Image courtesy of examiner.com

Okay, by “meet” I mean, of course, “sitting in a crowd listening to a speech” and by “maker” I mean “the guy I really really like,” but that’s what it felt like yesterday when I went to see Joss Whedon speak at Sydney’s Opera House.  This is the guy who wrote the show that changed how I viewed and still view television. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was the first show that I watched and then actually retained.  I mean, there were shows that I liked and watched frequently, but it always went in one ear and out the other, but Buffy was different - it’s hard to explain and it’s a story for another day, but all I know is that I’m grateful it happened.

I didn’t know what to expect going into this thing yesterday. I figured he was going to talk about how cool it was to do the stuff he does and then he was going to be grilled embarrassingly by over-zealous zealots he calls “fans.” I have some friends who saw him in Melbourne the night or two before and said that he was charming and intelligent (which was no surprise) but the host they had didn’t facilitate well. Even though I believe we had a different host, I thought the worst that could happen is that we’d have a douche up on stage showing his ass, but  I mean, a bad host is better than no Joss at all.

We were warned right.  Will Anderson, a local comedian, was a crude and disrespectful facilitaor.  Not that I think he meant to be, as I understand it, he is quite the fan, but he wore flip flops and swore a lot.  Sometimes there were awkward pauses in conversation where the audience and Mr. Whedon were like “ehwha?”  Not to mention he would occassionally interrupt the guest of honor to get his own less funny quip in.  That said…

…then there was Joss.

And oh boy, was there Joss.  He came out on stage with a bang.  Smoke and blue light brought a silhouette out into the shape of a man; a hero to so many. Then he started to speak.  The fact that he was just talking several yards away from me made the fangirl in me want to piddle in excitement.  At that point he could do no wrong.  Then, something brilliant happened.  He said that he was going to talk about something different this time around, that he wasn’t going to give the stock standard speech about networks and little trivia about the shows that we could find out anywhere on the internet, he was instead going to talk about himself and what made him tick.

Oh. Em. Gee.

That. Just. Happened.

It was amazing.  He got really intimate.  He spoke about his childhood and his fears growing up and what scared him and what his “dark place” was.  He said before he never knew why he wrote teenaged girls with superpowers.  He always just thought they were cool, but something must have been asked at the Melbourne talk that made him think because he said that the last few days has put some things into place for him.  Yes, he will always write about teenaged girls with superpowers, but more than that, he will always write about hopelessness.  He said that these young girls he wrote were his avatar because he is a small scared man that will always need to be saved. Wowza.

Ah, now, that is interesting.  He said that he was always frightened, helpless, and alone.  He talked about his father and how he was scared of his disapproving scowl ¹ and how if you dropped him three blocks from his house and turned him around twice, he would likely die of exposure.  There was a vulnerability and a truth to what he was saying that I have never heard from him in any interview or DVD extra.  It was amazing.  Amazing is not the best, most articulate way to express that, but it’s all I got. There was something very human but still “Joss is God” like about him as he continued to talk.

When he spoke about himself and his eccentricities it was amazing how much I related to him.  I know that must sound pompous, but I can’t help it. When he spoke about a plain, uneventful, childhood unworthy of a memoir and his social inability to speak to people, especially women, and I was there with him.  When he said that he said he wanted to be everything, to do everything; to paint, to write, to draw, to dance, to play in a band — but then only got good enough to then quit, I wanted to jump out of my seat and shout ‘amen.’ When he said that he was not scared to be alone but often was, I empathized wholeheartedly, thinking about the little study I have made for myself that no one is allowed in. And when he said “I will never be less than a storyteller,”  and spoke with a subtle, non-pretentious passion that oozed from ever pore, I was inspired and filled with hope.  It was so moving that I didn’t want it to end.

But it did.  Will Anderson came back on to try to be funnier than him and the mics were opened up to the audience to ask the equivalent of “what was your favorite childhood toy and why?” ²  I just wanted to scream at them all and get Joss to keep talking about whatever it was he wanted to say – politics, religion, shoe polish, anything – but alas, that would have been really awkward and Joss would have looked at me funny, so I allowed it to continue on course.

I did not expect to be a giant fangirl about this.  I thought it would just be something fun and cool to say, like I mentioned, he was the guy who started it all. Showing up was the only way I could show my gratitude.  I’m now so glad that I went, I got so much more out of it than ever thought possible.

____

un·der·whelm  [uhn-der-hwelm, -welm]

–verb : to fail to interest or astonish

This is my first post in almost three months.  My record to date.  It would have been closer to two months if I hadn’t spent the last two weeks pondering my glorious return.  Everything I remotely came up with was so underwhelming and certainly not glorious, so I have decided to embrace it.

