by Brian.


Truffaut had his childhood, Scorsese had his neighborhood, Crowe had Led Zeppelin, Spike Lee had oppression, but what about the rest of us? We yearn to make personal films, but we hear the "Write What You Know" mantra and realize that our lives, for lack of a better word, are boring. Titles such as The Lady from Springfield, Lawn Wars, and Mild Streets don't exactly evoke rushes of adrenaline; yet for many aspiring filmmakers, myself included, we were (un)fortunate enough to have a relatively positive and comfortable background before coming to the realm of writing or filmmaking. What are we, the infinite public-school population, to do? How can we make a past that we ourselves found drab seem interesting enough to pull audiences in while retaining that intimate personality?

The truth is, this writer does not know. However, I have a few educated guesses.

Obviously, if everyone wrote only what they knew, Stephen King would be a lot older than he is and there would be empty shelves in the Romance section of every bookstore. It's both impossible and impractical to limit yourself to the literal events in your life. One must take the saying to a more metaphorical level, generalizing and parsing in an effort to widen the horizon. So you grew up on a sleepy patch of street with three other kids and very, very long summers. This may sound boring at first glance, but if we investigate further, get into what made that street sleepy and those summers long, pretty soon we look up from the typewriter and see the beginnings of To Kill A Mockingbird. With this perspective, a white-collar job becomes Office Space, being out of work in LA becomes Swingers, and doing nothing in New York City becomes most of Woody Allen's filmography. Everything is in the angles; it's not what you know but how you look at it.

Another forgotten element in our suburban angst is imagination. I've certainly spent many hours in class not paying attention; running scenarios of terrorist attack, rioting, a janitor gone insane, or gym teachers with a grudge instead of reading poetry or doing math problems. In fact, the first idea I ever had for a story longer than five paragraphs involved a blatant rip-off of Lord of the Files, replacing the deserted island for my snowed-in high school, deciding where each clique would nest and where the major battlefields would be (My only problem was how to end it. It always seemed to me that I was OK with Golding as long as I didn't steal his ending). Although we don't have horribly traumatic events to take from, we certainly have those unlimited hours of imaginative speculation in return.

It's still a problem however when you read about John Ford hunting Elephants, Howard Hawks outgunning cowboys, or Raoul Walsh mouthing off to Bugsy Siegel. A dread sense of inferiority boils up along with a feeling of hopelessness: "How can I compete with that?" I think, as I close my book and turn the TV on. One way to overcome your normalcy is to embrace it. Make films like Todd Solodnz, write a story like Ordinary People, or win an Oscar for American Beauty. Not every story needs globe-spanning adventure or international intrigue; some of the best stories are small.

Sooner or later we all have to realize that we are not Orson Welles, raised in European locales with summers spent in the Old West. Using this fact to give up however is just an excuse.


back.