Whenever I’m stuck on a writing project—an all-too-frequent occurrence—I usually try to find my way forward by contemplating a single question: How can I shift what I’m trying to say without reaching for cliches? Because a lot of the time, the reason I’m banging my head against the wall is because I’m taking an approach to the material that’s too conventional or predictable. So I force myself to take a step back and think of some other way into the story, some other theme I should make it my mission to explore.
I’m pretty sure I can trace my embrace of this tactic to something I read in Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it aside about George Lucas and an experience he had while studying filmmaking at USC.
[Lucas] and a couple of other USC and UCLA students got a Columbia Pictures scholarship to shoot a short documentary on the making of MacKenna’s Gold, which was being shot in Page, Arizona. It was a lumbering, elephantine studio Western, very much in the style of the bloated musicals of the ’60s, and it was Lucas’s introduction to the Old Hollywood. “We had never been around such opulence, zillions of dollars being spent every five minutes on this huge, unwieldy thing,” he said. “It was mind-boggling to us because we had been making films for $300, and seeing this incredible waste—that was the worst of Hollywood.” While the other students shot conventional “making-of” documentaries, Lucas shot an imagistic film about the beauty of the desert, with the production barely visible in the far distance.
As always, the story worthiest of telling is rarely what’s right in front of your face.
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