Art Is Bad For You

"The ones who are successful have a great passion and that may mean to the exclusion of other things. There's a trade-off between focus and peripheral vision, in my mind. In order to have greater focus, you're going to give up something. There's a trade-off between focusing deeply on a single subject versus generalists who are good at many things. The people who tend to be successful are the ones who have the ability to have that focus to create something that is unique and of value."
--Bill Leipold
Owner, Columbine Plastics
Boulder, Colorado
from "Way of the Puck"

Lately I've been thinking about all the directing jobs I'm going to get when "Way of the Puck" blows up and becomes 2006's "Super Size Me." We crewpeople like to say that the director is the only person on set who can be employed without having any actual skillsets. This sounds just perfect. I can do this. I can hang out at the monitor with all of the producers and clients, then make the long walk onto set, lean into the lead actress' ear, and whisper: "Give me a little bit more on this one. Just a bit. Really feel it now." Or: "Bring it back just a hair for me. I want to sense you boiling within, you know? Bring up all of that great energy but don't let it out. Don't let it out." I can do this, I can do this.

Seriously though, I can do this. For a first-time director I do feel uniquely qualified for this job, having worked right next to hundreds of directors in the past. I can take the best and worst bits from all of these directors and swagger around without feeling too much like an impostor. The one thing I have learned is that I will work fast. I will shoot four to six pages a day. Working fast gets you better performances and a more involved crew, but most of all it gives you a sense of forward movement and keeps you in touch with the movie as a whole entity--today you are shooting this and this and this and this comes tomorrow. Although many would envy a cushy "Lawrence of Arabia" or "Spanglish" style shooting schedule, I think in the end you become disconnected from the whole--from the narrative thrust of it all--and just go about creating these separate, self-contained scenes that won't really cut together.

I imagine the same goes for novel writing as well. Which is why I believe the August novel-writing enterprise will produce better, more explosive work--in an eensy month--than a dragged-out, two-year revision fest.

Which brings me to my point: You can't have a balanced life and be a good (and productive) artist. These things are mutually exclusive. For years I thought otherwise. For years I thought the image of the tortured writer (locked in a room, banging out his masterpiece in a single burst of genius) was totally ridiculous. I subscribed to the original Scott Turrow system (forty-five minutes on the commute to work, forty-five minutes on the way home). Just put in your two or three pages a day and you'd finish sooner or later. The problem is that there is so much starting and stopping that you never really get to immerse fully in the project.

This is what I've learned doing the movie. If I had actually tried to have a balanced life or functional relationships I'd NEVER get done (sure, maybe the quality of the work itself might improve, you could argue that...but then again maybe it'll get worse). I'd be working on this thing until 2007.

Art is bad for you. Art is like working on a fishing boat in Alaska. You go out and work six hours on and six hours off for three months straight. Maybe you make $75,000. Maybe you make nothing. Maybe you fall overboard or get sick and die or maybe you have your hand cut off because you were flirting with someone's woman in a bar with a sawdust-covered floor. Very unhealthy behavior, all of this.

So anyway, over the past couple of days there's been a long-awaited return to normalcy. The movie is winding down now and Sleep's got a couple of days off from work. So off to the doctor and the dentist (no problems, no cavities, Sleepy E is in amazing health--more evidence of God's existence), reading again, doing some cooking, studying Japanese, lounging at the coffee shop, hitting up the Old Navy for the annual purchase of cargo shorts, taking pictures, running three times a week, even contemplating reentering the dating world.

Just look at all of the fun and healthy activities one can participate in when he's not working on some shitty, long term, life-ruining project! Ole!