Austin Powers: The Once and Future Festival

Passion makes the old medicine new:
Passion cuts the veins of weariness.
Passion is the elixir that renews:
How can there be weariness
When passion is present?
Oh, don’t sigh heavily from fatigue:
Seek passion, seek passion, seek passion!
— Rumi

Passionately address yourself to work that matters.
— Shane Black

And so we begin again. I’ve debated as to whether to dive right in, act as if nothing’s changed, no time has passed, just keep on trucking; or whether I should, you know, offer up a little meta-bloggery, discuss the approach we might take, the point of entry that would make the most sense. Perhaps you have a feeling about which way I’m leaning, perhaps not, but let’s just say that I’m glad to be here, blogging, and feeling good.

I spent several days recently taking the R5 into Philadelphia for a training course to bolster up skills demanded by the day job. It was not something I was altogether eager to submit to, as the event seemed perniciously corporate; but early on something changed, something probably inside my head, and the effort required to get there (including a longer-than-usual commute just to reach the station) made the whole venture seem worthwhile. I was out of my element in terms of schedule, location, routine; could not rely on the standard patterns; and oddly I found myself on something like an adventure.

Traveling along the Main Line, we rumbled past the spacious backyards of upper-middle-class suburbia, picking up elegantly dressed businesspeople at one stop after another: Wayne, Radnor, Bryn Mawr, Villanova. As the train drew closer to center city, you could actually witness the “progress” of socioeconomic degradation (but I’ll allow that downtown Philly is not the heart of darkness I once fancied it). Free from the responsibility of driving and the usual workplace demands, and without Jenifer and Hawk’s company, my thoughts often turned to my writing projects and the writers’ conference of the Austin Film Festival I’d attended what was now already some weeks ago.

I felt I was in a time of measured progress, at best; a restaging, one of those necessary interludes between full-bore efforts. For weeks I’d been struggling with time itself, the feeling of chronic jetlag, and a sense of toil without end. Even the I Ching’s counsel was bleak: “You have been wounded by dark forces.” This is not to suggest that I was unhappy, only to observe that a creature of routine finding himself without routine may be prone, at times, to fretting. And as Austin rolled around this creature also found himself without a new script in hand to tout, push, and sell; without a recent accolade or attaboy to trumpet; without anything, really, at all.

This proved to be perfect.

I took Jenifer’s suggestion to go without an agenda, to not concern myself with the unfinished state of my current script. This freed me to pitch the spate of new projects that had arrived unbidden in my noggin. It was both comforting and exhilarating to see a future beyond the historical epic, and I saw that even if I didn’t generate another idea I could easily have work for the next decade.

Austin was different this year, too. There was something richer about it, and I am not alone among my peers in expressing this. Perhaps we are in a different place now as writers, perhaps more receptive or just plain ready for the roof to blow off so the party can begin. The panel discussions seemed elevated, or perhaps the crowd, like us, had simply gotten older and there was an accretion of experience and skill and ambition and talent so that the whole beast of the conference was free to delve into the nitty gritty of writing and getting your writing turned into flickering images for others to clamor into a theater to view. I don’t remember, for example, repeated questions about what genres are hot and what are the studios looking for and should I write a spec that’s Hostel meets Wedding Crashers?

The overall thrust, from the writers generating content to the producers shepherding it and the actors embodying it, was that you need to write what you need to write. Concern yourself not with calculating the kind of spec that’s supposed to make a sale or garner assignment work—as if you could really ascertain this anyway. Trust that your own method, as wicked and flawed and weird as it might seem, will suffice—and is closer to that of the pros than to anything gleaned from books. To this end, Terry Rossio shared his inspiring theory of targeting, which boils down to writing beyond your current capacities. I know my heart swelled when Lawrence Kasdan, who knows something about screenwriting, said:

“The thing you must write is what will get you through.”

It’s going to be really cool to see what’s in theaters five to 10 years from now.

