While I was Dying [Day 2]: I Turn My Camera On

When I was a senior in high-school I won a trip to LA for a film I made.

The enormity of it didn’t really sink in at the time…

But I guess, in a way, I’ve really been working my way up to film for a while. I helped run the announcements at my high-school, made a few short films, acted in a few high-school productions. It’s not incoherent to think, as one of my collegiate advisors suggested recently, “Film is really an extension of your interests.”

So it is. And between the film I’m making (“Me & My Shadow”), the other one my directing partner and I have in mind, and the one I’d like to direct my senior year… that’s a decent game plan.

Which begs the question – is film becoming my thing? And is directing, the idea I sidelined in favor of writing, rearing its creative head? To quote Martin Landau – “This is a funny thing.”

There’s a lot of discussion that goes into the idea of the career – doing vs. thinking, studying vs. acting, and just what innovation means in our current cultural milieu. And more-so than most folks, I’m heartened by the curious blend of academia and creative content I’ve begun to carve out for myself. And ultimately, either way, the best I can hope for is a career where I’m allowed to invest in stories. In people. To tinker in the machinery of life.

There is… a magic to talking about stories. To planning camera angles or referencing shots. To drafting storyboards and staying up late in the youthful chaos of creation. Much like Lester Bangs in Almost Famous I’m caught up in the act of art, the literal process of creation that swirls around and increasingly subsumes me. I am, as I wrote in a tiny notebook some five years ago, the conduit.

In the meantime, I dream of a world where I can do everything. And work towards a world where distinctions dissolve.

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When We Were Young: Handcuffs + Canada

“And we walked off to look for America.” – Paul Simon (“America”, 1968)

Oregon author Ken Kesey once noted something to the effect that at a certain point you just have to give yourself over to the cosmic nature of the trip.

Acid-head much?

He has a point though. The trip (and few have been more memorable than his band of Merry Pranksters meandering their way into the upper-crust fabric of Leary’s NY) can’t always be planned. And Corey (my heterosexual co-director) and I thought a lot about that! We had talks with professors, co-workers, and just about everybody who’d toss us an ear to figure out what could be chance and what needed fastidious planning. We negotiated the balance.

We’re making a movie. And in the private moments of my insecurity I comfort myself with the fact that I, who am not a film student, have the ambition to make the piece of art I would have liked to see someone else complete. If I’d seen this on Life + Times or flicked across it on Netflix I’d be impressed, instead I’m setting the scene so when someone asks how I spent the first month of my second decade alive I can answer:

Handcuffed… in Canada… living out my Thoreauvian pursuits.

And when they ask how much I made my first film for?

Probably less than your monthly pay-check.

There’s been a lot of talk about what will happen once we’re cuffed. The journey, the results, the conceit, the arrests, the alcohol, the chutzpah, the sights, and ultimately… the road. What’ll we find? I’ve never been more heartened by the answer – I don’t know.

 

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Me & My Shadow [1]: Playing with Handcuffs (Prelude To a Kiss)

“I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately.” –  Henry Thoreau [Walden]

I’m making a movie.

Before we get into the philosophical meanderings, I want to make all the base information clear. So, for your benefit:

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Please get involved! This film project is the follow-up to my playwriting project. And as you can probably imagine from all the writing I do on here, I’m trying to make a real go of it. For that reason we need your help. Man cannot live on Grants alone.

Now, Thoreau. I’m studying transcendentalism at the moment, and it gets me thinking about my documentary project. Thoreau gets a bad rap in regards to Walden – mostly from people who think they have him all figured out. “How hypocritical of him to live in the woods [not really the woods] and tell me how to live my life.” Or more likely “You know, he didn’t even really live that far from the town.” Right. Total hack. The reality is, of course, that Thoreau deliberately chose a place (in the middle of a logging road) that would allow him to interact with the residents of Walden Pond passing by. Walden was, as he acknowledges, “an experiment”. And the metaphor that Thoreau uses – the circle with unending radii – is suggestive not of a single, right way to live (in solitude) but rather of experimentation and discovery. Walden didn’t want to live naturally or in solitude – he wanted to live “deliberately”. He wanted to find a new mode of expression with purpose.

And so do we. Not in the same way, mind you, but Corey and I want to tell a great, engaging story. We also want to tap into that expansive, American experience by acknowledging that there are other ways to live. That if Thoreau wanted solitude… we want contact. We want to know what happens when we really see one another. It’s a social experiment – one I’m proud to say fits into a continuum of American discovery.

There’s another, nagging aspect of the film. When we travel through cities (Philadelphia, DC, New York) we’re planning on having different goals. And the one for NY (on December 31st) is to search for a midnight kiss. Uh-oh. Well, anyone who knows me even decently is probably aware of the fact that I’ve spent the last 19+ years fastidiously avoiding that aspect of human relationships. For the last two years I’ve so ardently avoided it that I’ve turned down some pretty promising opportunities. That’s a choice I live with every day, and most of the time, I can reconcile without fear. But…

Here I’m being asked to devote my very first kiss (something I’ve built up to extraordinarily intimate, but let’s be real here, is a rite of passage) to the camera. While attached to someone. With a girl I’ve known for at most about two days.

That’s part of when I realized how extraordinary (and frightening) this project is. Because it’s something that hasn’t been done before, that will push us, and at its very best will capture real and intimate moments of our lives indiscriminately. It’s those tiny discoveries, those moments that push us out of the everyday and into the vastly charming, uncomfortable, and human… that make me believe there’s something here.

We’re putting the handcuffs on. We’re sending the key away. We’re turning the cameras on.

We’d like you to be there.

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