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July 10, 2006
"A national dream-life."
I spoke to a media executive yesterday who's written 6 (unproduced) screenplays in the last 20 years or so. He's working on a new one, daunted but undeterred by career, famiily obligations, stress, etc. Somewhat inspiring.
He recommended several books and loaned me a few others, including "Writing in Restaurants" by David Mamet. Here's a snippet that resonated with me during this morning's commute:
To the greatest extent we, in an evil time, which is to say a time in which we do not wish to examine ourselves and our unhappiness; we, in the body of the artistic community, elect dream material (plays) which cater to a very low level of fantasy. We cast ourselves (for the writing and the production and the patronage of plays we cannot but identify with the protagonist) in dreams of wish fulfillment. These dreams -- even and, perhaps, especially those which seem the most conservative and bourgeois -- seem to offer solutions to our concerns based on the idea that the concerns themselves do not exist, that they are only temporary aberrations of an essentially benign universe, or (and here is, perhaps, the hidden delusional postulate in our election of the happy-ending comedy-drama) of a universe which is positively responsive at that point at which our individual worthinesses (or inabilities, as it amounts to the same thing) are brought to its attentions. We leave the theater after such plays as smug as after a satisfying daydream. Our prejudices have been assuaged, and we have been reassured that nothing is wrong, but we are, finally, no happier.
Posted by Your Protagonist at July 10, 2006 09:18 AM