Work continues on my climate change comedy. The fragile setting I have come up with is threatened by landslides triggered by atmospheric river driven storms. That piece of the script is easy enough to deal with. I located some landslides along the coast of California then found reports filed by CalTrans and United States Geological Survey that have sent their scientists out to look the slides over and report back to their agencies.
Placing a central character into a dynamic threatened landscape is easy enough, the power of a film script is that there is literally nothing that cannot be visually created and used in your storytelling.
The script is set at a resort and it overlooks the Pacific Ocean. Most of the story revolves around a band stuck there due to the storms and then coming up with a plan to stay and perform while the locals are in doubt about how feasible it may be for anyone to continue to live along this stretch of changing coastline.
One aspect of character is the drive to belong to someone, someplace and something that they can build their lives around. How do you build a life somewhere when that place is so threatened? Uncertainty is excellent theater and it is also hell on our own inner drive to create a safe and reliable environment where you can build your life. These mutually contradictory problems are a great source of comedy.
There are challenges I am dealing with around the central character. If they come to this place that is so threatened why do they choose to stay? Of course we all do incredibly illogical nonsensical things all the time, and Big Sur has long captivated the imaginations of its visitors, and it is from millions of visitors that a mere handful hear the place calling on them to remain and make this place their life’s mission.
My central character becomes interested in a sailor preparing to leave to go cruising. Just as they arrive and decide this might be a place worth remaining the person that they imagine could unlock their emotions is planning on leaving.
I am specifically thinking through why they are choosing to remain when in many ways it would be far safer bet on their future to escape the landslides, get away from the road closures and continue on with their bus, their tour, their itinerary, and hopes for the bands future success.
The woman, the singer, the bossa nova vocalist from LA, born in the United States, then with her single mother originally from Brazil returns to her home country where she is raised until in her early 20’s leaves to pursue her musical career back in LA. She has a band, she has had a recording career, the business is as threatened as the cliffs along the Pacific Ocean, the uncertainty of the place is as uncertain as the path she has embarked upon as a singer and leader of her own band.
What she believes most is that the strength of her life comes from the power of her emotions and that there is much less importance attached to record sales or hillside landslide threats and much more importance attached to being your most authentic self, to be real, to love with courage, and not be seduced into making every decision on the basis of what is best for your band and business and instead asking what is best for your heart and soul. Even as these events threaten your career sometimes following your heart now will payoff big time later.
Artist’s have to feel their way into a situation. Some will surely prefer securing their job and income. Weighing our life’s opportunities and giving our emotional life the priority over our income and work isn’t all that unusual for a creative. Especially true is the ability for some artists to reincarnate themselves and to manifest a new platform and new vehicle for their creativity.
This gets into letting go, and of course that’s where the stakes are in this story. If you go all in on this crazy idea of staying here to play what happens if it doesn’t work out, what happens if it all falls apart, what does the character do then?
None of us are sure from creative project to creative project whether the new work will make it in the marketplace. Bringing a new song, new show, new act, new film to the marketplace is incredibly uncertain. A band that has established a relationship with a reliable audience is a big deal, not easy to toss away, and may be difficult to recreate.
A lot of talents I’ve known busted their butts to make it to where they are and for many that success is everything and for a great many never repeated a second time. The one-hit-wonders abound in film, books and music.
One of the key insights I have made is that creative people need to evolve to remain fresh and maintain a sense of being alive. If they are not risking everything they are in danger of abandoning their creative drive in pursuit of holding onto some false sense of security. Against this backdrop we can see how paradoxical success can be for a creative talent. We keep doing this for fear of failing to have our next project connect with our audience. It is one of the most agonizing qualities of a creative talents life— they are only as good as their current project and the risks involved in bringing a new project to life involves the very real chance that they will not succeed, that the work will not find its audience and that they could be at risk of losing everything.
Relationships are as fickle. And now they are living on a place where the landscape is as unpredictable as their art, as their love, as their entire life. For most artists success provides some income, supports the artist enough to do another project, but for many it is rare to put away so much money as to have secured your financial future for years to come.
These are forces that in part become that much more complicated due to the impact of the changing climate and the destructive forces they have unleashed. We are always struggling to secure our lives, to build a foundation that we can set our lives down upon, and then hopefully share our work, our home, and our hearts with a partner, our family in pursuit of a life worth living.
