Sam Shepard’s Start

“I got a job delivering papers in Pasadena, and pretty soon, by reading the ad sections, I found out about an opening with a traveling ensemble called the Bishop’s Company. I decided to give it a shot, thinking that this might be a way to really get out. At the audition they gave me a little Shakespeare thing to read—I was so scared I read the stage directions—and they hired me. I think they hired everyone.

“We traveled all over the country—New England, the South, the Midwest. I think the longest we stayed anywhere was two days. It was actually a great little fold-up theater. We were totally self-sufficient, we put up the lights, made the costumes, performed the play, and shut down. Anyway, one day we got to New York to do a production at a church in Brooklyn and I said, ‘I’m getting off the bus.’

“…I was staying on Avenue C and Tenth Street with a bunch of jazz musicians, one whom happened to be Charlie Mingus’s son. We knew each other from high school, and he got me a job as a busboy at the Village Gate. The headwaiter at the Gate was a guy named Ralph Cook. Ralph was just starting his theater at St. Mark’s in the Bowery, and he said he’d heard that I’d been writing some stuff, and he wanted to see it. So, I showed him a few plays I’d written, and he said, ‘Well, let’s do it.’ Things kind of took off from there. New York was like that in the sixties. You could write a one-act play and start doing it the next day. You could go to one of those theaters—Genesis, La Mama, Jusdon Poets—and find a way to get in done. Nothing like that exists today.”
Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Sam Shepard (and actor/screenwriter/director)
Playwrights at Work 

Nothing may exist exactly like that today, but I know there are still interesting things happening in little theaters in New York. But chances are the Sam Shepards starting out today all over the world are finding people with small digital cameras and making short films. Talking advantage of things like The 48 Hour Film Project where you not only start shooting the same day you write the script, but you have a commpleted film within 48 hours.

Sam Shepard proves that sometimes you just have to get off the bus.

Related posts:
Rapid Prototyping  (On quickly acting on ideas)
Sam Shepard, Chekov…and Al Franken (Includes the Shepard quote: “I’m self-taught. I learn everything by doing it.”)
Screenwriting Quote #43 (Aaron Sorkin) –On the traveling drama group Sorkin was a part of before becoming a writer.
Don’t Quit Your Day Job (Don’t overlook that Shepard’s break came because he was a bus boy.)

Scott W. Smith