Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

Category: Personal Essay

“The Dogcatcher” Unleashed:  The Story behind My Debut Novel

September 20, 2023 / / 55 Comments

My first novel, The Dogcatcher, is now available from DarkWinter Press.  It’s an occult horror/dark comedy about a municipal animal-control officer whose Upstate New York community is being terrorized by a creature in the woods.  Here’s a (spoiler-free) behind-the-scenes account of the project’s creative inception and development; how it’s responsible for my being blackballed in Hollywood; how the coronavirus pandemic challenged and ultimately elevated the story’s thematic ambitions; and how these characters hounded my imagination—forgive the pun—for no fewer than fourteen years.

The Dogcatcher is on sale in paperback and Kindle formats via Amazon.

In the spring of 2007, I came home from L.A. for a week to attend my sister’s graduation at Cornell University.  My first occasion to sojourn in the Finger Lakes region, I took the opportunity to stay in Downtown Ithaca, tour the Cornell campus, visit Buttermilk Falls State Park.  I was completely taken with the area’s scenic beauty and thought it would make the perfect location for a screenplay.  Only trouble was, all I had was a setting in search of a story.

CUT TO:  TWO YEARS LATER

Binge-watching wasn’t yet an institutionalized practice, but DVD-by-mail was surging, and my wife and I were, as such, working our way through The X-Files (1993–2002) from the beginning.  Though I have ethical reservations about Chris Carter’s hugely popular sci-fi series, I admired the creative fecundity of its monster-of-the-week procedural format, which allowed for the protagonists, his-and-her FBI agents Mulder and Scully, to investigate purported attacks by mutants and shapeshifters in every corner of the United States, from bustling cities to backwater burgs:  the Jersey Devil in Atlantic City (“The Jersey Devil”); a wolf-creature in Browning, Montana (“Shapes”); a prehistoric plesiosaur in Millikan, Georgia (“Quagmire”); El Chupacabra in Fresno, California (“El Mundo Gira”); the Mothman in Leon County, Florida (“Detour”); a giant praying mantis in Oak Brook, Illinois (“Folie à Deux”); a human bat in Burley, Idaho (“Patience”).

Special Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) in “The X-Files”

But the very premise of The X-Files stipulated that merely two underfunded federal agents, out of approximately 35,000 at the Bureau, were appropriated to investigate such anomalous urban legends.  I wondered:  If an average American town found itself bedeviled by a predatory cryptid—in real life, I mean—would the FBI really be the first responders?  Doubtful.  But who would?  The county police?  The National Guard?  If, say, a sasquatch went on a rampage, which regional public office would be the most well-equipped to deal with it…?

That’s when it occurred to me:  Animal Control.

And when I considered all the cultural associations we have with the word dogcatcher—“You couldn’t get elected dogcatcher in this town”—I knew I had my hero:  a civil servant who is the butt of everyone’s easy jokes, but whose specialized skills and tools and, ultimately, compassion are what save the day.

But it was, to be sure, a hell of a long road from that moment of inspiration to this:

When the basic concept was first devised, I wrote a 20-page story treatment for an early iteration of The Dogcatcher, dated August 25, 2009.  That same summer, I signed with new literary managers, who immediately wanted a summary of all the projects I’d been working on.  Among other synopses and screenplays, I sent them the Dogcatcher treatment.

They hated it.  They argued against the viability of mixing horror and humor, this despite a long precedent for such an incongruous tonal marriage in commercially successful and culturally influential movies the likes of An American Werewolf in London (1981), Ghostbusters (1984), Gremlins (1984), The Lost Boys (1987), Tremors (1990), Scream (1996), and Shaun of the Dead (2004), to say nothing of then–It Girl Megan Fox’s just-released succubus satire Jennifer’s Body (2009).  (I knew better than to cite seventy-year-old antecedents such as The Cat and the Canary and Hold That Ghost; Hollywood execs have little awareness of films that predate their own lifetimes.)  I was passionate about The Dogcatcher, but it was only one of several prospective projects I was ready to develop, so, on the advice of my new management, I put it in a drawer and moved on to other things.