I figured I would dazzle you with some trivia on the word, or at least an etymology of sorts.  The googled results are surprisingly underwhelming.  Not really sure what I was expecting, now that I think about it.

In the past three months, I have:

• Gotten my first technical writing job.  I am writing procedures in the corporate office of Westpac, an Australian bank.
• Submitted a second round of immigration application which in theory will lead to permanent residency.
• Discovered The Oatmeal
• Sanded and oiled six deck chairs we found in the trash pile of a Mormon church.  Surprisingly, this project has taken the entire three months.  I put the final coat of oil on this morning.  I still smell like turpentine.

All I  can do is apologize promise to attempt to be more dazzling, or at least more consistent, in the coming months.

I leave you with this profound quote:

Chastity: I know you can be overwhelmed, and you can be underwhelmed, but can you ever just be whelmed?
Bianca: I think you can in Europe.

God speed.

Now, I understand the uproar.  I get why they would come running to the defense of Sean and other’s like him.  However, I couldn’t quite gel with their arguments.  And I have figured out why when I read an article posted by the genius himself, Aaron Sorkin.  Immediately I felt “this is my opinion.” Funny that, I knew I had an opinion, I just couldn’t articulate what it was.

Me trying to recount it would only butcher the grace in which he writes, so I have posted Sorkin’s response in it’s entirety below.

Now That You Mention It, Rock Hudson Did Seem Gay

This is a sentence I never thought I would type: I’m coming to the defense of a theatre critic.

Newsweek‘s Ramin Setoodeh wrote an article last week titled “Straight Jacket” in which he argues that gay actors can’t and shouldn’t play straight characters. His “Exhibit A” in the piece is Sean Hayes, the stunningly gifted actor who came to our attention playing Jack MacFarland on the much beloved NBC half-hour comedyWill and Grace. (This was back when NBC broadcast television shows.) Mr. Hayes just opened in the Broadway revival of Promises, Promises, a 1968 musical by Neil Simon, Burt Bacharach and Hal David that was based on The Apartment, the Academy Award-winning film by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. (Izzy) Diamond that starred Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. Are you following so far?

It doesn’t really matter, because all you need to know is that Sean Hayes plays C.C. Baxter in this great show, and that C.C. Baxter is a man who is attracted to women.

Ramin Setoodeh, unlike the overwhelming majority of the people in the audience at the two preview performances I attended, was unhappy with Sean Hayes’ performance. This reaction was not due to Mr. Hayes’ acting, singing, dancing, comedy, unique charm and exceptional rapport with the audience. Mr. Setoodeh’s problem with the star’s performance was that in real life, Mr. Hayes is gay. And as if the studio had given the screenwriter a note that the story had to be spicier, Mr. Setoodeh is gay as well.

Much is being made of the Newsweek piece. Much should be. I’m proud to say that my friend, Kristin Chenoweth, who stars opposite Mr. Hayes in the show (and about whose performance I can’t possibly be objective — she’s sensational and we’ll leave it at that) led the charge — posting an online rebuttal to Mr. Setoodeh in which she called him homophobic.

For an actress who makes her living and her reputation on Broadway, throwing down with a prominent theatre critic isn’t something you do as a career move. In her response to Setoodeh, Ms. Chenoweth made good point after good point after good point…

…and missed the point.

So did Setoodeh.

First things first. An actor, no matter which sex they’re attracted to, can’t “play” gay or “play” straight. Gay and straight aren’t actable things. You can act effeminate and you can act macho (though macho usually ends up reading as gay), but an actor can’t play gay or straight anymore than they can play Catholic. The most disturbing thing to me about this episode is that the theater critic for Newsweek didn’t know that. Of COURSE gay actors can play straight characters — it’s impossible to believe that Mr. Setoodeh would prefer if Ian McKellen would stop doing King Lear.

But with sincere respect to Ms. Chenoweth and the hundreds and hundreds of Internet posters who’ve crashed down on Setoodeh in the last few days — some understandably passionate and some unfortunately hostile — I don’t think Setoodeh was being homophobic. Just wrong.

The problem doesn’t have anything to do with sexual preference. The problem has everything to do with the fact that we know too much about each other and we care too much about what we know. In one short decade we have been reconditioned to be entertained by the most private areas of other people’s lives. We’ve become the family dog who’s allowed to eat anything that falls on the floor, and the press is the little kid in the family who keeps dropping food. Sandy Bullock’s life falls apart? That’s for us. A golfer gets caught with strippers? We’ll take that, thank you. Lindsay Lohan’s an alcoholic? Mmm, mmm good! When Jennifer Aniston plays a movie character who’s looking for love, her performance — always sublime — doesn’t stand a chance against the real story we’ve been told it’s okay to pay attention to, which is that Jennifer Aniston is looking for love. I can’t hum a single John Mayer song but I can name five women he’s slept with. Sean, for Setoodeh, the show began before you even showed up to the theater that night.