Sure, there was the occasional disappointment, such as the discovery that Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York would not be playing until Tuesday. I can’t remember when I was so excited to see a movie about a figure of speech. And, of course, the damn thing always starts later than I expect it to on Thursday (in the words of Rhino the fanboy hamster: “Let it begin!”). But on the whole the conference felt supportive, at times maybe even triumphant.

At registration, a young man, a kid, was signing up for the pitch competition. I don’t even remember whether he asked for my advice. Maybe I just let him have it, which isn’t really my style, but I was excited for him to be on his first outing and let him know that the event had been really good for Tom and me. He had no idea what he was in for—how could he?—and that was all the more reason to go for it. In that moment I felt like a seasoned veteran, and envied him a little bit, and neither is a bad thing when it comes to affirming yourself as a writer.

These moments happen all the time in Austin. They are a large part of the conference’s value. Another key takeaway is that you meet people who are more like you, in the ways that matter, than most of the folks in your ordinary life back home. You are now a card-carrying member of a scattered tribe, not the only one ensorceled by the stories of the silver screen.

When two such word-warriors meet, a common element of the introduction is “How many times have you been to Austin?”—this being the screenwriter’s arch equivalent of “How much ya bench?” In other words, beneath the posturing and angling (for there is that, too): How serious are you? That’s another question Austin will ask you. Are you doing everything you need to do? Are you letting go of those things you don’t?

My answer to the first question, five so far, includes an oddball ringer and a touch of the primordial. My first time in Austin was so long ago I hadn’t even started screenwriting. Not really, anyway. In fact, I wasn’t even supposed to go.

A graduate student at the time, I’d had a paper accepted at the Society of Literature and Science, some fantastic Foucaultian thing linking cyberpunk, constitutional psychology, and 1930s bodybuilding. (I know, right?) I had already signed on to pack into a van and haul off to Atlanta for the conference when a friend of mine, a Ph.D. candidate in Communications, invited me to attend Austin instead. I was torn between what seemed like obligation and what seemed to hold a spark of destiny. It was one of the few times I have felt with a deep bodily knowledge that I was standing at a turning point in my life.

Until that point, I hadn’t acted on the dream that had started all those years ago with The Empire Strikes Back. That was the film where I first understood that films are made and before that written. In college I spent many hours standing in the stacks of the library reading journals of film criticism and books of Pauline Kael’s collected reviews, as if even sitting in a carrel would signify too much of a commitment. This was as close to screenwriting and filmmaking as I could allow myself to get, when my overriding obligation was to get a solid education in a reasonable discipline, when the university’s self-defined major in film meant cobbling together a courseload and the road to downtown Pittsburgh seemed much too far a trip for someone without a car, an understanding of bus schedules, or the time to squander on extracurricular pursuits whose end was something other than a corporate job with benefits.

Perhaps this explains why my memories of my first Austin are fragmentary:

In a warehouse listening to the soundtrack to Apollo 13 before the feature began, some film starring Denis Leary, Joe Mantegna, and Annabella Sciorra that, to my knowledge, never attained a wide release.

Pitching the late writer/producer Michael Piller on two-thirds of a script cobbled together in three weeks. He saw through our hasty effort but never hesitated to take us seriously.

Geena Davis iceskating furiously. That guy from Hack being really evil in a barn. Windmill. Water torture.

Ah, yes. The Long Kiss Goodnight. This film wasn’t part of the festival program in 1996, at least I don’t think it was. Now why exactly my friends and I would drive out to some suburban cineplex to catch a movie we could easily see back in State College or any other semi-populous district I have no idea. Even less clear to me is why I would preface this viewing with the alcohol-and-caffeine cocktail of a Shiner Bock (imbibed at the excellent but now defunct Gilligan’s restaurant) and a 32-ounce Diet Coke. Unaware that its writer, Shane Black himself, was probably already holed up in the Driskill lounge and beginning what would become his near-annual chautauqua, I got up no less than six times to pee during what felt like a very long night, indeed. Mr. Black, my apologies.

