March 2004 Archives
March 18, 2004
The Ambassador of Funk
One of the more amusing albums I’ve downloaded in recent months is one called Super Mario Compact Disco. It’s pretty simple to figure out the concept of this album: various well-known Mario tunes, remixed and full of overly cheerful rap lyrics extolling the excellence of Mario and his friends. It’s arguably the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life, but much like Rhapsody, it’s grown on me like moss.
For those of you out of the loop, my longtime traveling companion died after eight loyal years of service. After burial proceedings and a subsequent memorial service, I started looking into a replacement model. I know it seems a little fast, but I feel like you have to move on quickly or you never will. Know what I mean?
So I finally decided on one of those RioVolt MP3 CD players. I’ve got a couple of CD-RWs, and I’ve just been burning rips of the albums I’ve been listening to lately so I can enjoy them on the road instead of paying attention to the driving task and the IPDE process. One of these albums, needless to say, is Super Mario Compact Disco, which I tend to blast. I find it singularly amusing (and by “singularly,” I mean I’m the only person who finds it funny) that, when I play it, I become one of those people I make fun of who has the bass turned up really loud so you can hardly hear it, but yet it’s just crappy Mario songs with hip-hop backbeats.
Which brings me (finally) to the actual story. Last night was Saint Patrick’s day, as I’m sure you all blearily recall. As such, when I was driving home from my class around 10:30, there was a not-all-that-surprising-but-still-unusual amount of traffic. Most of them were swerving to and fro, driving ten under, and braking about 500 feet too soon. I wonder what that was about.
Anyway, I got to the intersection at Higgins and Mannheim*, and I was sitting at the red light (the first car in the left lane), waiting for it to change, when a car pulls up beside me. It, too, had bass blaring at extraordinary volume. I ignored it.
Then, I heard the engine revving. I turned my head toward their car, giving the driver my best bad-ass look (it’s not very good). It was four guys — two in the front, two in the back — all looking very gang-bangery and faux-tough (seriously, their bad-ass looks were about as good as mine). They seemed pretty intent on racing me, so I knew what I had to do.
I lowered the bass slightly so the chromatic tones of the Super Mario Land theme could be distinctly heard over the bass.
I rolled down the passenger window.
I said, “What, you wanna race?” in my best deep bad-ass voice, and all the while, remember, I still have my stone face (not to be confused with my stoned face) on.
And they started laughing. Really, really hard. And then they sort of shrugged me off, like I was either not worth their time or too amusing to want to harass.
I would have been offended, except it was exactly what I had planned.
It’s nice, I think, that I’ve finally managed to thrust into the public eye the things that make me privately titter and find that they amuse others as well.
Although I’m still not sure whether they were laughing with me or just at me.
*I apologize if my sad, lifelong obsession with maps is ruining the flow of the blog. I just feel the need to supply a photographic frame of reference whenever I mention specific locations like Adult World.
Posted by Stan on March 18, 2004 8:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Stories of Hilarity and Humiliation
March 17, 2004
How to Humiliate Yourself in Public Without Really Trying
Yesterday, after my Spike Lee-August Wilson class, people were talking about me. I’m not being paranoid, as I usually am. It was sort of obvious, since there are only three other white kids in the class, and I was the only one who hadn’t left, that it was me they were talking about when I heard murmurs of “crazy white boy,” and so on. I didn’t really know what it was they were saying, or why they were saying it. I decided I’d shut it out of my mind and just go home. It had been kind of a crappy day.
So I walked down the stairs, and I ran into some dude who was trying to find the fourth-floor library. He was going up the main stairwell, which doesn’t have access to floors 1-5 (those are the library floors), so I had to explain to him how to first get to the library and then find the elevators and stairs. He was foreign and confused already, so instead of being able to explain it, I had to actually walk with him down the stairs and show him where to go.
So I did, and I turned around and left, and the guy turned after me and said, “Thank you,” and then snickered. I stopped, turned around, gave him an odd look, he gave me an odd look, and then I turned back around and started the long walk to the subway.
People at the Congress Hotel, a block away, have been striking for a long time. Since last summer, or earlier (maybe spring?), so I’ve gotten used to it. They’re annoying to have to walk past, but I sympathize with the strikers as long as they aren’t making a ridiculous amount of noise. I’m not sure why, but yesterday, all the strikers were women. I walked briskly by them, as usual, and all of a sudden I heard an amused chorus of “Wooooooooo,” as if I’d just walked by them completely nude, followed by amused giggling.
