A little while ago I was sitting in Mohegan Sun’s sporting arena for the Connecticut boys’ basketball state championship games. I had been thinking about what was said about composition in one of my film classes, mostly focusing on how a filmmaker is always aware of his surroundings and has an eye for what would be nice visual shots, or compositions. I happened to be seated near the end of the court, just near enough to the middle so that I was past where thesideline and baseline meet, and I had a perfect view of a really great shot. From my seat I could see right into the hallway leading from the player’s locker rooms to the court where the players make their entrance. However, it was not the players that I was focused on. There was a man sitting in a chair, likely a security guard of some kind, just sitting by himself throughout the entire game. He was framed so nicely by the entrance, and was so far away on the opposite side of the court, at a perfectly unnatural angle, that I was frustrated and disappointed I could not shoot it and save the shot for something, anything. There was something that really fascinated me about this person sitting by himself, while a crowd filling the arena all focused on the players in the game, the players focused, of course, on the game.
Ever since I was little I’ve love to people watch. I’ve always been curious about different people, their motivations, who they are and who they’re trying to be. Who they really are. Their ambitions. If they have any ambitions. What kind of home life they have, if their parents are divorced, if they’re happy, sad, lonely, etc. Anything. I could sit in a coffee shop and watch the people there and those that pass outside probably all day. In fact, I dont even go to the library much because it’s actually too much of a distraction, I just watch. Instead, to do work I have to find somewhere I can be by myself.
That said, I realized what I already knew intuitively, just never really thought about it in such a way, never tried to label my thoughts. Everyone has a story. Every single person. It seems impossible to go through life without overcoming obstacles along the way, without constant conflict, tension. There are happy moments as well as sad, some difficult some easy. In screenwriting, you focus on those conflicts, tensions, and obstacles, and create a story with set-up, climax, and resolution. You amplify the struggles and conflicts, and cut out the rest of the boring parts that fill in time in real life.
While I sized up my perfect shot of this person sitting in the chair, thousands of people completely oblivious to him during the game, I found my thoughts slipping from the game itself to what this person’s story was. What struggles or conflicts had he overcome? What things had he done in his life? What were some of his accomplishments, and what were some of his regrets. Did he take any chances or play it safe? What kinds of relationships had he been in, was he currently in love or had he been previously? Was he still searching?
I realized that in our society no one really cares about one another. We all love to talk about ourselves and our own problems and successes and issues, but never listen and learn from one another. In a time when our tools and abilities to communicate with computers and cell phones have no limit, no one really truly gets to know one another. People aren’t interested in other people unless they have done something that fascinates us, which in America doesn’t seem to be much. Why do we care about Paris Hilton, and what she does with her life, honestly? Why do people care what musicians and actors think about politics or the government or the war?
I read a lot, and I always found the stories of how people that became famous or prominent in society always had such great background stories. Now I’m starting to think that once again we all have intersting aspects of our lives, peaks and downfalls, overcome conflicts to get to where we are. Once again, it is likely the skill of the journalist to take these facts and accentuate them to a level of mystique, to almost dehumanize someone by putting a celebrity on a pedestal above other humans, while smartly cutting out any boring, regular-day information about that person that would make us as consumers put the magazine or book or newspaper down. Its an intersting cycle.
I think regular day people are just as interesting as the people that are in the news every day, or on Entertainment News television. I am more curious about that person in the chair at the game than I am about what Kanye West has for breakfast or what Angelina Jolie’s dieting regimen is. A while back I remember talking to a security guard here at Endicott for almost an hour and a half in between him signing people in. I found out a lot about him in that brief time. He loved cars, and had spent most of his life working on them, and was proud of the cars that he had bought and built up, and talked about his past cars as if they were past wives. I learned that he did have past relationships, and was going through a rough time in his marriage at the time. He loved his daughter and was extremely proud of her, she was graduating from BU with a degree in English and I believe looking to earn a law degree afterwards. He had recently had heart surgery, and because of it could no longer work in his business with cars, which seemed to break his heart in my opinion. He couldn’t sleep at night, so he figured why not work nights here at Endicott in the mean time.
I never saw him again, but I learned a lot about someone I had just met, and I didnt have to say more than ten words, just listen. He, like everyone else, had a story. I want to be an artist, and as an artist focus on the motivations of human behavior and the affects things that go on in our world and in life have on us and the way we act. So in having those ambitions, I feel it is part of my job, my responsibility to experience as much life as I can – the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, and everything in between, so that when it calls for it when writing or filming a scene, I can have a certain experience to fall back on and empathize with, so that I can try to understand the way someone would act in that particular situation.
