Everyday’s a revolution
Pull it together and it comes undone
Just one more candle and a trip around the sun
Jimmy Buffett/Trip Around the Sun
Today’s my birthday and it seems like as good a time as ever to reflect on an old headshot of mine taken back when I was 22 and living in Los Angeles. My acting career peaked somewhere between playing Tom in “The Glass Menagerie” and doing a Domino’s Pizza commercial. For some strange reason Tom Cruise, Michael J. Fox, and Johnny Depp got all the good roles. Oh, and Brad Pitt and George Clooney did okay for themselves, too. (Maybe that perm held me back. But more likely the only thing I had in common with those superstars was trying to get a foothold in a tough industry back in the ’80s.)
I honestly believe if I’d had half the success of the above actors I’d long be dead. Either like James Dean in a Porsche or John Belushi in Bungalow 3. Instead, after film school I carved out a little 30+ year career behind the camera and living a relatively normal life. But also thankful to have had a few Jimmy Buffett-inspired adventures traveling to all 50 states and 15+ countries working on various productions.
These days I’m producing mostly educational projects in a studio, but it’s been fun the last decade to write this blog and be an aggregator of screenwriting/filmmaking information that bridged the book centered information era that started after Syd Field wrote Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting and this digital information era we’re in now. (Still moving forward with plans to land this plane in six months at the 10 year mark. But also working on a 2.0 version of this blog.)
The film industry has been through a world of change since I started this blog in ’08, but the world still needs storytellers—and it always will. I hope you became the screenwriting equivalent of Cruise/Fox/Depp/Pitt/Clooney, but if you don’t let me encourage you with some words an acting teaching once told me, “Just because you’re not Babe Ruth, doesn’t mean you can’t play the game.”
For those of you outside the United States, Babe Ruth was one of the greatest baseball players in the history of the game. So essentially, what my acting teacher was saying was even if you don’t reach the top of the heap, you can still enjoy the game. And if you’re fortunate, you can actually have a creative career, and a life that doesn’t end in a crumpled Porsche or in Bungalow 3.