I love movies about writers. I especially love moves about writers that are fictional. Movies such as Finding Forrester, Field Of Dreams, The Front, Californication, The West Wing (yeah, I know those are TV shows) and (most recently) Midnight In Paris. The thing I love about these movies the most is that we almost never hear the artist’s final work (Finding Forrester non-withstanding).
Whomever is writing the movie knows the type of character they need create and what the expectations of that character are. They also know if they build up a character’s talent (like Hank Moody in Californication), we hear their work and it sucks it completely destroy everything we’ve seen previous to that. We have heard very little of Hank Moody’s work on the show. We hear stray sentences and the occasion line from his screenplay, but never a work in it’s entirety. He has been built up as the monster talent and I think the writer knows that whatever we hear of his writing won’t measure up to what we expect from him.
As it turns out, Hank Moody’s book “God Hates Us All” has been released. Obviously it isn’t written by Hank himself, being that he dons’t exist, but it was released with his name slapped on the cover. I wouldn’t go anywhere near this thing. I’m not saying that it may not be good (I’m sure it’s a perfectly fine book) but I don’t want my vision of this character ruined.
The same goes for Field Of Dream’s Terrance Mann. Throughout the movie we hear about how there has been such controversy over his book, how he coined the phrase “make love not war”, how his writing influenced Ray to not play catch with his dad… and we never hear any of his work. Not even a snippet. I understand he was originally supposed to be J.D. Salinger, but that isn’t an excuse. Simply put, the writer of that movie wasn’t confident enough to come up with something convincing, so he worked around it.
That’s the kind of writer I wish I could be sometimes. If just everyone could come together and agree that I had a talent, and no one actually had to read my work, that’d be really swell. I could get behind that. It doesn’t work like that, which bring me to my next point:
The West Wing. Simultaneously my favorite and least favorite television show of all time. I love it because I can sit down and watch 6 episodes in a row and not notice where the time went. The character’s are perfect. It’s funny, it’s sad. It’s smart, serious and quick when it needs to be and silly, lighthearted and lackadaisical when it should be. Every single line on that show does its job, nothing is wasted.
I hate that show though, because it represents everything I’m not, both on real-life level in that I will never be able to go toe-to-toe with Aaron Sorkin (the writer of the first 4 seasons) and in the meta level because I will never be able to go toe-to-toe with Sam Seaborn or Toby Ziegler (the president’s speech writers). These are two fictional writers who’s work is not only throughout the entire show, but and the very forefront. They discuss writing, how it’s done, how great words can change the course of nations. “Oratory should raise your heart rate. Oratory should blow the doors off the place. We should be talking about not being satisfied with past solutions; we should be talking about a permanent revolution!” says Sam when in the middle of a writing slump, considering himself void of all his talent. We hear these characters say things like that throughout the show and then prove their worth by delivering some of the mot amazing presidential rhetoric ever written.
The kind of writer I want to be is Terrance Mann, celebrated but never read. The kind of writer I NEED to be is Sam Seaborn.
Perhaps better put: the kind of writer I need to want to be is Sam Seaborn.
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