Week 6: Sweeping Sand Around?

I have been very busy lately, which is different from saying I have accomplished anything. That distinction has started to bother me, mostly because so much of the work I am doing now leaves behind very little evidence that anything happened at all.

There is a kind of work where the result is obvious. You clean the kitchen and now the kitchen is clean. You lift something heavy and, assuming you have not misunderstood the basic premise of weightlifting, you lifted it. You finish a screenplay and can point to the PDF. Film development is apparently not that. Film development is emailing somebody because somebody else told you to email them, having a call so they can tell you to email a third person, then receiving a document from that person explaining why you need to talk to a lawyer. The lawyer needs a budget. The budgeter needs production assumptions. The payroll company wants to know when you are shooting.

You are not shooting. You are trying to figure out how to shoot.

After enough of this, the whole thing starts to feel like sweeping sand around. Not building a sandcastle. That would at least leave you with a castle. Just moving sand from one place to another and periodically standing back to admire the improved distribution of sand.

This was a very successful week, which is the annoying part.

The Battles of Birdtown continues to become more real in ways that are difficult to photograph. I have been talking to people in Missouri about what it would actually mean to bring a production there, not the ceremonial version where everybody says it would be great for the community and somebody takes a photo holding a clapboard, but the real version. Where does everybody stay? Who handles payroll? Who knows the incentive? What does the budget preparer need? What has to exist legally before somebody gives us money and we accidentally create a complete fucking mess?

I have now had conversations with economic-development people, production professionals, lawyers, payroll companies, filmmakers, community organizations and people connected to veterans and military families. A few weeks ago I could not have named most of these people. Now some of them have my screenplay, some are sending me documents, some are introducing me to other people, and some seem to genuinely want the movie to happen.

None of this means the movie is happening.

I keep reminding myself of that because it would be extremely easy to start narrating all of this like I am three calls away from principal photography. I am not. I am three calls away from three more calls. Probably an invoice. Maybe a spreadsheet. Almost certainly another person whose job I did not know existed.

Still, that is considerably different from sitting at home wondering how movies get made.

The rest of the career stuff has taken on a similar quality. King of the Dead is locked. Standby is locked. Other scripts are still moving through rewrites and reviews, but I have finally started getting better at recognizing the difference between “this story still has a problem” and “I am moving words around because moving words around feels safer than sending the thing to somebody.”

That has been a useful correction.

I have also stopped pretending every screenplay I have written belongs on the same conveyor belt. Some of them are movies I could conceivably initiate myself, or at least help get moving from the ground up. Others need producers, financiers, buyers, managers or companies with resources I do not have. Some should be sold. Some should be optioned. Some might be directed by me if the right situation comes together. Some absolutely should not be the first feature I attempt to personally drag uphill with a rope around my waist.

This revelation would probably have occurred sooner if I had ever once looked honestly at the budgets implied by my own writing.

Better late than never.

The outreach itself has also gotten less stupid. At the beginning of the Revamp, there was a certain caveman logic to it: find person, email person, find more person, email more person, eventually career happen. There was value in that. I needed to get over the weird fear that contacting people was somehow an intrusion. I needed reps. I needed to learn that most emails disappear into the void, some people answer, some people are generous, some people are busy, and none of it is a moral referendum on whether I deserve to be doing this.

But I am getting more selective now. The question is less “Who can I contact?” and more “Why am I contacting this particular person?” That sounds like a concept I should have absorbed before the age of forty-three, but a lot of the Revamp has been like that: discovering basic adult ideas late, then becoming extremely organized about them.

My calendar is a good example.

It now looks like a regional airport departure board. Work, gym, running, Charlie, writing, outreach, film development, travel prep, groceries, grooming, skin, teeth, laundry. I color-coded it by category because apparently I have decided that the answer to having too much going on is to make the chaos visually appealing.

This is either a significant organizational breakthrough or the moment the entire project became a diagnosable condition.

