Why I made a web series and not… something else
I’d be lying if I said that I’m a huge fan of web series. I’m not. I’m a huge fan of some web series, but I don’t seek out or watch web series in the way I seek out and watch good TV shows of films.1
So that might be a little rule breaking. Novelists should read a lot of novels and filmmakers should watch a lot of films, right? I don’t personally know anyone that watches a lot of web series. And Words Fail Me was more of a series of short films than a serialized story, for whatever that’s worth.
But I had a few reasons for making a web series, as opposed to a short film or a feature film.
One reason is that I eventually want to make a feature film.2 I had a lot of the artistic tools necessary for writing and directing feature film, but I was lacking in production experience. In fact, this was the first thing I ever directed, aside from a few improv shows, which is a fundamentally different kind of directing (usually called coaching).
I had read a lot of blogs and several books on film production and I had been on many sets as an actor in friends’ projects, student films, and one professional set of a commercial. So I had some familiarity with the process but the best way to learn any craft is to just fucking do it and make mistakes and learn from the mistakes.
I wanted to experience the filmmaking process from start to finish, but on a smaller scale, and this was a great way to do that. You get more or less the same learning with much smaller financial and time risk. A smaller project meant I could fail faster. You get all the experiences of a bigger project, things that you might not run up against when filming a short—trying to schedule multiple locations and multiple actors and a crew, feeding everyone, and a release plan that’s pretty low-budget but still involves a fair amount of planning.
The upside is that you uncover areas of risk without putting a lot of money on the line. There are a lot of things that, when they go wrong, can ruin any filmed project, but there are also a lot of things that can go wrong without ruining the project. The goal was to identify the former, which I call fatal risks, because those are the ones you want to insure against, prevent, and avoid.
Here’s another reason, which is more more existential than practical. I had been wanting to do more video work for a while, since mid-2013 and after about a year of saying to myself and my friends that I wanted to do more of it, I finally got sick of myself talking about it and decided to just shoot something.
“Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.”
–William Blake
I read that quote in a great little book that I read a long time ago, called If You Want to Write.
I try to be careful about sitting around wanting to do something for too long without doing it—the risk is that I create a sort of inertia for myself. I don’t want to be in the habit of not doing what I want to do. So after I can sense the inertia building up for a bit too long, there’s like this internal pressure for me to either drop it entirely and forget about it or to just fucking do it already.
And finally, I wanted to make something that I was proud of. I wanted to look back at what we created and have it stand as something that I’d be happy to let anyone see as a sample of my work. And more personally, I wanted to be able to watch the episodes and laugh. I definitely accomplished this goal. In fact, I accomplished all the goals I set out to accomplish.
Thanks for reading and thanks for watching.
All you need is one person to say “Get in”
A career in the arts is like a hitchhiking trip: All you need is one person to say “Get in” and off you go. And then the confidence begins.
– John Waters in his commencement speech at RISD
Talking people out of their creative/original/interesting ideas
We need to ask, what is it about our society where those of us who do not suffer from Asperger’s are at some massive disadvantage because we will be talked out of our interesting, original, creative ideas before they are even fully formed?
There is actually no such thing as atheism
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles – is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
– David Foster Wallace in his Kenyon Commencement Address (in book form)
I’ve thought before that we are still a Christian culture, even when we’re atheists, that like DFW says, we want something to give ourselves away to. I wonder is that a relic (no pun) of Christianity or is it human nature?
They will probably be hustlers, too
VONNEGUT
In a creative writing class of twenty people anywhere in this country, six students will be startlingly talented. Two of those might actually publish something by and by.
INTERVIEWER
What distinguishes those two from the rest?
VONNEGUT
They will have something other than literature itself on their minds. They will probably be hustlers, too. I mean that they won’t want to wait passively for somebody to discover them. They will insist on being read.
This scene from Wet Hot American Summer made me laugh so hard
Susie: You guys, I’m really going to miss this place.
Coop: Me too.
Ben: Hey, let’s all promise that in ten years from today, we’ll meet again, and we’ll see what kind of people we’ve blossomed into.
Susie: Yeah!
Ben: What time do you wanna meet?
J.J.: You mean ten years from now?
Coop: Let’s meet in the morning so we can make a day of it.
Susie: Okay, so what is it? Is it like 9:00? 9:30?
Coop: Well, let’s say 9:00, that way we can be here by 9:30.
McKinley: Well, no, why don’t we say 9:30, and then make it your beeswax to be here by 9:30? I mean, we’ll all be in our late 20s by then. I just don’t see any reason why we can’t be places on time.
Gary: Okay, then, it’s settled. 9:30 it is. All agreed?
Together: Agreed.
McKinley: Good, because I have something at 11:00.
Gary: You just have like a trapper-keeper full of appointments, right?
McKinley: No, I just have something at 11:00, and I can’t change it, because I already moved it twice.
I don’t know why it’s so funny to me but it’s like the perfectly absurd twist on a commonplace situation. Same reason I loved “The State” when I was a kid.
Some people find the taste of pilgrim guts to be too strong
One of the most arresting moments of Dream River comes in ‘Ride My Arrow’ when you sing, “Some people find the taste of pilgrim guts to be too strong/ Me, I find I can’t get by without them too long.” Yet the same song seems to be explicitly pacifist: “War muddies the river/ And getting out we’re dirtier than getting in”. What’s the meaning of this contradiction between the sentiment expressed by the song and the violent imagery within it?
BC: There are different kinds of violence. Some of them are excellent. A ripping away from blind, unfeeling or greedy tentacles. That is radical.
– Bill Callahan interviewed by thequietus.com
I’ve been listening to Callahan’s Dream River a lot lately and it’s really good music to work to. Completely relaxes me.