Moving Pictures

I went to film school in Chicago, back in the early days of the internet as we know it. I thought that in the future, everybody would need somebody who knows how to use a video camera and generate original content. This was six years before YouTube existed -- so I wasn't wrong, exactly. I just thought that my specialty would be a bit more special in the years ahead. Nevertheless, I learned a lot of cool stuff along the way, even if I will likely never have to load a manual sixteen millimeter camera in the dark ever again or edit another movie with actual pieces of tape.

For my last semester of film school, I participated in their "Semester in LA" program. We congregated five days a week on the CBS lot in Studio City, sandwiched between the sets of Big Brother and Malcolm in the Middle. I was among the dozen or so aspiring writers who met in one trailer, while the hopeful producers found themselves situated in another.
 
Our mornings typically began with a lecture. Then we'd have a guest speaker, somebody who actively worked in the industry and could offer some valuable insights. We ate lunch in the commissary amidst the casts and crews of other familiar TV shows, and then we would return to the trailer and spend the rest of the day writing. We had two weeks to write a feature-length script, two weeks to revise it, and then one week to apply for jobs and internships. It was intense. I loved it.  
 
I lived in LA for about two years. I spent my first few weeks in the City of Angels sleeping on the floor of a motel room in a sleeping bag. It certainly could have been worse. Before long, I got an apartment in the Valley with a friend of a friend, and then several months later, his girlfriend from back in Iowa joined us. At the end of our lease, they decided that they should have their own place, at which point I decided that I might as well get out of the Valley. 
 
For my second year, I moved into a basement studio apartment carved out of a very old hotel in Koreatown. Everyone who lived in this building was an artist of some persuasion. It was stipulated in the lease agreement. As you might expect, I met a lot of really interesting people there, some of whom I came to play music with and who brought me along to some cool parties in other parts of the city. There is a kernel of truth to the notion that Los Angeles is place where fakery thrives. At the same time, it's also a place where a lot of genuinely awesome people go to make something of themselves. Most of the people I met were of the latter.
 
My first industry gig out of film school was as an intern for a management company in Beverly Hills, where I read screenplays all day and wrote notes and recommendations for the managers. After that, I worked as a production assistant on a popular television show for a few weeks, which to this day, I still have never seen. I'm pretty sure that I only got the job because the person who hired me thought that I went to Columbia in New York as opposed to the similarly named institution in Chicago, where I actually earned my degree. Even though it was clearly stated on my resume, I never corrected her. I was just happy to be working.
 
In the hierarchy of the motion picture industry, production assistants are at the very bottom. They are generally assigned the menial tasks that don't fall under anyone else's outlined responsibility. One of my jobs as a PA was to bring the newest script over to the star's house. Another time, I had to take two live pigeons in a cardboard box somewhere off set. I released them in a laundromat parking lot, where I saw some other pigeons with whom they could potentially make friends. 
 
On Thursday of week three at the television show that shall remain unnamed and unwatched, I made a simple, stupid mistake. The single light in the tiny mailroom was out, such that I could only see with the help of a disposable lighter. Instead of putting the very important parcel in the express slot as I burned my thumb, I accidentally put it in the compartment with the empty envelopes. I was fired the following day, not long after somebody finally changed the lightbulb.
 
It took me a while to realize that this is how it goes when a job has hundreds of other applicants who would eagerly fill the position tomorrow, despite the poverty wages and lack of benefits. In retrospect, it was probably just as well, considering that my $350 car was not up for the challenge of commuting daily on the 405, as I had not yet moved out of the San Fernando Valley. Still, I think this was when my disillusionment with Hollywood officially began to set in.
 
For the rest of my time in Los Angeles, I got some freelance gigs reading screenplays and writing coverage in between unrelated office temp jobs. In both cases, work was sporadic. Sometimes I would have so many scripts that I hardly left my apartment. Other times, nobody would send me anything to read, such that I could barely afford to leave my apartment if I wanted to. Besides, if I forfeited my parking spot, it might take me forty-five minutes of circling the block like a vulture until I finally gave up and ate another ticket. I learned that LA is a particularly difficult place to be poor.
 
