The other day, I realized that a major reason I write, and the only reason I do photography is because I read Rebel Without a Crew by Robert Rodriguez when I was eighteen.
I've mentioned how I started writing because I needed scripts to turn into movies. I'd started that before I read Rebel without a Crew, but I never committed to making a movie until that book. He made a feature film for $7000 in the '90s and I had some money saved up, so I figured in the 2010s I could make one for way less. I started "production" of my latest screenplay. I had a shot list, a cast – friends, not actors - and crew - same friends, but mostly me, and I decided to take the true financial leap: I bought a camera and some audio equipment. It was a full-on production, and this was going to be real.
... Well, it folded for several reasons, mostly the drive of a bunch of 18 year olds who were clearly not in film school, getting distracted by other things.
But I had this camera now.
I took some photos around campus, mostly messing about with it, but found I liked the process. I tried my hand at a documentary on one of the clubs I participated in and that went really well. A year later I brought it along on a road trip and my love of photography started in earnest. I still try to go out birding once a week or so and take a few photos. My camera comes along on almost every adventure I go on.
It’s all art.
All from a book I read when I was eighteen and wanted movies to be my life.
It’s all art though.
I don't think that hit me as much until years later.
I remember a friend in college - we made movies together in high school - who had a camera. I told him about my dabbling in photography, about town and about campus. His response was: "That sounds fun in nature, but there's nothing to take pictures of around here." We were in a small Midwest college town. Of course there was nothing to take pictures of.
That didn’t stop me. I kept messing about and taking pictures. They're not great, but you can see how much I learned from them when you look at my photos today.
I realize now, the biggest lesson I took from Robert Rodriguez was that its ok to play in your room.
You can make such amazing art, right where you are. He did it in Mexico, at his friend’s little ranch, with a bus his cousin owned, a friend acting for him and his buddy's turtle, because then it would look like they had an animal wrangler on set and give the movie just that bit more gravitas of "being a real production."
It was always a real production.
Maybe your room doesn't have all that, and you make a movie set in a dead building, with a hallway whose doors open to a different part of a man's life every time - like I did.
Maybe your art isn't film, and you instead take photos of your lil Midwest college town and learn how to use a camera and a subject and light and all the fiddly bits of a lens to get beautiful pictures.
Or your art is writing. Your room is much bigger if your art is writing. You can put whatever you want on the page. The best art, though, comes from someplace you know. Your room is the experiences you've lived that you can bring to the page. You don't do this one to one, but you can do it surprisingly close.
Take the "failed" - but still so much fun - pronghorn hunt you and a buddy went on years ago, turn that into a western about a man named Cody walking across Nebraska/Colorado. Take your loneliness and tell a story of a man after the end of the world hanging out in a shoe store. Use the white noise machine your fiancé sleeps with as the antagonist in a dystopian world.
Play in your room.
It may just be a Newstrom thing, but when my parents were tired of me and couldn't kick me outside, I was told to play in my room. All I could play with was what was there. I wasn't wanting for toys and books and Legos, but still, there was a new constraint. It didn't stop me from playing.
That's what art is, play turned professional.
Take a look at your own room and I'm sure you won't find it wanting of anything. You've got all the toys you need right there.
I'll be giving Rebel Without a Crew a reread this year. I haven't read it in full since I was eighteen, which was a good while ago now. Even if it doesn't hit the same - which I doubt - that doesn't matter. It changed me.
It helped make me the artist I am today.
I still play in my room. My life is what ends up on the page, like every artist before me or after. It isn't a hindrance. It frees me.
I can make art wherever I am. You can too.
Love ya,
Max
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