Thoughtful and candid discussion and commentary on the performing arts by "those who do." This is a forum meant to reflect what's currently on the minds of working actors, directors, designers, producers and writers.
A certain consensus seems to
get agreed upon about movies before they recede into the past. A combination of
popularity and critical response are the primary ingredients, and it’s usually
more-or-less right. Movies like The Last
Emperor or Crash may capture the
zeitgeist enough to walk off with a Best Picture Oscar, but they tend to
disappear as time goes on. Whether this is because they are beautiful but
somewhat ephemeral (The Last Emperor)
or thuggishly manipulative and self-important (Crash), time takes care of what we could not see in the moment.
The opposite, however, happens
as well. Really wonderful films get disregarded and slip away largely unseen.
It’s a shame, so I’ve decided to do my small part to undo the process and pick
out five films that I think have been unfairly maligned. I’m sure everybody
has some version of this list in their mind (I could probably get to 20 without
breaking a sweat), but here’s mine:
Recently I caught a few minutes of a nature documentary on TV. I’m not sure what the whole thing was about, but what I remember was the fish. Lying in a rapidly evaporating stream, it was just barely covered in water. The day was blazingly hot. It flopped around madly, but there was nothing to be done. It had only minutes to live.
I was riveted by this spectacle, horrified actually (I’ve dreamt of it several times). Thinking of it later, I wondered why this image so burned itself into my mind. Then it occurred to me – that fish is me. And not only me. That fish is EVERYONE.
It was a skinny
envelope. We all know what skinny envelopes mean (all of us in the arts do,
anyway). A skinny envelope means “no”. I didn’t feel like hearing “no” that
day, so I placed the envelope, unopened, on my printer.
I got a lot of no’s back then, but they didn’t bother me
much. These days, when I sit on a panel like “Making Your Career as a
Playwright”, one of my fellow panelists is always talking about how you should
research all the places you submit to ensure your piece is right for them.
It sounds like very good advice. I did the exact opposite. I sent everything I
had to every place that would read it. I accepted a lot of rejections as the
price to be paid for playing.
The great Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami never intended to be a writer. When he graduated from college, he took out a loan and started a jazz club. The club was a great success. He ran it for 10 years.
One night he was at a baseball game, watching an American player named Dave Hilton bat. Hilton hit a ball deep into the outfield (it would end up being a double). As the ball sailed through the air, a thought, clear and unadorned, came into Murakami’s head – “I’m going to write a novel.”
He did, a novella called Hear the Wind Sing. It won a prestigious writer’s prize. His second novel was also a success, so he sold his jazz club in order to write full time. More than a dozen books later, with sales in the millions, translated into dozens of languages, Murakami is regularly mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize.
For one reason or another, you are called upon to look at some of your old work. As you go through it, a disquieting feeling arises. Lines are unfamiliar. You look at passages and can no longer remember writing them. The decisions that went into each and every word, decisions that lived in the forefront of your consciousness for months, or even years, are gone like vapor. There is a foreign quality to the whole project. You find yourself asking questions: What was the impetus for this scene? Where did these characters come from? In the end, it all crystalizes into a single, almost existential query:
I once heard a talk by the Artistic Director of one of the country’s largest and most respected children’s theatres. One of the great benefits of writing for kids, he said, was the response of the audience. “For children,” he said, “theatre is not an aesthetic experience. It’s just an experience.”
Those words came to mind after I saw the Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman last month. However great most theatrical experiences are – thrilling or funny or heartbreaking – they usually are, for me, aesthetic experiences. I have an amazing time, leave the theatre elated, and relish it for days afterward. This production of Death of a Salesman, however, felt qualitatively different. It wasn’t like I’d seen something. It was like something had happened to me.
People in the arts talk a lot about bravery, about having the courage to follow your impulse no matter where it leads. What this means, in practical terms, is that you have to give yourself the right to fail. You have to accept failure, make friends with it.
Still, people don’t really talk much about failure. It’s considered rude.
I have a friend. It doesn’t matter what her name is. Let’s call her “Erma Duricko.”
Erma likes quotes. Lots and lots of quotes. She has quotes tagging the end of her emails. She posts them every day on Facebook. These quotes are usually of an inspirational nature. They are usually on the subject of how beauty and art and love conquer all.
It’s a juggernaut. It won six Oliviers. It won five Tonys. It won Best Play on both sides of the pond. It has been made into a giganto new movie by Steven Spielberg that was nominated for two Golden Globes. It didn’t win any, but hey, you can’t have everything.
The ways in which this country is fucked up are too manifold to go in to in this humble little blog. But I would like to take up, for a moment, the issue of this country’s relationship to art and artists.
“Uh oh. Another plaintive whine from an artist who feels he’s unappreciated. THIS is gonna be fun to read!”
Fear not. I’ve always felt that though a life in the arts is difficult, it is also a choice. No one put a gun to my head to make me a playwright. When I decided to do this, I knew more or less (well, actually less – but that’s another story) what I was in for. I don’t want to talk not about myself here. I want to talk about Francis Ford Coppola.
There’s no excuse for it. I’m a playwright. I have to read plays. But I hate it. A friend of mine, Paul Meshejian, is the artistic director of PlayPenn. He is taking the 100 semi-finalists for the 2012 conference with him on his winter sojourn to Puerto Rico. He’s going to read them all down there. I told him it sounds like torture.
There are good reasons for a difficulty in reading plays. Most plays are bad (though that’s also true of most fiction, non-fiction, etc.). More importantly, plays aren’t meant to be read. They’re meant to be performed and seen. These are the good reasons for not liking to read plays. They are not, however, my reasons.
We all know what makes something good. We’re equally clear on what makes something bad (hint- it’s the opposite of what makes something good). But what about that mysterious quality that makes something Good Bad? You know what I’m talking about. That movie/book/TV show/song that you love even though you know its total crap. What quality does the Good Bad work of art have that Bad Bad work of art lacks? What separates Good Bad from Bad Bad?
I guess I have to come clean now. I’ll just say it quick. It’s like pulling off a Band-Aid...
It’s a little scary. At the very least it’s disorienting. You don’t know what time it is. You don’t know where you are.
It passes quickly, of course. The last time it happened to me, I found myself on NJ Transit. I was somewhere between Secaucus and Newark. It was around 5:30. I was on my way home.
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