Film Festivities

writing about the easy and hard parts of my creative practice the last two weeks

My last newsletter imagined Hell. To me, it looked like a world where all of the minor grievances I face: the moments within a day that I get angry or sad, were all that happened all of the time. Hell was a place where I was awash in feelings of insecurity or the sense of being out of place. Being lonely, uncomfortable, or dissatisfied is how I defined Hell, and ultimately reveals that I live an incredibly blessed life. My hell would be heaven for the vast majority of people who live on Earth.

Some distinctly unhellish moments from my life recently:

Last week, I attended the Beverly Hills Film Festival, where Chakras For Sale, a short I was in, premiered. It was awesome. Chakras was programmed high up in the block, the second to last showing, flanked by two other projects that were similarly ambitious in production value, length, and depth. It was wild to notice, as the block went on, that the projects seemed to get more cohesive, impactful, and polished. Of course I love work that is small and scrappy, but our team invested a lot of time, money, and effort into this project, and it was exciting to see that recognized. 

Watching yourself is always weird though. One of my favorite instances of actor-character bleed that I’ve witnessed is Adam Driver in Girls on HBO. Apparently Adam Driver hates watching himself on-screen, and in that show, his character is also named Adam and is also an actor and also covers his eyes when his work appears in front of him. 

Watching yourself is definitionally an out-of-body experience, and a crowd is the final test for a film and for an actor’s work. Audience members, shrouded in the anonymity of a dark theater, have no incentive to lie about how they feel. But I noticed midway through our movie that laughter was rolling throughout the entire film, and I realized that we had nothing to fear. 

A fever dream soon ensued: we were funneled towards a red carpet, where photographers asked us to pose. I found my self consciousness forced me into a big, overwhelmed smile.

I genuinely love film festivals. In the entertainment industry, you never know what is gonna be worthwhile and what is gonna be bullshit. Festivals strike a great balance. Your work is commended, which is somewhat helpful for your career and an immense blessing for your psychology. Also, after you’ve made a few independent films, you get hooked on watching independent films. Seeing work that has crossed a certain threshold of quality but still retains imperfection is the coolest thing ever. At a festival, you get to meet people who are so like-minded: who, just like you, made a movie that brought them to this event. You all get to be represented by work that you toiled over, and you leave feeling inspired.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t rest afterwards. Because I had booked that upcoming weekend to begin shooting my own production, Richie Gets Money. Punya, the director of Chakras for Sale, has been helping me get the project on its feet. In comparison to Chakras, RGM is bite sized: we used a single Sony FX3 camera to shoot, used no lighting equipment, and recorded with a pack of four $200 lavalier microphones.

Six of my friends, all talented comedians and improvisers, have created characters within Richie’s universe. They’ve helped me build out his world, and four of them were part of my shoot on Sunday. 

The project is so complicated, which is why I’ve only talked vaguely around it on this platform. It’s simply easier to explain through rambling, so I’m going to try to do that here: 

Richie Gets Money is an attempt to combine many different styles of working that I’ve become accustomed to over my creative career: unscripted production, devised theatre, improv comedy, and vlogging. 

So, who’s Richie? Richie is a man on a journey: to be the greatest white rapper of all time. He looks a lot like me. I’ve “known” Richie since 2021. I “met” him after an intense year of quarantine, where I had done a lot of content creation on the internet, and frankly felt overexposed in every single way. I realized that my brain was not functioning healthily while I was wrapped up in content creation. I started thinking about the inner life of a character who leaned into self promotion and social media harder than I ever could, while leaving other aspects of his humanity behind. Thus, Richie was born. You can find him on Instagram here. Let me break down each of the big creative strategies I’m using for this production.

Unscripted Production

This means reality TV or documentary work. Stuff where you feature real people who are representing themselves. When I first moved to LA, my first job was in unscripted production. At this company, we would find people that we thought could lead a good TV show. Then we would meet their current friends, or introduce them to new ones, and see if there were people in their life who would play well on camera, and we could build stories around. We would select characters, interview them, and then build stories around the lives of real people. 