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A History of the Blog (So Far)—and a Programming Update

September 26, 2022 / / 34 Comments

Since launching this blog eight years ago, I have maintained a consistent publishing schedule of one new post per month.  However, given the ways in which this ongoing project has evolved, that level of output is no longer sustainable.  Here’s a brief chronicle of the blog’s creative progression—and a statement on what comes next.

From the time I signed with my first literary manager in 1998 through the ignominious end of my career in Hollywood in 2014, I was exclusively focused on one form of creative expression:  screenwriting.

Though ultimately unproduced, my scripts nonetheless earned praise from producers and development execs for their uncommon visual suggestiveness and sharp sense of pace, which I controlled through deliberate syntactic arrangement of the very things that do not appear in the finished film for audiences to appreciate:  the stage description.

Screenwriters, if you’re unaware, are not by and large particularly skillful wordsmiths.  And, to be fair, it’s not required of them.  Plot structure, characterization, and dialogue are what the screenwriter is there to provide for a motion picture.  Why waste time and creative energy on pretty prose in a blueprint, which is all a screenplay really is?

A rarified handful of pro screenwriters, Shane Black and James Cameron among them, paint immersive pictures with their words, imparting how the world of the story feels over merely sequentially reporting what happens.  Such is the dynamic mode of screenwriting for which I strove.

Most screenplays—and I’m talking about scripts to produced films, written by Hollywood’s A-list scribes—aren’t much more than utilitarian laundry lists of things we’ll see and hear onscreen, conveyed without any visceral impression of style or tempo, and are, accordingly, nigh unreadable.  The director, after all, is going to make the movie he sees in his head; the script is just a means to get all the above- and below-the-line talent quite literally on the same page.

Excerpted from “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” by David Koepp.  Mind-numbing, no?

I actually like words, however.  I like how they sound, and the infinite combinations of meaning that can be made from them.  Truth is, I never should’ve aspired to be a screenwriter.  It was the wrong medium for my talents and interests.  “Author” and “essayist” were always a better fit for my writerly sensibilities.  It took the implosion of my career to finally embrace that.

So, when I started this blog at the encouragement of my wife—one of her many good ideas—I didn’t know quite what to write about except screenwriting.  Accordingly, my first two dozen posts are almost entirely devoted to matters of narrative craft, from my customized Storytelling 101 curriculum to the violation of the Double Hocus Pocus principle in Ghostbusters II to character deconstructions of Jack Bauer and John Rambo and a comparative analysis of the Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger interpretations of the Joker.

One year into this blogging project, all my notions about narrativity were challenged—perhaps even shattered—by a book I’d read called Present Shock:  When Everything Happens Now (2013) by Douglas Rushkoff, which argued that Joseph Campbell’s “heroic journey,” the dramatic schema that has served as the structural basis for nearly every story in the Western literary canon, had collapsed around the turn of the millennium, as evidenced by the fanatical popularity of “storyless” fiction like Lost, The X-Files, The Sopranos, CSI:  Crime Scene Investigation, The Walking Dead, and Game of Thrones.

Rushkoff’s premise inspired a yearslong scholarly investigation on my part, which began in earnest with a post called “Journey’s End:  Rushkoff and the Collapse of Narrative,” and turned the blog in a new, more complex direction.  This intellectual project would never be the same.

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EXT. LOS ANGELES – ONE YEAR LATER

June 27, 2022 / / 20 Comments

I thought I’d said everything I had to say about Los Angeles last winter.  Should’ve known Hollywood would demand a sequel.

Even at the height of its considerable cultural influence, I never much cared for Sex and the City—for a very simple reason:  I didn’t in any way recognize the New York it depicted.

As someone who’d grown up there, Sex seemed like a postfeminist fantasy of the city as a bastion of neoliberal materialism, conjured by someone who’d never actually been to New York or knew so much as the first thing about it.  It certainly didn’t reflect the experience of any working-class New Yorkers I knew.

