Beginnings
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On New Year’s Eve 2019, also my mother’s birthday, I signed a contract for the option of a short script, In the Desert of Dark and Light. It was a proof of concept to help raise money for the feature. Jason Gurvitz, founder of Green Dog Films, had read a query I’d sent in July of 2018 and planned to reach out to me as soon as he had time. That time turned out to be August 2019 – a baker’s dozen of month later. The query had been for the script, The Eagles of Kandahar, but it would take more money to make than he could raise. But he liked my writing and asked to see what else I had. After reading several other scripts, In the Desert of Dark and Light struck a chord with him because it involved immigration, the border, and the larger moral concerns surrounding this issue. It also attracted him because of his background as Spanish language translator, so much so he wanted to make it his directorial debut. As a writer this made me buoyant.
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After the initial email exchanges, Jason and I first met at the Neutra Gallery in the Silver Lake neighborhood in Los Angeles where I had a couple of photos on exhibit. He met my youngest daughter and my girlfriend before we talked about art and film. Before he left, we decided to meet up again soon for dinner with his wife and young daughter. We got together at the Annenberg Space for Photography(which has unfortunately closed permanently) in Century City. Ironically the exhibit was W|ALLS: Defend, Divide, and the Divine using images to interrogate “various aspects of wall – artistic social, political, and historical – in six sections: Delineation, Defense, Deterrent, The Divine, Decoration, and The Invisible.” In the Desert of Dark and Light is a story of border crossings in both the physical lines of nations and mental lines between sanity and madness, morality and immorality of individuals and of groups. After exploring the exhibit, we walked to a local restaurant and chatted about life, what we’d done, where we’d been, and what we hope to do as writers and filmmakers and as artists. He told me what hooked him in my query letter was my short bio and not the writing credits. It was my brief sentence about being a wildland firefighter and helicopter rappeller with a link to a more comprehensive bio where all my other jobs that would make me a “fascinating” guy to work with were listed, along with publications, and random blog posts. (Full disclosure: Bill Taub gets all the credit with helping me craft that query letter)
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By September I had begun writing the short based on the feature. He planned to shoot a proof-of-concept film to show potential investors to finance producing the feature. Jason had read the short story I’d adapted the feature from. “Red Flag Warning,” published in Narrative Magazine in 2008 after placing in one of their contests. It had been excerpted from an unpublished (and still unpublished) novel I’d been working on in grad school. The story had been inspired by my experiences fighting a wildfire on the New Mexico/Mexico border, having lived in southern Arizona as a kid, and my lifelong fascination with exploring notions of good and evil – Light and Dark. Richard Hugo said we spend our lives writing about our obsessions, and there is something in this story I need to tell: Novel – Short Story – Feature – Short Script – and hopefully back to feature. I may even resurrect the novel.
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Before Thanksgiving, I had a solid draft of the short had been completed. The process of notes back and forth with the director to make the script as strong as possible (more on that in a later blog post). The writer-director debates were not the nightmare I’d read about in so many screenwriter interviews or profiles and stories in script to screen in books. The process was creatively invigorating. Jason and I had the normal conversations that editors have with writers or say any group of students sitting in a workshop. We shared some of the same films as touchstones.
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Importantly, we shared the desire to tell this story on the border because it cuts across place, cultures, and time as the exhibition at the Annenberg Space for Photography illustrated in images. Borders are constructs of the last war just as refugees crossing borders are victims of wars or victims of the economic wars and the avarice of powerful nations. It is a moral issue and to tell the story through the lens of three perspectives is illuminating. The Rise from Darkness to Light, The Fall from Light to Darkness, and The Rock of Moral Clarity on which someone lives their life gives the narrative not an either-or morality tale, but a space where we find ourselves in world of contradictions to sort out. You, my friend, are in the desert looking for shade in the lee of a large rock.
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Jason and I shared the desire for authenticity in these perspectives to create a compelling narrative. The authenticity of a lived life and the emotional states of those in great duress in fear, desperation, grief, loss, along with hope, relief, joy, grace, and comfort no matter how small. We wanted an authenticity to the world of the story, the desert, and the lives of fictional people who the actors breathed life into, giving substance to these ghosts who have haunted my mind for years.
(To Be Continued)
