Street Players: A Screenplay
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Dear Reader,
This book is a screenplay I wrote in 2021. As anyone that is familiar with my work might already know: each year I write a new script and submit it to various screenplay competitions, the most notable one being The Academy Nicholl Fellowships. It’s not that I care about winning (although that would obviously be nice), I’d just really like to have a career in the film industry. I turn 30 years old next month, and it is quite clear to me at this point that those dreams will never happen in the way I wanted. I wanted to start my career in my 20s like all my cinematic heroes got to (QT, PTA, Wes Anderson, etc), but it’s over for me. I was born in the worst time in human history to be an ambitious & hopeful person, and I’m pretty much fucked like everyone else in my generation (you can read my novel The Lost Generation for more on that). But just because things are hopeless and we’re in the middle of a collapse, it doesn’t mean I don’t still write a script every year. “You never know the luck of a lousy puss,” as my mother would say. It’s important to keep trying in life even when things seem shitty. As luck would have it: this script was actually judged highly in the 2021 Nicholl Fellowship competition. I don’t usually get very far, but this time they sent me a letter saying it was among the Top 20% of all entries, keep writing, and all that other horseshit they tell losers.
Allow me to briefly introduce what the hell this script is. It was inspired by stuff like Pulp Fiction, Tarantino in general, HBO’s The Deuce, Blaxploitation cinema, Dave Chappelle, Patrice O’Neal, Iceberg Slim, and one of my favourite writers, the criminally underrated author Donald Goines. It’s about a group of pimps and their employees, the mafia, police, and a group of teenagers in NYC in the 70s who cross paths. Some of my favourite films are things that can’t really be easily defined as one or the other, and that’s what I wanted to do with this. It’s not solely a comedy or a drama, it’s kind of both. I had the idea for this movie in my head for the longest time, and when I finally sat down to write it I found it all came out very quickly, and I couldn’t stop when the characters got to talking.
The fun thing to me about writing screenplays is that I can write stuff I would personally pay to see. At this stage it is fairly obvious to anyone paying attention that the artistry of cinema is practically dead; there are only a small handful of artists actually making stuff worth seeing anymore. The world I wanted to be part of is now over. We used to let absolutely batshit crazy people write & direct films, and we’d get groundbreakingly great stuff. Now, only like 5 people are still allowed free rein. So with that being said; when I write a script I like to imagine that it’s actually going to get made, I’m working for a movie studio in the early 90s, and they’re actually funding it and everything. I know it sounds silly to say, but I like to fantasize that whatever I’m making is about to actually be seen and experienced by people. I don’t just write shit to shelve later, I write it to get made. In a perfect world my career would have started about 5 years ago, I’d have a mansion in Hollywood by now, I would’ve already been nominated for a couple Oscars, married to a blonde trophy wife, etc. A guy can dream.
Anyway, a small warning before you read this: it has very strong language, lots of racism, violence, and misogyny. Street Players is a world where pretty much everyone is awful. This is a script that would never get made today. I don’t think this darkness is a reflection on who I am in any way, I just have a very dark sense of humour I guess. It’s hard to explain to people that the same guy who donates to charity and is generally a decent human being can also somehow come up with very nihilistic, messed up stuff like this. So there it is: you’ve been warned. If you’re sensitive to things of that nature I’d suggest you skip this one. Watch a superhero movie or something if you want to turn your brain off, that’s pretty much what they’re there for.
