Mario Muscar

 

Medium-Short

by Jason Gonzalez

 

 

“Yes” was the last thing I expected to hear. To be honest, I had bullshitted my way through most of the pitch and felt that it was so malformed an idea that this collection of group-think, TED Talk aficionados would pick it to death before it had a chance to leave the conference room. This is the kind of conference room that is a death chamber for ideas - with its bottled water atop a Swiss-minimalist, long table set in a space trying desperately to pass as “converted industrial” - High ceiling is laced with exposed ductwork and wiring that trails down to Edison bulbs that illuminate the banal screen prints of text lock-ups mounted on matte painted walls (3 of which are the same color, but one wall has the obvious and unfortunate task of embodying this company’s desperate need to come across as creative, clever, and perhaps even “rebellious”  by being a bright and contrasting color - a shade I can only describe as “electric puce”). This place was far too ripe with the amenities of modernity to have been shoehorned in to a historic bulling; this was a facility built to appear ‘reclaimed” - manufactured hip creed - a poser of a structure. But there it was; in this shrine to vapidity, I got my first “yes”; my first shot at being the professional I always wanted to be. I regretted it almost the second I heard the word.

 

I have been a professional creative for nearly 20 years now and have had my share of myopic, wrong-headed, and even shitty projects, but, until now, I had always relegated that kind of occupational compromise to my advertising work. Since the preponderance of my comic book work had been either for myself or for free, I was afforded the luxury of creative control. My personal project had been doing well for me and gained a bit of Indy notoriety within the industry - I was becoming the kind of artist that other artists loved, but had been friend-zoned by casual fans. I never wanted to be the guy drawing “The Avengers” for millions of fans to read; my style was far too niche for that, but I don’t want to be the Alban Berg of comic book artists either. I suppose there is a fine line between “making a living” and “selling out”, but, from my position within the industry, I could not even see the state in which that border might reside and I welcomed any tectonic shift in my career that would allow me the chance to explore where that line lay. When this movie studio emailed to praise my work and ask if I was open to working on projects that I didn’t create, I didn’t think twice about meeting with them and seeing what they had in mind.

 

I should mention that this was not my first flirtation with Hollywood. Some time ago, a friend of a friend had become the head of an animation studio and me and my project were recommended as a potential property to develop. Thus began a long series of lunches, meetings, and a revolving lineup of agents, producers, studios, managers, and myriad conference rooms - all designed and decorated in near identical manner  - and all to no fruition, but the lunches were great. LA is a great food city, if you know where to go. That seems to be these executives chief qualification: good taste in restaurants. They certainly didn’t share my taste in art or storytelling. But, then again, Hollywood isn’t necessarily in the business of art; they aren’t even in the business of entertainment. Like all big business, Hollywood is in the business of making money - entertainment just happens to be the lion’s share of conduit they chose to achieve this. The executives always seem to resent this unfortunate, squishy creative element in their otherwise rigid, yet simple math equation. Resent might be the wrong word - “envious”, maybe - they do love to try and play “creative” when given the chance; this is why the invented notes. And so my project was to be smothered beneath a ream of well-intentioned, though, ultimately, torpid notes and would never happen. Looking back, I should have realized that they weren’t interested in my ideas, just my property and skills. They wanted me, like most who are new and unestablished in the entertainment machine, to sign away my life and be happy for the chance to do so. The subversive in me took no proletariat posture against the big corporation on this issue; instead the uncompromising artist in me took the position of a petulant child who had to have things his way. Either way, my principles remained unblemished and my project remained unmade. All this is not to set the scene with myself cast as the consumed artiste who would not be seduced by the evils of Hollywood, but, rather, to illustrate that my eyes were wide open when I decided to engage with this studio.

 

I am from Los Angles, but have been exiled to Phoenix for the past 20 years (my ex-wife and children keep me tethered to the Valley of the Sun). It doesn’t take much baiting to entice me from my spider hole and out to the coast. As a professional freelancer, there is no time to request off, no supervisor to notify, and no one to cover my workload; I just go. Go out to LA to begin what I am sure is a Quixotic quest. After a few email exchanges and phone calls, we had set this meeting for 4 weeks from the last contact. During the course of our correspondence (and a few electronically signed NDAs), the nature of the project is revealed to me.

 

“What do you know about ‘Ferguson’?” - Melinda Lowe, VP of Marketing, asked.

 

“The city, the shooting, or the protests?” - I ask

 

“The Movie.” - she replies.

 

“Oh ya, I didn’t think that was out yet.” It was explained that, even though the wide release of the film had yet to take place, the Oscar-qualifying release into small, art house theaters had already happened and was getting “great word-on-the-street”. I explained that I hadn’t seen it yet (and didn’t really intend to), but had heard that it had something to do with that photographer, Wilder Matthews. “True.” Melinda went on. And then she explained that the movie was based on photo essay that Matthews had done over the course of the “civil unrest” surrounding the “Ferguson incident”. This kind of wordsmithed, PR-speak should have given me pause, but the casualness with which all of the raw human emotion was being summarized and commodified stir my Imp of the Perverse.

 

“I’m not sure I can see where I could be a part of this project. I mean, did you want me to illustrate a poster? But, if it’s been in limited release already, I’m assuming it already has a poster - or did you want to do an alternate poster like a Modo sort of thing?”

 

“We want to do a graphic novel.” she said.

 

“Isn’t the original photo essay kind of the ‘visual narrative’ of the story already?“

 

“We want continue the story from the movie. We took some artistic license with the narrative to make a more cohesive and relatable story in the film. Amalgamated some characters. Cut out others. The screenwriter and director had a real ‘vision’ of what they wanted to say and we want to explore continuing that narrative.”