(It would seem the more things change, the more they stay the same:  The recent SATC revival series, And Just Like That…, is reported to be full of unintentionally cringe-inducing scenes of the gals apparently interacting with Black women for the first time in their lives.  Sounds on-brand.)

But this isn’t a retroactive reappraisal of a 1990s pop-cultural pacesetter—those have been exhaustively conducted elsewhere of late—merely an acknowledgment that the impression the series made on the generation of (largely) female Millennials who adored it is undeniable, legions of whom relocated to New York in early adulthood to have the full Sex and the City experience, and who, in turn, in many ways remade the city in Carrie Bradshaw’s image, for better or worse.

I can’t say as I blame those folks, really.  That they were sold a load of shit isn’t their fault.  Here in New York, we were just as susceptible to Hollywood’s greener-grass illusions of elsewhere.  As a student in the 1990s, the Los Angeles of Beverly Hills, 90210 (1990–2000) and Baywatch (1989–2001), of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) and Clueless (1995), seemed like a fun-in-the-sun teenage paradise in stark contrast with the socially restrictive experience of my all-boys high school in the Bronx, where the only thing that ever passed for excitement were spontaneous gang beatings at the bus stop on Fordham Road.

The high-school experience depicted on “Beverly Hills, 90210” is one I think we can all relate to

The sunny schoolyards and neon-lit nighttime streets of L.A. carried the promise of good times, the kind that seemed altogether out of reach for me and my friends.  The appeal of what California had to offer was so intoxicating, in fact, my two best pals and I spent an entire summer in the mid-’90s trying to make the streets of the Bronx look like Santa Cruz—a place none of us had ever been—for an amateur sequel to The Lost Boys, the ’80s cult classic about a coven of adolescent vampires who’ve (wisely) opted to spend eternity on the boardwalk.  That notion unquestionably took hold of my impressionable imagination—it made me want to be a part of that culture, and tell those kinds of stories.

Accordingly, it’s fair to say it wasn’t merely the movie business that brought me to Los Angeles in my early twenties as an aspiring screenwriter, but arguably the romantic impressions of California itself imprinted upon my psyche by all those movies and TV series on which I came of age.  Yet for the two decades I lived there, the city I’d always imagined L.A. to be—a place full of golden possibilities, as low-key as New York was high-strung—wasn’t the one I experienced.  Not really.  Not until last month, anyway.

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You Can’t Go Home Again:  Hopeful Reflections on Returning to New York after 20 Years Away

February 28, 2022 / / 21 Comments

Following up on the personal story that began last month in “A Hollywood Ending:  Hopeful Reflections on a Failed Screenwriting Career,” here’s my take on whether we can ever truly go home again.

When I left my apartment of two decades in Los Angeles last spring, I knew it was the last time I’d ever see the place.  I’d never really experienced that particular manner of finality before—walking away from a longtime home with full knowledge I would never again cast eyes upon it—because when I moved to L.A. from the Bronx in 2001, it was implicit I’d have ample occasion to return.  My mother was here, after all, so it was still “Carlin homebase,” so to speak.

And, to be sure, I loved coming back for Christmas, and other sporadic occasions, to reconnect with the old hometown.  It was and remains the only place in the world where I can strut down the avenue like Tony Manero on 86th Street in Bensonhurst, both master of all I survey yet somehow, simultaneously and incongruously, just another townie.  I love that sensation—of belonging to a place so completely and so comfortably.  When I walk down the streets of New York, I am home.  And if that’s the standard for what home feels like, nothing else has ever come close—even L.A. after all that time.

After my screenwriting career abruptly ended in 2014, I spent the next several years nursing a quixotic fantasy in which I made my escape from L.A. both on a moment’s notice and without a backwards glance.  Sleep tight, ya morons!  Only trouble is, that’s like imagining yourself racing heroically into burning building to rescue someone trapped inside:  It’s an easy scenario to envision when it’s purely hypothetical, unlikely to ever be put to the test.

But over the winter of 2021, from the point at which my wife and I initiated the purchase of our new apartment in the Bronx through the day we left California for good, I had a lot of time to say the long goodbye to L.A.—to come to terms with the idea that I actually was leaving.  And throughout that six-month period, I couldn’t get Sean Penn’s elegiac soliloquy from State of Grace out of my head.