Unscripted TV is a form that really contrasted my experiences with traditional narrative work: it was very different from most of my experience in theatre and filmmaking. But it reminded me a lot of a favorite technique that I was introduced to in college:

Devised Theatre

At school, I learned to lean on devising techniques for creating new work. Devised work, for me, has always involved using interview, documentary, and improvisation to create collaborative pieces of performance art. At school, when mounting a devised piece, I would interview members of an ensemble, or group of artists, about their histories and how they relate to a certain theme or question I was looking to explore. Then, I would use those interviews to create fictional characters I was interested in having them play. Once the actors were briefed on those characters, I would place them into improvised scenes so I could see how they would interact with each other, and then I would use that information to create plot lines, and then a script. It’s kind of like working backwards, and synthesizing a play from the minds of your ensemble. You get to write based on what the ensemble has genuine connections to, because you basically pull the material from the minds of your team. The last piece of theatre that I used some of these techniques for was Concessions: The Play, where we used interview and improvisation to create a script. 

I’m sure you can maybe see the parallels that I drew between devised work and unscripted work- where we use interviews to create character and plot. The difference being that one features real people, and one features fictional characters. One is typically filmed and edited, and the other is seen onstage.

The idea of mimicking unscripted work with fictional characters is not particularly new, mockumentary is a very popular genre. Where RGM differs from traditional mockumentary to me, is with the devised work. With mockumentary, typically the characters are conceived in advance, or are scripted, their choices predetermined, and they are created in service to the plot. In Richie Gets Money, I have leaned into my devising background, and try to offer a lot of freedom towards the performers involved to make whatever choices come to them. I am interested in offering gentle guidance but mostly being genuinely surprised by my characters, the way you would be in actual unscripted television. I am getting to know these characters on the same timeline as the audience.

Improv Comedy

A good script is magic, of course. But I have wanted this particular process to be mostly improvised. With Richie, what I’m the most interested in is painting a thorough psychological portrait of a fictional character. I want to try and get at the very core of what we do when we “act” which is that we try to depict dramatic moments in a person’s life as organically as possible. When we say lines, we’re ultimately trying to access the feeling, and thus the appearance, of discovering words and thoughts as we attempt to achieve our goals by affecting the people around us.

When shooting, I tried to give actors a sense of their goals and obstacles. Then, after calling action, I watched them organically try to achieve those goals while meeting resistance from characters with opposing goals, thus creating “conflict.” Watching the characters improvise meant I was capturing the dissolution of their mental filters, seeing the characters think on their feet. I hope the result is something closer to the organic moments we’re oftentimes trying to achieve with performance art.

Many of my friends are comedians, or performers of some kind or another. Some of my favorite moments in the last few years have occurred either being or watching people onstage. There is a specific kind of joy that comes from laughing at something that happens on the spot. It feels like you’ve cracked through some kind of facade and accessed a moment that is incredibly divine. It’s true life, and true joy, the kind of joy we experience when something funny and unexpected happens in real life, and creates a memory that we hang onto.

Using improv instead of a script for this process allows me the opportunity to be genuinely surprised, or moved towards laughter or sadness or anger when watching the performances. There are, of course, cons that arise when working using improvisation. Your brain is doing a lot of work, and the results are unpredictable. But sometimes it’s fun to gamble.

Vlogging

Dude. I feel so lucky to have grown up with long form content on the internet. I MISS that. In this process, I wanted to make sure that form meets content. The production is low budget and scrappy, and made for YouTube, like the fun stuff on the internet I grew up on. It’s not trying to move as fast as possible, or be as short as possible. It’s supposed to breathe at least a little bit, which it feels like no one is allowed to do online anymore. That’s fine for a lot of content online, but for me, is something I have to avoid because I think a lot of great film and theatre necessitates breathing, taking your time, and being slow sometimes. I don’t want to lose that skillset. Ideally, I want to practice the skills that I would bring to the work I want to be a part of: ambitious, lengthy works of film and theater.

That said, I don’t want to spend the money and stress that it takes to create festival-caliber work. To me, this is designed for the internet, which is rip e with people improvising, oversharing, and clout-chasing. If anything, vlogging feels like a direct descendent of reality TV. I want the work to feel like that. I think that is the natural setting for my process: improvised performance that is built to exist online. By nature of speaking directly to a camera and documenting their life, vloggers present a level of psychological honesty that I want to mimick.

