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Partners, or: SHUT THE FUCK UP, OWEN!

Film school is all about teamwork.

Sometimes, this is a simple truth. In production classes, if the students don’t bond together there and help each other out as much as humanly possible, everybody’s film will fall apart. If I hadn’t gotten some editing advice from somebody who was, you know, competent, neither of the films I made in Production II would have worked at all. (It could be argued that they still don’t, but they’re much better than they could have been.) Conversely, if I hadn’t been there to help Gina in Kenosha, she never would have gotten any of those shots done. Or maybe I’m giving myself too much credit…

Sometimes, the idea of “teamwork” is more metaphysical. It’s more like we, as a whole, are a team, so be nice to everyone. If you don’t, it’ll probably bite you in the ass down the road. Two oft-repeated mantras around film school are “L.A. is a small town” and “Don’t burn any bridges.” It’s especially bad, in the grand scheme, if you’re burning bridges and making enemies before you’re even in L.A. or in some power position wherein burning a bridge actually means something. This (along with my physical unattractiveness, unpleasant disposition, and general fatitude) is exactly why I don’t date film students.

Most times, though, teamwork is something thrust on us. We are (unwillingly) divided into groups for no particular reason, except that the professors all believe (rightly, in most cases, although it stands to reason that teaming random strangers can sometimes be less productive than teaming people who get along well) that if we are forced into a team now, it’ll greatly benefit us down the road. You can learn, through forced teamwork, to peacefully coexist with people you’d ordinarily stab in the face.

I don’t dislike group work. For all my misanthropic puffery, I’m actually not aversed to meeting new people. Granted, I’m uncomfortable and awkward, but I’m fine once I get used to them (although that usually takes weeks and an obscene amount of caffeine). But still, I feel it’s always nice to know as many people as humanly possible, and to make sure they all owe you money for one reason or another. Although, given the choice, I’d probably end up doing all my group work with people I already know. I suppose that’s why so few professors give us the choice…

When our professor announced yesterday that we’d be getting into a group to do a really basic task, I was sort of frustrated at the simplicity, but then I thought that we’d get done quickly enough that I could shoot the shit. Plus, I know most of the people in my class, so I’d have my pick of the litter.

Then, she said, “I’ll assign you partners later,” and somehow I knew I’d end up with one of the three people I don’t know at all, and the only one of the three that I have absolutely no interest in ever knowing at all.

I knew I’d end up with Owen.

I have no idea how I knew, but I knew.

When the time came, and our professor had finally gotten Owen to stop talking about his various hilarious theories about the screenplay we were discussing for the week (The Manchurian Candidate), we were assigned in groups. Our professor did a quick head-count, realized we had an uneven amount of students, and decided we’d need one threesome. Meanwhile, I was thinking, “Pleasenotowenpleasenotowenpleasenot —”

“Stan, why don’t you get into a group with, um, Owen?” she asked, then added, “And Kim. That’ll be our threesome.”

I didn’t react at all. I was frozen with both rage and, to some degree, fear. Fear of actually having to talk to him, or maybe of talking to him and discovering I actually like him.

But I didn’t even need to react. My old friend Fellow is in this class (one of three we share this semester), and he reacted for me with the heaviest and loudest sigh imaginable. Owen looked right at me, saw I wasn’t the culprit, and then seemed to get confused. I found that hilarious.

Having Kim, who I also didn’t know, in the group was a slight reprieve, yes, but the completely phony theatricality of that planned “um” made me want to jump across the table and strangle my professor. She knew from the moment she said she’d be assigning partners that she was gonna put me with Owen, and I knew she had to die as a result.

The task at hand was simple: choose one of the characters in the screenplay and do a brief sketch. Not particularly difficult, since it’s a damn good script and all of the characters are pretty fully developed, but that didn’t stop Owen from ruining my life.

“Would either of you two object to the idea that Mrs. Iselin murdered Raymond’s father?” was the first thing Owen said when the group was situated. Then he laughed the laugh with which I have become disturbingly familiar. They say people in wars can often still hear bullets flying, bombs exploding, people screaming, years after the war is over.

I know that when I’m in my 80s, retired and in seclusion somewhere in Switzerland, I will still hear that shrill, obnoxious laugh. It won’t leave me. Ever.

That’s not to say his idea was bad; actually, as I read the screenplay, I kept wondering what happened to Raymond’s father — what did Mrs. Iselin do to him? It’s just the way he presents everything, with this air of pomposity, as if to say, “Man, nobody else could have thought of an idea this clever,” when, in fact, anybody with a tiny bit of common sense would be wondering or inferring that exact idea.

And that piercing, arrogant laugh, like he’s some sort of mad genius, cackling away at his inventiveness, when nothing he said was remotely inventive or clever.

Ordinarily, when Owen pitches his ideas, what he gets in response are murmured, bemused agreements. Nobody ever cares about what he says, but they want him to shut up, so they’ll immediately agree with anything he suggests. Why? Because if you don’t, you face the consequences. Such as him screaming at you. For weeks. About things nobody cares about, including the person who disagreed.

I tried a different method. I’ve already accepted him as my arch-nemesis for life, but that doesn’t mean he has to know it. If I not only blindly support his ambitions but also fill him with unadulterated, unrealistic praise, it’ll be all the more crushing when he inevitably is stomped down by people with actual power. At least, that’s the way I see things.

So, instead of just murmuring, “Yeah, Owen, whatever,” I took that basic rote and built on it. I said, “That’s a good idea. Very Hamlet,” which sort brought it back to something he had said earlier, about Raymond Shaw being a sort of “tragic hero” (of course, it took him 78 minutes to say that). Plus, it compared him to Shakespeare, and not just to Shakespeare, but to arguably the greatest play (if not greatest written work) in the English language.

