The write stuff

Sorry to have been away from the blog for a couple months. Too busy living!

OK, I'll be more specific. At my friend John's behest I sent out some screeners of my movie to get reviews. I got a glowing review from German website Search My Trash: "loving but also enjoyably mean ... viciously funny ... irreverent ... insane ... a really fun trip". The site also interviewed me about the film.

The film also got comparatively mixed reviews from Film Threat and Swedish website Film Bizarro. I also sent screeners or emails to other sites, but these are the three that responded.

Also, a movie I helped produce, Bury My Heart With Tonawanda, had its festival premiere at the 2013 Buffalo Niagara Film Festival. It won two awards: Best Western New York Film, and Audience Award. Hopefully the film will have additional success in other festivals.

Apart from the usual everyday challenges of work and stuff, and the occasional don't-feel-like-doing-anything lull, I'd also been developing another project, a sort of biopic about the behind-the-scenes history of Doctor Who. I'm not normally one to make fan films – in general I think people should create their own work from their own imagination. But this was a subject that I've been passionate about for many years.  

After much research and rewriting, I had a script that I was pleased with, and that friends who've read it said they really liked. I was going to do it as simple animation (or possibly a radio drama), and was ready to start casting voice actors. However, my enthusiasm for the project fizzled when some nastier details emerged in the press about the behind-the-scenes behavior of 1980s producer John Nathan-Turner, who has become the subject of a new biography.

I went through kind of a crappy time in my life around eleven years ago, which coincided with the time when Nathan-Turner died and was thus being talked about a lot in Who circles. People talked about how he continued to do his job in the face of harsh personal attacks, and I took a lot of comfort in that example. My development of this Who project largely grew out of that. I knew John Nathan-Turner was a controversial and not-always-liked character, but that was part of what made him a flawed hero in my book – in spite of his faults, he continued to fight for something that others no longer believed in, despite being harshly criticized for his efforts.

When I read some of these new details, I realized John Nathan-Turner wasn't someone I could fully endorse as a protagonist. He still had his virtues, but his faults were unpleasant enough that I no longer felt like I wanted to spend hours of my own time on a non-commercial project that hinged on him being a sympathetic underdog. And it's probably just as well – I realized I'd still been carrying the baggage of that time in my life, embodied in this script, and it was time to let go.

What I am working on now is the series of in-universe sci-fi novels that Josh, the protagonist of Saberfrog, is always obsessing over. For a long time I've thought it would be cool to have those books actually exist, so that when he talks about them in the movie he's talking about real books that you could actually read.

I've written the first one and it's not that long – more of a novella length – but it's my first attempt at a novel, and certainly the longest piece of prose fiction I've ever created. I've sent a draft to some friends to see what they think, and now I'm moving on to the second one in the series. One day, I'll be able to sell the movie and the books together as a set!

I also have a prequel idea, kind of a Corman-esque B-movie about some of the older Saberfrog characters as loony college students in the 1960s. I've written the beginning of that script and gotten an enthusiastic response from people I've shared it with, but I haven't gotten much farther in it. I might end up jumping back and forth between that project and the novels, depending on what mood I'm in.

After years of focusing on the movie Saberfrog, I'm content simply to do some writing for a while. I had been thinking about maybe filming something new this year, and while I wouldn't entirely rule it out yet, it's now slightly late in the year to not have a full script or a plan. For now, I would just like to be creative in a way that doesn't cost anything or require the coordination of locations and other people's schedules.

So there'll be a new Saberfrog-related movie, and/or the Saberfrog-related novels. And I'll be working on them at my own pace, as time and energy allows. Hopefully by the end of the year I'll have something to show off. I'll let y'all know.

Also, yesterday I went to the annual artist conference DIY Days in New York once again, and got to network with other artists, writers and filmmakers outside my usual social circle, which was a huge shot in the arm.

While stimulation from others is important, finding the inner peace and strength to do your work is also important. When you're in a rut, the tendency is to constantly look elsewhere for answers, thinking that reading one more book or seeing one more movie or going to one more event will restore your focus. But I've found that when you're actually being productive and creative, that's when everything clicks. The smart and successful people aren't necessarily the ones who read and think and analyze the most. Maybe they're actually the ones who understand the basics just enough, and then roll up their sleeves to actually do the damn work.

