Being in the Room to Witness Creativity

By

Scott D. Parker

I love to know how things are made. It’s one of the main reasons why I buy the DVDs of my favorite movies—other than, you know, ownership—because there are behind-the-scenes featurettes and interviews with the creators. 

I think this started back in the Star Wars days of the 1970s when I would read all about how George Lucas and company created the movie that changed the trajectory of so many lives. I loved how they raided model shops to create the Death Star and used miniatures, models, and matte paintings to create the galaxy far, far away. How many of us picked up our own cameras to make our own movies? I see a lot of hands out there.

Books

The written word is an odd thing. It’s all in the writer’s head. You can read excerpts and deleted drafts if you want, but it’s all rather frustrating not to be able to have, say, a video with writers giving you a running commentary of their thought process. Granted, I do talk to myself sometimes. Hey, I know I’m not alone. Another show of hands. Hmm, fewer. 

Music

Music, on the other hand, is chock full of behind-the-scenes content. It can range from filmed snippets that showed up on VHS tapes back in the day to feature-length examples like the Beatles film Peter Jackson put out a few years ago. I love seeing how all the music and songs we know by heart and sing at the top of our lungs in the shower came to be 

And I’ve got a new one for you.

The Greatest Night in Pop: A We Are the World Documentary

I first heard about this on The Ralph Report, a daily podcast hosted by Ralph Garman. Curious, I brought it up to my wife on Thursday night and she was game.

The title of the documentary tells you everything you need to know. Director Bao Nguyen follows Lionel Richie, Michael Jackson, and Quincey Jones as they took a suggestion from Harry Belefonte to write an American answer to the Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas.” That song was released in early December 1984 and about seven weeks later, the new song was complete.

But not before a long, long night of recording.

You know the tune. You can probably sing it right now without a single note as a cue. I’m right there with you. But did you know Stevie Wonder suggested an additional element? Or how Richie and Jackson came up with the melody and lyrics? How about all those individual solo parts that became so famous? Who would sing what? For how many words? Or the doubt some of the singers had for their certain sections. Or the role Stevie Wonder played in the Bob Dylan section. Or the fact that Bob Geldof, the man behind Band Aid and later in 1985, Live Aid, was in the room before the recording began to set the stage for the evening.

It is fascinating. 

There is a mix of current interviews with Richie, Bruce Springsteen, Dionne Warwick, Huey Lewis, and others where they reflect on the experience. For those artists no longer with us, Nguyen drops in some older interviews to fill in the blanks.

There was a moment—specifically the segment with Steve Perry and Daryl Hall—when I heard those familiar voices and heard those sung lines and tears welled up in my eyes. I looked over to my wife who was also wiping away tears. We both laughed yet we couldn’t quite put our finger on why we both became emotional. Perhaps it was the specialness of the once-in-a-lifetime event. Perhaps it was the fact that the recording is now 39 years in the past and we are all 39 years older and yet we can’t wrap our heads around that fact.

I don’t know, but I highly recommend this documentary on Netflix if not for the time-machine quality of it, but to witness creativity in action.

Do You Ever Defy Expectations Like Harrison Ford?

By
Scott D. Parker

Let’s be honest: if you watched Apple TV’s “Shrinking” series, a good number of us did so because we had one overriding thought: Harrison Ford doing a comedy?

Granted, it’s not a typical comedy sitcom with a laugh track on a stage with a studio audience. But it’s still a comedy. A trio of folks—Jason Segel, Bill Lawrence, and Brett Goldstein—created the show, and they know comedy.

The great thing about this 10-episode series: it is a comedy, but it is also something else: it’s an honest look a grief, how people get through it, and the pitfalls and victories along the way.

And it has Harrison Ford doing comedy. I’ll admit I was a little skeptical. Ford just doesn’t do comedies. Even now, without looking up his IMDB page, can you name any comedy he’s done? There are funny moments in various movies, but no comedies come to mind.

Why did he do it?

Maybe to see if he could.

It’s a Comedy and a Drama (i.e., Real Life)

The show centers on Segel’s Jimmy, a widower with a teenaged daughter, Alice (Lukita Maxwell). Both are trying to deal with the death of his wife/her mother and they are growing farther and farther apart. Jimmy is a therapist. Ford plays Paul, the senior therapist and one who serves as Jimmy’s mentor. The third therapist is Gaby (Jessica Williams) and they have a charming and fun relationship. The three actors are so good together that you might wonder if they’d worked together before.

Rounding out the cast is Liz (Christa Miller) as Jimmy’s next-door neighbor who basically took over helping to raise Alice after Jimmy checked out for a year and Brian (Michael Urie), a lawyer and good friend of Jimmy.

The events and relationships come across as genuine, albeit in a TV version. My wife doesn’t always laugh out loud at TV shows, but there was more than one time when we both were laughing so hard we had to pause and rewind the show because we missed next lines of dialogue. Two scenes later, our eyes welled up with tears and we’d give each other quick glances to confirm that yes, we were both crying.

That’s the kind of show this is. I don’t binge TV, and we watched the first episode way back on 4 March. We picked episode 2 up on 29 March and were done by month’s end. Even I couldn’t get enough of this show. My wife and I both expressed interest in going back and rewatching some Jason Segel movies.