Gary Oldman, Robin Wright, and Sean Penn in “State of Grace” (1990)

State of Grace is an obscure crime thriller from 1990 about the Irish-American street gangs that once ruled Hell’s Kitchen, New York.  (The director, Phil Joanou, has made the entire film available on Vimeo free of charge and in high definition.)  In it, Penn plays a character named Terry Noonan who grew up in the Kitchen and spent his youth running with the Westies, but who absconded, suddenly and unceremoniously, around age twenty.  He told neither his best friend, Jackie (Gary Oldman), nor his girlfriend, Kathleen (Robin Wright); he just disappeared like a thief in the night, his whereabouts unknown.

The story opens with Terry returning to the Kitchen after a decade-long absence, picking up where he left off with Jackie and Kathleen and the Westies.  This being a mob movie, I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say it ends tragically for just about every character, Terry included.  “I thought some things,” Terry wistfully confesses to Kathleen in a scene preceding the movie’s blood-soaked climax.  “That I could come back.”  He goes on to explain his reasons for coming home, and how he assumed everything would be when he got there, once he’d reintegrated himself in the old neighborhood.  He’d pictured it all so perfectly…

But it was only an idea.  Had nothin’ to do with the truth, it’s just… a fuckin’ idea, like… you believe in angels, or the saints, or that there’s such a thing as a state of grace.  And you believe it.  But it’s got nothin’ to do with reality.  It’s just an idea.  I mean, you got your ideas and you got reality.  They’re all… they’re all fucked up.

From State of Grace, written by Dennis McIntyre (with uncredited contributions from David Rabe)

Now, I don’t imagine it’ll surprise you to learn I was not involved with the criminal underworld when I lived in New York, nor did I slip away unannounced in the middle of the night without providing a forwarding address.  Nonetheless, Terry’s lamentation played on a loop in my mind’s ear throughout that winter:

I thought some things… that I could come back.

State of Grace is about a guy who learns the hard way you can’t simply come home after all that time away and expect to just pick up where you left off; it’s a cautionary tale about what we expect versus how things actually are.  Faced with the prospect of finally going home for good, I wondered:  Is that even possible?  Or was Thomas Wolfe right?  Had I been carrying around a romantic notion of a happy homecoming that had nothing to do with reality?

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A Hollywood Ending: Hopeful Reflections on a Failed Screenwriting Career

January 24, 2022 / / 36 Comments

I’ve alluded to the irretrievable implosion of my screenwriting career in many a previous blog post.  I never felt ready to write about it at length before now.  So, since we were just recently discussing the artful revelation of backstory, here’s mine.

Given the long odds of a career in Hollywood, even under the most favorable of circumstances, the unexpressed question that looms ominously over every aspirant is:  How do I know when it’s time to call this quits?

My wife and I were having drinks at the S&P Oyster Co. in Mystic, Connecticut, when I knew I was done with Hollywood forever—that my ship wasn’t coming.  That was September 24, 2014, during a visit to the East Coast for her aunt and uncle’s golden-anniversary party, exactly thirteen years to the day after we’d relocated from our hometown of New York City to L.A.

Right out of college, I’d landed representation as a screenwriter—though that management company folded a few months prior to my move, catalyzing, at least in part, my decision to try my luck in Tinseltown—and I had a reel full of TV spots and short films I’d cut while working as an audiovisual editor in SoHo, so I felt certain I’d land on my feet in Hollywood, this despite having no contacts there.

So, in the predawn hours of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I left the Bronx, the only home I’d ever known, and met my wife, though we weren’t married at the time, at JFK Airport to embark on our new adventure together.  Perhaps the cosmic timing of our departure (which was delayed by two weeks) should’ve been taken as a sign that the road ahead would be bumpier than I’d naïvely anticipated?

