Brain Fuzz, The Hump, and the Threshold of Pain

I had lamented earlier that I was becoming all-consumed by my recent projects, but I have a feeling that it's mutated into something much worse.

I'm in that strange place with the current script I'm working on where I've just lingered over the hump. I'm officially half-way through, and I have a clear idea where it goes from here, to the point where I could give you a scene-by-scene breakdown. But the problem I'm finding now is that despite being incredibly patient and meticulous so far, all I want is for this thing to be finished.

What is this sudden impatience? The script has been a real pleasure to write, and though there will be plenty of work to do in the rewriting stages, I don't really understand what it is that's making me anxious to see it through.

This is, naturally, opposed by another feeling that doesn't strike me until I sit down with the intention of writing. I would like to point out my use of the words "...with the intention of..." because it's around that time that every other stupid thing on the internet catches my fancy. Yesterday, for example, it was a classic.

I go on to berate myself for whatever reason, but by the time Final Draft is up and running, my brain is covered in this thick film and the ability to focus, to hone in on the characters and the scenes that should be unfolding before me, is replaced by an urgent need to fill pages - resulting in cliche and generally unwanted text. For example, the eight pages that I wrote last week are probably going to be trashed by later this afternoon.

I find that there's a slight fear in proceeding. I'm almost afraid to see where this thing ends. The middle third of any script, I believe, is the hardest, and with everything being relatively strong up to this point, I will admit that I'm afraid I'm going to fly this ring right into an oncoming train.

My hunch is that I need to remove any and all distractions so I can focus again, slowing down my pace, making each word count. This probably means not being at home when writing. This probably means writing for longer periods at a time and clearing my schedule to help me accomplish exactly that. Whatever's going on right now does nothing more than come off as completely annoying.

In a perfect world, I could spend the next 72 hours in front of a computer (with a pot of coffee always in the queue) finishing this script so that I can work on the next, but we all know the reality of that pipe dream. For now I just have to suck it up and hop aboard whatever narrow focus I happen to find.

As Promised

Anyone interested in watching the final Spider-Man 3 trailer (not the trailer that was in theaters with 300), click here. Click the TV screen in top left-corner labeled "TRAILERS," and then the new one should be the first option. Enjoy.

Career Day

Yesterday, NYU's Tisch School of the Arts held its annual Career Day, which consists of various entertainment-themed companies setting up a table along the outskirts of a square, black room while a bunch of desperate seniors and alums try to land a job.

The reality is that the lines are ridiculously long (I believe the line for CBS was somewhere out the door), most places aren't hiring or are only offering internships, most of the jobs that aren't production based aren't even in New York (so if you're not a film major, good luck), and you're one out of a billion in a no-win situation. Your odds of landing a job out of something like that are about as good as winning the lottery. It's sad if you're not expecting exactly that. But then again, there's something equally sad about expecting to be let down.

Two years removed from college, obtaining jobs in the entertainment industry (in New York anyway) is still something of a mystery to me, though my hunch is that, as in most situations, experience begets jobs. I would propose that you just have to suck it up and gain your experience without pay. Does that mean interning during the day and waiting tables/being a prostitute at night? Maybe. Though not all companies hire from within, being an intern at least sets you up to be an assistant somewhere, and depending on what you want to do, there is plenty of overlap.

Cake Man was with me yesterday, and he's only now just graduating from NYU, and though he mainly wants to write, he would rather have a day job in an entertainment field. He's been scanning the usual websites and exhausting most of his contacts for months to no avail. He refuses to work in restaurants. I want to stay hopeful for him, but I honestly don't think it's going to happen.

While my views are obviously cynical, there is an unbiased truth that graduating from an arts school and trying to land a job in your field is incredibly difficult. What makes the situation worse is that in my experience at NYU, in two different undergrad departments, that reality is one that no one makes a real effort to prepare you for. It's obviously mentioned over the course of a four year education, but I wish it was hammered home, perhaps with doomsday-like emphasis. I wish someone had told me to start interning as soon as possible and to just stick like glue to wherever I end up senior year. I wish I'd been taught things, as a writing student, like how to write a good query letter. It might have been nice to see a list, no matter how small, of people in the business that are generous and will allow people right out of school to volunteer, give their time, offer their services. It's not pay, but with most, seemingly all, doors closed, it would have been nice to know that someone's door is open if you're willing to walk through it.

In the drama department, I wish everyone interested was allowed to participate in the agent showcase, but no. There were auditions, and less than ten percent of the graduating class was selected.

There can obviously only be so much emphasis placed on career planning or job placement in an arts school, and if the philosophy happens to be that "our students are doomed, so let's train their brains out so they're as good as possible when the leave," I guess that's okay. Or was. Tisch is going to cost students (including an estimated 11K for room and board) over fifty-thousand dollars next year. That is a cool $200,000 for a BFA in the arts.

And there's really no better way to help students get a job than a handful of disinterested companies taking over a small black-box theater for three hours?

It's nothing short of a shame, and walking back to my completely non-arts related job after the event ended, I was with three of my friends, all League members, all having graduated since December, and I could see those first hints of betrayal. They gave so much time and effort for their education, loved their teachers, gave their classmates their all, and they were rewarded with unemployment and maybe the dawn of the most taxing emotional period of their lives to date.

I'd like to tell them that it gets better, but two years later, I still get bitter about it. Every once in a while. It's something people should know about and prepare for, and schools need to start focusing on job placement. Otherwise, it's getting less and less practical to break the bank on undergraduate education.

This isn't to deter anyone in a prestigious arts school, or some argument against them in general. There are ways to be wise to the circumstances and to prevent unemployability. But it needs to happen early on. And it might actually be more important than the training itself.