Two years and eight days after arriving in Los Angeles, one particular script and the story behind it led me to Oregon, where I worked on a next-to-no-budget feature-length documentary of my own design. I spent about a month filming it and a year and a half editing it with a friend of mine from film school. With just the two of of us, we made this movie using early digital equipment, all shot on Mini-DV tapes. As you may know, this is not an ideal format. Also, due to the aforementioned budgetary constraints, our playback device was a $200 camcorder that we had to return to the store multiple times. This was also not ideal.
 
YouTube came into existence during that period when we were editing my documentary. By the time we eventually had something to show for our relentless labor, we uploaded it over the course of several nights. The internet was still relatively primitive at the time, and video clips could only be a maximum of ten minutes, so we had to split the movie into nine parts. If you are so inclined, you can now watch it in its entirety. Despite and largely due to the extremely limited means that we had to work within, I am still quite proud of what we accomplished.
 
Fun fact: early film reels could also only be about ten minutes long. As the technology improved, they could be a bit longer, but this is why today sequences in movies (i.e., scenes that are part of a particular cause-and-effect chain of events, like a chapter in a book) are still typically between ten and sixteen minutes.
 
Not long after finishing the documentary, I got married. I continued to write coverage and work on various video projects while waiting to get paid what I had been promised for the documentary, which never happened. That's a harrowing story in itself. After our daughter was born, we moved back to the midwest to be closer to family. Film jobs, of course, are very hard to come by outside of certain epicenters of production, so I shifted gears and went into teaching.

Since that time, I have earned two graduate degrees, taught at several colleges, lived in other parts of the world, and written fifteen or so feature-length screenplays in multiple genres. For a while there, I was writing at least one script per year. That has tapered off lately, as I have been busy with other stuff. I have also learned that it is not much easier to be a screenwriter than any other role in the film industry unless you happen to live where the action is. There are exceptions, of course, but it has been extraordinarily difficult to get anybody to read my work over the years, despite it having placed in or even won some prestigious contests.

I still love movies, and I have not yet abandoned my aspirations in this arena. In fact, I usually have at least one screenplay in the works, even if I end up being among the only people who ever read it. Film is also my favorite kind of class to teach, and I'll be teaching another such course in the spring. I find motion pictures to be the most interesting and effective way to convey big ideas to mass audiences, which is a large part of what drew me to this medium in the first place. 


One if by Train

I love to travel but hate airports. I am also somewhat old-fashioned when it comes to adopting a lot of new technology. (I have owned a smart phone for about two and a half years now. I still don't use it much.) I am also a mostly patient guy who appreciates ample leg room. As such, I may seem the ideal demographic for traveling by train. But you'd be wrong. More about that later.

Until recently, I had not traveled long-distance by rail in the US in almost twenty years. My one and only previous experience with Amtrak left a lot to be desired. It was supposed to be an eight hour trip that took about fourteen, and on the way back, we had to take a bus for part of it because of a rail closure. Shipment of goods always had the right of way over the infrequent passenger trains, so there was a lot of waiting while freight cars passed by in the narrow mountain passages. My daughter was about six weeks old at the time, and this was one of her first ventures outside of the house. That may have contributed to the stress, although in all honesty, she probably handled the trip better than I did. 

When considering my options for going back to Michigan for the past four weeks, it was actually a little bit cheaper to fly. However, once I added in the fees for baggage and leaving my car at the Denver airport for that long, plus gas for driving there and back, the overall cost would have been over three times that. Amtrak should really work that into their marketing.

I also considered driving, but ever since pulling a trailer all the way here (about 1100 miles) in my Volkswagen -- which, by the way, I do not advise -- I am not sure that it is up for the challenge in its current state. The suspension and exhaust need some work, and the turbo engine isn't as punchy since hauling a trailer that probably outweighed the vehicle. Just to reiterate, I do not recommend that. Although in defense of my little GTI, I will note that it got me here without incident, which is why now, to express my gratitude, I drive it as little as possible.

That leaves me with the train. It cost about $350 round-trip, but I had to be flexible with the dates in order to find anything that low. I suspect that early summer is probably peak traveling season outside of major holidays. I went into this knowing that a 26-28 hour trip each way, which is already pretty intimidating, could easily turn into something that took several days. And who knows what kind of weirdos take the train across the country?
 
The Amish. There were lots of Amish people on the train and especially at the station in Chicago. They probably made up about 1/4 to 1/3 of the travelers. The rest were mostly college students and retirees. 