It took a full year in L.A. before I could even get a call returned, but finally I got some opportunities to edit a few independent shorts and features, and began networking my way into the industry.  But it would be another seven years yet before I procured representation as a screenwriter again, during which time I can’t tell you how many contemporaries I watched pack up their shit and abandon their dreams to move back home.  They’d decided it wasn’t worth it, that life was too short.  I’m certain I’d have been one of them were it not for my wife, who remained steadfastly supportive, and for a few friends—notably my buddy Mike—who were also Hollywood hopefuls determined to keep at it, too, through bad times and, well, less bad.  We were going to be the ones that hung in there and made it.

By 2009, things were looking up—considerably.  At long last I’d found representation once again with a management company, this time off a spec I’d written called Leapman, and all manner of opportunities soon followed:  to turn Leapman into a comic-book series; to sign with a big-letter talent agency; to vie for open screenwriting assignments; to develop an undersea sci-fi thriller (in the vein of The Abyss and Sphere) with a red-hot producer.

From “The Abyss” (1989), a movie about deep-sea extraterrestrials akin to the one I was developing

Around this same time, I got friendly with another up-and-coming screenwriter—we were repped by the same management—and he and I formed a critique group, enthusiastically enlisting half a dozen fledgling screenwriters we barely knew.  In short order, we all became close friends, meeting every other Tuesday night at one watering hole or another around Hollywood to trade script notes and war stories.  All unknowns at the time, some of those scribes have since gone on to write for shows including The Handmaid’s Tale and Women of the Movement, as well as WandaVision and Ted Lasso.

I was also, during this period, developing a short film with Mike.  He and I had met in 2003 on the postproduction crew of an indie film; we were on location in the redwoods of Marin County, right down the road from Skywalker Ranch, cutting dailies in a ramshackle cabin that looked for all the world like Ewok Village Hall.  Under those circumstances, it didn’t take long to become fast friends:  We were the same age, came up on the same cinematic influences, and—most notably—shared the same irreverent sense of humor, turning our verbal knives on all of Hollywood’s sacred cows, delighting in making one another howl with one progressively outrageous remark after the next.

Also like me, Mike was married to his teenage sweetheart, sans children, so we were both in the same place:  free to pursue our Hollywood dreams with the support of the women we loved.  It was and remains the closest male friendship I’ve ever made in my adult life.  As Mike continued to come into ever-more-promising editorial opportunities on studio features, my screenwriting career was kicking into high gear.  With aspirations to direct, he asked me if I wouldn’t mind taking one of my concepts—a horror/comedy I’d pitched him that reflected our mutual sensibilities—and scripting a short film for him to shoot.  So, there I was, developing a big-budget monster movie for a legit prodco by day, and a no-budget monster movie with my best friend by night.  After over a decade in Hollywood, everything had clicked into place.

And then came 2014.  Frustrated with the inexcusable lack of progress on the short—I’d written a script all of us were expressly happy with, and yet years had gone by and we were no closer to rolling camera—I put pressure on the project’s producer, Mike’s spouse, to do her part.  Consequently, for the first time in our decade-long association, our friendship grew strained, and once we both crossed the line and turned our caustic criticisms, the source of so many years of bonding and hilarity, on each other, our relationship eventually became irreversibly poisoned.  I’d lost my closest friend and ally in Hollywood, and that was only the beginning of my troubles.

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Entre Nous

September 1, 2021 / / 22 Comments

An old friend called recently for a commensurably old-fashioned reason:  just to say hi.  Turns out, Xers still do that.  Incorrigible habit we picked up in the analog age, I’m afraid.

We’d grown up together in the Bronx, though she’s lived in New England nearly as long as I’ve been in L.A., and we’ve seldom had occasion to cross paths in the old hometown over the past two decades.  Still, we’ve remained close; I regard her in every way as an older sister, indistinguishable from my actual older sisters.  She wanted to know how my wife and I were settling into our new home (more on that matter in a forthcoming post), and asked how my various writing projects were going, citing each by title.  Few of my friends ever inquire as to my writing (they’ve probably long since reasoned I’d be only too delighted to tell them, in exhaustive detail), and I’d buy the lot a round, with chasers, if even one could reference a single project by name.

