|
It’s early 2019, and I’m on staff at another church in another city. I’m drafting curriculum and editing books and writing blogs, but when I’m hanging out with people, it’s the filmmakers. We go to each other’s houses to play Resident Evil on VR. Some of us have a scheme to crowdfund a board game. Years later, most of us would be in Atlanta working together but right now, I’m just kind of peripherally connected to a crew that knows each other. They make together. Making bonds you. Look at this piece, one of them tells me. He says they’re trying to make something for Easter, and last year this really made waves at Passion in Atlanta. Could I use it as inspo and maybe write something original that was like it? I was so excited. I’d never gotten to do anything like this before. What poet doesn’t relish the idea of a captive audience? Shoot, what writer doesn’t dream of hearing someone say “write me something”? I’m going to be honest, what I wrote was overlong and melodramatic—a habit I am still trying to break—but genuinely, to this day, I still think I had something there. It ended up being a dramatic monologue from perspective of the “good thief” on the cross. It didn’t quite have that smack of fresh that the inspiration did, but it had that smack of mine, and that was enough for me. I was excited to see what it would become. We sent the script out to an actor friend in LA, who sent us back what I’m pretty sure was the first third party performance of something I’d written. I wish I had kept it—or if I had kept it, that I could find it. Because that piece was soon dead in the water. That’s how it goes in this line of work. Most of the time it’s something entirely out of your control. They were going a different direction, there was going to be no budget, some set of cosmic misalignments forestall it indefinitely. Insert reason here. It wasn’t for me to know. Anyway. I forgot about it. New jobs, new cities, new years. It’s 2024 and Finished is collecting dust in a draft on my Google Drive. A lot of us have found ourselves in Atlanta, working at the place where the original piece of inspiration came from, and we are compiling pitches for Easter this year. Remember that piece we almost made back in Nashville, my buddy asks. What if we dusted that off? So I do. I break it out and spend a day chopping off a few minutes, tightening some screws, and prepping it to present to the team. They loved it. Suddenly we’re full steam ahead on this script as our “A” idea going into the pitch meeting, even though like one week earlier, I’d forgotten it even existed. My friend Toph is tapped to direct, and he approaches it like it’s a music video. We worked on putting a track together, he reached out to a spoken word artist in London named Joshua Luke Smith, and we put together the first fleshed-out draft of this piece in five years.
|
