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Jen Frankel Blog Entry
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How can a girl with a fistful of screenplays, a couple of strong teleplays, and a ton of undeveloped ideas jostling for attention in her fitful brain end up feeling so inadequate?
It was the conversation I had with the TV Lit agent that got me churning in that direction, I think, eddying toward a strange sense of underachievement. It’s not that I don’t figure I can come up with something he can sell. It’s just that part of me cries out that I would have to. Don’t I have enough to sell already, without resorting to more creation?
It’s been a long time, a very long time, since I sat down and made one of those lists that dot my journals, the ones headed “things I want to do”. I haven’t had the time, or maybe it’s the energy or the imagination, to examine what I could do in addition to the things already keeping me busy. Matt and I, after all, were making and editing films, building the Festival; I was writing...
But driving down Hollywood Boulevard today, I had the sudden twinge of fear that being here in LA would change me in ways that a year ago, I would have cringed at. What if, being here, I was no longer able to resist the lure of the Academy Awards, and actually started taking them seriously? What if I lost my own sense of story, fining I was not just pretending to subvert my own ideas and instead had come to champion those perceptions perpetuated in Hollywood film I had long disdained?
It’s not enough to call it a “growing up process,” and write it off to a natural progression. Yes, there are lessons it’s good to learn as you grow. It’s a positive and fine thing to get comfortable with your own body, and beliefs, and ambitions. It’s great to learn to express yourself, to learn to love, and to understand how to work through pain and disappointment.
But maintaining a certain idealism and desire to rock the world on its mighty axis is positive too, and I think should never be grouped under the heading of “Stubborn Refusal to Grow Up.”
We tend to forget a lot of good things we knew as children as we reach up into our teens and twenties and beyond. We forget how to play well together, for example, and we forget how to be forthright in complaining when others AREN’T playing nicely. We forget how to trumpet our ownership of the things that are ours, and how to spontaneously give away treasures and big hugs to fast friends just because love has moved us. We forget to treat the trail into the deep, dark forest as an adventure, instead of a place of doom and foreboding.
I don’t want to lose track of what makes me passionate, the causes and the battles against unyielding foes. I want to remain irate in the face of injustice and unfairness. I want to remember that people – fictional or not – matter more than profits, no matter how attractive the money becomes. Money should buy me freedom from the things that make me unhappy and bring me closer to what brings me joy and productivity. When it ceases to serve that purpose, I will need to take a very careful look at my life to see what place my path has lead me to, and ask the question, do I still respect myself?
Matt asked us all to write about what we know and believe, and here’s my version. I couldn’t have written it a week ago, at least not without publishing serious amendments today. It’s funny what a week can do.
WHAT I KNOW AND BELIEVE
Creation drives everything that’s best in my life. When I’m low, I cease to create, and feel I’ve ceased to exist. When I am not, everything becomes an act of creation, and creating myself is the highest pleasure of all.
Joy is contagious.
Beauty isn’t what people think. I don’t know what I find attractive in a physical package. I only know what my heart tells me about who someone is, and they are more or less attractive accordingly.
Kindness is underrated.
Whatever you want, you will get – although the road is longer than you’d like and more interesting than you’d guess.
Driving is good. I know it’s bad for the environment, but hell, I’m in a Hybrid this week, and the view of Palos Verdes from Malibu is spectacular, as is the view from PV back across the bay to Malibu.
I require variety and newness to keep my soul healthy. My entire personality is predicated on moving on constantly, whether it is to find a new place to sit and write, a vista I’ve never seen or a familiar place in a new light, or the deepening of a relationship I plan to grow with and in forever.
It’s not important to be the centre of attention in social situations, and you should be very careful of anyone who needs to be – they’re usually very insecure and potential energy-sucking. Instead, you should celebrate the people who share themselves with you and enjoy you doing the same with them. It’s interaction that counts in this life, and the only thing that moves you forward.
There’s nothing worse than a hypocrite. Whether you’re fooling yourself or trying to fool others, hypocrisy indicates a willingness to be deceitful for the worst of possible motives. It’s better to admit you’re wrong or don’t know or are fallible than to pretend you have virtues you don’t.
Patience is indeed a virtue.
If you want to know whether you can really trust a person, it helps to examine their instinctive behaviours. Watch how they treat waiters. Listen to the way they deal with making an error. See what they do when they lose their luggage. It’ll tell you how they behave in a crisis.
I know that there are wonders in the world that can be explored by opening a book, or hopping a plane, or just closing your eyes.
I know that the next person to move the world will be the one who tells the most compelling stories...
I believe in love. Yeah, and not in a limp, pinkness and bunny-ears kind of way. I believe in love as a robust, primary coloured force to be reckoned with, an earth-shaking 10 on the Richter scale (that’s about a 7.8 on the new US scale). I believe in love as a psychic mover and shaker with the power to transform and transmute. Love is the answer to deep alchemical riddles, and love is they world’s safest compass. It cannot be foiled by magnets or derailed by the Bermuda Triangle. I may regret some things I’ve done in my life that might have wasted time, but I do not regret love.
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