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 Beginning is the End is the Beginning

Soil for legs
Axe for hands
Flower for eyes
Bird for ears
Mushroom for nose
Smile for mouth
Songs for lungs
Sweat for skin
Wind for mind
— Just Enough by Nanao Sakaki

The days are strange. Their shape matches that of prior days, the responsibilities known and commonplace, but these days are marked by an unfamiliar waiting-but-not-waiting, and filled with an eagerness to meet the new person in Jenifer’s belly. They herald the end of one era and the beginning of another. I will not be the same.

The day job has been intense, unremitting, and there I am told repeatedly to enjoy all the sleep I’m supposedly enjoying at the moment; my take is that I’ve been training for the sleeplessness that is to come. Dreams of editing newsletters three days in the past week are not encouraging, especially when there is no possibility of a holiday. The evening job has been no less intense, unremitting, and there I tell myself repeatedly not to be so hard on myself as I head into the second half of the current draft.

The real work, of course, is taking place in the ever-growing Pod that houses the nascent visitor soon to join the party. But not too soon. As Wing Commander of the Mobile Pod Defense Forces, my mission objective demands that I deflect all well-meaning but misguided attacks (such as the classic “How is she?” — the special intonation and accompanying hand-wringing reserved for the infirm and those perishing of consumption), wherever possible establishing a high-energy perimeter and employing whatever verbal throws and locks are required to squeeze the well-wishers from “Any day now!” to “When the baby’s ready.”

On my end, at numerous points along the axis I’ve been asked whether it’s hit me yet that I’m going to be a father, as if I were about to be struck by a baseball knocked over the hedge by a gangly urchin. To date the answer to that question has been an assertion of my readiness, my preparation, my active choosing. Now, however, as Jenifer and I approach the end of our time as Two, and I realize that our future travels will include a Third companion, I can offer a revised edition: the image of a an alarmed Wall-E scurrying from the massive dreadnought that’s now blotting out the sun, and whose landing is stirring up gale-force winds and the resulting dust storms. Of course, that could also be the result of our housecleaning campaign.

Going through books is a perilous task. In clearing out our old office, converting it to a guest room, I end up reading E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake,” triggered by a friend’s annual summer retreat to his Vermont summer home, and James Baldwin’s account of his time in a remote Swiss village, when I’m supposed to be reading manuals on parenting and childcare.

Amid these preparations, I receive news that an early script, Disaster Man, landed in the top 15 percent at the Nicholl Fellowships. It doesn’t advance, but nonetheless it’s encouraging to get a note from program director Greg Beal, who writes the nicest rejection letter you’ll ever get. I’ll have to catch up with him at the Austin Film Festival this fall (one of many reasons to make the pilgrimage). I find myself looking forward to this conference more than ever, in part because it will require the first significant travel in a year.

Last week Tom and I met to discuss future projects, things to pitch at the festival. He picked me up from the gym and we rode to his place in his convertible Skye. With the wind in my hair and Billy Corgan sneering on the “radio” (or whatever sort of satellite contraption Tom has set up), I was instantly whisked back in time to an earlier season, riding with Jenifer through the Stockholm archipelago the day after Midsummer. And then earlier: on the Autobahn with my old friend Thorsten, feeling very European with a scarf lashed around my neck because of a sore throat brought on by nightclub carousing. I was traveling through time, and the years held no meaning.

This spell held its power as, several days later, I found myself sifting through yet more books, more memories, stored in my parents’ garage. Here we reorganized space and time, and old books were not the only unwanted things discarded. Perhaps awareness that the Podnaut would soon be cleared to initiate its landing sequence is what helped us begin to dissolve the awkwardness that had passed between us for the whole of my adult life. All of us would soon take on new roles and there was no longer time for inherited and worn-out patterns of judgment and avoidance.

Afterwards my father and I threw the football for the first time in a decade. The motion came right back, as if no time had passed, and we dropped into an effortless harmony. I recalled the pang Mr. White felt, the chill of death, as he watched his son duplicate the actions of his youth, and I knew that I was stronger now, and my father knew it too.

The Sequel

The time is now. At last I can reveal the New Project. I know, you’re thinking, What about that sweeping Norse epic? and Where did I place my grocery list? A mere ruse, the Blue Harvest of spec scripts. No, the project whose very name I tremble with pleasure to utter, the script with a concept most high, is not the Viking-laden cleave-fest I mutter about from time to time but in fact the follow-up to American Jedi, a script I wrote with my friend Tom. The working title is I’m Killing Mr. Lucas Because He Hasn’t Released a Film on My Birthday: Being the Second Part in a Planned Trilogy of Assassination Comedies. I’d give you a synopsis, but I’m still working on the logline.

Thing is, George has a thing for Memorial Day weekend. It’s been good to him. And I understand that. You gotta make a living. So episode by episode, trilogy by trilogy, he sends his newborn films into the world, goes to Hawaii, and counts his money. That’s cool. But what’s not cool is that now, with the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, George has skunked me again. He’s had no less than 10 chances to get it right.

Ten opportunities to release a new film on my birthday, May 23. But no. Out trots Indy on May 22 and down goes another birthday in flames of bipolarity. He’s toying with me, George is. After all, these are the films that really mattered, the Lucasfilms of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series. These were Movies, and they were the ones that fired the imagination, the ones that produced that scary pounding in your chest.

At least, this is the announcement I had planned to make. It turns out that someone had the audacity to invent these Internets and, checking my facts, I discover that Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was released on Wednesday, May 23, 1984. My twelfth birthday.

Huh. That was the night—a school night—that my dad took me to see the new adventures of Indiana Jones. Opening night. How could I have forgotten? Worse, it seems that Raiders was released in June. June! I sure hope George is happy. Now he’s stolen my thesis.

Tom called me the other day, and he didn’t say so, but I think he was disappointed I’d already seen the new Indy. I explained that I had taken the Kid to see his first Indy movie. (The Kid is a really cool 13-year-old I’ve been training in the ways of iron.) My own kid is on the way, of course, and I can only imagine that 12 or 13 years from now the Jones boys will still be trotting the globe in search of mystical artifacts. We'll be there.

And, yeah, it was great. Thanks, Dad.

***Note to Lucasfilm lawyers: No need to follow up on this one. Everything’s perfectly all right here. We’re fine. We’re all fine here now, thank you. How are you?

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!

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.”