This is a joke I tell on myself: I may be a tech geek now, but before that I was a film geek. Before that I was…I don’t know…a geek without portfolio. My friends nod their heads sympathetically, but they don’t usually contradict me.
Strictly speaking, the joke’s not true. I was never a film geek. True, I took a lot of film courses as an undergraduate (York University in Toronto), and spent a lot of time hanging out with film people in the fine arts part of the school. True, the three years of screenwriting courses I took were required for my degree (interdisciplinary fine arts with a concentration in creative writing – I was told that I having a concentration meant I could claim creative writing as my major without stretching the truth too far). However, my degree was not in film; I also took theatre and interdisciplinary courses as part of my major.
Perhaps more important is that there was a fundamental difference between me and many of the film students I came to know. Most of them had had their childhood conversion experiences to film. Seriously. You’ve probably heard the story: how they got a toy camera for their twelfth birthday and, from then on, all they ever wanted to do was make films. These people lived, breathed, ate, dreamt and probably excreted film. It was the only thing in their field of vision (much like Saddam Hussein is the only thing in – oh, but this is not a political work, so let’s not go there).
My childhood conversion experience was to write comedy. In a now oft told tale (which has lost none of its power for me in the telling), when I was eight years old, I wrote parodies of Sherlock Holmes stories on the backs of my father’s green legal accounting pads. I was hooked. On writing comedy.
While it may appear fine to some people, this is a crucial difference: whereas most people devote themselves to working in a medium, I devoted myself to working in a genre. As the four volumes (and counting) of Les Pages aux Folles demonstrate, the medium is not as important to me as finding a way of expressing my comic vision within it. (My inner pretension meter has just given me a very loud raspberry – sorry about that. I’ll try and keep these kinds of observations to a minimum.) I have written humour for print, radio, television, film and interactive media – as I like to say, I have tried to write for every medium that exists…and one or two that are just being born.
Those who read my humour will know that I take an intellectual approach to writing. (A friend of mine who is generally supportive of my work has argued that I should put more of my emotions into my writing. Now, I think that an intellectual approach, although not common, is not unrewarding, but I’d rather make the point that if you scratch the surface of some of my comedies, they do, in fact, bleed.) This intellectual approach, which involved analysis of the storytelling aspects of all of the various media in which I work, meant that I was well positioned to do a lot of writing about the media themselves; wanting to understand how the media I was writing for worked, I developed some insights which (I hope) would be helpful for others. It is this that – finally! – brings us to the volume at hand.
Around my third year as an undergraduate, having finally settled on my major (after two or three unsuccessful efforts), I did find myself spending a fair bit of time in York’s film department. Tacked on the announcement wall was (obviously) the announcement of the creation of a new academic journal called Creative Screenwriting. I was intrigued, so I wrote an article entitled “Trends in Hollywood Screen Comedy,” which was basically a 10,000 word screed on why so much of what passes for comedy in Hollywood films isn’t especially funny. To my delight, editor Erik Bauer liked the article, and asked me to write others. These are collected in this volume.
Creative Screenwriting has morphed into a magazine. Although it is quite different from the periodical I started writing for, I am still occasionally able to get a piece of writing accepted into it. One piece I especially like is “Laughter Is Always Appropriate.” Erik had asked several writers for their response to the terrorist attack on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. I wrote about how humour could be seen in many ways as a response to pain, and that, rather than squawking about how irony was dead, we owed it to people to redouble our efforts to write funny scripts. The article appeared with nine others; it was a heartfelt response to a tragedy, and I will always be proud to be in such compassionate company.
The magazine also sponsored the Screenwriting Expo 2002, at which I was asked to speak. I traveled to Los Angeles to talk about “The Philosophy of Comedy Writing” (my lecture notes are not part of this volume, but they are on the Web site). This was the first time I had been to LA, and it made Hollywood real for me in a way that repeated viewings of Sunset Boulevard, The Player, et al had not. Almost like a place one could work. But, that’s a story to be written at some future date. Suffice it to say that my relationship with Creative Screenwriting has been very fruitful.
Also as an undergrad, I was writing reviews of a variety of media for the student newspaper, Excalibur. One year, I covered the Toronto International Film Festival (nee, the Festival of Festivals), and was hooked. I covered it several years, for a variety of publications.
One year, I ran into a woman who introduced herself (“Hi, I’m Lana McKenzie.”). We hit it off pretty well. Unfortunately, I have no memory for faces, so, the next year, she had to introduce herself again (“Hi. Lana McKenzie here.”). We had a pleasant enough time, but, since we didn’t see each other throughout the year, I still had trouble placing her the following year. I went up to her and said, “Hi. I don’t remember your name, but I do know we’ve spoken before.” She introduced herself once again, adding: “It’s a good thing you came up to me, cause there was no way I was going to say hi and introduce myself to you again!”
Lana was the editor of a newsletter called Reel Independence. The idea behind it was that each issue would carry three or four in-depth articles about how independent films got made. The articles were to include everything from finances to funny production stories; the intent was to both inform readers of the details of making films and to encourage them (“Hey, if she did it with all the obstacles she faced, making you film will be a breeze!”) Lana asked me if I would like to write an article or two, and I did.
Reel Independence is, alas, no longer with us. Since it had a small circulation to begin with, the articles I wrote for it, republished here, are almost undoubtedly new to readers.
I haven’t done much writing on film over the last few years; I’ve been concentrating more on new media. Putting together this volume has been something of a personal nostalgia trip. One of the things that it reminded me was that I really enjoy spending time and sharing ideas with creative people. (In a similar fashion, part of the pleasure of my post-graduate educational career was the fact that I got to spend time and share ideas with really smart people. Not that the two are mutually exclusive, but they do represent two very different threads in the tapestry that is my life. Damn pretentious metaphors – they creep in when you least expect them!)
You will find some interesting ideas and fascinating people in this volume. Enjoy.
Ira Nayman
Toronto
January, 2003
By the by: my thanks to Erik Bauer for his generous permission to republish articles that originally appeared in Creative Screenwriting and to Lana McKenzie for her kind permission to republish articles that originally appeared in Reel Independence.