What the fuck was going on?
I kept going. I got on the subway, rode home, and as we approached Cumberland, I got up and waited by the door. I looked at my seat, since I’m crazy and obsessive-compulsive, to make sure I hadn’t forgotten the nothing that I’d pulled out of my pockets when I got on the train, and then I saw it.
A big red comb. Right there on the seat.
The comb was not on the seat when I got on the train; otherwise, I wouldn’t have sat there. How’d it get there? I don’t know.
Did I have a comb stuck to my ass during my entire walk from my class to the subway? It’s possible. It would certainly explain all the weird snickering and hooting.
So now, in addition to the 14 million other things I check before I’m ready to move anywhere, I now have to thoroughly brush off my ass to make sure nobody’s comb is somehow stuck to it.
Sigh.
Posted by Stan on March 17, 2004 3:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Stories of Pain and Humiliation
March 11, 2004
Perfect Pitch
I’d been having trouble in my pitching class for the past couple of weeks because, frankly, the type of screenplay we are taught to value and aspire to write are not conducive to pitching. When you write a character-driven story, it’s usually difficult to describe it in terms of plot (which is, overall, what you do in a pitch), because the plot is usually pretty hackneyed (which is okay, because the characters are supposed to make your run-of-the-mill story interesting). And if you don’t have a retread of a storyline, you have a plot that’s so complicated or unusual that it’s impossible to make any sense of it without a long description of the characters, which is a pitching no-no.
When you pitch, you’re trying to sell a script to an executive who wants something exciting, or bold, or original, but most of all, you’re selling them something that will make money. And they get very, very afraid when you tell them you have a story about this really great character. Unless you’re Mike Myers. But he doesn’t have to pitch.
Anyway…
So I had this story. Or, rather, I had no story. I had these characters, and I put them into a story that I know will play, but to hear somebody describe it, it’s boring. Really, really, incredibly dull. Because the story is all, “This guy goes to the store and runs into blah-blah-blah…” There’s no, “And when the car flips over and crashes into the Korean grocery store, you realize the owner of that shop was really the rogue spy they’d been looking for all along.”
For three weeks in a row, when I pitched my lack-of-story, I got a sort of glazed, mildly irritated look from the prof, who I’m not a huge fan of. This was my lame attempt at rebellion. I’ve been saying, “I really need to kiss her ass so I can do well in this class,” but at the same time, I’ve been rebelling against the way she teaches the class. Not that she’s doing a particularly awful job (she’s doing much better than she did teaching SW1) — she’s just not teaching the class that was described to me.
I’m not sure why this is such a huge deal, though, since absolutely none of the classes are even remotely what were described to me. It’s the bait-and-switch semester for me, but I’ve been able to deal with it in the other classes. I just felt the need for slight rebellion, so I’ve been trying to force the class to be what it’s supposed to be, instead of accepting what it is.
And I talked to other people, saying roughly this: “Aren’t we supposed to be spending time developing fully realized stories that we will then pitch? Why have we been pitching since week two? I can’t come up with an entire, feature-length story in a week!” And the responses, from faculty and friends, has been, “You’re totally right — you’re supposed to be developing your ideas before you pitch them.” So I’ve been trying to stick it to her, telling her each week, “Hey, I don’t have a story. Know why? Because I haven’t been given enough time to develop it.”
Each week, she’d tell me to e-mail her, and she would help me flesh out the idea. Her tone, and the look in her eyes, indicated to me that she thinks I’m a big fuck-up because everybody else seems to be doing just fine. But I know why everyone else is doing fine — they didn’t come up with brand-spanking-new ideas to develop. They’re just pitching their SW2 screenplays.
On Sunday night, sometime between realizing I had no interest in writing a treatment that has no interesting story and realizing that I also am being graded on my terrible pitch in two weeks, I said, “Fuck it — I’ll just pitch my SW2 feature.” My script has a great deal of problems, and it’s nowhere near ready for anybody who isn’t a teacher to look at, but it has one key thing that my new idea was missing: a plot. More important, it’s a high-concept plot, which can be described in two sentences but leaves enough of the minor details out to intrigue the listener.