Hindsight is always 20/20, and though if given the option, I would still come to NYU, I would do almost everything there differently.


Write on...

An Explanation

I guess my reaction to the subject matter of my previous post deserves some kind of explanation, and though I can't give a very good one in under 4,000 words, I'll do the best I can.

If you didn't know, and I don't suspect I've given anyone reason to, Superman is my favorite superhero. He pretty much always been, with the exception of a year or two in 1989 after Tim Burton's Batman came out. Without delving too deeply into my psyche, I would say this is because Superman has the traits that I aspire to, namely being a leader and, well, being the best.

From a literary and dramatic standpoint, I can see where Superman creates problems: he's a boyscout, there has never been any real limit or guidelines to his powers, and he only has two weaknesses (Kryptonite and magic...but the magic thing has never been all that clear). While Batman has a psyche that creates all sorts of themes (I'll argue that Batman is completely psychopathic, which, to me, is part of the appeal), Superman's themes revolve a lot around being an alien and dealing with being a savior. He became Atlas, to steal from the myth, and more or less did that to himself, but it's hard to make the most powerful being in the universe a sympathetic character. He's perfect. In other words, he is boring.

And yet...he's Superman! Has it really come to the point that we can't find a story about him that's worth telling, that's worth creating for the big screen? Everyone has some relationship with the man of steel. I absolutely refuse to believe otherwise. Hell, almost everyone my age at least watched one episode of Lois and Clark. I'm not saying you have to care, I'm not saying you even have to like him (Cake Man, for one, isn't terribly fond), but have we finally left the age of heroes?

And by this I mean to suggest that this is, and has been maybe for decades, the age of the anti-hero: the everyman with the burden of a gift, with the deficiencies of self, whose actions are all a little selfish, even when selfless. Is it that we're looking for heroes that are like us? Instead of looking up to heroes that are somewhat better?

I remember when I used to watch the X-Men Saturday morning cartoon on Fox Kids, and I'll be the first to admit, Cyclops was nowhere near as interesting as Wolverine, but the burden on Scott Summers' shoulders as leader was no less real than Logan's inner torment. But then, it's a bad example. He is one of us, after all, a human, even with a mutated eye beam gene. Or something.

But Superman is not one of us, and his backstory, his legacy even, are the very things that will always make him an outsider. We can't aspire to be Superman, because we're all human. We're not from Krypton, we don't have powers enhanced by Earth's yellow sun. We can never hope to be faster than a speeding bullet. We can't leap tall buildings in a single bound, and though we can fight our own battles, maybe even choosing to stand for truth, justice, and...well, you know, there will always be that limit, that barrier. When we fail to be super, we will always have an excuse.

Is it because we're learning that there is no one fighting our battles for us? Our leaders are untrustworthy? Has the idea of power been soured by politics and war to the point that the more powerful a hero, especially when he's absurdly powerful, the more unappealing?

There are no answers, but maybe I understand Superman in a way that he's, honestly, not usually portrayed. I understand that while he's pummeling monsters and stopping bad guys (World War III is coming, DC fans), he has his own struggles -- concerns distinctly alien, but ones that make him human. He was raised as one of us. He can't be all that different.

An appearance in a JLA movie is no consolation either. But that's an entirely different entry.

No Superman Sequel?

Oh. Dear. God. NO!

Lights

The League, as you probably know, is a group of "superhero screenwriters" who encourage, aide, abet, teach, and critique each other in their work (and sometimes lives...). However, to say that we're exclusively screenwriters can be misleading. For the purposes of why we've banded together, having the common goal of writing for the screen is as useful for breaking into the industry as it is for bonding us together. However, we also know that some ideas simply cannot be forced into a medium into which they do not fit.

Imagine one of your favorite movies. I'll use "Glory" for mine. It's a great Civil War movie, with great character and great, but also important, battle sequences. If the author of that story was a playwright and a playwright only, "Glory" would have been about the debate to have an all black regiment. It would have been about politicians discussing the battle. And, if audiences were lucky, it might have culminated in the "giant battle" onstage, or, in other words, about twenty actors with rubber guns running around and jumping into the air when a "cannon ball exploded at their feet." It wouldn't have been the same story.

And it works the other way around. Some plays are great, but would make insufferable films, because there are certain elements that define the mediums. Very few artists can successfully ignore those and make a movie that's really a play but still captivates the movie-going audience. And vice versa.

All that said, as writers, we must recognize when we have an idea that transcends our normal medium. In fact, it can be helpful to try one's hand at writing all sorts of things. I know that for me, personally, I have ideas that seem destined to be only screenplays, or plays, or graphic novels, or comic book series, or novels. And though I'm in a league of "screenwriters," if you imagine the eight ideas I have in my head right now as lights in the dark, the one that is burning the brightest is meant to be a play. I acknowledge that. For my own sake, I had better start writing it now, or soon the light will syphon energy from all the others, until it is the only light still burning in my head.

Helpful Site

I was on SuperHeroHype.com earlier, and through an article on the Shazam movie, I stumbled upon screenwriter John August's ("Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," "Big Fish," "Go") blog, which he updates frequently. He started the site as an archive for all of the screenwriter helpful hint articles he wrote for imdb.com, and has since answered many people's questions about writing. I encourage people to check out the site, http://johnaugust.com and read through the archives to find any answers to questions they might have. I especially liked his article about the pleasurable anonymity of being a writer, which can be found at http://johnaugust.com/archives/2006/are-you-somebody.

So check out the site and, if you have on that no one else has asked, ask him a question. He seems to be pretty dedicated to helping aspiring writers out. (I thought it was especially important that, in his ask a question section, he specifically states that he will not respond to people individually, because the site is there as a general help for all, not a means through which one or two people seek to be given a leg up.) Hope you find something interesting there, I did.