This particular friend is a registered nurse who took a professional leave of absence to care for her terminally ailing mother after a prognosis set the woman’s lifespan expectations at perhaps a few months.  That was well over two years ago.  My friend’s life and career, accordingly, remain on indefinite hold.  So, when I asked how she was doing, she sighed and blurted, “Not great.”  To be clear:  She wasn’t looking to complain, only to confide.  I think it helped her, however fleetingly, to have the ear of someone who knows and loves her family as if it was his own, but isn’t directly involved with or affected by its short- and long-term dramas.

In May of 2016, we had a rare chance to hang together at the Casino Ballroom in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, to see old favorite Extreme perform (pictured: Gary Cherone and Nuno Bettencourt)

The entire conversation stood in stark contrast with an experience I’d had only a week earlier.  I was at a backyard barbecue in Jersey—there have been quite a number of those this past August, as it happens—with friends and relatives I hadn’t seen since well before the shutdown, folks I’ve known for at least a quarter century if not the entirety of my life.  We’d all just endured the collective trauma of pandemia, and I guess I had a notion in my head that being in each other’s company once again would provide a tangible sensation of catharsis—a renewed appreciation for our shared history; a deeper sense of trust in one another; a tighter grip on the ties that bind; a desire, for lack of a more erudite phrase, to be real.  To confide.

Heh.  My wife warned me years ago I’m a hopeless Romantic.  Well, she was right yet again, because while it was certainly nice to see them, we mostly just talked about the same old shit:  the Yankees’ midseason slump; the enduring mystery of why Millennials venerate The Office as the Greatest Sitcom Ever; etcetera, etcetera.  I wasn’t asked about my work—I can write about all this publicly with full confidence none of them will ever read it—and I’ve learned to stop asking about theirs; I never get an answer, anyway.  And Christ knows no one expressed a candid or unflattering word about how they were feeling.  No, everyone just put on a happy face—though many of them didn’t seem particularly happy to me—and a lot of perfectly polite if entirely superficial discourse ensued… just like the good old days.

The difference this time, I suppose, was how attuned I was to the skillful manner by which some of those folks—not all of them, to be perfectly fair—fluidly change the subject the instant a question trips the “too personal” wire.  Suddenly, I found myself flashing back on a zillion cocktail conversations over multiple decades and wondering if a piece of information has ever been exchanged that offered even so much as a cursory glimpse at their secret hearts?  I don’t think it has, and not for lack of trying on my part.  I make it easy for people to open up, if they choose.

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One Good Idea: Reflections on My Longest-Running Project—and Most Successful Creative Collaboration

February 15, 2021 / / 34 Comments

My wife and I are celebrating twenty-five years together this winter.  God, that’s three impeachments ago.  To place it in even more sobering perspective, the January morning we’d met for our first date at the AMC on Third Avenue at 86th Street, I’d never in my life sent an e-mail.  At best, I had peripheral awareness of the “World Wide Web”—whatever that was—and certainly no idea how to access it (not that I’d ever need to).  I definitely didn’t have a cell phone—which, admittedly, would’ve come in handy, seeing how I was running late to meet her.

But we met that morning just the same; in those days—don’t ask me how, for this secret, like the whereabouts of Cleopatra’s tomb, is permanently lost to history—folks somehow met up at a prearranged location without real-time text updates.  It’s true.  We met many more times over the month that followed, in many more locales around the city:  Theodore Roosevelt Park on the Upper West Side; Washington Square Park in the Village.  (Public parks are a godsend for penniless students at commuter college.)  It was cold as hell that winter, but I never cared; I was happy to sit outside in the bitter temperatures for hours—and we did—just to be with her.  By February, we were officially inseparable—and have remained so ever since.

A lifetime has passed since then, one in which, hand in hand, we’ve graduated college, traveled to Europe on several occasions, moved across the country (on September 11, 2001 of all cosmic dates), weathered the deaths of a parent apiece, eloped in Vegas, cared for twenty-four different pets (mostly fosters), consciously practiced patience with and developed deeper appreciation for one another during this indefinite interval of self-quarantine (we haven’t seen our immediate family on the East Coast since Thanksgiving of 2019), and have perennially quoted lines from GoodFellas to one another… because, well, GoodFellas might be the only thing that’s aged as well as we have.

