The writers consider the character wall
The Writers Room
I’m blessed to have such a talented room of wonderfully creative writers, 2/3 of which are Thai. I could not begin to conceive so many of the story points with any real local authenticity without their input. Not only that, but they are not afraid to defend ideas, dissent from the group, propose bad ideas, hunting for better ideas. They keep me on my toes.
We have two walls. One wall with each major (and some minor) character on the Y axis, and each episode number on the X axis. And at each intersection, where appropriate, we come up with one or two central beats, events, or actions that are pivotal to their main story or goal through the season.
We have a second wall with large chunks of space for anywhere from 20-35 index cards. This is where we break story depending on the other wall. How do the major character beats on the other wall break down into smaller beats of the episode, how do they interact with the other character beats, is there a conflict or theme that needs adjusting, how do the extra personal events affect the character beats... all these questions get sorted out here, shuffled, debated, torn down, moved, repurposed, trashed, realized, rinse repeat.
Eventually this should all lead to an outline for each episode that we all know quite well. Each writer will get their episodes to turn into a script, and they will work from this outline until a draft is complete.
We took a detour today from our work of breaking the season to really hone back down on major character events throughout the first season. It’s amazing how much talking and creative mental energy it takes to get a single post it or index card up on the wall.And tomorrow many of the post it’s and index cards will fall and be replaced by better ideas. And the day after that and after that.
Brick by brick by brick...
Location Scouting in Chumphon, Thailand
Pat, our location scout, has been making movies and television in Thailand for many years, you might not know him but it’s very likely you have heard of his work. He picked us up at the airport in Champhon yesterday and drove us to Nana Beach in the Pathio District where he regaled us with some of his life stories— the years he lived in a hut that costed 300 baht (about $10), and ran a kind of hut motel that sold some netting huts for 50 baht— he lived on an island in the 70’s and 80’s where thousands of tourists would come for the full moon parties. He learned to say “I love you” and “you are beautiful” in a dozen languages and he laughs about the nights of staying up all night with women whose names he sometimes didn’t know. Once after a brutal 7 month shoot he left Bangkok to live on an island again, away from everything. He lived without a phone, or newspapers, and this move was lucky as he made it right before a market crash. He lives in Bangkok now, with two golden retrievers, and you can follow them on Instagram at @mali_and_maru
An Email To My Summer Intensive Students On Our Last Day
My first question is... how did ya'll get me watching RIVERDALE and now I can't stop??
This is a dumpster fire of an addictive show. I don't care who killed Jason, but damned if it's not playing in the background as I write this.
Second. I am genuinely so sorry to have to have said goodbye to you all yesterday. I was blown away with the level of talent and commitment you all brought in. I am a bit envious of John as he gets to make it to the final week with you all. And believe me when I tell you you're in the best hands.
I do hope that John and I have helped demystify some of the audition process thus far.
I wanted to leave you with a few resources that helped me along my way, and I wish someone had given me sooner. Take em or leave em. Not every tool fits in every hand, but you're better off for knowing what's out there.
1. Self Management For Actors by Bonnie Gillespie.
This is her 4th Edition, I believe I came up on the 3rd edition when a T-Rex was running Paramount. There's a lot of built in powerlessness that comes with being an actor unless you educate yourself on ways to manage yourself in an unruly business. There are a lot of books out there, but I can vouch for this one. This book was incredibly helpful to me. She also has a fantastic blog that goes back YEARS AND YEARS... covering everything from "how to pick a headshot" to "how to move up from a co-star to a guest star" to "how do I fire my agent?" She does career coaching, if that's something you're into, I've never tried it, but I hear it is good. Get on her email list for bits of advice on the weekly.
2. Making Your Life As An Artist. by Andrew Simonet. Whoa... I just got this one a year ago by our theatre company consultant-- where was this book 15 years ago for me? And if you can stand reading on a PDF it is FREE. Short, but practical advice for making your life (notice... not "a living") as an artist. Read this and really think about your personal mission statement... GAME CHANGER.
3. Do It Yourself. I can't overstate this one enough. Acting is a very long, often zero sum game. You really have to give yourself a number of years before you truly start seeing results that have nice accompanying paychecks... and even then it is unreliable. So while you're building that extraordinary life in the long game... MAKE SHIT HAPPEN.
If Podcasting isn't your jam, how about a web series, if that isn't your thing, do you like making theatre, or did you check out that short film festival in your neighborhood and meet a DP who you get along with on a certain idea? Find your medium, grab the mic, and start telling stories. As you do it, you'll fail, and you'll get better, and you'll fail, and you'll get really really good.
