Productivity Ramblings

3:41 a.m. My stomach is still recovering from the bout of food poisoning a few weeks ago. No more chocolate for a while.

I just finished watching the special features for All About Eve (remember those?). Now I’m watching the commentary for The Hustler. I’ve been trying to watch pre-1970 movies lately, and now I’m at the age where I feel like I can finally appreciate them, instead of thinking: “A black and white movie? Boring!” I know not all pre-1970 movies are black and white, but you get the idea.

Can I say, the staging of the camera and actors in The Hustler is pretty wonderful? Look at this composed shot:

Look at the camera placement relative to where the actors are. I’m not only talking about the actors in the foreground either. There’s a symmetry that I really like, that somehow works for the shot. I really want to figure out how to stage the camera and actors with the same kind of fluency for the sake of the story. For the record, I stole this image from the Wonders in the Dark website (but I’m assuming they got it from somewhere else).

And as I finish writing this, I hear 1st Assistant Director Ulu Grosbard on the commentary say that he felt “very strongly” that [director] Robert Rossen was “staging those scenes with a very accurate sense of what the scene was about. He knew what the point of the scene was. And he knew therefore when he was physically staging it, as well as the input from his actors — he knew what he wanted to get out of the scene.”

I still feel like if I were to stage a scene tomorrow, I would have a lot of trouble. Anyway, I did end up working on my final pages of a screenplay today. Writing felt like fricking hard work today, like rolling a boulder up a muddy hill in a rainstorm. I typed complete and utter crap for the first hour, deliberately, just to get the nuts and bolts of the scene out, not knowing if I’d be able to make it more eloquent later. But after a break I went back and attacked the dialogue again, and I felt I had a better understanding of what the character wanted to say, and I polished the words a bit and the lines sounded more like they were coming from his heart. It’s not quite finished yet, but at least there was progress and change.

I’m writing about this because I used to be one of those people who thought that if screenwriting wasn’t easy, then I should be doing something else. If it didn’t come naturally, I’d never be good enough to “make it”. And that thought would make me so sad, and I’d get really depressed, until I realized how badly I actually wanted to write. I’d write until it got hard again, and the whole process repeated itself.

But by all accounts, writing is hard. It is work. It’s not like, this incredible reservoir of creativity and inspiration, all the time. You sit there, and knock your head against a wall, and sometimes type stuff you know will never see the light of day. And I used to be scared, terrified to do that, because it meant I wasn’t good, at this thing that I really, really wanted to do. And I hated being bad at something I cared about, so much. It just felt like there was no hope.

And here is where I need to be clear: there is a difference between “making it” and “doing the thing”. I am currently finishing a screenplay that’s an improvement on my previous one, but still absolutely not ready to show or produce, with like, no guarantee I will ever have any kind of career. I have spent countless hours since 2013 reading screenplays, writing screenplays (finished and unfinished), working on treatments, brainstorming ideas, with no real guarantee of “making it”. And I’ve come to the conclusion, which may be bullshit to a small degree, that I do this because I will absolutely die if I don’t. Without developing stories and crafting screenplays, my life has very little meaning.

This is a very sad thought, actually. They talk about on The Hustler commentary that values and character are more important than whatever the heck you’re doing, some pool game or whatever else. There is more to life, more important things, than the thing you’re doing, the thing you’re working on.

I do like screenwriting a lot, though. But I do feel like having a well-rounded, rich life is important, too. And that’s something to talk about in another entry.