Clearly, we didn’t do the conference right. We had no rhythm. No preparation. We made no connections. Still, the conference made me feel like a writer and, more important, became the known thing I would return to when I was ready.

Let me put it plainly. My decision to attend the Austin Film Festival changed my life.

. . . . .

Saturday night, the last night of the conference, finds our posse down Brazos at a large pool hall that could only be found in a college town, or maybe only one in Texas, I don’t know. Tom is delightfully drunk, and he and I are getting schooled on the green felt field by our newfound friend Tim, a Los Angeleno by way of Chicago. Someone approaches me. The kid from registration. He wanted me to know, he says, that he’d won the pitch competition. He just wanted me to know.

He is proud, we shake hands, and I remember the intoxicating feeling of victory, but also more than that, much more: the tangible sense that you are moving forward, that others are seeing you, and that you have both the capacity and the responsibility to passionately address yourself to more than a Driskill cheeseburger.

The kid’s name, by the way, is Nick Hurwitch. I have no idea what will happen to him, how he will answer Austin’s questions, and whether he will ever return. But he was here, as my friends and I were, and perhaps he, like us, saw greatness sitting in the director’s chairs at the head of the Driskill Ballroom and felt that maybe, just maybe, there was greatness waiting for him, too.

“You have to have this thing that will not be extinguished.”
— Lawrence Kasdan

The Blessing

A voice in the dark: “Ryan.” Only it isn’t dark, not entirely. The bedroom is lit with the eerie glow of the new alarm clock/radio’s blue LED, the sort of light cast by the TV that’s left on by grandmoms when they can’t sleep, only without the flickering.

“Ryan.” There it is again, that voice. Jenifer’s voice. I leap out of bed—which you can do when it’s only eight inches off the floor—and into action. The heartrate soars, adrenaline courses, the klaxons are blaring—DIVE! DIVE!—and I am the personification of power and puissance, I am a ninja, I am the wind, and I am fumbling with epic mightiness to fix a sock on Hawk’s flailing foot—and then Jenifer’s voice cuts in again and points out in no uncertain terms that my efforts are “strictly tertiary concerns” (I apparently having vaulted right over those of the primary and secondary orders) and that my attention is needed on the more immediate and urgent task of changing the wee bairn’s diaper.

Yes, of course, I answer, perhaps not in those words. I’m not sure, really, what I say, only I brave the beacon of Mínas Morgul (so I have come to call the ever-watchful blue LED; and, yes, I know in the movie it’s green) and haul baby Hawk into the bathroom for another stint at natural infant hygiene, otherwise known as “elimination communication”; for Jenifer has developed (and I to a lesser extent) the ability to detect his waste elimination needs almost before he does. Sometimes we miss (hence the diaper), but more often than not we anticipate in time and thus enjoy Hawk’s happy attention rather than his unhappy wrath. This, as you can imagine, is exhausting.

And I wonder why I find myself already a week out from the final day of the Screenwriters’ Conference of the Austin Film Festival. The conference was the first time I was away from little Hawk since his birth eight weeks (already!) before. During the summer Jenifer and I had decided that the conference would be sufficiently far away in time that my going would not be an issue; in fact, Jenifer insisted I go.

For weeks the trip loomed large in my imagination as I looked forward to the epic anchor point of the year, the screenwriter’s New Year; and if my departure was less grand than that of Húrin son of Thúrin, or of Hector’s taking leave of Andromache, each famously dandling their sons on the eve of their doom, then my return home was a triumph neither of those heroes could lay claim to. I had survived the foreign campaign unscathed and returned to hearth and home restored by the effort. During the conference, Hawk was never far from my thoughts, but upon seeing him again I was completely surprised by how overcome with emotion I was. How had he grown so much in only five days’ time? What had I missed? What new superpowers had he manifested? I felt reborn from four days of paneling and partying, but nothing could compare with Hawk’s evident transformation and the incessant march of his metabolism.

