Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Story Time!

Due to a convoluted series of coincidences, I found myself reminiscing back to 1999/2000 tonight and thought, for the first time in probably over 10 years, of the time I applied to UCLA film school.

Oh yes I did.  And I told no one save for the people I cajoled into writing recommendation letters for me.

At the time, before easy digital desktop filmmaking, the film school at UCLA did not require any film experience, and would accept creative-writing samples as evidence of storytelling genius.  I don't know what the hell they want now.

You see where this is going, right?  I submitted some of these poems.  I don't remember which ones, but does it matter?  They all suck.  And here's where it gets weird...

Haha, no it doesn't.  It doesn't get weird at all.  I was rejected summarily, OF COURSE, because these poems are dogshit laid out on paper and obviously I would have been a spectacular trainwreck as a film student, which I know because I went ahead and took a filmmaking class at the community college and I saved my bacon in a finals-week Hail Mary scratch film.

I've got some news for you: Creative expression is a lot of work, and I suck at it; I would love to tell you that these poems come from a time in my life as a nascent artist, before I really "developed my craft" (barf), and that these days I'm an accomplished poet and author.  But that's just not me, and I'm about 93% OK with that.  If nothing else, this stuff is pretty damn funny, made doubly so by Christy's amazing illustrations (don't let her be too self-deprecating about them). 

-Sandy

No comments:

Post a Comment