The volcanic eruption of tabloids, Internet insanity and — you better believe it — reality TV, has de-creepyized voyeurism. More than that, it’s made the private lives of public people — in the vocabulary of television writers — the “A” story. And in a not-so-convoluted way, the “A” story has an author — thousands of authors in an extraordinary collaboration. When I need the audience to know that a piece of information they’re about to hear is important, I can use words, a close-up, a push-in, music… when the authors of the no-longer-private-lives “A” story want the audience to know that something’s important, it shows up on our Yahoo homepage. (The third story on my homepage yesterday was that Britain, our closest ally, has a new Prime Minister. The first story was about Justin Bieber. Unless the new Prime Minister is Justin Bieber, something’s obviously gone wrong.) Is Sean Hayes’ sexuality relevant to his performance? It has to be — the “authors” told us it was important. (Though Setoodeh would have done well to have asked himself if Mr. Hayes’ performance would have been any different if C.C. Baxter was in love with a man instead of Ms. Chenoweth’s Fran Kubelik. It wouldn’t have been.)

I would never presume to — and those words are almost always followed by whoever said them proceeding to do exactly what they just said they would never presume to do — but I would never presume to tell someone how they should feel about something. I can only imagine that Setoodeh’s piece felt like a solid kidney punch, not to just Mr. Hayes and the other actors tagged in the story, but to teenagers — kids who live in daily fear of what their parents are going to say, of getting the hell beaten out of them at school, of being an oddity. Gay actors, you’ll forgive the expression, are caught between a rock and a hard place. Only criminals and adulterers should have to hide who they are. And in addition to living their own lives in sun and not shadow, these actors want to — admirably — be role models for these kids. But they also know the blanker their canvas the better their chance of marginalizing the “A” story. They know that even in 2010, there’s still no such thing as an actor who’s gay, a movie star and alive all at the same time.

So while I would never presume to tell someone how to feel, if it were me, I would re-direct my energy away from Mr. Setoodeh. (Ryan Murphy– the very gifted creator of Glee whose cast member, the invaluable Jonathan Groff, was also smacked in the teeth by Setoodeh– has called for a boycott of Newsweek. I get it completely, but I say please don’t boycott Newsweek — it’s still one of the very last places left where we can find news. Boycott the red carpet instead. You’re going to win the Emmy, Ryan, and you’re going to get the whole publicity bump that comes with it. You and your cast should proudly walk past every microphone that’s shoved in your faces. The people holding the microphones are writing the “A” story and you don’t have script approval. Boycott In Touch and Us Weekly and Brangelina Daily and every other piece of crap that makes us feel like we’re all sitting under hairdryers.)

Gay actors are in absolutely no danger of losing parts in Broadway shows, so if it were me, I’d re-direct my anger to the real problem. The honest-to-God, no kidding around, small-minded, mean-spirited, hysterically frightened, pig-ignorant bigots who don’t think homosexuals are fit to get married, adopt children or fight and die for their country. The ones who hold signs saying “God Hates Fags.” Those people aren’t in the backwoods of Idaho, they’re in Congress. Fight THEM. I’ll help.

And you know who else will help? Ramin Setoodeh. I promise you he’s on the side of the good guys.

It is a love story between two people via email, starting from 1999. Each blog post is one of the emails, which he updates regularly.  He has just started and it’s already entertaining.

I’m excited to see how it plays out.  And it really doesn’t take that long.  I check it between my emails and facebook.

Check it out here:

Bored Olives by Stephen Davis

Like any up and coming so-called writer, I have a hard drive FULL of first drafts, half drafts, title pages, notes, treatments, and drool… but this is different for me, for some reason.  I wrote a couple of different drafts myself, ² then, at the point of my most subjectivity, I roped three unsuspecting people into workshopping it with me.

The workshop was comprised of my partner and two of my very close friends. These are among the very few people that I trust enough to read my work without fearing judgement, well, personal judgement.  There is a certain vulnerability to putting a work in progress out to be read.  Not only was I admitting that I put my best efforts into this 100 page pile of papers, but that after  my best efforts it still wasn’t finished.  On top of all that, I was asking them to spend a good chunk of time reading it and then committing several hours to discussing it with me.

After everyone had read it, the four of us talked about the script in general; the characters, the story as a whole, the holes in the whole, the strengths, the weaknesses, etc.  Then we sat down and went through the entire script page by page breaking it down further.  It took better part of a day and a half.  So two days, eaten out of their rare three day weekend.  All that for ONE free lunch.  It’s a big ask, and they were troopers.