Devised work, unscripted production, improv, and vlogging come together for me because they are all vehicles towards capturing those honest moments that I seek. Psychological honesty is, right now, one of my big interests and priorities in performance-based art. I think it’s the essence of creative work for me right now, and I am designing this production to be the most fun method I can possibly use to chase it.

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I’ve been “getting in trouble” lately, which means I’ve been making commitments I am unprepared to meet, and then preparing to meet them before the time should come. For this shoot, I didn’t have the full story outline until the day before. The first act of business was locking the shoot date, location, and making sure all the necessary players would be there. Then, based on which actors were available during what windows, I created plot lines that would not just justify, but do justice to those characters interacting. The weekend of the production, I finally learned how to use the audio equipment that I’ve been hanging onto for over a year now.

On the day of production, we spent about six hours shooting the improvised scenes. Because the crew was so tight, we spent way more time shooting than setting up: not at all common for a film set. We would reset only a few times per moment we were trying to capture: attempting to tighten and solidify plot and character details, many of which were provided by the actors themselves.

The shoot was a lot of fun. As stressful as it is to mount a creative production, it was honestly less stressful than like, hosting a party or something. But the work has barely begun. I now have to sift through hours of the improvised footage, and see how it could shape an entertaining story. For all the dense text I’ve just written about my artistic process, it could literally suck. In any case though, I’m sure it’ll make me laugh.

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I got to rest for a quick second after this production, but only just a second. I had agreed to do a standup show later that week, and needed to prepare. I don’t know if most performers would be stressed about a standup show that was four days away, but I find standup to be pretty daunting, at times. I wanted to perform new material at the show, but as of Sunday, I had not written any. This was another way I had planned to “get in trouble.”

I had been sitting on the ideas that I wanted to write for quite some time though, and with my creative faucet cracked open on Sunday, writing the set came easily. It was even easy to memorize, which is usually my greatest shortcoming. However, a day before the show, I really crashed emotionally.

I got insanely depressed, which just happens sometimes, but is especially frustrating when so many amazing days were barely in the rear view mirror. Unfortunately, bad days are sometimes just the other side of coin that is the currency of my psyche. I undergo the occasional crisis of self esteem. This can be a major creative block, especially with standup comedy.

Because of the frequency with which I hit these spells (a rate I’m trying to reduce, I promise) I usually do not feel a call towards standup when I’m between gigs. I have trouble with the form, as something that feels both very vulnerable and very shallow. I don’t really crave being an individual name: I’m mainly drawn to the communal nature of theatre or film. But the biggest barrier between me and standup, oftentimes, is the sheer vulnerability of it. Social anxiety is another challenge for me, and standup can feel like the final boss: you ask a room full of strangers to listen to you speak, and hope that they think you are funny. The goal is not simply to provoke thought or self-express: there is a metric for success. When struggling with self esteem, this becomes a big challenge. I ask myself how could it be possible that a room full of people could even like me? In general, the notion of being seen and exposed to others who might not accept me can be a difficult, nagging thought.

That feeling creates a creative block. It makes me feel, at times, that my voice should not be heard by others, or should be contorted into something else. In these moments, I feel that it would be wrong to make others aware of the world that exists between my ears, behind my eyes, that exists before my mouth opens. I have to keep that world a secret.

That’s where I was up until a few hours before the show. I was lucky that in this case, I felt that I could genuinely trust a lot of the material. I do mostly stand by my ability to write a joke. On the day, what helped me push through my feelings of inadequacy was a very simple shift in mindset. I thought about how sharing myself and my perspective with the crowd of strangers could be an act of self love. I would accept that these people would sit inside my inner world with me, and I would accept myself in return.

The show was fucking awesome, and I had a great night. I feel a little more committed to the idea that by involving other people in my work, in my thoughts, and in my life, I am throwing a housewarming. I show those I meet the home that I live in, and ask them to stay a while. Looking at the decor on the walls, it hardly feels like hell.

Thank you, Sampson!!!