In short, my SW2 feature is exactly the opposite of everything I’ve ever been taught about writing, but it’s also exactly what a producer wants to hear about. That was actually one of the comments I got from a professor, whose input I value highly, who read my screenplay, deemed it crap, and then told me that my SW2 professor (who gave me an A and said it was the best script in the class) “should not be grading on whether or not the script will sell.” Which meant that, even though she hated it from a writing standpoint, I could sell it tomorrow. It was a moment of Bullets Over Broadway illogic — “I don’t write hits. My plays are art. They’re written specifically to go unproduced.” Uh-huh.
Okay, enough ego stroking. Back to the pitching class.
So I went in, still dreading the pitch, wondering if I’d totally fuck it up. I’ve always had two things going for me in the pitch sessions: I’m really fucking loud, and I’m really fucking energetic. Which is counterproductive when you’re pitching a Bergman-y depressing drama. But it’s vital when you’re pitching a comedy for the ADD generation! Unless you happen to forget the entire story, as I feared I would (I haven’t looked at the script since I finished writing it, which was several months ago; and, yeah, my memory is that bad).
Then, when we got into class, the prof opened by saying, “I noticed after listening to your pitches last week that maybe you need some help developing your stories. They seem a little thin.” Oh, thank God. We’d break up into groups, workshop our treatments, and try to fill out our gaunt little stories. It’d be almost like a real writing class. Plus, I’d maybe be able to pad out my original idea and make it interesting enough to ramble about for five minutes.
She continued, “So we’re gonna pitch them —”
Fuck!
“— and then I’ll give specific comments and open up the floor to the class to see how you can improve it.”
Okay, it’s almost like a workshop, except with pitching. Which meant, obviously, that I’d have to go back to my plan of pitching my SW2 feature.
Since we, strangely enough, left off with my unbelievably terrible pitch last week (which meant we only got through half the class), I ended up pitching last again (as I suppose I will from now on, since everything’s all mucked up). I got up there, nervous as all get-out. I’d been trying to remember every important detail of the story and organizing it in my mind, so I could vomit it all out properly during the pitch. And I sat down across from the prof, introduced myself, and then launched into it.
<ego>
I’m telling you, I was in the fucking zone. I’m generally extremely nervous at the thought of speaking in front of people, but when I actually do it, I’m fine. This was no exception. But this was beyond any effort in the history of my existence. I was articulate (no stammering!), witty (in the same tone of the script), and unbelievably succinct. I hit plot point after plot point, and when I was done, my prof just stared at me. The look in her eyes was something I’ve never seen before. It was something like lust, greed, and shock, all rolled into one.
</ego>
This, of course, meant only one thing: I won. Even if she remembers me from SW1 — I don’t think she does — any inkling she may have had at me while I was shouting at her about incompetence has now been dashed away, and I’ve been accepted in the Inner Circle (whatchoo gonna do?). In fact, I was so on, she invited — no, she insisted that I come to a lecture given by one of her friends that evening, all about the industry and pitching and so on.
I didn’t really want to go, and it was kind of a waste of time (the speaker was good, but he didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, and he was really anti-pitching, so he didn’t give any decent pointers or anecdotes), but as part of the kiss-ass mentality, I felt I needed to, and I think it benefited me in very positive ways.
Hopefully.
Posted by Stan on March 11, 2004 8:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | School Rants
March 6, 2004
Owning Owen
As I have every Wednesday since the start of this semester, I got to school around 4:30. My class starts at 6, so I have a good hour and a half to eat dinner, grab a cup of coffee, and hang out with a couple of girls I had a class with last semester, both of whom have a (different) class at 6. We shoot the shit about whatever, and we realized last Wednesday that they seem to have screenings every Wednesday night. This is sorta frustrating, since we all have class and can never attend the screenings (although I probably wouldn’t even be down there if I didn’t have class, so…).
This week, though, they kinda went all out for whatever the screening was (it turned out to be 11 shorts by 11 different directors, strung together as a feature under the guise of being an “exquisite corpse” experiment — lame!). They set up a bunch of tables set up and set out a huge spread catered by Yang’s, the Chinese place down the street (which, by the way, is a terrific restaurant). I had just eaten, so I wasn’t as excited as I probably would have normally been about free food, but the girls both got some plates of shit before class.
