Meet Me on the Playground

(Not like that)

I had my three remaining wisdom teeth pulled last Thursday.

The procedure itself was a breeze. My oral surgeon suggested I sleep through it and I agreed before he finished the sentence. One minute I was talking to him about hydration levels for pizza dough and the next thing I know he was waking me up.

As I came to I realized I’d had a dream somewhere in the middle where I was inside my own mouth, leading a team of commandos to defend my teeth. I remember thinking, “I know why I’m having this dream. It’s because they’re taking out my wisdom teeth.” That was the high point of the experience.

I didn’t feel much like working over the weekend. By Monday I figured it was time to get back in the saddle so I pulled up my journal entry from January 1st, to see what I wrote down back then in terms of goals. I wanted to know how I fared at the end of this first quarter.

On January 1st there were ten active projects in the rundown. Four of them were hanging chads, things I pitched or met on before the end of the year, a mix of original series and open writing assignments, both film and television. Those four were all dead by the end of January. Absolutely brutal. Another one died two weeks ago when the producers attached themselves to a project with a similar concept.

But… one of the dead projects led to the adult animated series pitch, which is in the hands of the studio as we speak. I have my first in person pitch in years scheduled for next week for the live action sci-fi series based on IP that I’ve been in love with for over a decade. I just started the process of breaking that one down into smaller sub-sections for memorization and rehearsal. I want to be overly prepared to counteract the nerves that I’m sure will be there for this first time back in person.

On Tuesday, I had a zoom meeting with the director and producer attached to my new series, HALF-LIGHT, the one I’m adapting from my feature spec. As I mentioned in the last newsletter, there’s more to it than just chopping the feature in half. I need to introduce new characters who can carry their own storylines, those stories have to be as engaging as the character I built to carry her own movie, and they all have to come together in a satisfying way.

As I was thinking about it over the past few weeks I remembered a character from one of the projects that died in January. With a slight bit of reworking they fit perfectly into this new series. It was a great reminder how no work is ever really wasted. A character I spent months and months experimenting with, coming up with an elaborate backstory and writing scenes for had found a new home. That’s one of the side benefits of being obsessed with certain genres and themes. It wouldn’t have worked if I’d tried to pull a character from, say, the backstage comedy I wrote in 2013.

I started reworking scenes from the feature and experimenting with their placement in the pilot. Before I knew it I was on page 18. The question now is whether to keep going and finish the new pilot or write a pitch for it instead. Part of me would love to have a completed spec pilot and a polished feature spec (ROAR) by the end of the month. It’s always more satisfying to have something tangible to show for my effort.

Speaking of ROAR, my reps put a plan together and it’s about to take its first steps into the world this weekend. I think I mentioned this before but when I sent it to them I included a four-page deck that contained a cover image, a page with a two-sentence logline, a page with images from comp films and comic book properties, and a page with a kind of “author’s note” about the origin of the idea and the themes. My reps thought the mini-deck was cool and we’re going to include it with the script.

It’s the first time I’ve done anything like that and I think it helps to have some visual elements for context. I can tell you the tonal comps but there’s still a bit of a Rorschach test going on in your mind. With these specific images I think people will have a much clearer frame of reference in their head when they read it.

Cover image for my mini-deck, made with Dall-e. I wanted the muscle car to look like it had eyes.

I’ll tell you what I’d love to do one of these days, maybe you will be motivated enough and crazy enough to try it. So…

When companies like Stern release a new pinball machine they typically release three versions, a Pro, a Premium, and a Limited Edition. The Pro is the bare bones, basic pinball machine and it’s generally fine and fun to play. The Limited Edition has all kinds of cool stuff that the others don’t have, maybe some different artwork, toys, a topper, it’s often signed by the designers, that sort of thing. There’s just a more personal touch.

Brand new Stern Foo Fighters machine at Revenge Of in Glassell Park. It’s like playing pinball in the Millennium Falcon.

One of these days I’d love to have a screenplay go out the same way. There would be a Pro version that is your basic boring PDF, formatted to the industry standard. But there would also be a Limited Edition that would have some cool cover and concept art, a playlist, maybe annotations, hyperlinks to images of locations, that sort of thing.

It’s crazy that this industry has been around for over a hundred years and the script format hasn’t changed all that much. I get why it needs to be a certain way when we’re actually making the thing but the version that sells the dream could be so much cooler.

One of these days…

A few issues ago I talked about Ellie’s obsession with her new cat toy, the piece of fur on a string tied to a pole. The situation is so much more intense now.

