Velocity
It's been a long time since I've written for this blog. So many stories to tell and yet I hesitate cause I don't feel that most of them are relevant. But, I do owe you some sort of an...uh, transition from the quite period to what has caused me to return to writing.
Writers are born and not made and that is something that I firmly believe. I believe this because writers are proficient at writing because there's something missing for them in the first-person, this is why they communicate so well as writers...because for them major parts of communication in the first-person are lost. I am a glaring example of this. Those who have met me will tell you that I am charming, intriguing, sincere, trustful and that I have the ability to make people do almost anything do to my ability to conjure emotions and sincerity. Well, nothing could be farther from the truth. My truly close friends will tell you that I'm moody, at times very distant and nearly always deeply in thought. Much of what people interpret as me is a well-honed survival trait that I developed as a child and a young adult. There was a different Cooprdog many moons ago. Think of a young pup who believed all his parents told him and viewed the world as a fair, just and optimistic place. The attrition and red badges of courage that my 40+ years have given me have greatly changed that opinion of the world.
I return to this blog because I have nowhere else to go. That's the thing about writing, it's always with you. I doesn't matter if I do not write a single word for 10 years, nothing will be lost, nothing will be taken for granted. That's the tough part to understand...that the words don't have to come out...and when they do, they always come out correctly; assuming you believe in such trivial concepts as correct and incorrect.
SLZ as a project is still alive and well...if by well you mean has a pulse. It's still my greatest work (in my opinion)and it will get made...well, there's still a possibility. There's also a possibility that my head will turn into a giant bag of weed. I returned to screenwriting after something like a 7 year hiatus and wrote "D is for Detra". I love the script but as per usual I'm pushing too many boundaries for the traditional model. I shot a TV pilot for a semi-reality show. I really enjoyed the shooting, but the project was kind of disastrous. Here's a tip: if you're a filmmaker your venture into reality TV will probably not go well. Not because your skills are one-dimensional and not because the reality people are jaded (everyone is jaded)...but because you think of the subtleties of light, lens, camera position and sequences. I had grand ideas of what I wanted to do on the small screen (the screen that I hate) and the more I shot the bigger these ideas got. What I wound up with was a very visual, very trippy...experiment. Which is not a good thing. I am a producer. I have responsibilities and one of the responsibilities is to get a return on investment. Just shooting hot shit to smoke weed to is not acceptable. This is the toughest thing for me to learn.
The ideas come quickly now. And with a quick text to Det. Budd they manifest into scenes, projects, films and productions. But with skill comes the desire for larger budgets...and hence the depression.
I am in a box now. My badass Datsun has a blown motor and is bleeding me dry. My lovelife is dead. Primarily because I live with my ex-girlfriend and that's slightly more enjoyable than sandpaper sliding across my nuts. Lost my job, and my loft...and my intergalatic, panty collecting lifestyle. I had the magnanimous idea to apply to the Nichols Fellowship and a few TV writing fellowships. I had initially refused to enter these competitions, because I am an outlier, all ways has been, always will be...legitimacy isn't really an option for persons like myself. I suppose you could buy it, but how legitimate is that? Anyways...I applied and it went pretty poorly. By that I mean lots of self-doubt, emotional pain and fear of the mail (cause that's where the rejection letters come from). I should really be thankful, because it forced me to be extremely productive in a very short period of time. I wrote 4 scripts and shot a TV pilot and less than 6 months.
But it was all for nothing; and before you new-agey "everything happens for a reason" people chime in lemme put you in your place. Rationalizing your failures that way will have you not learning from your disastrous mistakes and yet chalking them up to "it happened for a reason" instead of refining your process. Let's be frank...people who don't win the gold and don't make it into the NFL, NBA, ect...generally don't believe their exclusion is the way it's supposed to be. It is fear of failure that drives me (well that's not true it's really the fear of not living up to my intellectual potential). What I'm getting at is that when you fail (ad I just did) let it be a failure. Let is suck for a while and wallow around in it and inhale the suckiness...so that you remember precisely why you never want to return here again.
Since my life is in a serious state of flux, and I can't race and I can't get fucked, and I lack the means to produce...all I have left is the keyboard.
I guess it was inevitable that I would return, cause this is one of the few places I am truly comfortable.
...velocity, the title of this entry, is something I should explain since I rarely explain my titles...and for the record I think of the title of my films before I write them...it's more romantic that way! By velocity I am referring to a body in motion - accelerating at a given rate for a given amount of time. It's my metaphor for the lack of control I feel...if that's not too much of a cop out.
