A Dream Corrected – SIX HOURS
(SIX HOURS is my category for brief thoughts at the end of the day.)
Thirty years ago, I decided that I would become a screenwriter. I’ve just discovered that my passion for film writing has been based on a fallacy.
The flaw in my thinking is understandable. When I decided on my profession, and set about learning how to do it, I was living in a golden age, a time not replicated since, when skill was part of the culture, talent was in the air and practiced nearly effortlessly. When one lives inside that sort of age, one can’t recognize it as special. It is just the way things are (or were). Therefore, I saw exceptional writers and directors working in that time and didn’t see them as exceptions. They were not outliers, not to me. They were the working standard.
This flaw in my thinking comes to mind as I read the reflections about Rob Reiner after his death. He was an outlier in the industry: known as a nice guy who cared about good scripts, who valued story and substance over empty style and flash. He made films in many genres and his work defined any genre he chose to work in. The genres of romantic comedy (When Harry Met Sally), horror/thriller (Misery), and fantasy (The Princess Bride) were all changed by his work.
Without knowing that he was one of my heroes, he was a hero to me, because of the freedom he practiced. There were other heroes. And I knew their names: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Stanley Kubrick and Francis Ford Coppola. All outliers who were fortunate enough often to slipstream into the mainstream. They defined culture and made a living at it.
I (naively!) thought what they were doing was possible for many of us, even newcomers to the profession. I never believed that it would be easy, by any means, but I thought it was possible to live and create a creative life like theirs, one that allowed for near-infinite inventiveness. Not every one of those directors had the nice-guy reputation that Reiner did, but they were known as people you’d want to spend time with, even if they were aloof (Godard) or strange sometimes (Kubrick), or irresponsible with budgets (Coppola). The message I took from their work and lives was that you could be a decent person and succeed at making movies. The best people did the best projects.
Looking back now, I would say that was a fantasy that I held close to my heart. It was valuable, because it inspired me to keep going and write, but also painful to realize that I was living in a special time, a bubble of excellence around me, and I assumed that it was the normal way that things went. Among the many things I learned was that genre hopping was possible for only a few, the one-percent top people with the most power in the profession. The rest of us learn to stay in a lane, develop a genre and work it. People will get to know you that way faster.
Still, maybe I haven’t learned my lesson all that well. I bend and break genres when I can. It’s bad for business but good for the soul.
____ Coming soon in this space ... serialized chapters from my new novel trilogy, THE SHADOW SIDE OF LUCAS PERFECT. To warm up the motor, I'll be running short pieces that are a blend of blog and journal. I'll call those short pieces SIX HOURS, since they are often written at the end of the day.