Chasing Chase: How to Not Fade Away

On the last day of screenwriting class this semester, I asked my students if they had ever heard of Twin Peaks. If any of these students were even alive when it premiered in 1990, they would have been very young. Still, most of them had heard of the show and responded enthusiastically. Then I asked if they had ever heard of another series about the comings and goings of a variety of offbeat characters in a small, remote town, Northern Exposure, which also premiered in 1990. One student was vaguely familiar with it and not especially enthusiastic.

While I got caught up in the initial Twin Peaks mania, I began to feel that it was going nowhere fast. It was a very cool idea for a show without really being about anything. By the second season, the charm had worn off and watching became a chore.  The writers seemed to be making things up as they went along.

Northern Exposure did not grab me from the start but I liked it, stuck with it and think that it actually got much better as it went along. I believe the reason was that veteran producer David Chase was brought in to oversee the show. Every episode felt like an offbeat but ultimately rich and beautiful independent film. Maybe I was missing something there but, after an episode of Twin Peaks, I could usually say, “That was cool.” After an episode of Northern Exposure, I felt like I had something to think about and discuss with others.

Chase started in TV as story editor in the seventies on one my favorite shows, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, but his career really took off when he became a producer on the well-regarded hit show The Rockford Files.  Chase created the critically acclaimed but short-lived series I’ll Fly Away before coming to work on Northern Exposure. After Northern, Chase created the HBO  series, The Sopranos. My students would have been little kids and young teenagers when the show ran. Few, if any, had seen it, but when asked, most had heard of it.

To explain the significance of The Sopranos in the context of episodic TV, I said to them, “Without The Sopranos  we would not have had The Wire, Breaking Bad, Sons Of Anarchy or American Horror Story, to name a few.”

I saw David Chase’s feature film debut, Not Fade Away, the other night. Growing up in northern New Jersey in the sixties, Chase was, like many kids in the Beatles era, pursuing rock and roll dreams. He was a drummer in a number of bands before finally deciding to go to film school. Not Fade Away is about a young man in sixties north Jersey playing drums in a band and eventually going to film school.  I hated the film not just because it was an incoherent mess but because its creator fell into the same traps that so many other filmmakers have fallen into over the years --- self-indulgently recreating, reliving and, to some degree, re-inventing their past to make it interesting to themselves more than to an audience. Based on nothing but instinct, I am guessing that, at one time, David Chase had a relationship -- or wished he did -- with a girl who looks like the female lead in his film. So much in this film must have been of great personal significance to the filmmaker but winds up feeling empty and pointless to the audience.

All of this stuff gets back to something that I bring up on the first day of class every semester: the role of the artist in society. Artists take in the world, observe and consider some piece of the human experience and then represent (or RE-present) it in some form to an audience. In a best case scenario, a work of art provokes the audience, stirring emotions and ideas. Either the audience responds and relates to it or reacts against it. We all have different experiences and we all have different tastes. Yes, you should draw on personal experiences and feelings about things you have seen and done; they should inform your work, but you have to remember to say something about the world other than that it exists. The producers of Not Fade Away clearly took great pains to be extremely accurate about period details. The problem is that we do not go to movies to see great production design; we go to see good stories about interesting characters working through circumstances that, in one way or another, we relate to, think about, and take something away from, deriving a new sense of the world and our place in it, whether we know it or not.

I tell my students on both the first and last days of class that, as artists, they need to decide what they want to be and what kind of work they want to do. They should be provocative; that is, create work that not only entertains but also strikes a chord and makes people think or feel something about the world around them, either on a small, intimate, personal level or on a broader, grander scale.

They cannot -- well, they should not -- spoon feed the audience simplistic, meaningless junk. I compare movies to food. There are health food movies and there are junk food movies. 

Their work should not just sit there like a bag of chips. Of course, as I tell them, people like chips, and following that model, like junk food movies. One can earn a pretty solid living making junk food.

All of the students in my class will be graduating in the next year or two. One way or another, all of them want to make a living in the film industry. Making art and making a living can be tough to combine.

I read a screenplay last week and I am getting paid to evaluate it. The script was in really bad shape and I dreaded the idea of talking to the writer, telling him how much I didn't like it. While I knew that I couldn't tell him it sucks, I could point out what is wrong with it, what is right with it and what it needs in order to be a good movie. I just got off of the phone with the writer. He knows that it needs work and he was really receptive to my ideas for it.  I am very likely to get hired to re-write the screenplay.  I will  find something in this story, something I can work with, something that I can make entertaining and, if I am lucky, meaningful. I will do my best on the job and, if I do my best, it just might wind up being a pretty decent screenplay. So, do I put myself through this? Why am I going to work so hard on it? Because this is what I want to do for a living.