Twentymiglia
I was so excited to see this story in the Baltimore Sun about how the Baltimore School for the Arts is starting a film program. Though I knew that the article (and the generous gift from the Josephs) was coming, seeing the story in print was somewhat cathartic.
My friend and colleague, Bea Bufrahi, had been developing this program for years. Long before I worked at the Baltimore School for the Arts, Bea was running video classes where stage production students made short, obscure films. It’s hard to exaggerate how much effort she put into these films. Bea is nothing if not dedicated. Few people came to her film showcases. She didn’t always get paid. But still she persisted.
I am very lucky to have had the good people at the Saul Zaentz Incubator pair me with two extraordinary mentors. The first is Josh Penn, producer of the film Beasts of the Southern Wild. The second mentor is Stacie Passon, writer and director of Concussion. 
For most of my career, mentorship has meant studying written works. For screenwriting, William Goldman, Robert Bolt, David Mamet. For literature, Jorge Luis Borges, W.G. Sebald, Virginia Woolf and so many more. In poetry, Auden, Browning.
I had it in mind to write this immense post about my visit to the Future of Storytelling Festival . Housed in the Africa Center on 110th street in NYC, it was a pretty inspiring event. In fact, it was so big, I almost didn’t write about it. But then I decided to forget fancy blogging and get right to the pics….
Yes, it was filled with VR headsets and Kinect xbox 360 games. One expected that. But there were so many fun and stimulating attempts to get stories told in new ways that I’d have to say VR is just one of many wonderful avenues now open to the storyteller or story-consumer. VR is in that way something of a synecdoche, not the whole.
Of the many installations, at the top of my list was “Notes on Blindness” presented by Ex Nihilio, Archer’s Mark & Audiogaming. It was a documentary using a mix of audio files and gameplay software. From the site:
So…I hate when people suggest that I read a Self-Help book. But this is a good one. I mean it. Gordon Livingston is a fine writer with measured opinions and a great deal of life experience Read my book notes on Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart and think about giving it a read.
I am super psyched that my screenplay, When We Fall, has been selected as one of nine projects to be developed by the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund at Johns Hopkins.
This was actually the second time I submitted the script. The first time I sent it over, I knew that it was not quite ready to make the rounds. It was clocking in at about 90 pages, but the scope of the story really required more development and, consequently, more pages. Also there was a ton of melodrama, something that happens when I sense the emotional note that is supposed to be played, but I haven’t picked the right “instrument.”
Yesterday, a good friend of mine, filmmaker Niels Dachler, turned me on to an organization called Dragon Dreaming International. Started by community organizers, John Croft and Vivienne Elantra, the project–or rather the process— considers methods for solving some pretty complex 21st century problems.
From their website:
There is an African proverb; “if you want to go fast you go alone. If you want to go far you go together”. But given the interlocking problem described above, we need to go fast and we need to go far. How do we go alone and together at the same time. Dragon Dreaming shows us how.
We humans collectively create our reality, both by our actions and our inaction. That is the reason why we can only find the way out of our environmental, economical and identity crises toward a better world if we go together.
