Art and escape

I find myself working on a new screenplay with no intention of marketing it, except possibly passively, just to distract myself from the world at large. Writing as escape. I never used to write for this purpose. I wrote to get published, get produced, make money. I succeeded best in the 80s, all three streams flowing well, but it's only recently, since the advances in technology, that I found myself changing my priorities. First, the best writing moneymaker, screenplays, dried up with the loss of the traditional option as it became a buyer's market. In the 80s, you could make damn good money writing scripts that got optioned and went nowhere. Immoral, from a playwright's point of view, but not immoral enough not to take advantage of. With print on demand and digital technology, I learned I could write with a different motivation, taking control of my legacy by writing for an archive at a university, and since I was very tired of all the ridiculous games one is asked to play in the star-driven pop culture universe, dropping out and writing exclusively for an archive struck me as a sane thing to do. So I did. But then I ran out of things to write about, mostly, made digital films instead, which are much harder work, more than my aging self wanted to do finally, and found mysef in a retirement mode, where my energy would mostly go to teaching. The problem was that with less work in my head, that space of consciousness was filled with brooding about the state of the world, all very depressing.

Then a commercial screenplay idea came to me. This is the only story idea I've ever had that I can explain in 30 seconds, completely, without misunderstanding. Just what LaLaLand adores. So I wrote it, mostly grunt work, and am now marketing it. In the meantime, I found a number of unfinished splays in my computer and so am tackling them. They are fun to write. However, the best consequence of writing them is distraction. Is escape. The world has never been in worse shape from any point of view I bring to it, and it depresses the hell out of me to think what a mess we've made of things, with even worse to come, so distraction, escape, is quite welcome, and so I find myself writing these unfinished screenplays without any desire to market them for the reason that doing them keeps me from brooding too much about our environmental demise and all the voters out there who convert their understandable anger into support of certain idiotic political figures. You know who they are.

Art as escape. If I didn't have it, I think I'd turn into Jack Nicholson at the end of The Pledge., incoherent and babbling to myself.