Sometimes it's good not to be practical

and/or reconnecting with a nearly lost spark

Paul Walter Hauser as Lefty Ledbetter in National Anthem

I’m deep into the post-production process of National Anthem. For the last week, I’ve been in NYC with my cinematographer Nigel Bluck and our colorist Alex Bickel (for my money, the best colorist in the biz; see his work here) as we finalize the visuals of National Anthem.

I’ll be here for half a week more. At the end, we’ll more or less have the look of my first directorial effort finalized, a few VFX shots aside.

NYC is a strange beast to me. This is the first time I’ve spent more than say 48 hours here in like 15 years. I never really liked this city but I'm having kind of a transcendent time here this week. It's nice to be here finalizing the look for my film, of course. That's a major miracle in the context of my life and I don't take it lightly. But much bigger for me personally is just refamiliarizing myself with my love of art, in general.

Since I made the jump from poetry to screenwriting about eleven years ago, I've been in such a state of silent unrelenting professional panic — here I am, some weirdo poetry hick who somehow snuck in behind enemy lines — that I've only felt the merest flickers of that inner creative fire. I've been too busy running through brick walls just to keep from getting thrown out.

I didn't really expect to take this particular professional path, so when an entry to it opened up eleven years ago — an opportunity to not only tell stories for a large audience but to also support my family while doing so — I leapt in with a sort of relentless pragmatic fervor, working and writing around the clock so I could stay professionally afloat.

I still do this. It's a rare weekend where I'm not working on some script that I'm convinced is going to be the game-changer for me. (Some of those scripts actually did prove to be game-changing, so I'm not completely irrational on this front.)

None of this is unique for my line of work. But it's my life so I get to mythologize myself to myself. Anyway, if you're acquainted with me, you know that I wear a blue collar chip on my shoulder. Part of it is that I feel like there's not many people with my background in the entertainment industry, so I feel a calling to represent my rural roots and to try and tell stories that folks back home will dig. Because if I don't do that, who the hell will?

But part of it is also just ego. It's me looking around Hollywood and seeing all of these thin beautiful sophisticated children of privilege and thinking, "I got here as a plain-looking chubby nobody from a trailer park, motherfuckers, and I'm still going to out-write every single one of you."

Zahn McClarnon as Ghost Eye & Derek Hinkey as Hank in National Anthem

That kind of chip on the shoulder can keep you hustling, but it can also alienate you from the guileless, pure existential longing that drove you to the arts in the first place.

Again, this is probably not unique for a writer or artist of any kind. But I think often about how contingent my whole discovery that I loved the arts was. A Townes Van Zandt and Don Williams song here, a particularly generous high school English teacher there. A community college creative writing course here, an obsession with a key Meat Puppets lyric there. A discovery of Franz Kafka as an 18 year old here, a total adrenaline rush of seeing Tarantino's first two films dozens and dozens of times there.

Maybe I would've realized I was an artist without the above, but...I doubt it. There are many, many, many versions of my life where I never realize that I'm actually a writer, or that I love the arts, or that the arts are the sphere of expression through which I am meant to experience the world. And all of those versions of my life are terrifying to me.

Sydney Sweeney as Penny Jo Poplin in National Anthem

It's hard to communicate just how lost in the world I was before my art conversion experience began for me around 18, 19. Until then, I was half-convinced I was invisible, some kind of chubby ghost who walked around by himself at school and then rode the short bus to his trailer out in an abandoned mining community outside of town, a nice place where the few other kids who lived there were five years younger than him and he often felt like a weirdo playing with them, so he mostly walked around alone in the woods.

Girls didn't see me. I didn't know how to hang out. The start of each school year, from elementary school through high school, my thought process was basically, "I hope someone will reach out and be a friend with me this year because I really don't know how to do it."

I think it was in third grade when I convinced my teachers to let me run a class survey to find out what the most popular songs, bands, and movies were. This was my grand strategy to find out what the popular kids liked in the hopes that it would help me make a close friend.

Anyway, then, as a community college student, I discovered, in a real way, ART. And I started coming alive. I'd hated the books we were assigned in high school. And it's not like we had novels and poetry in our trailer. But then it was a total road to Damascus moment from like 18 to 21: Kafka appeared, then Vonnegut, then ee cummings and Flannery O'Connor and Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare and Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch and before I knew it I was on the ground, writhing in transformation.

And suddenly, for the first time, I had a bridge from myself to the larger world. And maybe even more importantly, I had a way of convincing myself in a daily fashion that I actually existed, by creating an equivalency to my being in art. Writing worked. So did theater, so did music, so did painting. It was literally life-saving.

You must read this book. Seriously. Fucking read it.

In a weird way, I got reconnected with all of that this week. I don't know what it was. Some combination of finishing reading David Milch's absolutely transcendent new memoir and then starting to read Madeline Miller's great Song of Achilles. But also just being in this great city, for the first time feeling nearly equal to experiencing it, walking all weekend while listening to Nas and Pharoah Sanders and Henri Texier and Biggie and Wu Tang and Kamasi Washington. Plus also getting to make discoveries at the Museum of Modern Art and The American Folk Art Museum.

photograph by Alessandra Sanguinetti

And also discovering the photography of Alessandra Sanguinetti, whose photographs of her cousins in rural Argentina weirdly evoke images of my childhood in rural Washington state.

All in all, it's not a big thing for anyone but me. But it's a kind of private epiphany (well, public now, I guess) of "oh yeah, you idiot, this is why you've devoted your only life to this ephemeral shit in the first place." It's my religion and my grip upon my world. And it's such a relief to feel it fully — even if it's momentarily — once again.

And why am I posting these navel gazings to a Practical Screenwriting substack? Because perhaps other writers can use a reminder that practicality isn’t all there is. There’s also that first sacred desperate initial impulse. It’s what feeds us. And it’s worth protecting, even though we — and by this, of course I mostly mean “I” — forget it all the time.

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