I do like being able to look at a day and immediately see what kind of day I have built. There have been too many years when the schedule was basically work, get tired, look at phone, wonder why nothing is happening, sleep, repeat until death. So I will take the colors.

That might be the larger change underneath all of this. The Revamp started as a reaction to things I did not like about myself or my life, but it has gradually turned into a project about maintenance, which is much less exciting and probably much more important.

Things like grooming, skincare, dental care, hydration, training, sleeping at a sane hour, walking Charlie, keeping food in the apartment, doing laundry, cleaning the place before it becomes evidence. These should not be accomplishments. They are simply things adults are supposed to do. But the entire reason I started this was because I had gotten very good at treating basic maintenance as optional while giving unlimited energy to whatever felt urgent.

The urgent thing always won.

Then one day I looked like shit in a stadium bathroom.

So.

Progress.

I am also getting ready for Austin, which turns out to contain an absurd number of smaller tasks inside the sentence “I’m going to Austin.” Flights, hotel, rental car, festival schedule, clothes, shoes that will not destroy my feet, what I need on my phone, what needs to be printed, who might be there, who I should talk to, who I should absolutely not pursue through a hotel lobby like a man selling timeshares, and how Marcel and I are even getting to the airport.

We have apparently reached the phase of adulthood where airport transportation requires scenario planning involving two cars, two wives and potentially some unlucky friend.

I am looking forward to the trip. I am also planning it like the invasion of Normandy.

The checklist is still useful through all of this because the checklist was supposed to be the point. Not the aesthetic of self-improvement. Not buying a lot of new things. Not making an elaborate productivity system so I could spend six months admiring the productivity system. The actual list.

Take care of my body. Read. Sleep. Meditate. Do the breathwork. Look after myself. Look after my home. Do something meaningful for the career every day. Send the work out. Ask for things. Talk to people. Stop waiting until I somehow feel like the kind of person who is allowed to do those things.

A lot of those boxes are getting checked now.

Not all of them.

I scheduled several Birdtown finance blocks this week with great confidence and did not do a fucking one. They looked excellent on the calendar. Really first-class blocks. Very professional. They have now been moved into next week, where I assume they will spend the weekend reflecting on what they have done.

I also have not finished the book I have been reading, so there is now a two-and-a-half-hour appointment on the calendar that could basically be titled SIT DOWN AND FINISH THE FUCKING BOOK.

This is what growth looks like sometimes.

Sometimes you become more disciplined. Sometimes you discover that apparently you need to schedule a formal meeting with yourself in order to read.

What is different now is that I am less interested in using those misses as proof that everything else does not count.

I used to be very good at that. I could complete twelve things, miss three, and somehow decide the three unfinished things were the real story. There is something perversely satisfying about that because it means the standard never has to move. You can always be disappointed. There is always another box to use as evidence against yourself.

I do not want to do that anymore.

The missed things are real. They do not erase the other things.

The career is moving. The scripts are moving. People are reading them. Birdtown has gone from something I talked about wanting to make to something other people are now spending their own time thinking about. I am having more conversations, making more asks, following more threads, taking better care of myself, and becoming slightly less likely to disappear into my apartment for three weeks because I am “working.”

That last part may be as important as any of it.

The Revamp checklist, six weeks in, does not show some completed transformation. It shows a lot of small systems finally beginning to function at the same time. The physical work is happening. The career work is happening. The writing is moving. Reading is back. The house is being maintained. Charlie gets his walks. The calendar is structured. The clothes are better. The asks are bigger. The conversations are better. The follow-through is better.

There is still an absurd amount to do.

Most of it will probably continue to look unimpressive while I am doing it. Send this. Read that. Call this guy. Ask this woman. Go run. Walk Charlie. Drink water. Rewrite ten pages. Do laundry. Find a lawyer. Buy dog food. Try not to become an asshole.

Sweep a little more sand around.

Every once in a while, look up and see if the shoreline moved.