I had returned to the new world, the one without order or plan, the one that demanded an abandoning of expectation and preference for structure and predictability. In this world, as I have suggested, things tend to take longer to accomplish and at times risk not being done at all. So it was with our planning for Hawk’s baby blessing.

Jenifer and I had struggled to come up with a location and format for the event. When asked what a baby blessing was, I’d joke that it was a christening without the Christ, but really what we were after was a gathering of our closest friends and family that was reverent but not overly programmed. We felt that it should have a sense of ritual about it, should be led by a qualified facilitator; we didn’t want to just wing it. Here Hawk would be officially introduced to our community and we wanted to get it right.

Jenifer’s father joked that, knowing us, we’d enlist an East African shaman to conduct the ceremony. I wish I’d been there to see the look on his face when Jenifer reported that our first choice was, in fact, Malidoma Patrice Somé, noted shaman and elder of the Dagara tribe of West Africa. Unfortunately, his schedule was booked.

On to Plan B: The Great Quentini, a local performance artist known for his unconventional drum kits (fashioned from junkyard scraps), irreverent but heartfelt spoken-word pieces (on the importance of chlorophyll), and genius for unusual hats (carved from foam). But he, too, was unavailable.

I mentioned our dilemma to my local men’s group and one of the guys suggested we require everyone to bring their own blessing. YES! We would have everyone else shoulder the load. Perfect!

That left the location to find. We wanted an outdoor site and had originally dreamed of holding the event atop the nearby Hawk Mountain for obvious reasons, but with October you never know what kind of weather you’re going to get and we had mobility concerns to take into consideration for a couple of our guests. For a time the leading contender was Wayne’s Woods (named for General “Mad Anthony” Wayne) in the Valley Forge National Historical Park, but here there was no guarantee of freedom from crowds.

In the end we held the blessing at ocean earth wind fire, the yoga studio where Jenifer works and our home base in Phoenixville. Jenifer and Hawk and I took our place in the backyard and the gathered joined in an effortless circle. My mother started to Jenifer’s left, presenting a cross-stitch wall hanging announcing Hawk’s birthday, and then each member of the circle in turn presented his or her gift to Hawk. Each gift beautifully bespoke the giver’s individual talents: testaments, artwork, performance, poems both original and carefully chosen.

Just as the city sounds penetrated our patch of greenspace, we made no effort to block out the external world or the public atmosphere of failures and bailouts, the sense of crisis in the air. The world has always been ending, but with such folk as were gathered about us it will always begin anew. These extraordinary people, our community, had witnessed and supported our growth as we pursued our callings, and now Hawk had heard the call. Perhaps Tom, in identifying what was required of each of us, put it most simply: “Never be afraid to be great.”

Afterwards Hawk’s two families spent the remainder of the afternoon at Chanticleer Garden, followed by dinner in downtown Wayne. The day had been perfect, the weather beautiful, and finally the time came for our families to part ways. Jenifer and I decide to take “the back way,” as we often do, and here that means a passage through Valley Forge Park. But Hawk’s cries of hunger mean that we have to stop for a feeding, and Jenifer and I smile at each other as we recognize that the only stopping place is the great Arch. This stone monument is one of my favorite places, a sanctuary.

We are alone, the three of us, at this sacred spot. I think of it as the spiritual epicenter of the land, where General Washington and his men braved the harshest of winters during the Revolutionary War. At the edge of the field are the darkening trees of Wayne’s Woods, and as I collect photos Jenifer and Hawk remain at the Arch under the silent watch of the deer and a burning sky.

Darkness falls and Hawk finishes. Only it isn’t dark, not entirely. We get in the car and, guided by moon and stars, find our way home.

