A Screenplay to Send to Acclaimed British Director Steve McQueen

I've decided to write a screenplay about human misery, so that critics will love me. The film is called A Pile of Dung and it's about a man with no arms and no legs and no tongue. He lies on top of a pile of dung in an alley. He's had his tongue cut out and his nose cut off and he just lies there and moans. I'm picturing Michael Fassbender for the role. It will be a short screenplay since the film is just the noseless, tongueless torso moaning on top of the pile of dung, but the film will be three hours long.

The Ambitious Play

Here's something I wrote in April of this year:

The Writer Part One: Revenge of the Writer

My name is Rob, and I'm a recovered blogger. I began writing a blog in December of 2005, at first for my own amusement, primarily concerning Chicago theater, something for which I had a passion since my conception, because my mom and dad had met each other while acting for a theater company in the '60s. Then, like magic, people started reading the blog and I felt a growing responsibility to the people of the world to continue to write about Chicago theater, especially after Time Out Chicago published a little capsule on my blog at the beginning of 2008. 

I wrote funny things, reviewed plays, wrote a few more funny things, reviewed a few more plays, and found myself inundated with press releases and countless invites to plays I could see for free. I saw a lot of plays and i wrote about a lot of plays, but then? Then I just plain got tired.

I confess after the experience of several years of writing about theater that I have a new grudging respect for writers who somehow manage to write about theater over and over again with little or no financial incentive whatsoever, and this counts the critics and writers who are actually paid for their work, since I'm sure very few of them make very much money at all, especially when you break it down by the number of hours they are forced to spend at the plays themselves. Before you start bitching about critics, think about the lives they lead, the time they have to spend away from their loved ones, the busy opening seasons in September and January when they have to see seven shows a week in addition to working full time during the day, and appreciate how they don't all go insane, tearing off their clothes in the middle of Michigan Avenue and jumping in front of a bus.

I felt like doing that and I didn't even spend much time on writing about theater. I became  so burned out that I haven't seen a single play since June, which I think is a record for me in the last decade. And I'm still getting free tickets! The nice P.R. folks at Broadway In Chicago, for example, seem to have completely missed that I deleted my theater blog over six months ago and keep dutifully sending me press passes. This is hardly surprising since they continue to distribute press passes to bloggers who can't write, so why not send passes to those who don't?

So now I'm starting over again on the cusp of 2012. What can I write about here? Honestly, I have no idea. I just feel like having somewhere to write things I can share that go beyond what I can contribute to the world's discussions on Twitter. I'm working on a few things. I am a reporter at a financial newspaper by day and teach Moving Image Art at Columbia College and Comedy Writing at the Second City Training Center. I'm polishing up a few plays I started years ago, one called Calvin Exits and two others called Her Mouth Was Full of Faces and Everyone Dies at the End.

My big creative commitment, however, is my first shot at a novel. Actually, that's a lie. It's my second shot. In the summer, I attempted to start a novel called The Ten Houses. While it has potential, I chose to make teenagers the main characters, probably because the setting of the potential novel was based on where I grew up and my memories of the town come from when I was a teenager. I think that was a mistake. I could never identify with teenagers, especially when I was a teenager. I also thought that basing a place on the town where I grew up was somehow cheating myself of the opportunity of creating a whole new world. Granted, the town of Evansdale as I created it in The Ten Houses is far from the actual Hinsdale, Illinois, but I still felt it was something I needed to move beyond.

Here's the first page of The Ten Houses:

This is the story of Evansdale. It was a nice town with a lot of houses with a lot of families. Some of the families were very rich and some were only somewhat rich. There was everything you wanted in a town. There were grocery stores, bookshops, a train station run by Old Mr. Crabtree, whose name was not Old Mr. Crabtree but something long and Polish. There were bakeries and stores for baby clothes, children’s clothes, teenagers’ clothes, grownups’ clothes, old people’s clothes and even dead people’s clothes. There was a high school with a football stadium and another high school without a football stadium. One was called Central and the other one was called South. (The central part of town was the very rich part of town and the south part was only rich.) There were two competing toy stores, one that sold toys for tall children and the other that sold toys to children of average height. There was a video store, a police station, a fire station, a post office, a store near the post office that only sold stamps, a candy store, and plenty of little boutiques where people could buy expensive clothes that would last for a very short time before completely dissolving. 

There was even a store that sold movie posters and several restaurants all owned by the Chester family, a very wealthy family that loved to manage restaurants that would last only six months before they would have to replace them with other restaurants.

There was a playground that had a giant Pac-Man that children could play inside pretending they were eaten ghosts and a slide that ended too far above the ground to be safe. 

There was even a detective agency owned by a man named Robert Roberts who always walked around wearing a hat and thick glasses and had a slight limp, although which leg he limped on changed depending on the day of the week. He acted like it was the 1940s and never had any work, but he always walked the streets of Evansdale looking for crimes that would never be committed and he would always stay in business even though he never had any money. 

There was a shop where you could buy model trains. There was a shop where you could buy paintings of model trains. There was a shop where you could buy paintings of shops where you could buy paintings of model trains. There was even a shop that sold models of all the shops in town. That shop was owned by Henrietta Tittle, one of the last original matriarchs of the town. You could see her behind the counter of the shop, all 89 years of her, wearing a kimono she said she received from Emperor Hirohito himself after they had exhausted themselves in a torrid affair in a grand hotel in Hawaii. Most people thought she was lying but she claimed she had a photo of Hirohito shaving in the hotel room bathroom. It was impossible to tell for sure because his face was covered with shaving cream. 

But all that is gone now. This town that used to have hundreds of houses now only has ten. They are ten houses so big they take up an entire town.

This is the story of how that happened and where the people in the hundreds of houses went and who the people in the ten houses were and how they happened to live in those ten houses.

Actually, now that I look at it for the first time in a few months, it's pretty amusing. Perhaps I will revisit another day. But, for now, I'm playing with the idea of a novel about a fictional town in Pennsylvania, a town with two theater companies, a ruthless philanthropist and a wonder dog and their adventures with a playwright who could neither read nor write and the young girl who wanted to destroy all animal life on the planet.

Perhaps this space will be somewhere I can share ideas I feel are worth sharing, and update my friends and family on my writing. I have every intention of finishing this novel in 2012. Whether or not that happens, I have no idea, but after a couple of years of not writing anything that really pleased me, and now that I've turned 40 (something not entirely unforeseen since I turned 39 last year), it's time to find the creative me again. This will manifest itself in all kinds of places, and here's one of them. 

Merry Christmas Eve Eve.

The Audition

I wrote this about a year ago. I like it.