It was an amazing process, the workshopping.  There were three very different voices coming at in in three very different ways, being very honest and open with how they felt with the script and the story.  I assure you it wasn’t two days of my besties talking about how awesome I was.  Far from it.  I took none of the criticism to heart, as a personal attack on me or my work, but as criticism and much needed objectivity that will help my project grow to new heights. I got so much out of it.  Perhaps one day when I can afford to buy them two lunches, and perhaps slightly fancier ones, I will do it on another project.  It was an absolutely invaluable process. I recommend it to anyone.

After that, I spent the last day of my holiday working in some of the changes we talked about.  Then every waking moment over the next week.  (Time was starting to bear down on me and I had a deadline to make.) I didn’t take everything they said word for word, because ultimately it was my script and I had to really discern what the story I want to tell was.  However, I now had a better sense of the flaws and how I could possibly make the story more precise and clear.

Then I made my partner read it twice more… in one day.  We worked on the typos and made sure all the lines read right and then… well, and then there was nothing more I could do.  Well, of course, there is always more to do, but I had gotten it to the point of a solid draft.  It told a decent story and showed off my writing potential (whatever that may be).  I was proud to submit what was in front of me.

Then it was gone.  Out of my hands.  There was nothing more I could do.  Now, I can only wait and see what happens with it.

And start on my next project, of course.

___

Hollywood University OR: How to get a job in Hollywood

and

A TV Calling

Also, my earnest apologies for the lack of updates.  The joys of an crazy life.

I have decided that Draft 2 is my nemesis.  I sit there thinking “but it’s written, why is it not good enough for you people?!” and I am disheartened by the worthlessness I feel by not being some kind of prodigy.  It’s hard to go back and kill your babies, if you will, meaning taking out all the little gems that you think make the screenplay gold and unique.  It’s a pain, because you sit there thinking about how you will never be able to be as crisp, articulate or funny again.  It’s the danger of good one liners.  They either hold up the editing process or set the bar too high, either way, I’m digressing.

Then comes figuring out strategy.  Do I have to start with a blank page, or can I just walk through each scene and rejig what’s not working?  I’ve heard different schools on this.  Starting over completely is intriquing because it really is a blank slate.  You are coming up with out of your head again.  Yes, you have points in your head, but you don’t have it sitting in front of you, forcing only the important points to stick out in your brain.  On the other hand, Draft 1 couldn’t be all that bad, surely there is something working enough that’s worth keeping.

I’m experimenting with a new technique on my current screenplay.  I call it the “Draft 1.5.”  Though I’m sure I’m not the first person to ever do this, or a variation thereof, I’ve never heard of anyone speak of it specifically.

I’m writing the first draft by hand.  This means that I force to get my idea out of my head onto paper and because there’s no curser I can’t just go back and change anything I want.  It keeps the temptation to be constantly rewriting at bay.  Hopefully this means I’m less likely to burn out, get to close to the story, write myself in a corner, and get the draft complete.

Eventually, after I have gotten as many ideas on paper as I can at the time, I will have to transcribe it onto the computer.  Agents very rarely accept spiral notebooks as manuscript these days, especially with the chicken scratch known as my handwriting.  This is when I can start seeing what works and what doesn’t.  As I go through the screenplay I can massage what I have already written and see what works and what doesn’t.  It’s an automatic second pass of the story without having to start completely from scratch.

Hopefully, by the end of it, I will have an insanely attractive first draft and not some pile of poo.  Then I can take a week off, forget about it and go back for my real second draft.  Maybe by then I will be able to decide what strategy I wan to take on tackling it.
Draft 1.5 will either be insanely efficient or a massive waste of time.  Only time will tell.

It was a pretty tough call for me.  On one hand, I’m in no position in my career to be turning down a credit, especially on a feature film.  I have nothing against the film and I wish it success, but it was a small, fairly new company trying to get a low budget comedy up and running.  The likelihood of it turning much profit was slim.  (Maybe it wasn’t, maybe it will go one to rake in oodles.)  Unfortunately, the other hand is that I need to pay rent now, this month, and I can’t take weeks/months of unpaid time because I have enough trouble paying the bills and my credit card off as it is.

It would have been nice to have a credit on that film.  I have a fairly anemic resume at the moment and another feature film could have helped me a lot in getting my next (paid) gig.

So this is what it means to be an adult then; making decisions based on being able to eat opposed to “pursuing a dream.”

Hopefully, next time this sort of thing comes up I will have the cash saved away that I will be able to take the time off, but unfortunately now, my car insurance needs me.