What the Effingham, Illinois I am working on

I got to catch up with a friend last night at the Three Clubs in H'wood (my world got ROCKED yesterday when I tried to Google Three of Clubs and found out it isn't called that... WHAT. But it's only ONE club, I don't get it), and as I plopped down for what turned out to be a pretty impressive improv-ed play, she asked how I was doing. I surprised myself by answering, "Amazing!"

I am broke. BROKE. But as we speak, the ideas cooking in my head are smelling pretty tasty and promising. Yes, I am amazing. But the crazy part is that it will be a while from now or it will be never that you, dear ones, will get to read or see what I've got simmering on my brain stove. My friend asked why I was doing so well, and dutifully I tried to launch into an explanation of my projects... have you ever tried to talk to someone about what you're writing? No?

Well, I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it.

Yeah. It's not a thing I would recommend doing in public. I don't know how much "writer mumbo-jumbo" I actually believe... are the stories already out there, like radio waves, and we just tell them? Do you invent characters or do they find you? How concrete is this other world where writers go when they write? Clearly it's potent enough to drive most of us batshit...

But I also know that screenwriting is a particular brand of this madness, because IT'S NOT LITERATURE. Think about it. If you are literally any other kind of writer -- poet, essayist, novelist, short fiction writer, journalist, biographer, etc. etc. -- then your writing ITSELF is the end goal. Your writing ITSELF has value. Even a playwright gets respect for the text of the play itself; you can go to the library and check out a play, you can win a Pulitzer for a play -- hell, you can win a Pulitzer for MUSIC -- but you can't win one for screenwriting. It's true. Look it up.

Asshole.

And, yeah, I get it. By the time a screenplay makes it to you, the viewer, it's not a screenplay anymore. By then, it's a movie, and hundreds maybe thousands of people have worked on it and you can hardly be said to be its author anymore, at least not in any sense that matters. But without the screenwriter, there is no such thing as a movie. The screenwriter is the spark, the ignition point -- ain't no fire without us, baby. And that -- the very ugly nature of this beast called filmmaking -- is what shunts screenwriters to the side and invalidates them as WRITERS, worthy on the fact that they access the same magic and practice the same sorcery as other writers and walk the same road -- a road paved with, I don't know, unicorn horns and hot lava.

...and they're still all one person, right?

Anyway, the whole thing goes back to my post about processing work and the nature of creation. S was talking to me last night after the play, and he mentioned that, because he has been working with a writer on developing/writing a screenplay, he has been starting to get a taste of what my life is like in terms of the pleasure of creation. My friends, creation is pleasure.

When S gets behind a camera and starts shooting, then there's pressure. Then there are high stakes, because there is money involved, and you're getting to the step where people might actually see what you're doing. But when you sit in your office/living room/coffee shop and you put words on paper, then you're free again to explore and create untethered. To be honest, there isn't a lot of pressure -- especially when you're broke, like me, and only writing on spec at the moment, like me, so there isn't money and there's virtually no chance of ANYBODY ever seeing what you're working on -- because being a screenwriter means you're operating on the very fringes of what people consider to be art/literature, so CREATE AWAY.

And be amazing. It's not a fair world, the world of the screenwriter. My mentor and friend, let's call him J, constantly writes, spending years developing scripts, doing drafts, making compromises, fighting with actors, fighting with producers, fighting with his own writing partner, and then he pushes his projects out of the nest and he gets to watch most of them go KERSPLAT on the pavement 90% of the time. The ones that do find their wings half the time don't remember who their mommy is, or they have had just too many mommies, so J then loses his credits in arbitration, so even if you have seen one of his movies, you probably don't even know it. This is a dude who was nominated for TWO OSCARS -- and that's the highest award we give, no Pulitzers for you, puny mortal screenwriters -- because somehow enough of his words made it into the mouths of Anthony Hopkins and Will Smith, and even if you've seen his movies, which you probably haven't, you STILL don't know who he is. And that's pretty much the best future I can hope for.

I still want it. This is the life I picked. It's pretty fun! If you think about it. Or don't. Just don't think about it. I may have made a wrong turn back there somewhere.

I'm not in the documentary business and facts are for SISSIES

There has been a big hullaballoo lately about a lack of diversity in movies -- and particularly in Oscar-nominated movies. This post is not about that, not really. This post is about history. QUICK DICTIONARY TIME. For this post, we'll define history as: stories about people who are all dead now. I know, I know, history is always happening all around us all the time, so a lot of people are still alive at the moment that are important to history, but we gotta start somewhere, so we'll say that history is about dead people, kk?

Look! Some history! Sorta!!!!