Then there was me. As someone who is both tall and frugal, the lack of legroom in coach is another of the reasons that I tend to dislike air travel. That said, even the cheap seats on the train had plenty of room to fully extend my legs. The cushions were ok but became less comfortable as time went on. For whatever reason, I happen to be the type of person who cannot sleep in a sitting position. Despite being on some very long flights, I have never slept on an airplane for more than a few minutes at a time. Riding the train was no different in that regard. 
 
This no doubt made the very long trip seem even longer. While I had expected the constant rattling on the tracks to be unnerving and the train whistle to be like an alarm clock going off every time we were about to cross a road, it really wasn't so bad. I'm sure that the massive weight of the locomotive contributed to its ability to sail along the tracks, and the whistle was hardly noticeable from inside. Most of the people around me seemed to have no trouble sleeping, except and in spite of the two assholes who brought their outside voices onto the train only to exercise them in small hours of the morning on the way back. Unlike during my trip to Michigan, on the return voyage, I had various seatmates for almost the entire time, which made it a little harder to stretch out and get comfortable. 

Would I do it again? Probably. It really wasn't so bad, and it is kind of nice that I was able to walk less than a mile to and from the train station and my house while my old VW remained parked in my driveway. It was wonderful to see so many of the people I love and spend time with them. Doing so was priceless, and I look forward to the next opportunity, regardless of how I get there. It was also nice to come home a month later, even if my sleep schedule may yet take a little while to recover. 

Crash and Burn

Prior to yesterday evening, I hadn't performed stand-up comedy in about eight years. Even then, my experience was limited to maybe six or seven shows, most of which were for small public and private audiences at the university where I earned my doctorate. None were paid. I did it for fun, and because it was something that I had wanted to do since I was probably about twelve years old. 
 
My experience telling jokes into a microphone started with a summer elective that I took in grad school, and then it kind of blossomed from there. The biggest crowd that I performed for was about three hundred and fifty people at a fundraising event at the college, but most of the other audiences were much smaller than that. On a few occasions, they were entirely composed of professors and other grad students. It was a pretty safe space to learn the ropes, and I could get away with what I thought were some fairly clever jokes.  

As I moved away from the college (both graduating and then physically moving), the opportunities to do comedy pretty much dried up -- unless I wanted to travel any kind of distance to perform at random open mics, which I didn't have much interest in. In shows like this that I have attended and/or participated in, the audience has generally been made up of people who were just waiting for their turns, too nervous about their own sets to pay much attention to anything else. These events are good for practice, but they're usually not much fun for either the performer or the audience, at least not in my experience on both sides of the equation.
 
In the years since finishing the PhD program, I have shifted my focus more to making music and other kinds of writing, while living in much smaller communities that host few if any comedy venues. Even if I wanted to travel to an open mic to perform, now we're talking about at least a two hour drive each way. As a result, it had been a while since I had even thought about writing jokes.
 
When this most recent opportunity presented itself, I reflexively said yes almost immediately, as I remembered having rather enjoyed the experience of making a room full of people laugh. It is one of the rare forms of writing that offers direct and autonomous validation. If a joke works, you get to know right then and there, and it's a pretty good feeling. In the handful of times that I had performed stand-up, I never bombed, per se, but I now realize that this is not the kind of thing that you should ever say aloud.
 
I am not afraid of failing any more than I am afraid of wasps. Still, it sucks to get stung, such that I generally try to avoid it. At least once since I had volunteered to participate in last night's event, I did ask myself what the hell I was getting into. This was a legitimate question, as I literally knew next to nothing about it. I was just excited to do comedy again and figured that the worst case scenario was that it goes poorly and then life moves on. That turned out to be a pretty accurate assessment.
 
None of my material had been workshopped or tested at all. I went into it completely blind and with 100% new jokes. I had absolutely no idea what to expect in terms of the audience or what they think is funny. I basically just wrote material that I thought was humorous and hoped that other people might, too.

Over the past few weeks, I put a lot of work into the stand-up set that I performed last night, usually at least an hour or two every day, often more. Most mornings, I woke up with comedic bits playing out in my head. I wrote, polished, memorized and practiced over two thousand words of material. The idea was to try to connect with the crowd and then take them to interesting places, often by way of what I thought were witty observations. 
 
What actually occurred was a bit of a shitshow.
 
