Nicholas Thurkettle

There is a screenplay I have felt the desire to write for probably 11 years now. For the longest time I forbade myself to do it, declaring that I would keep it germinating in my brain until I had the a) distance, and b) talent, to make it something more than a big pile of self-indulgence.

Now, to be fair, there is a certain school of wisdom that says a big pile of self-indulgence could have a very unique magic to it, but that is not generally how I roll.

Last summer, Adam actively encouraged me to work on something that had direct and clear personal meaning to me (instead of spelunking for meaning inside all these spec script-friendly stories in which I submerge myself.) And I found myself looking at the informal list of ideas I’d built up over the years for this story, and started going to work on it.

It suddenly felt so thoroughly natural – sorting out the major characters, the big sequences, the little detail flourishes. I am a well-designed refinery for story material now, and I had ample raw stuff with which to work. But at the top of my brainstorming document, I wrote in all caps:

“DO NOT BLOCK OUT SCENE ORDER”.

This was my way of spiting technique. For so long I’ve held to a discipline of drafting the actual script in order. Once the outlining is done, I do not let myself skip ahead, but proceed from Page One to the end, so as not to cheat my way around the hard stuff. I really cannot tell you if it’s a good way of doing things, but I’ve kept to it for all major projects since basically my third screenplay. But this time I decided to resist. Instead I would just write scenes – meet the characters there, watch what they do, and start finding the shape of the story that way. I don’t know what will come of it, but I am very curious to find out.

Then things got very, very bad financially (as they regularly do in my life), so I tried to focus on the things that were either making me money at that moment, or stood a greater-than-zero chance of making me money in the next year.

Lately things have improved financially, and I’ve been re-embracing the philosophy that working on multiple projects simultaneously is not so bad – because if you sit down to write and don’t work on the thing you intended, at least you didn’t write NOTHING.

And so, from time to time in the last few weeks, I’ve tinkered with the brainstorming list; adding and embellishing and choosing, assigning names to characters. Then, on Sunday, a scene sprang into my head. It was not an opening scene or an ending, just something that revealed an aspect of a character to me, something that was true, and involving, and fit into the evolution of a storyline. And suddenly it was absolutely, positively, unbearable that I had not written this scene.

Tonight I wrote it. Eleven years of waiting; two pages tonight.

Now I’ve gone and started something…

So I have no substance of my own to provide tonight. Enjoy tunes instead!

The Apples in Stereo: Sunndal Song

Rogue Wave: Good Morning (The Future)

The Antlers: Bear

Passion Pit: Sleepyhead

Codeine Velvet Club: Hollywood
(See this video and then the video for Vanity Kills – insanely sexy)

Pomplamoose Music: September
(Yeah, I know I’m late to the party with Pomplamoose. I didn’t say it was all “Brand Spanking New Things You’ve Never Heard Of Wot I’m Listening To Right Now”.)

Peter Gabriel: Flume

Pierre Henry: Psyché Rock
(The basis for the theme song of a television program you might know)

I’m in Peoria, Illinois, in the upstairs lobby of Bradley’s theatre building – the Hartmann Center for the Performing Arts. I remember quite distinctly that there were not computers just laying around for anyone to use back when I was here. I do remember there was an excellent little crash couch on this spot, and that at one overnight lock-in we set up a Nintendo 64 and played Mario Kart from it in the wee hours.

The students are all running around rehearsing the tech schedule for the shows tonight; walking through lighting changes and furniture moves, last-minute costume approvals, vocal exercises. I have had a big grin on my face ever since I got here; this place is a home to me, and that feeling took me the moment I walked back through the doors. The students are different people but the same types I knew – passionate and determined and still not-quite-formed, awkwardly brilliant and beautiful.

I don’t have any job to do today but plant my ass in the seat with the “Reserved” sign on it, but I am absorbing this hectic electric urgency happening all around me. There’s a show about to happen. Only hours to go.

Yesterday, Roxie and I spent a couple of hours strolling through the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden near her home.

The pictures can do most of the talking:
(continue reading…)

So, I’m really on hiatus with the movie reviews again. While I’m seeing less movies than I prefer, I am still seeing them, and easily have a dozen I could write up. But I’m too far behind for my old every-new-movie-I-see standard, and when it comes to just writing up ones about which I am inspired to write, even that inspiration is having a hard time finding space. I’m still learning my impulses as a writer – this is likely to continue until I die – but what I know is that when writing time is precious, and the weight of an entirely self-imposed project is not only making me more glum about my output, it is actually threatening to discourage me from going to more movies, then it is REALLY time to remember that some of the things I make into projects, shouldn’t be.

Alice in Wonderland, though? That movie made me mean mad.

P.S. I do still intend to re-post more of my archive from the other blogs. Because reviews of movies that came out six years ago are exactly what blogging’s about, right?