White Bread

“Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.”
-- Stella Adler

One of my roommates in L.A., John, represented my fiercest aversions towards film school, and his senior film embodied them. I heard tales of his epic, a project on which my dormmate occasionally served as part of the crew. He spent several evenings, after-hours, in vacated bars on The Strip for filming. We never got into specifics about the production, but Sean spoke volumes in the morning when he walked into our room shaking his head.

Little birdies brought me more details of the production. John spared no expense with his work. Unsatisfied with the limited collection of cameras the SIU cinema department offered, he decided to go halfway across the country to rent a shamelessly expensive high-end 16mm camera. Too good to soil his film with unproven actors from the SIU theater department (who would work for the credit), he went to St. Louis to audition "professional" actors (who he would have to pay). By the time we all moved to Los Angeles, his budget had blown up, exceeding ten thousand dollars at the halfway point. He threw his parents into debt and maxed out both his credit cards, forcing himself to beg his grandparents for money in order to fund his internship stint in Hollywood.

I felt guilty asking my parents for my outlandish L.A. rent, and here John was throwing himself and his family into debt for a student film. I would have had to be certain that I had something pretty great, in story – not to mention talent, to ask that of my family. From what I saw of the film, John did not have that. Early in the summer, he got a rough cut of his film on video, and he gathered his roomies around the television to premiere his passion project. Watching it without the sound (he hadn't even added that expense yet), very little of the film stuck with me. I remember one overhead tracking shot that floated above a bathroom floor, revealing a young man trying to resuscitate his overdosed girlfriend, her head glamorously framed between the wall and the toilet.

Film school culture romanticized this sort of gritty subject matter, though the majority of its students came from comfortable homes and they had limited knowledge of the subjects they found so fascinating. Sure, most of them are more familiar with pot than their professors, but to call pot “drug culture” anymore is like calling jock itch a national health emergency. The fascination these kids had with lives so far removed from their own always confused me; there seemed to be a certain amount of self-loathing involved, as if the experiences of their own lives lacked dramatic value.

From the minute I stepped into my first film class, I felt out of step with the majority of my peers. In my Intro to Film class, we went around the room on the first day to reveal some of our favorite filmmakers. I began film school at the apex of the independent revolution. Naturally names like Tarantino and Van Sant came up frequently. Out of Sight had just jumped into my Top Ten, so I was relieved that I could volunteer an independent darling like Soderbergh.

But I was ashamed that I couldn’t bring myself to admit that my favorite filmmaker of all time remains Steven Spielberg. Just three months after he released the definitive war movie, Saving Private Ryan, I felt ashamed to admit my affection for the film, as if the entire class would turn to me like I had forgot to wear pants to class. Many of my peers found the concept of a popular artist impossible to reconcile. To them, the value came from the struggle more than the product. Film didn't have value if it wasn’t about the dirt that studios were “afraid” to touch. It wasn't film if you didn’t put your friends and family into the poor house in order to make it. Their passions seemed less about filmmaking then cinematic martyrdom, and I had no interest in that.

Still, their evident insecurities eventually infected my own line of thinking. With a dearth of potential inspirations collected from my own childhood, from the great Ski King to the mysticism of the Mississippi (piggy-backing on Mr. Clemens, I know), I suddenly doubted whether those stories had value in the grim cynicism of SIU’s film school. My creative writing classes only exacerbated the problem as I read about the self-destructive dysfunction in Dorothy Allison’s “River of Names,” the slow death of alcoholism in “All the Way in Flagstaff, Arizona,” and incest in Mona Simpson’s “Lawns.” Even Denis Johnson’s “Emergency,” my all-time favorite short story, was so bizarrely brilliant and dark that I felt completely inept with my white bread subject matter.

My worst case of doubt came after meeting with my Screenwriting professor about my final project. Since my senior year of high school, when my football career came to its tragic end, I felt it was the one story I was meant to tell. Whether for therapeutic reasons, or simply narrative ones, there was no story I was more interested in telling than that one. But apparently that was not enough to inspire my professor. We met for a quick chat in his office. He pulled out my script and set it in his lap with a thoughtful sigh, then turned and asked me the question that changed the course of my writing career forever.

“This needs something. This character…” he began, referring to the protagonist who suffered a career-ending injury. “Could he perhaps become addicted to pain-killers?”

The question baffled me. I stammered for a moment before laying out the entire story, and in a way, my heart for his further consideration.

“That’s not what the story is about,” I told him. “It’s about being young, and how much of the danger of youth comes from not having passions. Not knowing what you care about. What you believe in. This kid had that. He had his passion. He knew what he cared about. But he had it taken away from him. And the issue is how does he deal with that?”

“Yea,” he said. “I just don’t think that’s enough.”

I left his office doubting my great, personal story. Did I really need to spice it up with drugs? Is that the magic ingredient for a compelling story? Somebody has to be an alcoholic, or a junkie, or a whore. If that was the case, maybe I wasn’t destined for this storytelling gig. I was a white, middle-class male. I rarely drank. I never touched drugs. And thus far I have exhibited a reasonable modesty in regards to sex. What the hell was I gonna write about?

I went through my remaining semesters at SIU suffering from an intense uncertainty about my work. All of my professors seemed perfectly upfront about my talent as a wordsmith, but they found something lacking in my subject matter. Only my thesis screenplay sponsor, Dru Vratil, seemed to exhibit exceptional foresight when it came to my abilities. Though I look back on the final screenplay I turned into her and cringe, she seemed to see and understand (even if I didn’t) the ideas I was examining, the philosophies I was struggling with. When every other writing professor I studied under seemed anxious for their students to reconsider their callings, Dru pushed me to keep working and to trust that I would grow as a writer as I grew as a person.

She was right. I have done both. Before I accepted the quest for the holy Master’s Degree, I had to first accept who I was as a person and a writer. I am a devout believer in “write what you know,” and since drugs, sex, and violence hold limited influence on my life track, I accept that they have little place in my writing. They will all serve their purpose as my writing career moves ahead, but I cannot imagine any of them being the focus of my work.

My stories are small. They are modest. They are personal. And there’s nothing wrong with that. This fall, as I completed my grad school applications, I wrote what I consider the best story of my life thus far. And it’s a quiet, subtle story about two people who had a place in each other’s life at one time, but have since moved on. As they reunite they must also reevaluate whether their history can justify a future.

I love that story. Objectively, it’s a good story. And it is completely drug-free. There are a few beers, and some intense sexual tension, but that’s it. I could have made either of the main characters an alcoholic and pleased my former professors, but as I said five years ago:

“That’s not what the story is about.”

For the first time in a long time, I’m excited about being a writer again. I believe in the stories I have to tell, and believe they have as much, if not more, to offer than the sensationalistic pap that got my classmates turned on. In a world of increasing dread, why do we need to romanticize the ills of life? I don’t know. I choose instead to look for hope.

Hope in serious literature? What a radical idea.