So that's the next step right now. Just doing the damn work.

RIP JN-T, 10 years later

May 2002 was a pretty crappy time for me. I'd become involved in an arts organization I will not name, thinking it would be a great experience as well as a step forward in my film career. Instead it was one of the grimmest experiences I've ever had, due to some very ugly personal politics that arose.

I'd been promoted to a high position in the organization because some officers above me were not getting along with a colleague and suddenly quit. I thought I could sort out the resulting mess, and I was wrong. I wanted to leave the organization in better shape than I found it, but by the end of May it became clear that this was not going to be possible.

By the end of that month, I found myself thinking of John Nathan-Turner. He was the producer of Doctor Who during the 1980s, and played a large role in promoting the show in the US. Doctor Who was still near the peak of its popularity when “JN-T” (as he was widely known) became producer in 1980. By 1989, the show had been canceled after years of declining ratings and viewer dissatisfaction, for which JN-T was often blamed.

I didn't know a huge amount about the show's behind-the-scenes history at that point. But from the few available books I'd read on the subject, I got a sense that JN-T stayed aboard the sinking ship longer and longer, thinking that if he fixed one more crisis he could leave the show in good health … and ended up still in charge when the show was finally canceled, thus forever taking the blame for its demise.

I decided I would learn from his example, and not make the same mistake. As much work as I had put into the organization, and as much as I cared about its continuing success, I decided to resign my post and let it become someone else's problem. I eventually cut my ties with the organization entirely. It was a painful and devastating decision, but necessary for my mental health.

I then found out that JN-T had passed away on May 1, at a relatively young age. Doctor Who Magazine published a tribute issue in memory of the former producer, and when I read it it hit me hard. The issue described at length the personal attacks JN-T had endured during his time on the show, from both colleagues and fans. Friends praised him for keeping his chin up, continuing to do his work as best he could, and not sinking to the level of his attackers.

Misery loves company, so the saying goes, and I took great consolation in reading about the ups and downs of his time on Doctor Who, feeling that I'd walked a mile in his shoes. Disturbingly, I knew that this story was seeing print only because of his passing – to some degree, I owed my sanity to the fact that this man died exactly when he did.

But I never met the man. Over the years I've seen and read interviews with various people who worked with him, and certain themes have emerged. People seemed to like him socially but not entirely trust his artistic judgment, feeling that he didn't have the greatest understanding of scripts. Worse, he apparently felt a need to be the boss at all times, and would lose his temper if he thought someone was challenging his authority. So at least some of the criticism he endured may have been justified.

JN-T craved the approval of fandom, and made a number of personal appearances at conventions and on talk shows. By putting himself so much in the spotlight, he may have made himself a target. Years before the Internet was widespread, Doctor Who was the first geek franchise to allow the fans to have a say in the show's creative content. JN-T gave fan Ian Levine the unofficial role of continuity advisor, letting him insert references to old episodes as well as select old clips for use in flashbacks. Some fan-made artwork was also used in the show itself, including lapel badges worn by the Doctor himself (as played Colin Baker in the mid-80s). It's now felt that this emphasis on fan-pleasing in-jokes was detrimental to the show. It's a cruel irony that the historians asserting this view are probably the very fans who were demanding that kind of fan service back in the 1980s.

Perhaps the lesson is that fame is fickle, and that by putting yourself in the spotlight you make yourself a target. Some people have a knee-jerk assumption that anyone who reaches a position of fame and authority couldn't possibly be flesh and blood like you and me, but must be evil robots whose sole purpose is to add to the sum of human misery.

As an aspiring young filmmaker with big dreams, it never occurred to me that becoming successful and achieving your goals could make one a target of hostility, often from people you don't even know. This has become even more true in the Internet era, when an offhand Twitter remark can provoke a firestorm and wreck a career.

A more recent Doctor Who showrunner, Steven Moffatt, said in an interview that you can try to be a pandering crowdpleaser, but if the audience isn't surprised enough then they'll get bored. Whether John Nathan-Turner learned this lesson is hard to say – by his last couple of seasons he had apparently begun to cut himself off from fandom, and the episodes from those last two years are often considered to be among his best.

So the greater lesson might be that you can't please everyone all the time, and that all you can really do is maintain your integrity and do what you think is right, even when it would be easier not to.