There Will Be Blog

Oh, yes, there will be, once I figure out the new non-routine. There are indeed events, happenings, and occurrences, not to mention incidents and perhaps even affairs, all requiring reportage and perspectivizing and nostalgianating, including Hawk's baby blessing and the annual sojourn to Texas for the Austin Film Festival, by which I really mean the Screenwriters' Conference. Please do stand by.

Intermission

I'm supposed to be packing. Again. The better portion of last week I was at the Austin Film Festival, and tomorrow I head to the Poconos for Jenifer's autumn yoga retreat. I'm told that Odin himself will be present (pics to come!), which is especially auspicious considering that I spent the past few weeks completing, refining, polishing the treatment for my Viking screenplay. In fact, I finished it just in time for the dash to Tom's mother's house, our traditional night-before-and-close-to-the-airport staging area. (Okay, so Yours Truly driving in the rain in the dark in New Jersey in a Prius is not, technically, a “dash.” We also stopped at Bertucci’s.) I’m pleased with the treatment and look forward to writing the next draft, but I’m also happy to pause for a few moments and catch my breath.

Austin is a place where you can discuss the nuts and bolts of screenwriting with folks like John Milius and Terry Rossio. Austin is where you can see other writers and, more important, be seen as a writer. Austin is fertile ground, where a friend’s offhand comment at a party can instantly lodge in your mind and blossom into a premise for a high-concept comedy. Tom said he would attend the conference just for the plane ride home, when, inevitably, the backlog of promising concepts grows ever longer.

Austin is also where friends new and old gather in the Driskill lounge to catch up on each other’s doings: Julie, a panelist this year, has a movie in post-production; Deb has a beautiful new book and promotional tour hitting stores this fall; and Brett is flying high as one of 10 finalists for the Nicholl Fellowships. You could do worse than this conference.

Alas, the suitcase beckons. Soon tomorrow will rise, and Jenifer and I will celebrate our five-year anniversary.

I won!

As my friend Tom says, my good luck continues. I just learned from Lindsay at the Austin Film Festival that one of my nights at this year’s conference will be on the house. Sweet!

They seem to like having me there as much as I like going. Last year my producer’s badge was covered since Tom and I won the pitch contest the previous year. At this rate, I fully expect to be invited to speak on next year’s panel “How to Win Things at Austin.” Stay tuned!

Hey, I got somethin'!

So I got a cool thing in the mail today. A letter from the Austin Film Festival saying my script Disaster Man is a second rounder in this year's Comedy category. I'll take that. It's always good to have some external validation, a nod that says someone else out there "gets" Disaster Man, in which a spastic would-be comic book artist battles his professor for the ultimate action figure.* Naturally, it's about fascism.

Sure, a win would have been nice, and would have built on Disaster Man's Chesterfield semifinalist placing, but this felt like a gift. I wish I could say I'd carefully clipped five proofs of purchase from blisterpack cardboard, sent them in, and waited 8 to 12 anxious, mailbox-checking weeks for delivery. But I didn't. I forgot. It's been a busy summer. See you in Austin this October.

*The Crimson Shaman with Obsidian Gauntlets. No, you can't have him.

George Lucas . . . prepare to be toormahnated.

I am not a cyborg from the future. Honest. And I wish nothing but light and goodness for George. I swear. But all the pics from the Austin pitch competition suggest that behind those glowing red eyes, lurking beneath that grainy facade, is the endoskeleton of a T-101 (or is it T-800?). Of course, the script Thomas and I pitched, American Jedi, is about an obsessed fan who sets out to kill George for ruining Star Wars. You know, a light assassination comedy.

In fact, as Thomas I were wrapping up the fourth draft last spring, we received a curious phone call. Seems Lucasfilm had hired a local private investigator to make sure we were on the up and up. The short we had made to promote the script had worked its way around Los Angeles. The letter we sent George about the short had not yet been returned to us unopened -- that would happen a few days later. So within the hour our intrepid gumshoe arrived at Thomas's house and we had a nice chat in the living room.

