October Compendium

A collection of thoughts, ideas, tips, and tricks I've been thinking about recently.

Hello, friends! I hope you’ve had a great October.

I wanted to pass on some things I’ve been thinking about over the past month. At the end of this issue there’s a bit about my friend and fellow artist, Tony Teel, and a GoFundMe I set up for him.

Here’s a quick work update to start:

I’ve been on a bit of a speed run as we head into the last couple months of the year.

I’m in the middle of pitching the new series idea I told you about last time. It’s probably the fastest a project like this has ever come together for me. I reached out to the producer in late August to pitch him the idea based on our general back in April. After our August meeting, I wrote the full pitch, we attached a great actor, and we were off to the races setting meetings. We’ve done four so far, one more to go this month.

My feature project, ROAR, is still moving forward. I met with the director this week to talk about some new ideas for the script before a revised version goes out to actors. I got to meet him in person for the first time last month and came away even more psyched about the movie we will (hopefully) get to make soon.

My novel, The Kickout, is out to editors as of last week. It’s fun to think that maybe someone out there in the ether was reading it over the weekend.

Last week, I sent my managers my new romantic (heist) comedy spec, STOKE. I’m really happy with how this first draft turned out. I just kept following the characters until they led me to the end of their story. With any luck, like ROAR, it could be the foundation for more adventures in the future.

In addition to all of this, I’ve been working on a project outside of TV and film, but it’s not something I can really talk about yet, other than to say I’ve been learning a ton about new ways to tell stories. It’s been challenging and fun and a chance to “dance with the algorithms,” as Peter Gabriel would say. Hopefully, I can tell you more soon.

One of my best friends, Joshua Kobak, made this image for me for my birthday, a depiction of my Buddha-nature, complete with Ellie and her beloved lizards. It’s a pretty accurate depiction of what it has felt like to be in this flow state for the past few months:

Even though I’m juggling a handful of projects right now, the only one that is paying the bills is the one that’s NOT related to TV/film. Most of the conversations I have with other writers and producers are still pretty bleak. Some folks I know have been lucky enough to sell projects or get staffed but it’s still tough out there. I’m doing the only thing I can do which is keep pressing forward, coming up with new stuff, being as proactive as I can, and taking time to also focus on the personal restoration project. Speaking of…

I’m just about to hit the end of month 10 and should officially be down 60 pounds by November 1st. Here’s a pic of the non-illustrated me and Ellie on our annual family trip to the apple orchards in Oak Glen.

As I was finishing the last draft of STOKE I read a book on Stanislavsky’s method that I brought back from my parents’ house last December. There are so many great quotes in it, including, “Time is an excellent artist. It not only purifies but is capable of poeticizing memories.”

And, “There are no accidents in art, only the fruits of long labor.”

I was reminded of this many times when the final pieces of STOKE started clicking into place, and events that were set in motion on paper months ago found satisfying payoffs in the final scenes. Sometimes it seems like magic, and then I remember, no, actually, I wake up thinking about this stuff and go to bed at night thinking about it, and I mull it over in the hours in between, every time I step outside to walk the dog, or go to the gym. A finished script or a book isn’t there by magic, it’s the end result of creative pressure applied over time.

One of my favorite ideas in the book is the “magic if.” Stanislavsky knew that an actor couldn’t actually believe in the truth and reality of the events on stage, but they could believe in the possibility of the events. Instead of thinking, “I am King Lear,” he wanted them to think, “What would I do if I were in King Lear’s position?”

This brings me to the roundup of things I’ve been thinking about over the past few weeks as I’ve been working on all of these projects.

1. “They don’t know they’re in this movie.”

I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m still on it. This is one of my current gut checks that gets me out of thinking of characters as pawns on a board that I’m trying to move toward a predetermined ending, and gets me thinking about them as real people instead. This is where the “magic if” comes in handy. It transforms the character’s aims to the writer’s. I can apply it scene to scene and even line by line. Forget the outline, forget the end of the movie. Knowing what I know about this character right now, if I was in their shoes, how might I react? What would I do next?

2) The First 90 Seconds

Even though all of my pitches have been over Zoom, I still like to memorize them as much as possible so I’m not just reading a document to someone over the computer. (And by the way, that absolutely works for a lot of people. It just doesn’t work for me.) Lately, I’ve stopped over-rehearsing and instead started focusing on just doing the first 90 second backwards and forwards until I could do it while running from zombies. I realized that if I just got extremely comfortable with that first 90 seconds, by the time it’s over, I’m much more relaxed. I’m mostly through the “why me, why now” portion of the pitch and on to the story part of the pitch, where ideas are connected in a more logical, cause and effect kind of way.

3) The Good Stuff Eventually Moves Left

This is one of the fundamental truths that I learned in the writer’s room. You spend a lot of time breaking out stories in index cards on the board, with the early stuff in the season or episode to the left and the later stuff to the far right. At some point, whether self-inflicted or due to notes from various partners, you realize that you’ve got a bunch of exciting stuff planned downstream and you’re spinning wheels in the middle before you get there.

So you start moving cards left. “What if the final moments of the episode are actually the end of Act Two? Or the teaser?” “What if that mid-season twist happens at the end of episode three?” It’s a little panic inducing, because now you have to come up with MORE exciting stuff for later, but whatever, they’re ideas and you can make more. (See also: “Burn the first reel.”) It takes me a while to get there but I always do.

