Steffany

Most of what’s been on my mind has been lingering there. I am unable to articulate everything, but at any given moment, I’m engaging in dialogue with myself about what has changed or remained the same in the past year. I know I’m not supposed to spend so much time looking backward, but it feels inevitable. I’ve also begun to come up with a list of goals as I move forward. It’s really important that I look ahead and not lose sight of the things that I want for myself. Let’s get it popping. I’m going to write extensively about one of my 2016 goals: writing a screenplay.

I’ve been putting this off for far too long. I have notebooks with dialogue scribbled in the margins and Word documents filled with poor attempts to fit my ideas into a screenplay format. Fuck that. The formatting is a bit stifling because I have very specific visuals I want articulated within certain scenes. It’s all in the details! You can’t shoot a scene at the house of a black grandmother without the big wooden spoon and fork set on the wall, between a picture of the first family and Martin Luther King, Jr. I’d rather have too much detail than not enough, but that’s just me.

My best friend for life just created her first film. It’s documentary-style, with her narrating over the footage. Each section of the movie focuses on a specific girl, all of them artists, and what inspires them and makes them tick. Just last night we went to Staples to print up mockups of the film poster. I have decided to make myself a one-woman street team—I’m going to promote the film, and help with social media strategy and marketing. I am beyond proud of her and it also had me like, “OK, Steff, let’s get it!”

They offer screenwriting classes at my school, but I don’t want to be graded on the process of learning how to figure the screenwriting thing out. I also don’t want to read and watch movies by and for white men who are seen as the geniuses of American cinema and who safeguard the industry I am going to break into. I mean, I get it. Citizen Kane is a masterpiece. And then if you want to get really artsy fartsy, you have to bring up the French New Wave. I mentioned I’d seen the movies around a bunch of film geeks, and was immediately quizzed. “What magazine did Truffaut and Godard work at before they decided to make films?”

“Cahiers du Cinema.” I say it was a little bit of “told you so” in my voice, because how dare they question me?

Helping my friend with her project makes me think that fertile environments for creativity are where you least expect them. My school is considered the breeding ground for great film, theater, and visual arts. However, I beg to differ. How much creative work can I achieve in a room of young men circle jerking to Pulp Fiction? Ask any person born in the ’90s who aspires to make films what their favorites are and they’ll tell you Pulp Fiction. I hate that people are so hellbent on watching movies they’ve been told are masterpieces. In my eyes, most of them are just OK. And yet, right there in that Staples, I probably could’ve masterminded something with my best friend. We’ve already come up with a concept that just needs a little more nurturing. It might actually get done.

I am confident that if my screenplay is great, with a little bit of grinding, nothing is unattainable. I’ve seen so many talented people scared to go forth and put their art out there. It upsets me a little bit, because I think of all the mediocre people with inflated egos I go to school with. In some cases, their lack of fear and their access to resources trumps their lack of talent. They’re examples of people who might fuck around and win an Oscar.

There’s this pathetic conversation I watch take place all of the time about what can be considered “real cinema,” and it upsets me because most of what is considered “real cinema” doesn’t have people like me in front of or behind the camera. Often, black directors do not get their just due, as we’ve seen with Creed, Straight Outta Compton, and Selma. (Ryan Coogler deserves a Best Director nomination.) I don’t know, maybe I’m ranting, but I’ve been thinking about all of this. Someone sent me a text message, someone I’d been sharing my ideas with for the longest. They wrote, “The world needs your art.” That’s just the message I’m trying to share with all of you. ♦