As we talk every week (this week, despite the distraction of possible free food, was no exception), I am always, always, always on the lookout for Owen, my arch-nemesis.
I was happy — I didn’t see him at all before class. He generally gets there early and attempts to harass various professors and students before class, and it’s impossible to miss that voice, but he was nowhere to be found. Still, I didn’t want to take any chances by going into the room early. He may have just gotten there early and sat down, since he’s probably already reachd his peer alienation quota for March. I just sat with my friends and continued to shoot the shit.
When I walked into the room at 5:55, there were only a few people there. It’s basically a large conference table (actually several tables arranged to create one large one) surrounded by chairs. Since I’m near-sighted and a kiss-ass, I usually sit in the front of the room, near the prof. Usually it works out, but this semester is sort of weird, since he hears all the sarcastic comments I make to the guy next to me and assumes I want to contribute these valuable insights in our class discussion.
But the guy next to me wasn’t here. In fact, there was an abyss of empty seats all along my side of the table. I mean, I know I smell, but seriously —
Oh well. At least Owen, who usually sits down at the opposite end of my side, wasn’t there.
Or was he? At almost six on the nose, Owen stormed into the room, loudly declaring to no one that he was “running late.” The prof wasn’t even there yet, and none of us gave a shit, so he was pretty much putting on a show for his personal amusement. He rounded the corner of the table, saw that most of the seats were empty, and —
Oh shit. What was he doing? He walked right past his usual seat at the end of the table and —
Oh Jesus, was he going to sit next to me? Please, for the love of God and all that’s holy, I might start believing in something bigger than myself (it might cheer me up) if you just don’t let him sit next to me.
Owen sat down. Not next to me, but one seat over.
Thank you, God. I hope you don’t hold me to all that stuff I said a second ago, because you and I both know it’s not gonna happen.
I thought maybe, since we were partnered up in our other class last week, he might believe that I don’t despise him and attempt to engage me in conversation. I was, thankfully, wrong. In fact, he didn’t even say “hello” to me or acknowledge my existence in any way. Normally, that would drive me crazy, since I have an obsessive need for validation. I (mostly) openly dislike nearly every I meet, but I still want them to like me, or at least to pretend to.
But with Owen, I will gladly accept his snubbing.
“I’ll be right back,” Owen said to no one. “I can’t believe I’m running so late tonight!”
He got up and left the room. Almost immediately thereafter, the guy who normally sits next to me, Nick, sat down next to me. He looked over at the bag and coat in the seat next to him.
“Is that Owen?” he asked.
“Yup,” I responded.
“Aw, fuck!” he proclaimed.
“Yup,” I agreed.
Nick looked around, but by that time, most of the other seats were filled. “Fuck it,” he said. “I’ll just ignore him.”
I nodded. His plan was solid.
Owen returned a few minutes later, rambled about comics some, and then our prof came in (about ten minutes late) and announced that there’s a free Chinese buffet outside the screening room.
“What?!” Owen almost screamed.
“Yeah,” the prof continued. “Just slip into the line. Nobody will even know you’re not here for the screening.”
Owen literally leaped from his chair, knocking the goddamn thing over (and not righting it, because he was in such a hurry), and thundered out of the room like a buffalo that lost its way from the herd. Now, I’m a large guy myself, so I’m sometimes hesitant to make fun of people who are fat, too, but at least I don’t do things to draw attention to my fatcomings. I don’t wear tight clothes to show off my lumpy physique, for one, and I don’t run my fat ass around, for another. Seeing a fat guy run just looks stupid. Did you ever seen the John Belushi “Donuts” sketch? See what I mean?
Anyway, he disappeared for a little while. A couple of other guys went to get food, but they just came back with sodas and declared the line was too long.
We started class, and there was a loud knock (or kick) at the door about 15 minutes later. Owen was balancing three plates of food and a soda, so he didn’t have enough hands to actually open the door. I don’t want to make fun of him for that, because I’m about as big a tightwad as you’ll ever find, so it’s very rare that I’ll pass up free food, even when I’m not hungry. But this is Owen we’re talking about — he eats like a goddamn pig. Seriously, I wish he had sat in his normal spot so I wouldn’t have to hear him eating. At least when I take advantage of free food, I’m not completely disgusting about it.