Goodfellas Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta at the Jackson Hole diner in Queens, the site of many of our dates in the college years

She’s certainly aged preternaturally well in her own right.  She was the prettiest girl at school—no minor triumph, given that there were almost 20,000 students at Hunter College at the time—but she’s impossibly more beautiful today.  When I glance in the mirror, however, I in no way recognize the kid that fell in love with her all those years ago.  This is a good thing.  I think—I hope—I’m a much better man today than I was then.  Kinder; more compassionate; more sensitive; more patient.  Certainly wiser.  And hopefully more deserving of the love she’s given so freely and steadfastly.  Indeed, hopefully that above all else.

All the best ideas to grace my life over the past quarter century have been hers, without so much as a lone exception.  Long before I took up blogging, she’d encouraged me to do so.  I was such an incorrigible Luddite, however; furthermore, I reasoned it would be a distraction from my “real” work:  screenwriting.  Now I wish I’d swapped screenwriting for blogging years earlier.  The former—my bright idea—made me miserable; the latter has allowed me to better know myself unquantifiably.  I am an exponentially better writer for this continuing project—the one she had the wisdom to suggest years before I could see the value in it myself.  She didn’t hold that against me, though; she even set up my WordPress domain.  Now you get to read all about the esoteric bullshit she alone used to entertain over dinner.

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All That You Can’t Leave Behind: On Memories, Memorabilia, and Minimalism

April 30, 2019 / / 22 Comments

A lifelong packrat, here’s the story of my unlikely conversion to minimalism.

Concert tickets.  Refrigerator magnets.  Christmas ornaments.  Comic books.  Trading cards.  Greeting cards.  Bobbleheads.  Bank statements.  Photo albums.  Vinyl records.  Shoes.  Shot glasses.  Jewelry.  Blu-rays.

What does the stuff we collect, consciously or unconsciously, contribute to the story of our lives?

And… what does it mean for us when there’s less of it?

Photo credit: Ticketmaster blog, June 26, 2015

In an opinion piece that appeared in the New York Times earlier this month, columnist Peter Funt laments the obsolescence of analog mementoes in a Digital Age:

And so ticket stubs join theater playbills, picture postcards, handwritten letters and framed photos as fading forms of preserving our memories.  It raises the question, Is our view of the past, of our own personal history, somehow different without hard copies?

Peter Funt, “Does Anyone Collect Old Emails?,” Opinion, New York Times, April 5, 2019

In recent years, I’ve expanded this blog from its initial scope, an exclusively academic forum on storytelling craft, to chronicle my own personal history, often in no particular order.  I am ever and always in search of a clearer, more complete, more honest perspective on my past, and how it has shaped the narrative arc of my life; I mine my memories regularly for content, and for truth.

I have also routinely expressed apprehension about the practices we’ve lost in a Digital Age, the kind to which Mr. Funt refers, particularly as that applies to the corrupted discipline of storytelling itself:  From the superhero crossovers of the “Arrowverse,” to the literary Easter-egg hunt of Castle Rock, to the expansive franchising of Star Wars, today’s popular entertainments are less concerned with saying something meaningful about the human condition than they are with challenging the viewer to catch all their internal cross-references.  Whereas stories once rewarded audiences with insight, now the reward is the esteemed privilege of calling oneself a superfan—a participatory designation earned by following all the breadcrumbs and connecting all the dots… an assignment only achievable if one never misses a new installment:

In a nod to the subscription model of consumption—where we lease cars or pay monthly to a music service—the extended narratives of prestige TV series spread out their climaxes over several years rather than building to a single, motion picture explosion at the end.  But this means energizing the audience and online fan base with puzzles and “spoilers”. . . .

