California Drought of Water & Creative Solutions to Poverty

At the beginning of April I read a New YorkTimes article about California in crisis over water shortage from prolonged drought. The article has the most extraordinary photographs of lush, well-watered upper middle class areas bordering on desert.

It’s always been like that in California, the land of creative milk and honey with a driving culture of virtually zero constraint, but how long can you sustain man-made solutions against the power of nature when it’s been so interfered with it’s on a rampage like an angry god? Problem with us humans is we tend to be short on long-term vision and if we can force our will on the natural world or a group of people, or even just one person for a while we think it’s forever.

When you’re riding a wave of monumental success it’s easy to believe you’re in control of everything. We all do it. We’ve all got Superman or Superwoman complexes at some level, to varying degrees.

But too many people and not enough water has always been kind of like railway tracks. You look down them and it seems like they’re merging in the distance but you tell yourself it’s just an optical illusion. Usually it is but not this time. Those tracks have always been leaning inwards towards each other and failing a sudden and dramatic turn in climate change, the collision that’s already actually happening isn’t going to magically unhappen.

But maybe the drought will end at some point. If it does, the Californians with money and/or access to it will probably find a way around the problem in the mean time and on the surface it seems like Californians are pretty well off. California has the 7^th largest economy in the world and the average income in 2013 was measured at just over $5,000 a year. But how can median income mean anything in a state with Silicon Valley where a data scientist can get from $120,000 to $250,000 a year, and Hollywood, where an actor can get a couple of million bucks to appear in a scene for one day—and the fruit and vegetables they buy are harvested by somebody who earns from $10,000 to $15,000 a year?

Without Silicon Valley and Hollywood the average would drop significantly. Even with them, taking into account costs of living (including childcare) and taxes etc., 23.8% were living in poverty in 2012, which put California at the top of the US Census Bureau’s list of poverty in all the states.

It’s still the same old story, the one we don’t want to look at. It’s not love and glory. It’s not romantic. It’s ugly, it’s scary, it’s a nuisance. But like any virulent, disfiguring disease, poverty spreads unless it’s dealt with seriously. In a drought it goes viral. And, most inconveniently, poor people are actually human, they affect things like economies. You’d think with all that incredible creativity in California they’d have cracked this one by now. There’s a great song sung by Bessie Smith, Janis Joplin, Eric Clapton; Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out. Ain’t that the truth.

Hollywood, Playing It Safe, Heroes & Heroines

Hollywood. Who can ever understand what motivates decision makers in their choices of scripts to pump money into? Lots of people think they’ve nailed a formula for success, most notably those who teach scriptwriting and sell their services as script editors. It’s a huge industry. They all claim they know what makes producers choose your script. They gloss over the truth that ‘producers’ come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them think they know the formula for success and they reckon the other guy doesn't. The other guy - oh, I don't need to finish this sentence, do I?

The script teachers and editors also rarely agree with each other. It’s confusing if you’re new at the game or don’t have a mind of your own and can’t figure out that self-styled authorities’ true skill lies in milking your insecurity.

They need you to believe your writing is full of imperfections and that you’ll never succeed without their very special advice. I entered a high profile script competition last year and didn’t make the short list but within days of being told so I got an email from a guy who’s a co-partner or something or other in the company, telling me, congratulations! You’ve won a discount on an advice session.

I called him up. He was a nice guy; I enjoyed talking to him. Then he said he could help me with my script and tighten it up so that agents and producers would be more likely to look at it. I said how do you know anybody will like the version your advice has led to? IMO, I continued, getting noticed is less about a perfect script and more about gutzpah; getting out there so people know you exist. Not backing down or giving up when you don’t win a competition or somebody says no thanks.

Or says it more rudely; it’s not unheard of for a big fish in a little pond who doesn’t like your work to tell you you’ll never make it in the industry. Pretty much everybody who’s succeeded in the world in any discipline has been fed that line some time or another. And we all know who’s the one left with the regrets.

My fella seemed to be smiling when he admitted he couldn’t guarantee that his advice would further me in any way.  Ha! The pleasures of having a mind of your own.

All of this is not to say that I don’t care about the quality of my scripts. I do. But that’s just for me. I’m under no illusion that it’ll be the primary factor in my success. So I turned down the generous offer, which amounted to R2500 for an hour. Of advice that might or might not be of any use to me. But my money would have been of a lot of use to that fella.

Some of the teachers etc. really do understand story-telling and can boast of many ‘students’ who have achieved a lot of success. But whether that success came directly and solely from their teaching or not, who can say?

Here’s the reality: Sometimes there’s a massive difference between a good script and one that will attract a producer, or between a brilliant director and one whose work will garner Academy Awards. Take Martin Scorsese. He’s widely acknowledged as the most influential filmmaker in the history of Hollywood but he’s only won one Oscar. And Boyhood, nominated for a best screenplay Oscar this year, deserves a column on its own, not all of it gushing praise.

But sometimes a quality script does attract producers – I’m thinking The King’s Speech - and awards and great directors do get Oscars for their work. Robert Zemeckis won in 1994 for Forrest Gump and beat Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction). That was a good decision!

There’s just no predictable formula in Hollywood, because producers come in all shapes and sizes and are as subject to whim as those who determine what or who should win an award.

I reckon the best way to get the most out of everything as a screenwriter is to write as much quality as you can and enjoy yourself when doing it, then fight like the devil to find producers who’ll throw money at you, and find ways to enjoy that fight as well. Because if you write to please producers you’ve never met, based on somebody else’s opinion of what those producers want when they’ve never met them either… It’s gambling on rather long odds. And the worst part of it is how horrible the whole experience is.

Scripts are all about heroes and heroines so if you’re writing about them I figure you might as well be one yourself. Heroes and heroines do their own thing and everything they can to forge a path to success, facing fears, dealing with insecurity and with all the demons and harsh realities that are part of the landscape of not playing it safe. They don’t strive to adapt. They strive to conquer.