The Terror of Men, Composing, 30/10/2017

So I haven't written a post about my artistic work in a while, and I really should. I’m getting to the point where my Patreon’s getting hungry for more content. And if you’ll allow me to get a little crassly commercial here, I’m getting close to a point where the activities of Adam Writes Everything are going to get a bit more commercial.

Let me start at the current moment. I’m working on a new film project with a collaborator who I met as a colleague at my current teaching job. Right now, we’re putting the script together in tandem.

No, I'm not actually working with Ghostface Killah. But the privacy-
screen name for the blog works well for his personality.

We’ve opened up a Google Doc where Ghost throws up ideas, key lines, descriptions of scenes; then I refine all that into a shooting script. When we have the script together, Ghost gets a small crew together from the folks he’s made weird-ass short films before, and we get to work.

Did I mention I’ve ended up cast in this? I play a slightly deranged criminal psychiatrist. It’s been more than a decade since I’ve written anything to perform myself. It’s been bracing to get back into that – you approach the writing differently when you know you’ll be saying the lines yourself.

Mainly, you know your own acting talent, and definitely its limits.

I can’t tell you too much about the story, because it’s actually a little complex and I want to keep it secret. But it’s a horror film. A horror film that revolves around identity-cracking psychosis and violence against women.

An obsession-turned-tragedy sublimated into a split personality that’s carried out a serial killer’s campaign. Satanic-cum-Freudian rituals executed on IKEA furniture in a disused suburban basement.

I’m going all in here. I’m just going to throw every image of self-deluding misogyny on screen in the most intensely horrific, terrifying, icky, pathetic way possible. An exorcism.

An impossible exorcism, of course. A reasonably self-conscious man knows that possibility to intimidate just by being in the room is present in his whole life. We’re never getting rid of the desires.

Tamping it down because we’re realized that a just society is one where – at minimum – men fear the repercussions of offending any woman as much as a woman now fears the repercussions of offending a powerful man.

So that’s the kind of film I want to make here. I’d also like to do it with virtually no money, which I think we can manage. It’s the perfect kind of film to make a killing on the horror festival circuit.
• • •
I’ll be sharing this post on my Patreon page this week, since I haven’t posted there in a while. But after Ghost gets over his flu, we’re going to record our first YouTube channel video. Mostly talking about the ideas behind the film.

Later this year, I’ll finally transition Adam Writes Everything into a proper website. Much of the same will be going on, but I’ll just create more of a brand around it.

I said a week or so ago that I started this blog as therapy. That was true, back in 2013. Since then, I’ve grown more into my ambitions, and I’m in a position where their possibility is actually in sight. Not just a dream.

Being in Toronto is part of that, thanks to the extra connections you can make in this city. Reestablishing a foundation for teaching work, with a decent salary that can easily become more decent over time. Building the artistic side of my philosophical work is my own ideal for the rest of my life.

It’s been years, but I’m ready at last to begin that work. Took me long enough. Fucking economy.