He looked at me with this glaze-eyed sort of “Whatever, man,” look, and then went on with another of his ideas. This sort of amused me, since he seemed to not have any real idea what the hell I was talking about, which indicates that he hasn’t read what is arguably the greatest dramatic work in the history of the English language (and, basically, required reading for anyone pretending to be a screenwriter, or a writer in general).

I got sort of tired of him after that. He has a tendency to pontificate loudly and at length, cutting off everybody. It’s funny, because Lucy called me the other day, utterly distraught over the fact that one of her friends had mocked Lucy’s self-absorbed tendencies by saying, “You know, it’s called a conversation, not a monologue,” but I personally think that, while it’s very difficult to quiet Lucy at times, the statement is more applicable to Owen. I mean, at least when Lucy lets you get a word in edgewise, she listens to what you’re saying (I swear, she does).

But Owen will go on and on, talking about nothing, and then when you try to comment on what he’s saying, he’ll cut you off and keep talking. It seems like he does this mostly because (1) nearly everything he says has nothing to do with the discussion at hand, so most of the responses will either call him on his bullshit and/or redirect the conversation toward the topic, and (2) generally people disagree with his loudly stated opinions. Of course, most don’t disagree with him aloud because, as I’ve said, he’s not worth the effort, but I believe he knows that people do disagree with him, so he silences any potential naysayers by just not letting anybody else speak.

And that really brings me to the thing that makes me want to destroy him. We pay a lot of money for classes, and it’s really irritating to have them monopolized by one guy who doesn’t even have anything interesting or on-topic to say. But yet he talks anyway. Endlessly. And we don’t get to a lot of what’s on the syllabus, and I think a lot of that has to do with Owen.

When we divided into groups, nearly everybody had very full character sketches, but ours was scanty because Kim and I were huddled together under a blanket of apathy, but Owen just kept going on and on and on and on about how hilarious Raymond Shaw’s childhood must have been with a mother like Mrs. Iselin. Even when we were way beyond the childhood/home life/parents stuff, he kept going back to that again and again and again.

Why did he keep doing that? I don’t know. He seems obscenely preoccupied with the idea that childhood ruins human beings, which I guess is true to some degree, but my general thought is GET OVER IT. You can’t leap into a time machine and fix you rotten childhood, and even if you did, who’s to say you’d be better off for it? I really think that if I had the Sam Beckett-esque ability to fix bad things in the past, I’d be a lot worse off and more maladjusted than I already am (which, honestly, is saying a lot). Hell, I’d probably beat out Owen on the irritating scale.

Your life is what it is, and your past is what it was. If something adversely affected you as a child, the only thing that can really be done about it now is to be cognizant of it and what it’s done to you, and try to change yourself now (if that’s what you think is needed). Whining about it doesn’t help anybody; it’s just really irritating. Unless it’s me whining about The Ex, which many people find hilarious.

Although I actually have this theory, which is part of what bugs me so much about Owen (even though others are much more whiny about particular events in their life), that, barring any sort of really horrible stuff (like sexual/physical abuse or being some sort of crack baby or something), nobody’s childhood was really uniquely horrible. Of all the people I’ve talked to about childhood, and a lot of people seem to think theirs was a terror unlike any others, they all seem to be universally shitty. But that’s sort of what it’s all about; if you don’t learn to accept your shitty upbringing, everybody will end up like Owen at some point or another.

Of course, I’m no sociologist or psychologist, but it’s just one of those things I’ve noticed in talking to people or reading things they’ve written (it seems a lot of screenwriters really feel that stories about bad childhoods are completely original).

Anyway, as far as actual, lengthy diatribes Owen has launched in on, he spent much of our class time talking about the following (other than the whole Raymond-Mrs. Iselin comedy, which I already mentioned):

• A new, more modern brainwashing technique that he concocted after reading The Manchurian Candidate (during a discussion of actual conspiracy and paranoia sightings we’ve witnessed, such as seeing people taking part in what you really believe is a drug deal; off-topic much?)
• How timely The Manchurian Candidate is, despite being written forty years ago (he went on and on and on about this, and while he’s correct, everything he suggested for “modernization” was literally aped from the actual, new update that’s being worked on right now, which the class discussed the night before in our Chicago screenwriter class)
• How Axelrod wrote the script more like a novel than a screenplay (which was both refreshing to read and was a refreshingly on-topic comment, although when he cited a specific example, it was passages of really clichéd dialogue, and not at all from the copy block; I still have no idea why he did that)

And that’s not all, but I’m sort of drawing a blank as to the rest of it. At several points, the professor actually would ask questions and say things like, “Okay, Owen, give somebody else a chance to speak.” Because it’s not like we’re all aversed to class participation — we just don’t get the chance, because Owen asks like every question is directed at him alone. And when others talk and actually say something insightful, he just sits over there in his corner, seething. I don’t know what he’s thinking, but he has such a look of rage and inferiority on his face, it could only be, “These fucking idiots know nothing” or “Goddammit, why didn’t I think of that?”

In summary, he drives me fucking nuts, and I will kill myself if we end up paired together again. Kim and I both had a buffer in each other this time, so it wasn’t like we really had to directly communicate with him. It was also nice, because our professor left for awhile, but when she came back, Owen engaged her in conversation and completely ignored us, so we actually got some work done.

But next time, once we have all the students in class (we were missing three, which means we’ll have an exact even number on days when everybody is in attendance), I may not be so lucky.

Posted by Stan on February 28, 2004 1:18 PM  | Permalink | School Rants | Digg It