When you start writing, who are you facing? The intended audience could be:

yourself

your grandfather

your childhood

your imagined public

your real public

your country

your enemies

the past

the future

We are advised to choose one, pick your lane, focus your message, hone your approach, etc., to be successful. But here’s my problem with all of that. I have a deep, ingrained resistance to being caged in, limited to one subject area. I’d rather go wide angle and cast the net of my inquiry wherever it feels right. Call me a contrarian in that regard. If the experts advise one thing, it’s practically guaranteed I’m going to feel better doing it differently a la Sinatra. Yes, audience growth has not been happening, but so what if your intended audience is all of the above. Notice my list does not include experts or wannabe experts on a particular subject. It does not include self-titled influencers or gurus who promise one sort of redemption or another. Hey, I’m just a guy here on my soapbox. Not just a guy, let’s be honest — an elderly white guy, over-educated, over-privileged, with acute imposter syndrome and a reflexive penchant for using bigger words than in common usage. It’s tough being me. You don’t want to know, I understand. But you don’t get to choose what words I use or what thoughts I espouse or what approach I take on these here reflections on the world. It’s called The Truth Now, after the book I wrote about a guy just released from prison after 19 years. What would that be like? That’s his truth and I told it. It’s also about the world we live in, the past, the interconnected nature of reality, the point of storytelling, healing, love between men and women and dogs, and okay, redemption. One reviewer said it was a good book about mental illness, and my immediate reaction was no. It was about reintegration into society and how “mental illness” is just a social construct and how we filter out the voices of the past as a survival mechanism but at the peril of our souls.

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An interesting thing happened to me recently and it involves a fact you didn’t know: I’m a film school dropout. I attended Columbia Film School’s MFA program for a couple of years back in the day, long enough to learn that I couldn’t write screenplays to save my life. Follow a formula? Me? Not happening, sorry. It’s just not in my mental DNA. But long enough also, despite it not being the focus of the program, to learn the rudiments of the actual craft of making a film. So in desperation one day, I took out a student loan for $10K from the Citibank on the corner of Amsterdam and 110th and shot a film based on a script I wrote called Stone Age Lament. It was a g

reat little project, a lot of fun, worked with a whole bunch of good, talented people, and shot and put together a great student film in 16mm black and white, which showed at the NY Downtown Film Festival to some acclaim in 1986, I believe. But I couldn’t get funding from Columbia to finish final editing, and although I had the sponsorship and support of Voytech Jasny, a visiting professor and exiled Czech film maker, I couldn’t get the program to accept it as a thesis film. So I dropped out, put the film on a video tape, stuck the tape away, thought to myself — they can’t stop me from writing, all I need is a word processor (this was before laptops), and got a job back in journalism as a local hire for AP in Venezuela and moved out of New York after a small time in hospital recovering from what they termed a schizoid break.

Life happens, and years later my daughter is back from college and we get talking about her friend at Emerson in the film program and I mention my student film on a videotape in the attic. She convinces me to dig it out and convert the tape to digital so we can watch it together. Weeks later I pick up the thumb drive at Walmart and drive home. That evening I gather my daughter and wife on the sofa, open up the laptop, and we watch my student film.

The experience was uncanny. More than a blast from the past, it was like proof that there is a certain obsessive quality to what I do. The story was about a guy who hears voices and works in a junkyard and chronicles his attempts at striking up a relationship with a woman in order to save himself from drowning in his own self-made prison of an apartment and ruminating introspections. In other words, it was a prequel to the book I wrote almost 40 years later, The Truth Now. My daughter loved it, my wife wanted to know what was going through my head, which I couldn’t explain very well. I was confused: proud of myself for sticking to my guns and at the same time sad for not sticking a lot harder. When I got some pushback, I just folded and ran — with the intention of doing an end run on the bastards. The problem with an end run is it takes so damn long that sometimes the whistle blows before the run is done.

The other day, just a few days ago, my daughter told me how much she liked the film. “Better than all the student films I’ve seen,” she said. “You should make another one.”

So guess what. That’s what we’re going to do. Anybody know a good producer, script consultant, production team, film guru? Get in touch.

What’s it going to be called? The Truth Now, of course.

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