Anyway, we got into this discussion about Glengarry Glen Ross, which was the script we had to read for this week, and eventually the conversation drifted to how it would be made today, or if it would be made today. Our prof argued that it wouldn’t be made, or at least not with any major actors, because it wouldn’t make any money. It’s possible he was right, but he wanted to know why this was. What was the current trend?
Somebody argued that people want escapism. That’s the new trend. That’s why Lord of the Rings has been so successful; that’s why comic-book adaptations have been so successful. Even if they’re acting as a social commentary, people can ignore that aspect (if they choose to) and enjoy the pure entertainment of it. And everything’s pretty clear-cut — here’s a good guy, here’s a bad guy, and there’s very little gray area. “It’s all black-and-white,” he said.
“I’m…” Owen began, but stopped himself, obviously trying to think of a more polite way to articulate something but having trouble because he was so clearly enraged. “I have to disagree with you about the superhero movies. They are not black-and-white.”
“You can argue with me all you want,” Artie responded, “but when I go and see Spider-Man, no matter what happens, I know Spider-Man’s the good guy and the Green Goblin is the bad guy, and I know I’m gonna root for Spider-Man to kick his ass no matter what happens.”
Which somehow shut Owen up. That surprised me, but maybe he just gave up because Art was pretty much right.
The discussion also touched on the idea that many films are adapted from other sources. Art argued that this was because it was a sure moneymaker. If a book — a book, for crying out loud! — could be a bestseller, the movie would be a box-office bonanza. Execs play it safe, sure, but that’s no reason for 80% of domestic movies to be adaptations, remakes, and sequels. Especially when so many of them are crap.
My argument was that nobody ever reads anymore. Hollywood buys book properties, bestsellers or not, when they see movie potential, but they don’t always market them as BASED ON THE BOOK BY… unless Stephen King, John Grisham, or Thomas Harris are involved. And they do this because they assume (often accurately) that nobody’s read the book, so they’ll think it’s some original thing when it’s really just an easy way to make a buck.
All the while, as I’m making my point, Owen is making his own point to no one in particular. And his voice steadily increased in volume, so after I’m finish all of a sudden I hear this screaming — literally, screaming — “…and that’s why they allowed this FASCIST DICTATOR in office. They just accept what’s SHOVED IN THEIR FACES because they’re too stupid to pick up a BOOK!” And on “book,” he melodramatically slammed some book or another onto the table for emphasis.
Me and Nick looked at each other, then I looked at Art (who was sitting right across the table from me). We were all trying our best not to burst out laughing, but it was quite amusing.
“Moving on…” the prof said, breaking the uncomfortable gosh-should-we-laugh atmosphere that plagued the entire room.
Eventually, we started talking about the papers we have due around midterm (about four weeks away, with our wonky schedule), and we were forced on the spot to pitch an idea for the paper. Since the class is about Chicago screenwriters, the paper topic needed to be at least vaguely on-topic. One guy was struggling, but he decided on something. “I thought I’d compare Manhunter to the book and the remake. Did Michael Mann write Manhunter?” If Mann hadn’t written it, that would’ve potentially blown the whole topic.
But, yeah, he wrote the script.
Before anybody could answer him, though, Owen shrieked out, “Thomas Harris wrote the novel!”
This guy looked at Owen with mixed contempt and disgust and said, “I know. I was talking about the script.”
Owen. Owned. He just sat back and shut up.
Meanwhile, I tried helping this girl sitting next to me (she actually had nowhere to sit, so she had to pull up a chair on the other side of me, literally right next to the professor). We had been flirting all through class, and she kept making references to John Hughes movie, so I kept telling her she should write about how Pretty in Pink was a better movie than Sixteen Candles.
“Are you fucking kidding?” Nick yelled abruptly. “Sixteen Candles is so much better.” And the girl agreed, which launched a 10-minute debate about which one is actually a better movie. During this, Owen got visibly agitated. Remember, in our first class, he decried the work of John Hughes as completely unrealistic.
Since he had nothing to add to the conversation, nothing to make us shut up like we’d been doing to him during the entire session, he just said — again, to no one — “If only Todd Solondz was from Chicago.”
Ugh.