...there will be more later...if I'm not too bitter.
COOPRDOG
Writers are born and not made and that is something that I firmly believe. I believe this because writers are proficient at writing because there's something missing for them in the first-person, this is why they communicate so well as writers...because for them major parts of communication in the first-person are lost. I am a glaring example of this. Those who have met me will tell you that I am charming, intriguing, sincere, trustful and that I have the ability to make people do almost anything do to my ability to conjure emotions and sincerity. Well, nothing could be farther from the truth. My truly close friends will tell you that I'm moody, at times very distant and nearly always deeply in thought. Much of what people interpret as me is a well-honed survival trait that I developed as a child and a young adult. There was a different Cooprdog many moons ago. Think of a young pup who believed all his parents told him and viewed the world as a fair, just and optimistic place. The attrition and red badges of courage that my 40+ years have given me have greatly changed that opinion of the world.
I return to this blog because I have nowhere else to go. That's the thing about writing, it's always with you. I doesn't matter if I do not write a single word for 10 years, nothing will be lost, nothing will be taken for granted. That's the tough part to understand...that the words don't have to come out...and when they do, they always come out correctly; assuming you believe in such trivial concepts as correct and incorrect.
SLZ as a project is still alive and well...if by well you mean has a pulse. It's still my greatest work (in my opinion)and it will get made...well, there's still a possibility. There's also a possibility that my head will turn into a giant bag of weed. I returned to screenwriting after something like a 7 year hiatus and wrote "D is for Detra". I love the script but as per usual I'm pushing too many boundaries for the traditional model. I shot a TV pilot for a semi-reality show. I really enjoyed the shooting, but the project was kind of disastrous. Here's a tip: if you're a filmmaker your venture into reality TV will probably not go well. Not because your skills are one-dimensional and not because the reality people are jaded (everyone is jaded)...but because you think of the subtleties of light, lens, camera position and sequences. I had grand ideas of what I wanted to do on the small screen (the screen that I hate) and the more I shot the bigger these ideas got. What I wound up with was a very visual, very trippy...experiment. Which is not a good thing. I am a producer. I have responsibilities and one of the responsibilities is to get a return on investment. Just shooting hot shit to smoke weed to is not acceptable. This is the toughest thing for me to learn.
The ideas come quickly now. And with a quick text to Det. Budd they manifest into scenes, projects, films and productions. But with skill comes the desire for larger budgets...and hence the depression.
I am in a box now. My badass Datsun has a blown motor and is bleeding me dry. My lovelife is dead. Primarily because I live with my ex-girlfriend and that's slightly more enjoyable than sandpaper sliding across my nuts. Lost my job, and my loft...and my intergalatic, panty collecting lifestyle. I had the magnanimous idea to apply to the Nichols Fellowship and a few TV writing fellowships. I had initially refused to enter these competitions, because I am an outlier, all ways has been, always will be...legitimacy isn't really an option for persons like myself. I suppose you could buy it, but how legitimate is that? Anyways...I applied and it went pretty poorly. By that I mean lots of self-doubt, emotional pain and fear of the mail (cause that's where the rejection letters come from). I should really be thankful, because it forced me to be extremely productive in a very short period of time. I wrote 4 scripts and shot a TV pilot and less than 6 months.
But it was all for nothing; and before you new-agey "everything happens for a reason" people chime in lemme put you in your place. Rationalizing your failures that way will have you not learning from your disastrous mistakes and yet chalking them up to "it happened for a reason" instead of refining your process. Let's be frank...people who don't win the gold and don't make it into the NFL, NBA, ect...generally don't believe their exclusion is the way it's supposed to be. It is fear of failure that drives me (well that's not true it's really the fear of not living up to my intellectual potential). What I'm getting at is that when you fail (ad I just did) let it be a failure. Let is suck for a while and wallow around in it and inhale the suckiness...so that you remember precisely why you never want to return here again.
Since my life is in a serious state of flux, and I can't race and I can't get fucked, and I lack the means to produce...all I have left is the keyboard.
I guess it was inevitable that I would return, cause this is one of the few places I am truly comfortable.
...velocity, the title of this entry, is something I should explain since I rarely explain my titles...and for the record I think of the title of my films before I write them...it's more romantic that way! By velocity I am referring to a body in motion - accelerating at a given rate for a given amount of time. It's my metaphor for the lack of control I feel...if that's not too much of a cop out.
...there will be more later...if I'm not too bitter.
COOPRDOG
posted by Cooprdog at 7:42 PM
1 comments