Let's talk about Hamilton. Wait. Back up. Let's talk about "historical accuracy." A few years ago Clint Eastwood made a movie called Flags of our Fathers, which was about the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima and what happened to the guys in the picture after the picture got famous. Clint Eastwood (who, it is becoming obvious, is kind of an asshole and maybe not even a great director, but definitely the father of some foxy, foxy kids) at the time got a lot of criticism for not having a single African American soldier in the movie. (He also cast Michael Pena as Native American Ira Hayes, which I can't remember if people didn't like or not.) Anyway, back then, Eastwood's main argument was that he was going for HISTORICAL ACCURACY, SPIKE LEE, OKAY?, and there weren't any black soldiers in the movie because in WWII the units were segregated and the fact was there actually weren't any black marines present at the flag-raising in real life. Spike Lee and others did not like this, for obvious reasons, and eventually Spielberg had to get involved to break up the old-man fistfight, because I guess he's like everybody's mom.

Flash-forward to 2015 and Suffragette. Now, if you've been following along, you'll know that Suffragette got into hot water for almost exactly the same reasons, only here there was no Spielberg to sort it out with milk and cookies. Suffragette, which about the women's right-to-vote movement in the 1912ishes in England, doesn't have any people of color in it either -- doesn't have any women of color participating in this otherwise kickass lady victory. And then there was this t-shirt thing. Not great.

What do we want? HISTORICAL ACCURACY! When do we want it? ALWAYS!!!! unlessit'snarrativelyinconvenient

See, that, to me, was the extra-crazy part about the Suffragette debacle -- they actually went with the Eastwood party-line of WE ARE GOING FOR HISTORICAL ACCURACY, so no black people. And, yeah, they're right; there WEREN'T many/any women of color involved in this particular part of the suffragette movement in history, but that's because they were being deliberately excluded, even then. Admittedly, England wasn't super diverse at the time, but definitely around the world, women of color, like Ida B. Wells, were fighting this fight while all of this was going on and they were being persecuted for it, even more so than their white sisters -- even sometimes by their white sisters.

But my point that I'm trying to get to in all of this is: WHO CARES. Here is a friendly reminder, say this with me:
"What is history?"
History is stories.
"Who writes the stories?"
The winners, the owners, those who have power.
"What happens to the losers in history?"
Their stories are told for them or forgotten.

Then say it again and again until it starts to sink in. HISTORY IS STORIES. The winners write the stories. The losers' stories are told for them -- or forgotten.
HISTORY IS STORIES.
No, wait, you say, movies are stories. History is facts. NO. History is stories, told by the people who live to tell them, who pay to tell them, who have the power to tell them. So history is fluid by nature, subjective by nature, OPPRESSIVE BY NATURE.

Enter Hamilton. If you have been paying attention, you don't need me to tell you that Hamilton is the shit. It's everything. But one of the reasons it's everything is because it gives zero fucks about good ol' historical accuracy. Let's rap about the founding fathers! Let's cast WHOEVER in it -- in fact, let's make the only white guy in the show the King of England. Let's be incisive, let's be crude, let's be unforgiving. In fact, let's bring the women to the front -- the women who were ACTUALLY THERE -- YOU KNOW WHAT, THERE'S SOME HISTORICAL ACCURACY -- instead of brushing them under the historical rug. In fact, Hamilton is damn accurate -- more accurate than most of the "historical" stuff we make.

Bitches be accurate af

But it doesn't have to be. That's what I'm getting at here. People calling Hamilton a "reimagining" are ignoring the fact that every piece of fiction -- book, play, movie -- based on history IS a reimagining. Actually every history book is ALSO a reimagining. Think about THAT. Is our history that precious? Or is it that when we hide behind historical accuracy, we're just showing our true colors? Is our view so narrow, our footing so precarious, that we are still walking on the eggshells of the past, still afraid of the long, long dead ghosts of the former winners, the ex-owners, the men (always MEN!) who used to have power???

My point is, I wasn't there. Neither were you. Neither was the main character of Suffragette, by the way, whom the filmmakers have said is a "hybrid" character. Oh, so we fictionalized that, but we couldn't fictionalize a single suffragette who wasn't white? Oh man. The past isn't coming for you, creators. We are the ones telling the stories now. Realize you were raised with blinders on, and seek at every turn to cast them off, seek at every turn to stop to stop telling the stories you think are "true", and start telling the ones you want to MAKE true. Yes, it is good to find the badass people in history who were always bucking the systems -- like the suffragettes -- and yes, PLEASE, try to tell their stories. But also go after the systems themselves, the systems that are still feeding you the lies of what you can and can't make, the systems that are still teaching you that you can somehow break or dishonor the dead. They are dead and we are alive and our only chance to speak is NOW. You know, I'm just saying (to myself as much as to you or anyone): don't throw away your shot.