So, to change the subject for no reason, he started talking about how illogical Glengarry Glen Ross is, because they’re all so desperate to do a job for so little commission — but that’s the whole point. Their jobs suck, their lives suck, but they’re utterly desperate for that money. If they don’t get it, they’re fucked. They lose their job, they lose their money, and (in the case of Shelly Levene) they lose their family.
When this was pointed out to Owen, his response was, again, “Oh.”
Lastly, Owen went on about how he’s been step-outlining his mythic novel, which he’s been working on for years and has “82 subplots.” A step outline works like this (and is really only conducive to screenplays or maybe playscripts): you go scene-by-scene, describe what happens in the scene, and then write out the conflict (both textual and subtextual), the purpose of the scene, how it moves along the story, and so on. It’s really helpful in writing a script, but I can’t possibly imagine it helping with a novel. The form is so completely different — I mean, a novel can go on for hundreds of pages with no conflict at all and still be interesting.
But that’s just a minor thing. If it works for him, fine. But I could’ve owned him on that, if I’d wanted to really get into it. I’m too passive for that, though.
That’s the thing, though: granted, it’s only week four, but nobody’s ever really said anything to Owen to call him on his bullshit. Everybody just sat and took it, even though most of them knew him in advance of this class. Maybe they’ve all gotten tired of him, or maybe they were all on edge because, honestly, Wednesday night classes suck balls.
But it was sort of a turning point, I guess, and I noticed that on Thursday, the normally garrulous Owen was actually rather quiet and timid and only spoke when spoken to.
Frankly, it was nice.
Posted by Stan on March 6, 2004 1:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | School Rants
March 5, 2004
The Experiment
I’m taking an experimental film class this semester, and if I haven’t already pointed this out, I’m not a huge fan of the whole experimental thing. I dunno, though; it’s a slippery slope, experimental filmmaking. Some of it tries so desperately to be art that it’s crap. At the same rate, some of trounces about believing it’s crap and ends up…well, not art, but not crap, either. Good.
I guess, if you were to boil my feelings down to the simplest, I like dreams. I like films that use experimental techniques to achieve a dream-like aesthetic. Mulholland Drive and Beauty and the Beast (not the Disney one), as a recent and an old example. I also dig Fritz Lang and a lot of what I’ve seen of the whole German Expressionist movement. It’s not strictly dream-like, but many of those films create a warped, surreal universe, which you don’t see much these days outside of sci-fi (although a lot of expressionism was sci-fi, and a lot of current sci-fi creates a warped universe to exhibit a shitty movie, so I’ll shut up now…).
But it’s just one of those things. I like what I like; I don’t like what I don’t like. I don’t get all opinionated about it, because I really feel pretty apathetic toward the whole genre. I don’t declare all experimental films art and all narrative films crap, as some do. But I also don’t do the opposite, even though I’m definitely fonder of a story than of arbitrary imagery or painful quick-cutting. You could say, though, that when I like something, I like it because it doesn’t beat me over the head with a fucking hammer. “THIS IS THE POINT,” Jane Campion declares when Holly Hunter goes over the side of the boat with her piano, “GET IT?!”
Frankly, yes, but try subtlety. For the love of God, just try it. Mulholland Drive was subtle to the extent of “Huh?” and Beauty and the Beast was basically a straight narrative that took place in a fucked-up place where fucked-up people lived. They kept the Giant Hammer of Overbearing Symbolism inside that case marked “IN CASE OF EMERGENCY &NDASH; BREAK GLASS.” Which, yes, I appreciate a whole lot, but they also had an eerie internal logic. Nobody questions the fact that candelabra are held by disembodied human arms that move, because to them, it makes sense. Therefore, it’s an interesting image and not a flashy gimmick. It doesn’t draw attention to itself; it’s just there.
So, subtlety. I dig it. When I started with this class, I wasn’t really looking forward to writing an experimental film, because I was misinformed by the professor. She had a very, very broad definition of the word “experimental” (she included straight, non-genre narrative involving wacky characters as well as straight narrative that’s nonlinear, like Annie Hall or Pulp Fiction), which she has since narrowed to exclude anything that includes any sort of literal story whatsoever.
We are poets now. Give me a moment to adjust my beret and wax my mustache. We work in compression, in telling a story using almost nothing but symbols and imagery. If there’s any literal, logical story — get it the fuck out of here.
This makes my life really difficult.