AND SHHHHH... WHILE YOU'RE MAKING YOUR OWN SHIT HAPPEN your confidence in auditions SKY-ROCKETS... SHHHHH... don't tell anyone... SHHHHHH
-Tell me about yourself
-I just wrapped my first feature.
-Oh you were in it?
-I directed it.
-Ohhh.
(badass)
Of all the mistakes I made (and ooooh boy, I have DOOZIES) my biggest mistakes were saying No to independent projects with friends who are creative partners. I often thought: no, I can't work on that little play or short film, I have an agent and will soon be working on television all the time! Nope, nope, nope. Some of those projects had collaborators that are quite literally running things on Broadway, or else doing things that are so thrilling and exciting that the line to get in is very very long.
If Apple can start in a garage, your film can start on the living room floor of your shared one bedroom with no AC over pizza and a six pack of beer.
4. Don't Fear The Day Job. This one sucks. Money from acting will come. The stories are true though... it can often take a while. Or then you hit jackpots for a year or two and then it dries up, inexplicably. The "Making Your Life As An Artist" book really knocks this one out of the park... Ask yourself what else do you love doing that also feeds you? Are you a fitness person who can do personal training? Do you have a passion for buying and selling vintage clothes on the internet? Are you a Disney fanatic who wants to spend your weekend dressing up at a theme park? Do you have a passion for food service and like waiting tables and selling high quality wine? ... you get the idea. (and I know some incredibly successful actors who have all done these things).
5. Essentialism by Greg McKeown. This is not an acting book at all. But that's the point. If Silicon Valley nerds take silent meditation retreats and improv classes then I think artists should nose around in what makes them tick... how they operate. I also teach professional development to the corporate world and this is one of the best books I've come across in a long time. I highly recommend just getting the audio book and listening while you sit in traffic or do your dishes. You'll finish it in a week or less. This book asks you to prioritize and cut out the noise. An excellent excellent read.
6. Self Taping. You'll have to do this a lot nowadays. Practice with friends using your iPhones, and how to upload, etc. You want to have the technical kinks all worked out before you get the audition. Eventually you'll really want to pay for this service to get high quality if it's for a big job. I know of two that are run by excellent people:
Put Me On Self Tape
and
Your Audition Friend
7. The IAMA Theatre Company. Okay, this is my personal plug. John and I are in this company and it's kind of our artistic home now. (Also, this company, now ten years old DID start on a living room floor). If you move to LA come check us out. LA is a great theatre town, despite its reputation to the contrary.
8. ME! Stay in touch! And when you come back to LA for good or just to stay, hit me up, let me know what you're up to. christianjamesdurso@gmail.com
Sending Love and many broken legs!
200 Days of Headspace
Towards the end of 2017 I asked my wonderful network of friends to share their most impactful purchase of less than 100 dollars over the past year. Along with the Instant Pots and marriage licenses a few pointed out that the Headspace subscription had been their most impactful purchase.
Around the New Year I downloaded the application and decided I’d commit to the ten free trial days. I enjoyed Andy Puddicombe’s calming British dialect — I suspect if you cannot enjoy his voice then Headspace is a dealbreaker from jump, he guides every meditation in the library— and the simple yet powerful exercises he led me through. The algorithm cleverly found me on social media as my trial was ending and offered a discount for the subscription. I bit.
I’m now 200 days into a resolution to spend at least part of my day, ten minutes if I can, usually in the mornings, often before the coffee, or right after my morning pages, listening to Puddicombe’s soothing baritone and checking into my breath. I’d like to report a calmer, stress-free life as a result of my 30 some hours I’ve spent meditating this year. I can’t exactly do that in good faith — 4 out of 5 meditations I’m spending the time chasing my mind around the room like a puppy who took my socks, trying to get it to return to a gentle focus on my breath for longer than one or two moments— but I also can’t say that there haven’t been subtle, positive changes to my life that may stem from this practice.
If my time meditating has taught me anything, it’s to not look for hard results in this arena, but rather to observe, and to simply practice returning the mind to the breath again and again. And that might be it. And that might be everything.
Happy breathing!
Highland 2 Review: More, but not sure why.
I’ve tried to convince other screenwriters to use Fountain syntax and Highland. Some have bit, some balked at the learning curve (which really takes about ten minutes for such a great game changer). But I continued to advocate because it made the writing process so much more fluid than anything I’d ever come across.