We played the video for her on Thomas's widescreen TV, and she laughed. She pointed out her favorite part. We agreed. She admitted that she wasn't really into the whole Star Wars thing, but that her son really dug the video. We pointed out that the web site's URL was displayed in the video's background and that anyone in the target audience would be in on the joke.

Of course, she expressed Lucasfilm's desire for us to take down the web site, cease distributing the video file, and presumably move on to more George-friendly subject matter. Of course, none of this was in writing. Now, admittedly, we were slightly intimidated, not knowing how far this would go, so we did take the video down -- for awhile. But the site itself stayed up, and in a matter of days we had thousands of hits from within the Lucasfilm empire: LucasArts, Skywalker Sound, ILM. Someone was watching and not just a bunch of lawyers.

Time passed and we never once noticed armed thugs trailing us. Our P.I. did call us once more -- this time to request that we take down my pen-and-ink wash of George (which incidentally was part of a dream journal I did for an art class nine years prior) and that we change the name of the web site and presumably the script. But again, nothing in writing.

Several months later, at the Minnesota Men's Conference, I had the good fortune of meeting the amazing Doug von Koss. He worked in the art department on several of George's movies. I told him about our project and how we were interested in holding a mirror up to fan culture. I relayed how our protagonist was a firm believer in the widespread AICN Talkback-type sentiment "George Lucas raped my childhood. " Doug was appalled: "That's the most awful thing I've ever heard." I asked him about George. And he said that George is one of the most genuine people he's ever met. An inspiration.

And that's what I had hoped to hear. That's why we wrote American Jedi. So, yeah, I'm not a cyborg from the future. And I'm pretty sure Thomas isn't one, either.

Victory! We Have Victory!

No, we didn’t stave off 10,000 of Saruman’s fighting Uruk-hai at Helm’s Deep. We merely won the Third Annual Pitch Competition at the Austin Film Festival. We being Thomas Crymes (far left), my writing partner on American Jedi, and little ol’ me.

Which reminds me. The funny thing about the festival is that I almost didn’t exist. For weeks prior I had been receiving confirmation e-mails from the festival coordinators assuring "Thomas Crymes" that he had a spot reserved. I was happy for Thomas but not a little concerned that I would be spending over a thousand dollars to travel to a foreign country only to be turned away at the door because my papers weren’t in order. And since one goal of attending the festival was to become somewhat less of a non-entity to the film industry, well, this was a little vexing.

When we arrived at the Driskill I went through the process of proving my identity and managed to have a conference badge produced on the spot. The festival coordinators even threw in passes to that night’s Food and Film event. We were hungry and the food was good. Pretty cool.

So we’re at the first round of the pitch competition and it’s our turn to go. Thomas is called, I join him on the stage, we pitch, folks laugh, the judges advance us to the final round, and we make sure that my name is registered for the finals later that evening.

CUT TO:

The Finals. Cuba Libre, downtown Austin. (Strangely, it’s right next door to the Alamo Draft House, which we’d written into the script.) We’d been waiting the whole day for this and I wanted to get to the fun stuff, like imbibing. The festival wrap a couple hours before seemed a cruel joke, since I’m a very spotty drinker and wanted to be sharp for the performance.

“Next up . . . Thomas Crymes.”

Okay, I get it. I’m not really here. This is all a dream. We had thought the whole two-person team concept was down, but maybe not. Thomas and I wend our way to the stage and I give my name.

However.

There is only one mike, and it's not like we've done this before. I briefly entertain the idea of crooning a duet but reason returns in a flash. I hold the mike, Thomas leans in. We give our pitch, the crowd goes nuts, the judges try to stop laughing . . . and I promptly have a Guinness. We wait for the rest of the contestants to do their thing. A strange balance between trying not to wish ill fortune upon our fellow competitors (I’m better than that, aren’t I?) and yet holding myself open to the possibility of a royal fuckup (maybe not).

And we wait. And finally the emcee takes the mike.

“And our winner is . . . Thomas Crymes.”