A Sandbox and a Pendulum

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 16 July 2014.

A scene from Drunk History

Here's a quick prelude to some thoughts I've been having.

Recently a few things have been making me reflect on Arthur White. One is JPII's letter (more on that another time) and the role of artists. Another is Steve Miller's book Detroit Rock City, which got me thinking a lot about the DIY thing that made Detroit rock so great and also more or less kept it off the national radar, since it was so feral in Californian terms. The final thing is a few things: NPR storytelling shows, Maron, and Drunk History.

Back to Detroit. When I thought of the idea of working on a screenplay or teleplay, the idea was rooted in actually putting on shows and getting footage onto the internet. An Evening with Arthur White is so natural to the way I work.

I was talking about it with my sister, who is an outstanding photographer. She was talking about how I was a good photographer before she was, and it's true: I had a 100% in photography class and won the book award for the class. But when I took the class, there was some weird physics experiment involving a sandbox and a pendulum that was more or less in the darkroom, and, as a result, I always had scratched negatives from all the sand in the room. And really, that's become my aesthetic--sand in the negatives, which is in many ways like the swaddled existence. Everything is so punk and lo-fi and duct taped together, and hopefully the ideas transcend the materials that produced them. With my moving, though, I pretty much killed our ability to take that approach, and it was difficult even when I was in town. Too many moving parts and no real way to deal fairly with all the people we'd need.

So the screenplay idea made sense: get the ideas on paper and let a network fund everything. We could get as wild as we wanted and if we won the lottery odds-wise, we would have a really polished, professional product with great marketing potential. Plus, we could take our time and handle the work. At the same time, though, the odds of getting signed would be so slim, as would the odds of maintaining our vision of the project. Plus, our chances to play our characters would just disappear.

Tonight, it dawned on me while watching Drunk History that if we were to work on making the project podcast-based, we could retain the DIY feel and our own ownership of the project while liberating ourselves from the tyranny of the visual, which creates massive amounts of cost and labor. A podcast would let us tell our stories from multiple angles and create a venue for the music.  We also wouldn't have to have everything ready to go, which is something I liked about the performance idea originally: let a little of the story out at a time, and since the story could come from multiple narrators, the different stories wouldn't even have to mesh with each other.

You might remember an old idea I had for the Arthur White superfan who runs the fansite who really knows very little about the story and just wants to maintain the aura that comes from being the biggest fan of a group nobody knows. We could have him on. We could interview people who saw the shows. We could play snippets of records we make, or we could broadcast concerts that wouldn't have to look particularly authentic as long as they sounded authentic. We could even get into the meta stuff by being ourselves on occasion.

What do you think?