The thing about pitching in LA is that, for me, its the closest I get to old-fashioned tell-me-a-story storytelling. Raised on my mothers side by southerners, I was steeped in the oral Southern storytelling tradition from birth. Ask for a peach, and someone will say, I know a woman who died from a peach. Have I ever told you that story? Your answer doesnt matter. You will be told the story -- which will be archetypal, brutal, and, if you lean in, will lead to more stories. When I had a bunch of early, messy pages for THE FUTURE FOR CURIOUS PEOPLE, I created a pitch and pitched it to some producers. ( Emmy Castlen -- I bet that includes you.) Thats the other thing -- LA is filled with hyper-educated, widely read people who know story. Some leaned in. The story got tighter, smarter. Late one night back in my hotel, I watched a Charlie Rose interview with a panel of neurologists and, oddly enough, the artist Chuck Close, who suffers from the inability to recognize faces and whose work is to paint enormous canvases of detailed portraits of peoples faces. The mechanism for envisioning, which is key to the story, clicked into place. The rest-- including roping in my co-author -- came later. And this summer, I took the novel and returned it to its elemental form -- the screenplay, which may be what it was all along. As a kid, I wanted to be a playwright, but I then realized I couldnt play God in that role. I had to rely on actors. But this summer, Seeing Sam Rockwell in FOOL FOR LOVE, finally reading JUST KIDS and only getting starstruck in the parts with Sam Shepard, sending my 17 year old off to NYC to do improv, seeing a great new play DANCING LESSONS premiere a few weeks ago... I start hearing characters in my head. They begin confessing. I feel a story, and then I turn to Dave and start to tell it. When I was coming up, writing teachers told us not to talk about our stories, but the telling is where I come from. (After reading POWERS OF TWO new nonfiction on collaboration by Joshua Wolf Shenk, I know just how important that turning-to-Dave is ...) First and foremost, I tell stories. (To my students, a warning -- with me, youll start by telling...)
Posted on: Wed, 03 Sep 2014 12:53:32 +0000
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