Our assignment for the first couple of weeks were to find compelling images, from magazines or photographs or some such, and then to find random objects that took our attention. With our objects, we created a sculpture. When the sculpture was created, keeping the photos in mind, we wrote a one-page treatment (which, for those unfamiliar, is defined at the bottom of this entry).
Based on such loose guidelines, I was given to believe the whole idea was a sort of free-association type of deal. The treatment I wrote told a story (at least, I see the story) using almost nothing but symbols, very little dialogue. I thought it was pretty solid, in the sense that it had the only stuff it really needed: conflict (both internal and external), theme, and symbology. The literal narrative is this: a woman wants to escape her life, only to find the place she escapes to is much, much worse. Very Alice in Wonderland, but subconsciously so.
Anyway, not the greatest idea in the world, but for a treatment I wrote in 10 minutes, it wasn’t bad, especially considering how much I actually thought it through, as far as the bad symbols and metaphor-tastic dialogue was concerned. Trust me, I’ve written worse, and recently. But I had problems with the treatment. For reasons I will never, ever, ever, ever get into on this blog, the contents of the story and many of the symbols have a great deal of personal significance to me. I didn’t want anybody in my class or my professor to know this any more than I want any of you Internet trolls (no offense, ven) to know this, so I cleverly hid the personal stuff in the way I always do: by making fun of how terrible the writing was.
My transitions were clumsy and awkward, so I ripped on them. A lot of the symbols, even though they held meaning for me, seemed very cheesy on the page, so I mocked them, too. Even though they got laughs when I read them in class, the treatment as a whole didn’t particularly go over well. Everybody thought I was just parodying an experimental film, and I was accused (by a really nice guy who I like a lot — who happened to write a treatment that was so anvilicious Jane Campion would probably buy it tomorrow) of creating meaningless symbols.
Which, I guess, mission accomplished as far as dissolving the notion that anyone would connect my personal connection to this story. But it bombed conceptually, because everybody was so distracted by the humor that they didn’t realize that, personal or not, everything in the treatment did have meaning. Yeah, I was self-deprecating and probably taking the reader/listener out of the moment, but if you paid attention to everything else…I dunno, it wasn’t good, but it wasn’t meaningless, either.
People like me, pretending to be writers, are often told that, no matter what you do, a story will fall flat if you have no connection to the material. Sure, you can have a deep, intimate connection to your story, and it can still fail. But you stand more of a chance of success if the connection is there. “Why do you need to tell this story?” is what we’re always asked. And I know why I needed to tell that story, and it was all there on the page, if you cross out the sarcastic commentary and pay attention to what’s actually going on.
So, I took it to one of my friends to get a real opinion. The events of the class were Tuesday, but taking the story to this friend happened yesterday. She knows a disgusting amount about all of what inspired this story, and now I realize I’m being so vague that I probably shouldn’t even be ranting about my bad treatment since nobody knows what the hell I’m talking about. Too late.
Anyway, she knows the inspiration, she knows where a lot of the symbols come from, and — most importantly — she’s a lot smarter than me. So I was telling her about this class, and she asked to read the treatment. I let her, obviously, and she took out a pen and started scratching out all the commentary as she read it. Then, she re-read it.
Afterward, she asked, “Are you a moron?” Since she clearly knew the answer, I assumed she was being rhetorical and said nothing. She continued, “Nobody knows what the hell you’re talking about here. You’re not telling a story. Well, you are, but you’re not telling that story. Nobody’s gonna look at this and say, ‘Well, that Stan, he sure goes out with fucked-up girls, and this story proves it.’ What they’re gonna see is what they did see — a story about a woman trying to change her life and ends up making it worse — except they’ll probably like it better without all the jokes.”
And she’s right. Nobody who doesn’t know me or my situation would have any idea what the fuck I’m talking about. To them, it’s just this story about some woman. In a way, that’s very freeing, as somebody who pretends to be a writer. I tend to keep the personal stuff bottled up like a post-Taco Bell intestinal tract, just brewing there, waiting to explode in some form or another. Or I hide behind jokes, which is more common. “Here’s something bad that happened to me once — look at it and laugh.” And yeah, it’s funny, and in time, my current situation will probably be funny, too, but to deal with it right now, in writing, I’ve found a way to do it.
I still suck at it, though.
Posted by Stan on March 5, 2004 6:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | School Rants