4) “I can do it with a look.”

There are many apocryphal stories about actors who strolled up to the director with script in hand, pointed to a monologue, or several pages of a scene, and said, “I can do all of that with a look.” I had my own moment like that when I was writing the very last scene of STOKE. I had an “end of BUTCH AND SUNDANCE” kind of moment between the two leads, during which one of them looked at the other and referenced an exchange they had earlier in the movie. I thought I was so clever when I wrote it. I could imagine the audience nodding their heads in the darkened theater, thinking, “Well done, old chap, bringing it all full circle.” The next morning, I read through it and cringed so hard. If the audience couldn’t feel that subtext from a look it means I hadn’t done my job for the previous 117 pages. So, I cut the lines and saved the director and actors the trouble of having to do it on the day.

“I can do it with a look…” it’s not just for Clint Eastwood anymore.

5) No Regerts

I’ve been deep in this pitch all month. Every time I do it I get more excited about actually making the show at some point. I’m sure this is a psychological by-product of the energy and enthusiasm I bring to each pitch. Perception creates reality. The more I talk about how great I think it is the more I fall in love with it. Which means it will be all the more painful it if it doesn’t get made. If that happens, I won’t regret going all-in emotionally. I would, however, regret not being fully prepared, and I’d regret not putting my heart on the line in the zoom.

Sometimes heartbreak is the price of admission.

6) “When making plans, you must allow yourself to get lost in order to find the thing you didn’t know you were looking for.” — Chris Kelly

Great advice for road trips and for making art. This is a perfect way to describe my current rolling outline way of writing. I really enjoy getting lost for a bit in the middle of a script these days. It can be frustrating and a little scary at times, but in the end, I always end up somewhere that I never would have thought of if I hadn’t allowed myself the freedom to not know what happens next.

7) Framing Rejection

I’ve been dealing with consistent rejection for over thirty years now, starting with auditioning for shows in college and summer stock. It was never easy but it’s more intense now because the business is still so fucked. It feels like the stakes are higher for every shot on goal.

It would be easy to slip a little deeper into darkness and despair with every pass. To counterbalance that, I’ve been making a conscious choice to look at rejection not as evidence of the quality of my ideas or how I communicated them, but rather evidence of the amount of work and perseverance it took to get to the point where I could be rejected. Which brings me to…

8) Look Out for Your Future Self

Coming to the end of this year, I realized that all of these things are in motion now because Past Me took action months, a year, or even years ago. Present Me has these current opportunities because Past Me pushed through to the end of a novel, Past Me finished a feature spec, Past Me started and finished a second feature spec, and Past Me reached out to a producer a few months ago after cracking an idea for a series. Past Me was looking out for Future Me. He didn’t want me to get to the end of the year and feel like he was at square one.

But I confess, Present Me is feeling a bit frustrated that all of these projects are moving at a pace dictated by other people. I can imagine Future Me sitting here a year from now writing about these same frustrations if I take the same path.

I want to look out for Future Me by bypassing traditional routes for the next idea, and take it directly to an audience, rather than having it sit in random inboxes for six months or a year. Part of being an artist means taking the stuff we’re feeling inside or thinking about, making something with it, and sharing that thing with other people in the hopes that they feel the same way. I’ve created a ton of stuff over the past two years but it’s maybe been seen by a few dozen people in the business? I want to give Future Me the gift of being able to share something directly, even if it’s just with a handful of people. So Present Me is taking a few steps a day toward that goal.

Picture Future You in the lobby of some producer’s office or on a zoom with a studio head a year from now, all because you put pen to paper today.

Another Scene from STOKE

In the last issue I posted a scene from the WIP, the romantic (heist) comedy, STOKE. It was a character intro for Charlie and it ended with a mysterious person sitting in his hotel room. That person’s name is Thalia. They were members of a heist crew, they fell in love on the job, then went through a tumultuous breakup. They haven’t seen each other in two years. Thalia came to that hotel room because their old boss and beloved mentor, Uncle Vic, has been murdered.

This is the very next scene, and the second one that I wrote for the movie. This one is very much inspired by stuff like MIDNIGHT RUN and THE NICE GUYS, two-handers where the main characters start off like oil and water. The relationship dynamic was inspired by some driven, ambitious female friends I’ve had over the years who found themselves in long term relationships with guys who had little to no ambition at all. Guys who just wanted to coast and have a good time. FYI, this is very NSFW language. You have been warned!

My Friend Tony

I met Tony Teel years ago during my first summer stock season at The Wagon Wheel Theatre in Indiana. He was a cook at one of my all-time favorite places in the world, a beach volleyball bar called Spike’s. We regularly shut the place down over Red Stripes, talking movies and filmmaking. Tony is a fellow artist, a brother, and just an all around amazing dude. Years ago, he was diagnosed with MD and after a recent run of (unrelated) bad medical luck, he’s lost most of his mobility. Subsequently, he’s lost his ability to work and create.

Last week, I started a GoFundMe with the hopes of getting him an Apple Vision Pro that he could use to reconnect with the world from his hospital bed and maybe even start creating again. If you are willing and able to contribute, it would mean the world. Click here to find out more!