Great Talent Lounging at the Pool
THE SEIZE-UP KNOWN AS “WRITER’S BLOCK” plagues creative folks of all kinds–novelists, playwrights, poets, and other artists, too: the composer Rachmaninoff was famously blocked until “cured” by hypnosis (he promptly wrote the Piano Concerto #2 in C minor–the one classical piece just about anyone can hum).
Whatever you call it, the affliction comes in all sizes and shapes. Sometimes, when we say “I was blocked,” we might be talking about a day’s work. Sometimes one’s whole life, massive creative potential not realized. Consider this:
This raggedy old allegory was going around in LA film circles when I was out there:
A talented young New York playwright is lured out to the West Coast to write screenplays. He goes out back and lies by the pool for a while. He comes inside and looks in a mirror–AND HE’S 50!
Point being, of course, true creativity thrives in an environment that supports it for its own sake (pure theater); or conversely, a great young talent, coaxed by big paychecks into a writing for hire (Hollywood), will end up 50 years old, lounging around the pool behind the $10 million house, wondering where it all went while?
Yeah, it’s kind of darkly humorous, but seriously, haven’t we all thought a lot about this question? I have, and I’m still mixed on it. Here’s why:
• I went to “Hollywood” and wrote my brains out–and I feel I became a pretty good screenwriter. But I never made much money out there. I wasn’t alone, either. A huge number of very talented screenwriters were struggling like me, and very few ever made the big paychecks. Even fewer had the good fortune of scoring with their beloved “spec script,” the unassigned labor of love they toiled on for years in anonymity and relative poverty. And though there are more markets now for good original work, the tectonic plates of this basically discouraging paradigm haven’t shifted much.
• That extended one-liner was already gray when I heard it. It dates back to the era of highest prestige for American Theater — Broadway of the 20s through the 50s — when New York playwrights had 100% of the prestige among dramatic writers, and Hollywood screenwriters less than zero. That has’t been true for quite a while now. Every year some brilliant original American screenplays are written and actually made. You can see them on the screen, they even win Oscars, in every genre from romantic comedy to experimental drama. Can Broadway say that anymore?
• I’m aware I’m somewhat warping the issue when I say “Broadway.” Every year brilliant plays are produced in New York and elsewhere. But they make little if any money for their writers, and Broadway no longer looks to off-Broadway for anything but the occasional weirdly fresh musical. If you’ve written an astoundingly good stage drama or even straight comedy, it’s far more likely to have a future in the thriving independent film industry, as an adaptation, than to get a Broadway production.
• This year’s Oscar-winning original screenwriter is next year’s high-priced writer for hire. It’s the paradigme: You break through as the astoundingly brilliant pen behind your Oscar winning spec, and next year you’re getting paid $5 million to write Spiderman 9 or Indiana Jones Meets the Medicare Donut. Point being: it’s damned hard to remain a “starving” original writer in the midst of massive success.
• And who’s to say a starving writer of great talent shouldn’t want to put that talent to work for hire? Those writers by the pool aren’t indolent, by the way. They work hard, most of them. And if they couldn’t stand what they did, they’d take their money and move to a shack in Maine (and it would be a pretty nice “shack”).
But here’s a different view of it all, one that I feel has serious weight. (I’ll set it as a quote, even though no one said it):
“I don’t begrudge anyone the opportunity to make a good living, but what about those who have so many more brilliant works as yet unwritten? They intend to totally get them written, they announce over and over, especially now that they have a small fortune to live on. But it never happens.
“Is there moral significance in so much money being paid for a so much inconsequential work? And why would they keep saying it, that they’re “going to write that play or that novel” yet as soon as they get up from lying inside the pool, they go inside and they’re 50? Why say it and not do it, in defiance of all reason? And then you wonder whatever the hell ever happened to their great talent? Is that just their (and our) tough luck? Or might it be that it has some larger meaning?”
But here’s my question, which takes a simpler form: Is this a form of writer’s block? What do you think?
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The story of my writing life has been the struggle between writing for pseudonym to pay the bills and trying to stretch my wings into new genres for me. Paying the bills always seems to win, which drives me nuts. Trying to change that this spring.
You and me both, Natasha.
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