Born Under Punches

I got home last night and the neighbourhood looked so trashy. Broken safety glass all over the street and garbage and dead palm tree fronds flattened in the middle of the road and folks smoking outside their front gates. I mean, after dark, the place usually becomes more ghetto than it is by day, but last night was off the hook. It's like seeing a fairly slutty aquaintance wear something incredibly slutty. Surprising that she really had it in her, dismay, and a little titilation on the side.

Tonight my very great writing teacher chatted about "the biz", not just sharing the story of his friend who lived in someone's bathtub while writing a brilliant screenplay, but also giving us the Reality Begins Here speech.

(The phrase "Reality Ends Here" is the motto or something of USC Cinema-Television. It was grafitti from back in the day that is now inscribed in the cement at the doorways of various USC film buildings, including Marcia Lucas Post and the Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts. It's true in both the sense of "welcome to the world of making movies" and in the possibly unintended sense of "welcome to mistakenly believing that the kind of stuff you are doing here as a student will be the same kind of thing you will be able to do in the real world as a professional".)

We get the Reality Begins Here speech every few months. It follows this major theme: your chance of being a feature film director is as good as being struck by lightening, twice. We all know this, it's simple math, not to mention the math of how many students get pumped through USC. And hey, let's not discount the math of how many female feature film directors they are.

But it's really not the best time to be hearing it. Every day, these days, is a gaunlet to be run. The basic things you think would be necessary to daily life have been sacked in this hundred mile sprint to the finish line. Grooming, nutrition, sleep. I have to make an active decision to make sleeping a priority; it'd be too easy to make that dismissable luxury and the fall down dead in the middle of a shot, proving that "you can sleep when you're dead" can be more true than you ever thought possible and simultaneously exposing the film to unacceptable light leak through the eyepiece and ruining the shot.