No One Like Me



Notes from the WALK

Is mine a singular genius? Is this idea I have as miraculous as it seems? These thoughts course through my brain as my feet lead me home. 

It is a movie idea; one I’ve had for years. The opening scene has been scripted and plotted since day one. It was the seed; germinated but somehow not sprouted. It rests in outline form in one of three notebooks I keep for such things. God, I hope I can find it.

I birthed the climactic scene about six months ago. It is still in my head, fully realized, if not documented. I feel I could pour it onto a page at a moment’s notice, if need be. Need, in this case, is apparently a producer making such a demand? Perhaps it is time to redefine need. 

Until now, the rest of the movie hasn’t existed. Actually, it has existed in the sense that I’ve always known there was a whole movie there. It’s just that I had only two scenes in mind. Sometimes that’s all you need. A beginning and an end.

But today, on the WALK, the rest of the movie took shape. I now know what has to happen; how to get from beginning to end. I know what it’s about, what’s at stake. Scenes take shape. Characters emerge. This is the most exciting part of the creative process, as far as I know. 

Suddenly, I’m scouting locations in my mind. I’m contemplating shooting schedules. We could do the location work in the City in two weeks with maybe four days of second unit. Then we could do all the interiors on set in LA. Yeah. That’ll keep the budget down. By the time I emerge from under the bay tree canopy, this baby will be in the can.

Except it won’t. 

I’ve had this idea for three years. 36 months to work on it. 156 weeks to polish the script. 1095 days to raise money. All wasted. 26,280 hours have come and gone since the idea struck me and even after today’s breakthrough that is all it is. An idea. 

Is mine a unique brand of self-delusion? What if underachievement is my superpower? These thoughts weigh on my mind as I arrive home. 

Wow. That was quick.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

If I Told Me I Wouldn’t Believe Me

When I was a freshman in college, I took a class that covered, among other things, the way human beings measure the passing of time. One method, which in my dimmed memory was called something like “astronomical time” or “real time,” referred to measures of time that are rooted in celestial events. For example, a day is a day because that’s how long it takes the earth to revolve on its axis one time. A year is a year because that’s how long it takes the earth to travel its orbit around the sun. Long before there were people, there were days and years. Some things happen whether or not we’re paying attention. There is another kind of time. I wish I could remember what the professor called it. Human time? Invented time? These are the measures of time that humans create. Epochs and eras, ages and empires, months and hours. Perhaps they are not quite arbitrary, but they are most certainly invented. We think that a year has to have 12 months, but it doesn’t. A day could just as easily b
Read more

The Yearbook

There are many things to say about my middle school. So many factoids, experiential leavings, tragicomic anecdotes. Like my math teacher, the deaf World War II veteran who made us write lines when he saw our lips moving. Or the English teacher who sent me to the vice-principal’s office for publicly correcting her spelling of “greatful.” Or the rampaging flocks of seagulls that laid siege to the yard during lunchtime (we had no cafeteria), stealing sandwiches from unguarded six graders and shit bombing a student or two per day. The school was located across the street from a sewage treatment plant. We once had to evacuate because of a chlorine gas leak. It was designed by the same architect who designed San Quentin. The dark tinted windows allowed us to see out, but no one could see in. My town was a progressive one, even more so in the mid 1980s. Yet I somehow recollect that the majority of our black classmates were in the same homeroom, assigned to a husband-and-wife teach
Read more

The Sibling Bucket

Notes from today’s HIKE… We’d been hiking for 90 minutes when the counting started. “One, two, three, four…” My five year-old son began verbally marking each of the steps required to get home. He was tired. I didn’t blame him. The HIKE (as the WALK is known when kids are involved) can be stretched to several miles. There’s a lot of up and down, especially when your legs are the length of a stick of salami, and not quite as muscular. As kids go, mine hike better than most, particularly if they don’t realize they’re hiking. I tend to say things like Let’s go look for banana slugs in the woods or Want to go find a good tree to climb? I don’t think of this as lying. It’s more like clever packaging. By the time they realize they’re exhausted, we’re an hour away from home and they’ve got no choice but to hike back. I am either building their stamina or teaching them not to be so trusting. Either way, a win-win in my book. Unlike her brother, the eight year-old fancies herself
Read more