INT. UNIV. TEXAS COMMUNICATIONS BUILDING A DAYWhen I was in college, my first ambition was to be a disk jockey. Of course, you couldn't take any classes in what you actually wanted to learn until you had done with all your required classes. By the time I took my first radio class the first semester of my junior year, I had already started reviewing movies for the student paper. The radio class turned out to be rather discouraging, and in those days the University of Texas's radio station was the primary NPR station for the whole region and they didn't let any of the students near it, so I had no opportunity to get any actual experience. I did learn to cut and splice audio tape, though, a skill I have not had the opportunity to apply since.
Having been discouraged from becoming a disk jockey, I switched to the film criticism program, which was conveniently in the same department, so all I had to do was sign up for different classes. I did well in film criticism, and the department head even asked me one day if I had ever considered getting a graduate degree. "No way," I said. "Every one of your grad students is a total asshole, and I don't want to become like them."
That's a true story. Well, thirty years later one of those grad students is in charge of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences screenwriter fellowship program -- which is not, I think, the same thing as actually being a successful screenwriter. At least the imdb doesn't list his name anywhere. But as the formatting examples on that page show, he does have a very good grasp of how to format a script.
One of the reasons I disliked that guy was that there was a fellow student we were both hot for, a girl who lived in my co-op named Bernice. My opinion at the time was that he treated her in a dismissive manner, and I could treat her much better. I didn't get much chance to, because she moved out of town. About 18 months later, when it was time for me to leave town too, she found herself in San Francisco, and when I complained to her in a letter that I was getting bored with Austin, she said, "Why don't you come out here?"
Thus it was that I moved to San Francisco in April, 1979. Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I had had the guts to move to New York instead. I would have been around a flourishing writers' scene that included Kathy Acker, Jim Carroll, and (if I really wanted to write about film) Jonas Mekas. Instead I came out to SF and did contact improvisation. I didn't really start focussing on writing until about 1985, long after my fascination with movies had waned.
We take so many detours in our lives not knowing what we really should be doing. If I had gone to New York in 1979, 23 years old and full of piss and vinegar, I might have got somewhere. On the other hand, I might have been crushed by New York; living in Austin with a bunch of stale hippies was probably not the best preparation for moving to New York at the nadir of its urban decay. And I have a fine full life here in SF, and thirty or forty more years of writing left in me. I still might get somewhere.