Doing the Unexpected

Oh, and Brett Goldstein? You know him as the gruff Roy on “Ted Lasso.” He wrote two of the episodes, one of which just ripped out the emotions and the tears out of our bodies. He also wrote one of the recent episodes of “Ted Lasso,” one of the more emotional ones. For a guy that I came to know as an actor first, he can really write well.

Back to Ford. After a career of not doing TV, he’s now doing two shows (“1923” is the other one). “1923” is a western so that’s at least in Ford’s wheelhouse, but “Shrinking?” That’s something new. He’s said in interviews that the script was one of the best he’d ever read…and that’s saying quite a bit.

Being the professional actor that he is, I get the sense that “Shrinking” came to him at the right time. He liked what he read and said yes. At first, I suspect he might have been a little hesitant to agree to do a project that was so unlike what he was used to and is known for.

Then, I thought about it differently. What if he took this role exactly because no one expected it of him? How daring is that? Or, rather, how exciting.

When was the last time you thought about creating something—a book, a song, a work of art—that no one expected of you? Did it make you scared? Did that fear make you pause and not move forward?

Or did you accept the fear, defy expectations, and go for it?

Routines Gives Covid Days Structure and Builds Anticipation

by
Scott D. Parker

It’s not often when the day job and the fiction job intersect, but they did this week.

On the day job front, we had our weekly team meeting yesterday. We’ve got a team of about 25 folks and, ever since 16 March, we’ve been working from home. Fridays are our Zoom calls and we get to see each other’s faces and enjoy an hour of camaraderie.

Yesterday, the grandboss asked how we were doing. And not in a flippant way, but an honest deep dive into how we were coping with the new paradigm of remote working. How were we feeling? How are we getting along with our families? The discussion was good with a few of my team members relating the sameness of our day-to-day lives. One of us commented that she sometimes realized that she needed to just get up out of her chair and walk outside to break up the monotony of her home office.

On the internet and Facebook this week, a few of my fellow writers voiced their frustration with the inability to write ever since the Coronavirus descended over all of us. When we’re all stuck at home with few prospects of getting out to typical places like movie theaters, theme parks, or seemingly every other summer tradition, how the heck can we harness the creativity to write?

I can’t answer these questions, but I can answer them with techniques I use that gets me through each day and each week.

Routine and Built-in Anticipation

Some of y’all will read this and chuckle. You may even give me a hard time. Don’t worry about it: my family gives me a hard time about it, too, but I still carry on.

Maybe it’s a sign of my age (51) but I seek out routine and thrive in it.

On the creative side of things, I hold one rule steadfast: write first thing in the morning. No internet. No email. Nothing other than a cup of coffee, a Bible reading, and the immediate opening of the laptop to work on a story. For the past month, it’s been edits and revision to my next book. Soon it’ll be a return to new stories, but, above all else, I carve out the time to be creative when the world is still dark and I’m the only one in the house awake. It was a routine I needed to create, but now that I have, it’s one of my favorite parts of the day.

This routine paid for itself on Monday of this week when, after I had a productive session, I logged into my bank to pay bills and discovered one of our checks had been stolen and forged. Yes, money had also been stolen. It’s resolved now, but the point is this: had I not already done my creative work, I did not have the mindset to be creative after that discovery. So, write in the morning before the day gets to you.

Building Anticipation

How good is a tuna fish sandwich? How valuable is movie night? How do these things relate to each other?

I love tuna fish sandwiches. It’s one of my favorite things to each for lunch. I branch out and try different recipes, often with salads, but the good, old-fashioned tuna fish sandwich is one of my favorite comfort foods.

But ever since I started working from home, I limit the traditional tuna fish sandwich to my Friday lunches. Why? To build anticipation. I’ll admit I look forward to lunches everyday because not only does my entire family of three eat together, but my wife and I play three games each of backgammon and Yahtzee. But I only eat tuna fish sandwiches on Fridays. Now, my family gently ribs me about this, but I can’t tell you how good that tuna sandwich tastes after a week of anticipation. Yesterday’s sandwich was particularly good. It’s something I look forward to all week long.

Ditto the Friday Night Movies. In the summer of 2020 when Covid has robbed us of a typical summer movie blockbuster season, I invented one. I’ve been revisiting summer movies from the past with even-numbered anniversaries (i.e., years ending in 0 or 5) and it’s been fun. But my point is that Fridays are movie nights. The other six days, sure we can watch a movie (we rarely do; the wife and I watch TV shows every night), but the special day is Friday.

Just like the tuna fish sandwich, I look forward to movie nights all week long. I build the anticipation, and that makes the sometimes monotonous days go by faster. And it makes Fridays all the more special.

Saturday mornings are do-nuts from Shipley’s, a cartoon (currently Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated) and every episode of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. Saturday nights feature the Texas Music Scene TV show. Sunday mornings are online church. Every night at 9pm is our TV show time (about to start season 6 of Bosch). Friday night (lots of Friday things) is also cocktail night. Thursday is often take-out food night.

Yes, there are times when the wife makes tuna fish on a Tuesday and I’ll opt out. Yeah, really. It’s to keep those Friday lunches special. It’s to build anticipation.

So that’s a glimpse into how I’m coping with working from home and maintaining my creativity.

How are you doing?