. . . The superfan of commercial entertainment gets rewarded for going to all the associated websites and fan forums, and reading all the official novels.  Superfans know all the answers because they have purchased all the products in the franchise.  Like one of those card games where you keep buying new, expensive packs in order to assemble a powerful team of monsters, all it takes to master a TV show is work and money.

Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human (New York:  W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), 163

Fanboys and -girls thought they were legitimized when the geek subculture went mainstream—when superheroes and sci-fi went from niche hobby to pop-cultural monopoly—but they were really just commodified:  “geek” shifted from a stigmatized social category to a lucrative economic one.  Leveraging our telecommunications-induced FOMO, a new permutation of commercial narrative was contrived:  the “mega-franchise,” which seeks not our intermittent audience, but rather our habitual obedience.  Sure, you may not have even liked the last four Star Wars or Terminator or Transformers movies… but do you really wanna run the risk of skipping this one?

More is more: Every “Star Wars” character has its own backstory and action figure—collect them all!

So, given those two ongoing preoccupations—personal history and receding traditions in the Digital Age—the thesis of “Does Anyone Collect Old Emails?” would’ve spoken to me regardless, but the timing of it was nonetheless uncanny, as I have devoted no small degree of consideration in recent months to the matter of the physical objects we amass, wittingly or otherwise, and how they tether us to the past.  Here’s the story.

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Through the Looking Glass: How Johnny Depp’s Reclusive Tendencies Are a Funhouse Reflection of Our Own

August 31, 2018 / / 29 Comments

From his days on Jump Street when I was in junior high, to his offbeat movie roles during my time as a “serious” film student in college, to our shared penchant for supernatural cinema, Johnny Depp has steadfastly remained the most exciting actor of his generation.  But his apparent withdrawal from reality in recent years is the role I’d most come to identify with after my screenwriting career catastrophically imploded.  Alas, Mr. Depp—this is where I leave you.

Rolling Stone recently ran a feature profile on actor Johnny Depp, detailing his extensive financial hardships (a reported $650 million fortune vaporized by his compulsive-spending disorder), legal entanglements (home foreclosures and a contentious lawsuit with his former business managers), personal controversies (allegations of spousal abuse and a growing dependency on drugs and alcohol), and “reports he couldn’t remember his lines and had to have them fed to him through an earpiece” (Stephen Rodrick, “The Trouble with Johnny,” Rolling Stone 1317 [July 2018]:  83).

Thorough as Rodrick’s reporting is, though, the documented facts of the respective scandals are less compelling—less tragic, even—than the wider arc of the narrative he presents, illustrating just how far Depp has come from the “days when he was a male ingénue and not a punchline:  bankrupt, isolated and one more mistake away from being blackballed from his industry” (ibid., 134).

Isolated is precisely the right word; one can’t read the Rolling Stone piece and not be impressed by the extent to which Johnny Depp is alone in the crumbling edifice of his ivory tower:

I want to go home, but feel reluctant to leave.  One of the most famous actors in the world is now smoking dope with a writer and his lawyer while his cook makes dinner and his bodyguards watch television.  There is no one around him who isn’t getting paid.

ibid., 135

Yeah.  But who gives a shit, though—am I right?  Whether you’re of the mind that it’s hard to feel bad for spoiled Hollywood stars devoid of limits or impulse control, or whether, like me, you don’t have a crap to spare for the vacuous affairs of celebrity culture (I’ve been checked out at least as long as “Brangelina” was a thing), the trials of Johnny Depp should logically provoke either schadenfreude or apathy, but certainly not sympathetic interest.

If only this were a movie still…

And yet I don’t merely sympathize with his current state of reclusion—in fact I empathize with it.  Perhaps that’s because the different seasons of Depp’s career—the spring, summer, and arguably now the fall—have run parallel to my own life.  During my time as a film-school student in the nineties, he was one of the most exciting actors to follow because of his uniquely unconventional tastes in directors and material.  After I moved to Hollywood and learned to loathe the blockbuster, he headlined the last big movie franchise I actually genuinely enjoy.  But my awareness of him, and his singular talents, predates all of that.  He’s one of the only major artists whose career I’ve followed since its inception.

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