Diana spent the evening putting up the tree and stringing the lights. We even got our first ornament up... fresh from the Walt Disney World. While she was working on that, we played some movies that we had not seen in awhile. First it was Mean Girls, then Clerks II.
After that, I watched the making-of doc on Clerks II. Yeah, it's long, and I've seen it before, but I really find the process fascinating, especially as it relates to the making of his prior movies and trying to figure out what exactly the movie was supposed to be. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see that what Smith is getting at in the doc is that the movie was about getting back to doing whatever it is that you really love, which is exactly what he was doing in making that movie following the commercial and critical downfall of Jersey Girl (which, by the way, I thought was Afleck's best movie since Good Will Hunting).
Unlike my usual fascination with coming of age stories, this one is a, holy shit I'm in my thirties, what the fuck am I doing story. That's a fairly relevant thing for someone 35 and unemployed! It also gets me back to thinking about how much I want to make a film. What I have a hard time finding is my voice.
I suppose that someone who just met me could say, "Well just fucking write a script." But I have. I did it in 2004, and I submitted it to Project Greenlight and got very useful feedback. It was a year where I felt very empowered, blowing off a high paying contract gig to write my book and coach the shit out of my volleyball team that year. I wrote it in a couple of days, and it essentially told a somewhat fictionalized version of my journey to finally dating and believing I could be with someone. The movie is kinda all over the place, but it has a lot of my favorite dick-and-fart joke stories. The problem is that it's often too serious or too silly, and I don't feel like the characters are drawn well enough. It's like I was intentionally trying to combine a Cameron Crowe flick with American Pie. I think with some revisions it could be made, but I can't find the Project Greenlight feedback anywhere on my computer. It feels amateurish.
But my biggest fear is that making something autobiographical is both the easy way out (I don't have to invent as much) and the hardest thing to do (it has to measure up to my actual experience). I'd like to write something that's purely fiction, but I'm not sure if I have that in me. On the other hand, I think that Smith taking the pressure of a big Hollywood movie not being what he wants to do and translating that to the Clerks characters not doing what they truly want is a pretty good fictionalization of real things that he was feeling.
I think the biggest story that my voice wants to tell is one of my recovery from that very next year, after I wrote the screenplay and my book. To say that 2005 was, uh, rough, would be an understatement. My self esteem completely went into the crapper when Steph and I split. The interim story between then and now involved two significant, complicated relationships and several really strange, uh, encounters. The story "ends" with me meeting Diana, happy to meet her and also thankful for the experiences of the two prior years.
That's a story that I'd like to tell. To do so, I think it has to be simplified. Maybe elements of the relationships are written as one (though they were certainly very different), and maybe that has to be further distilled into the real point of the story: That others can help you realize all that you have to offer. I mean, the recurring theme in all of my non-trivial relationships has been that woman telling me I have so much love to offer, even if they weren't the right person for me. Maybe it's the reconciliation of the fact that the love doesn't guarantee success. The happy ending can't always be that you get the girl. It can, however, be the idea that you'll find her eventually.
In the mean time, maybe I need to do the short horror film I was thinking about. I mean shit, I can write ten pages, and find a couple of people to shoot it with. I don't know how creepy it would actually be, but expectations for that genre are generally pretty low anyway.
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