1/2 way to 1/4 way home!
It’s mid-October and I’m half-way through my first semester of the two-year experience that is the PPU MFA program. What does that mean exactly? Well, if I was on a road trip from Washington, DC to Los Angeles, CA, which is ~40 hours depending on your preferred route, I’d be about 1/8 of the way there, or ~5 hours into my journey; in short, I’m just outside Marion, VA. Am I making progress? Yes. Do I have many more miles to go? Absolutely! Pedal to the metal - this is no time for a pit stop!
In any event, this week my writing class transitions from screenwriting to playwriting. I have a new professor (Molly Rice) and a new syllabus, to boot! In ~7 weeks I’ll have written a 10 min. play and a dramatic monologue, so stay tuned for that! In the meantime, here’s my latest short script rewrite and feature-length movie treatment of Bass Player Wanted, my project from the first half of the semester. Imperfect as it is, I’ve enjoyed fleshing out the concept a bit over these past few months. For now, I’ll set it aside and maybe revisit it again down the road. I’m thinking if I fleshed it all out and finished the script at some point it could make for an interesting graphic novel.
As for my Dramatic & Cinematic Theory class, I submitted my first major paper last night. The assignment was pretty open-ended. I honed in on a topic after an hour long conversation with the professor, Matt Swensen, an incredibly engaging and thoughtful scholar. This class is a real bear - an enormous volume of reading, and not the lightest material, to say the least. At this point, I think I’m following about 60% of what’s going on (and I suspect my essay reflects this). Grappling with various theories and abstract concepts is one thing; applying them to the real world is quite another. But I gave it the old college try. I’m curious to see my professor’s feedback on my essay, which was about the rhetoric of comedy in film.
Unrelatedly, I should note that today is my birthday. 45 years old and still pluggin’ away! A friend told me today that if I live to 90 this is the half-way point. That might have been a depressing thought, except that I had a dream once as a kid - a vision, really - that I would live to the ripe, old age of 123. So, no - I don’t feel old in the slightest.