My set was essentially three parts: 1.) Sesame Street-based jokes, 2.) Jokes about running, with an emphasis on marathons, including a brief history lesson on the matter, and 3.) Jokes about being a sad bastard who lives alone and is amused by mindless consumerism.
 
The audience, from what I could tell: 1.) Was not into Sesame Street, 2.) Cared less about marathons than I do, and 3.) Were either much younger than me, or a little older than me. Most appeared to be on a date, and my jokes about being awkwardly single in the era of late capitalism did not land.
 
I hope that I did not spoil anyone's evening or ruin their chances for another date, but very little of my material seemed to resonate.
 
To make matters worse -- much worse, in fact -- the wireless microphone kept cutting out. This rendered my performance very difficult. About a minute or two in, most of my intricately crafted jokes emerged from the speaker as loose, broken syllables, accompanied by jarring pops of static. I tried to listen to what was coming through the PA system while also keeping track of what I was saying, as to stay on script. My brain went into a feedback loop of sorts trying to keep it all straight.
 
At one point, I repeated the setup for a joke three times only to have the punchline lost to the whims of the shitty bluetooth connection. As I was performing, one of the guys involved with the event suggested that I aim the bottom of the microphone at the receiver in the far left side of the room. It wasn't his equipment; he was just trying to help. Meanwhile, as I am taking direction while performing, I attempted to maintain the illusion of spontaneity while also trying to recite all fifty or so of my jokes in a sequence that made sense.
 
Just three hours prior to the event, I had rehearsed the entire script from memory verbatim. Twice. Every word and every pause were where I wanted them. I thought that my set was in pretty good shape. I had it memorized well enough that I could focus on the performative aspects, or so I thought.
 
As it played out in the unpredictable real world, though, I was now being told to aim the microphone in my hand to the distant side of the room at about a sixty degree angle to the floor in order to get a better connection with the speaker. It was a very unnatural way to deliver the material, which ultimately proved not to work, either. However, it took me about four or five misfired jokes before I abandoned the attempt. 
 
I continued to trample on my lines and trip over the segues, while also trying to remember which of my two thousand words the audience had already heard and which were worth repeating. In total, I inadvertently omitted more a third of what I had written and told several parts out of order. I think there might have even been a callback in there to a joke that the audience never even heard the first time around.
 
To make up for the loss of material that I had skipped over, I filled in some of that extra time with awkward pauses. I was dying up there. Except "up there" in this case really just meant across the small dining room, while much of the audience consumed their steak dinners. In fairness, I suppose it's probably hard to laugh and savor a delicious ribeye at the same time, but I can't recall ever having tried it. 
 
I probably could have made a joke about how much I was sweating in my sweater, but I'm glad to say that I didn't. I wasn't that far gone. I did what I could to recover and keep my cool. However, improvisation was kept to a minimum as I struggled to remember my jokes, most of which seemed to work better on the page, while continuing to fight against a PA system that seemed intent to piss all over my set.  
 
Toward the end of the routine, out of frustration and utter hopelessness, I abandoned the microphone and shouted my jokes. That didn't work, either, as it dramatically changed the tone of my delivery, especially for the people in front. They are the unfortunate souls who got to witness this whole mess as it unraveled in real-time.

Crash and burn. It's how we learn. 

Next time, whenever that is, I hope to have a better sense of what I might have in common with the audience, whoever and wherever they happen to be. I would also like to test the PA equipment first. Those are my takeaways from this whole experience. On the other hand, maybe I'll just stick to playing music for now.

It is possible, of course, that I am my own harshest critic, and that the sporadic bluetooth connection bothered me far more than it did anyone else, but I really don't think that's true. Frankly, if I was in the audience, I'm pretty sure I would have thought that it was shit, too, even though these were all jokes that were essentially written for my own amusement, but which I had hoped that other people might connect with as well. 
 
At least it was a free show, so hopefully nobody felt ripped off. Plus I got a pretty good hamburger out of the deal, as well as a story about the time that I went up in flames like an ill-fated firework fiasco. My hope is that my memory of this event gets funnier with time, so that at least some humor comes out of all of this, even if it is entirely at my expense.

I guess what doesn't kill you makes you say, damn, I'm glad that's over. I like to think that any lessons learned from the experience can be applied to next time, which hopefully doesn't take another eight years to transpire.