The Old Scout (5 min read)
Welcome to Issue #11! There's an important lesson I learned about life and art from a baseball scout, links to things that inspired or enlightened me this week, and a link to a new flash fiction story. Have a great weekend!
The Old Scout (5 min read)
When Julie and I first moved to California we lived in Santa Ana so that she could go to grad school at Cal State Fullerton while I was trying to break into Hollywood. We lived in grad housing downtown in a building called The Grand Central Art Center, the bottom floor of which was an exhibition space with an emphasis on social practice art, something I’d never heard about before GCAC. Social practice art focuses on engagement through human interaction. The engagement isn’t just a means to a finished piece, it’s part of the art itself.
I became friends with the director John Spiak and in 2012 he hired me to make a short documentary with artist-in-residence Adam Moser about his project The Cut-Off Men. For this piece Adam put together a team made up of members from the community who all felt like their chance at a career in major league baseball had been cut short for one reason or another, and together they went to an open tryout in Compton to play for a bunch of scouts. I took along the only gear I had, a small handheld camera, a tripod, and one lavalier mic.
I have a lot of great memories from that day and from working with Adam and John on the short documentary piece. The first thing that comes to mind is the speech the manager gave to the 300 or so attendees before the start of the tryout, a speech that started with the line, “We’re going to crush a lot of dreams here today.” Whenever I start thinking that the business of show is brutal and unforgiving I think back to that moment for a bit of a perspective reset.
The second thing I remember is a story that I’ve told to nearly every young person I’ve known over the past nine years and I’m relaying it here as well the sake of posterity. Maybe it’s something you’ve always known or felt but have never articulated it quite this way. Maybe it will be a reminder to you or give you a tool to pass on to someone else you know. It's something I found just as relevant to screenwriting as it was to baseball.
Over the course of the afternoon I noticed a bunch of young men who were there to try out were making the trek outside the fence up the left-field line to talk to a gentleman who looked to be in his 70’s, sitting in a lawn chair and taking it all in. They would shake his hand and smile as he talked and I could see the respect emanating from their body language. I figured this guy had to be a famous baseball player but not being much of a sports fan I didn’t recognize him at all.
At one point I set up nearby to grab a couple of shots and saw John Spiak talking to him. John filled me in after and it turns out the guy was a legendary scout named Phil Pote who spent half-a-century working for clubs like the Dodgers. Then I overheard him talking to one of the young attendees and I’ve repeated what he said word for word at least three hundred times since. He said, “The better a person you are the better a baseball player you’ll be because people will give you opportunities they won’t give everybody else.”
That’s such a simple truth and it applies directly to almost everything we do in life. The better a person you are the more experience you'll get, which in turn makes you better at whatever it is you want to do.
It’s the whole reason I was standing on that sideline in the first place. John gave me an opportunity to make some extra money and be part of a cool project because (I think, I hope) I was a positive, helpful presence in the community at GCAC.
Looking back over the course of my life I can see where I was given opportunities that helped me grow as an artist because someone just liked me as a human being. If I’m honest with myself I can also point to a handful of places where my ego and attitude probably cost me the chance to parlay those experiences into something more. I kicked over the ladder before I got the chance to climb another level.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this over the past few days and how there really is no divide at this point between who we are online and who we are in real life. Fo better or worse our social media self is our community facing self. Snark and negativity might pay off in short term dopamine hits that come from likes and retweets but it might not pay dividends in real life opportunities. We all have off-days and God knows sometimes a well-burned bridge lights the path forward. But if the negative far outweighs the positive we may never know the chances we missed because of it.
By the way, I went to look up the scout’s name again and found that he passed away in 2018. I’m attaching an article from 2009 that came up that described almost exactly the same scene of young hopefuls paying homage three years prior. It would be impossible to know how many lives he impacted over the years but it’s something to aspire to, regardless.
Adam Moser - The Cut-Off Men — www.youtube.com ADAM MOSER: THE CUT-OFF MENAdam Moser’s GCAC project involved the opportunity to realize his lifelong dream of playing in the big leagues by trying out for M...
Scout's honor: It's Phil Pote - Los Angeles Times — www.latimes.com Scout's honor: It's Phil Pote
This article below has excellent advice on making a career in writing for TV:
TV writing: Career tips, salary range, portfolio suggestions - Los Angeles Times — www.latimes.com What does a TV writer do? How do you become one? How do you move up? How much money can you make? The L.A. Times is explaining the entertainment industry — here's what you need to know about being a TV writer.
Scientists Discover 'Time Cells' In the Brain That Enable 'Mental Time Travel' — www.vice.com A new experiment probed how the human brain encodes and processes the flow of time.
Flash Fiction: Livewire
I've been writing a lot of short fiction to experiment with voice and amassing raw material for future projects. Here's a link to a tech-noir flash fiction story if you're into that sort of thing...
LIVEWIRE – Extant StoryTech — extantstorytech.com LIVEWIRE A Flash Fiction Story by Mickey Fisher Ava exhaled the high end stratus toward the ceiling, the thick cloud changing color with the lights over the nearby dance floor. She put her lips next to my ear to make herself heard over the music and