself.

My first screenplay...

I survived the holidays, mostly by being a hermit and reading my new favorite book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. Now moving onto Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. I also ate a delicious cake shaped like a log, so festive...

Earlier this month I completed an introduction screenwriting class where I wrote a 24 page screenplay for a short film. It was this class that I hoped would help me work on the big problem I was having  of not being able to tell a story (see my previous post), and I was totally right. In fact, writing the thing and dedicating all of my energy to learning as much as I could about the process itself has changed me for the better.

I started out thinking that I would just try screenwriting to gain a little story telling experience, but what I learned is that this isn't just a craft that I want to dip my toes into. While in the midst of writing it, something unexpected happened that I've never encountered before. I simply lost myself in a world of my own. The characters I had created had grown into something more than the pages of their bio. I could suddenly hear their voices and thoughts in reaction to an obstacle that I had given them. I could imagine a place that I had never been before and yet give it plenty of life and a purpose. My imagination and the ever elusive writing muscle that I had been so desperate to exercise had both gotten a rigorous work out.

I've always struggled to find a medium that I feel comfortable expressing myself in, but something clicked after writing these meager 24 pages. Now nobody is saying they're very good pages, but they're mine and something I feel proud of. When I finished it, and boy did it feel good, I knew that I should probably pay attention. Here was an opportunity to start something new in life. I knew from making short films in school that I think visually, but it never really occurred to me to direct that effort into writing visually. It was definitely something I had to be taught how to do. In a sense, I had learned more in this class than I had in the majority of my other film courses.

I want to keep going with it and see where it will take me. This winter I'll be starting my first feature and I see it as a wonderful opportunity. I'm in the mode now where I'm starting out and simply creating a stack of work. Screenwriters generally don't even sell a feature script until they already have 15-20 sitting on a shelf already, and I think at this point in time that is exactly what I intend to do. They might never see the light of day, but it's practice and something that I want to work towards. I want to make something that I can be proud of, and if I can make even a cent for it, well I'll consider that a win.

Rather than have you vaguely attempt to relate to what the hell I'm referencing, I'll simply attach my screenplay to read. Keep in mind that I've never done this before, but that's kind of why it's fun. I don't want to be shy about it, the more feedback I can get as I move forward the better.

Welcome to Earth

On to the next one!

To study film, sort of.

A funny thing happens when a desperate college student plays a little game called "Go down the entire list of majors and pick one, or die." Suddenly you insert yourself into weird fantasies and scenarios previously thought to be out of the question. Traveling down the list one by one, I think to myself "How can I embarrass my parents the most and spend a lot of borrowed money doing it?" I pass over "Film and Digital Media" and then it hits me. Wait a second... can I actually just sit there all day and watch movies... for college?!

To most people I just say yes, it's pretty sweet blah,blah,blah. But beneath the surface of it, my experience with studying film at the university level in California has left me with mixed feelings.

As an undergrad, at least at my school, you get about two or three options with this discipline. The first is obviously production, you're making actual films for class. The second is critical studies, you read, write, and probably even teach some other students film theory. The third is more focused on digital media, mixed mediums, web design, etc. Now, I'm coming out of this thing with all my energy put into the production side and about 3 years in I start to notice a big problem.

Everyone starts off in the same boat learning the language of film. Cuts, tracking shots, lighting, editing, every filmic technique -- mostly through example. It's true, I did in fact sit there for years doing exactly what I pictured, which was watching film after film and then getting lectured about it. Now this is all fine and dandy, but it was also a problem for me because we were being taught how a story is told in film without being taught how to tell a story period. This might sound like a stupid complaint, really, who the hell doesn't know how to tell a story?

The thing is, after watching plenty of student films that we made for class over the years, most people couldn't convey much to an audience aside from the fact that it took them all night to get the title cards just right... We all knew how to work a camera, we were raised with them, but what frustrated the hell out of me was that dramatic storytelling, screenwriting, even three-act structure was just not a halmark of my education. Right away I learned technique from Hitchcock and theory from Eisenstein, but actually telling the story and in an interesting way was the farthest thing from my mind.

I feel like I've only reacted naturally in response to this backwards strategy of teaching film. I got sick of not knowing how to write. Why doesn't my short film about a dude who listens to a vinyl record and dreams about being a criminal getting judged by a demon while he's actually a police officer who just broke up with his girlfriend make any fucking sense? At least partly because I didn't think to take the only screenwriting class offered until my senior year. I'm going to be mentioning it in more posts in the future, but for now let's say that taking that class has to be the best decision I've made in years. It's also what sparked the idea for this post in the first place, because every day I thought "Why is this not mandatory for all beginning film students?!" Now I know how to develop characters, premises, obstacles, a setup and punchline... be it a little late in the game.

I think my perspective has drastically changed and in a good way. Of course I still want to work in production, but I've also jumped on the writing train and it's opened up a lot of new ideas for me. I'm reading more than ever, studying screenplays, and working on a voice for myself. It's the only logical path to take for fixing the problem that I had earlier where I couldn't make coherent films. I simply want to get the writing down solid.

Don't get me wrong, I've had a blast studying film over the past 4 years and, to be honest, I might have dropped out to do something else had I not come upon it. Shooting bloody fight scenes, emotional breaking points, twisted fantasies, and everything in between is something that not many students get to do for their assignments and I feel lucky for the opportunity at such an exciting education. Now I'll be writing a feature film for my senior exit instead of the usual senior short film, and will hopefully hone the skill to get somewhere with it in the real world...


(licks his peppermint Haagen-Dazs ice cream bar)

Mmm. I'm home in Napa for the holidays. It's time to freeload for a few weeks and catch up on my, uhm, more ice cream? I think yes.

Favorite Christmas movie? No question, I'm in front of that 24-hour marathon every year!

Also considering using Django Unchained as an excuse to escape the impending family living room get together. Last year was actually the first time I was driven to do such a thing and I snuck out for Tintin in 3D. Yes, I will pay good money to get the hell out of that nightmare and no, I don't feel any remorse. Ho ho ho!