So when Highland 2 dropped I didn’t even skip a beat, I bought it from the app store the first week it was available. I was very excited to start using it. But as I began playing with the features I regretted that I was not one of the Beta Testers…
Because I’m not in love with it.
Let me start by saying that almost everything I write ends up in Final Draft at some point.
Joshua Tree Hymn
The Sand Flats blush because they've seen the end;
The cities sell the fountain of youth,
But the Granite Boulders whisper
"we were a millennium below the earth and still your bones will be there longer";
When the Redwoods take the eyes above,
the desert draws the gaze within.
An F-250 roars across a black vein into rust sundown clouds;
The sun lingers, as if to stay, and then she sends stars;
Blue tide pools trickle below your surface,
And for your own reasons,
You keep these to yourself,
Like the gold better men
Never found.
A Reply To A Former Student Concerning Advice On Starting A Theatre Company
The following is an email I sent to a former acting student of mine who asked about forming a theatre company in Los Angeles. The show she mentioned was eventually mounted in Hollywood and she told me that my email had an impact in how they went forward. I reread the email and decided the advice was worth sharing.
______!
It's so great to hear from you. I love that you've started a theatre company!! Yes yes yes, this is a great thing to do. ____________ sounds like a wonderful idea and that fact that you're focusing on a female driven story is just the best.
Your question about obtaining financing is the million dollar question. As long as [your] Theatre is in operation you'll be addressing and struggling with this question, so my advice is to cozy up to it and get used to asking, looking, searching.
It sounds like ___________ is helping foot some of the bills, which is a great start (a better start than we had at IAMA). And I think that your goals for wanting to pay everyone involved are really great to have though they do come at a high cost. I do have some experience with Grants though I have to say that they are time consuming and it's probably best to think about Grants for the long term existence of [your] Theatre rather than to fund a single play, especially the first play. A grant can often take months to apply for and even more months to hear back about. And also, once you've had some work and some successes it will probably be easier to obtain some of those grants.
Cinephilia, Revisited
Fifteen years ago Lesyle Headland called me and said, “I’m writing a play and there’s this weird roommate character who just showed up, and I kinda hear your voice as I write him. We’re putting together a reading in Bushwick in a few weeks, you want in?” Since at the time I was pretty much just waiting tables and listening to Bjork all day in my South Williamsburg apartment and because Lesyle put together the team dreams are made of— Frank Boyd, Carmen Herlihy, and Lauren Marks as director— it was a no brainer. “Great,” she said, “we’ll rehearse at my place.”
Her place was just up Bedford Avenue, which was perfect, because that meant I could walk to rehearsal. We’d all moved to Williamsburg after graduation because it was affordable, if one can imagine such a thing. We sat around her kitchen table (in my memory Leslye was chain smoking, but perhaps she wasn’t) and we read. Thus began my first “gig” after college. It would also turn into a play that would change my life and forever affect the way I would watch a movie— or a film, I should say— the distinction was made clear, and with expletives, by page five. Cinephilia felt lifted directly from the torn bedsheets of our own idle apartments, and it spoke straight about the mess that gets left in the heart when someone you love isn’t able to love you back— it did all this in movie-language, as if she’d somehow weaponized Easy Riders, Raging Bull but in an empty Brooklyn room save for a broken bed, a DVD player, a neurotic roommate, and the ever-present threat of California. It was brilliant.
In those precious weeks we talked about heartache, obsession, drugs, Soderberg,
Edge Of Tolerance
Snows have fallen in the San Bernadino Mountains. It is President's Day weekend and despite the average Los Angelino predilection for despising the current president it seems they are prepared to not look a gift horse in the mouth. A brief scroll through my various social media feeds shows staycations in Malibu, jaunts to Joshua Tree National Park, the Grand Canyon. I click on their geo tags and take the fast lane down the wormhole.
I start in Joshua Tree with my thumb and middle finger. I zoom into the surrounding areas, Landers, and Pioneertown where I celebrated my last birthday. Then with the flip of my finger suddenly I’m rocketing east towards Phoenix. Interstate 10 is a marvel of human engineering. I follow it out as far as Santa Fe. I zoom in on the suburbs and think about the people who live there, the day’s traffic report.
I spend a lot of time looking at maps. In my own home I have half a dozen maps framed in my entry way. I took old Thomas Guides and tore out maps of my home town. In my bathroom I've framed the NPS maps of the mountains I’ve climbed. The Sierras, The Cascade range. I’ve also framed the maps of other cities I’ve called home. My eyes walk down Oxford Street and Jodenbreestraat. I think cartographers are poets who leave the house.