It is literally the first thing she thinks about when she wakes me up in the morning. She paws at my C-PAP mask until I take it off, then she runs down the hall and stands by the toys. We play for nearly an hour every morning, then we come back to it a handful of times throughout the day. If she had her way we would do nothing else.

Find someone who looks at you the way my dog looks at this disgusting patch of fur.

It can be a bit much but it’s also clear to me how important this is for her mental health and well-being. Sure, she had fun with the squirrels before and she enjoys a good game of hide and seek, but there’s a challenge to chasing this little furry patch around the house and the yard that activates her in ways I never imagined. She’s like a whole different dog. Knowing this, we can never go back to before.

And I get it because play is crucial to what I do.

I struggled to get back to work this week after taking a few days off. Everything felt forced, nothing was coming. But there was one thing I kept thinking about while I was out walking Ellie or playing the fur patch game.

It was an idea for a scene that I had years ago, totally detached from any story, about a man and a woman who meet up in a hotel room to have sex. They’re just getting into it when they hear a bunch of drunk guys in the room next door singing “Sweet Caroline.” The guy groans, “Red Sox fans.” He pounds on the wall, tells them to shut up. They tell him to fuck off. The woman starts getting dressed, she knows what’s going to happen. He’s going to go fight this whole group of guys and probably get his ass kicked. Her night is ruined.

I don’t know why that scene kept popping up in my head. Like I said, it’s not connected to anything else. I have no plot in mind, I don’t even know who these people are. I just know that this guy cannot, will not, let things go.

So I finally gave in to the urge to write a stray scene and it was just pure play, devoid of any expectations or stakes. It was super fun and there were surprises waiting for me on the other side of that door. Messing around got me back in a writing groove. And who knows, maybe this sequence is the seed of something bigger down the line. Maybe this knucklehead will connect to some other idea that I come up with later, like what just happened with HALF-LIGHT.

Something else I’ve been playing around with lately is writing a cell phone novel. I love the idea of every page being a chapter and pushing words around to create a rhythm. I used Dall-e to come up with some images to go along with each chapter in a black and white manga style. It’s just for fun right now, a purely creative exercise. But I know from studying my other favorite artists that experimentation and engaging in play is the path to creative breakthrough.

As I was writing this newsletter I went down a rabbit hole of YouTube clips about JOHN WICK 4. I’ve seen it once and will likely see it again this weekend. It may be my favorite of the whole series. We’re lucky to live in a world where this franchise exists. I found this interview with the director, Chad Stahelski, where he talked about how important this concept is to him, but from an angle I’d never thought about:

“You get better through really pushing yourself, you take a little break, you see life in a different perspective, you take all that input and you turn it around. If you’re constantly working you can’t take that breath. So after each JOHN WICK we take a breath and it’s more exploratory. Like me and my stunt team, we go back to the gym, we start working out, we just have fun. It’s just about research and fun. You gotta go on the playground a little bit.”

I love that so many of the ideas for the stunts in the movie start the same way as ideas for stories do for me. They’re doing it through physicality, like how my niece Macy keeps a movement journal in her dance program at college.

Maybe you’ve got some big projects you’re trying to finish, or maybe you’re just starting at the bottom of a mountain and you are frozen in place because of the enormity of the task. Maybe you’re hopped up on antibiotics and the strongest Ibuprofen you can get over the counter and your jaw is still sore because somebody yanked a few bones from your skull, maybe you don’t feel much like tackling anything of substance.

So, don’t.

Take a breath.

Go on the playground.

One more thing…

I’ve been loving the new Boygenius record. There’s a song called “Leonard Cohen” that references the famous line from his song, “Anthem,” that, “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” By coincidence, there’s also a reference to it in Lana Del Rey’s song, “Kintsugi,” from her new record.

That line from Mr. Cohen is one of my favorite lines from anything, ever, even if I wouldn’t put the song in my Top 10. I referenced it in my play, REPLICA, it sets up the big climactic moment in Act Two that triggered audible gasps in the theater during its world premiere run in Houston. I was so inspired hearing it referenced in Boygenius and Lana this week. What a gift that would be, to write one line, eleven words that ring out through time and echo back through other peoples art.

We’re playing with powerful magic here.

Check out Chad Stahelski’s interview about going to the playground here!

Check out the Boygenius ode to Leonard Cohen here!

Check out Lana Del Rey’s “Kintsugi” here!