 

“And you want me to draw it? Or write and draw?”

 

“Both.”

 

In the intervening weeks, I had a chance to watch a screener of the movie and do a little research on Wilder Matthews and his original photo essay. “Artistic license” was a bit of an understatement. The movie essentially tells the backstory each of the main subjects featured in Matthews’ photo essay and the events leading up to the moments captured in the photographs. It really is a beautiful tapestry or 6 or 7 individual and interwoven storylines that coalesce at the first protests. The art direction is amazing and the way it is lit and filmed is breathtaking; the Director of Photography needs an Academy Award for this. Despite some of the familiar tropes of inner-city life and the Black experience in America, it actually is a pretty good movie. After I see the movie, I decide to research the actual events - thanks goodness for the IMDB “Trivia” section. This is where the movie begins to unravel for me. Turns out that Matthews had compiled the photo essay from images he took from many different protests all around the country in 2014; not just Ferguson. In fact, less than a third of the photos included were from Ferguson. Of the iconic images included in the movie, only 2 were actually from Ferguson. The backstories were all fabricated whole cloth. None of the facts about the actual people in the images were even sought out, nor are they even remotely true. All of the script gymnastics that had to happened to intertwine these images into a story must have been tremendous. This is why Matthews (according to IMDB and Wikipedia) has completely severed any and all association with the film even though one of the characters in the film is the “photographer”- a fictionalized version of himself created out of notes and the need to have a narrative “through line”. I wonder if the studio asked him first to help create this “sequel” to the story. I wonder if that is why they want it to be drawn now, so there is “true” side to the story - just the one they made up in some conference room. I wonder all of this as I head West. Toward the land of my birth; the place where they make everything up and the continent ends. It is a place of creation and terminus. I contemplate narrative as the human condition and plasticity of truth and art’s relation to it. I think about how Picasso once said “Art is the lie which enables us to realize the truth.”, or, at least, he was purported to have said this, but I’m sure he said something more like: “El arte es la mentira que nos permite comprender la verdad ” - he was Spanish after all - and is quoting him in English a type of “artistic license”? Unlike Matthews, would Picasso have been complicit with his translation?

 

Mostly I wonder what the hell I am going to say in this meeting? They asked me to bring in some ideas, and, after nearly a month to think about what I might want to do continuing the story in comic book form, I have next to nothing. I keep getting caught in the idea that I am being asked to create a comic book adaptation of a photo essay that was turned into a movie. This comic book is surely going to be used as a pitch for a sequel to the movie and, if that happens, I’m not even sure what level of meta that movie will reside on.

 

Four and a half hours in to my drive, somewhere around Indio, I had finally have enough of an idea that I could pitch it. That’s not to say that I hadn’t yet thought of any approaches, but the vast majority of avenues I had contemplated were artistic dead ends, or worse yet, they were one-note solutions. The hardest part of being an artist (or professional creative) isn’t trying to come up with ideas; the challenge is gauging the efficacy of one of your ideas over the others without the benefit of any of them being manifest in any medium other than thoughts. Trying to vet which idea has “legs” and which ones are half-measures is what I am actually paid to do, not execution. I stop at a Starbucks in Cabazon, coffee-up, and jot some rationale notes in to my phone.  Twenty years in advertising and I am well-versed in the vernacular of selling ideas; I’ll try to work in the words “emblematic” and “congruous” - the “bottled water set” seem to love those words; though they have recently ousted “juxtaposition” and “confluence” - fickle. I only ever make notes; never write out what I’m going to say verbatim. I can never deliver with any sincerity and my focus on the script transmits as condescending. The truth is, I’m better off-the-cuff, or shooting from the hip, or pick your cliché; part of me needs it to be last minute and high-pressure. I’m not sure what this says about me, but I haven’t ever given amount of real thought - I’m not willing to “split the lark to find the music” as Emily Dickinson suggested. The pitch is never about the idea anyhow. The pitch is about conveying to the client that you have given real thought to solution and their faith in you is not misplaced. The pitch is about trust and an “idea timesheet” of sorts; you have to show that you’ve put in the hours. “How long did that take you to do?” - is the question that has punctuated the entirety of my artistic existence. It seems like an innocent question, and there was once a time when my response was a face-value accounting of my time spent on a project, but as I have grown older, I have unpacked more and more of the insidious nature of this query. As a child drawing, this was an honest attempt on my elders’ part to assess my level of enthusiasm or commitment to my craft; perhaps a loose attempt to gauge my passion for art. Once I engaged with art on academic level, this was a one of many means to qualify my grade on assigned work. Once I became a professional creative, this is now the measure of how to commodify my creativity; to quantify art at an agreed upon rate. I understand this compulsion; I get the need to set up a metric for compensation, but, in truth, the method undermines the very nature of creativity. Account Executives and Accountants need to bill for something, but “hours” is amongst the worst ways to judge this. Anyone who has ever set pencil to paper in an attempt to give an idea shape knows that sometimes you make mark after mark only to crumble the over-erased and smudged page to then free-throw the offending slate to some near-enough waste bin to then begin again until some workable idea makes itself seem present. Being a professional means this process is routine; and I am competent enough to know that the good work is just beyond the bad that requires me to exorcise it in this ritual. But, sometimes, and do mean rarely, I get an idea so apparent and insistent that I can scarcely keep up with its creation. It’s as if I am tracing a latent image that my subconscious is projecting onto the page. These ideas invariably have “legs”; the components rise from the idea organically and determined. These are those proverbial “standing in the shower” moments; bolts from the blue - profound and unassailable creativity. These are the ideas that win awards and RFPs. This type of creativity happens in a flash though, so to bill for them based on “how long it took me” would be a disservice to them. The hourly rate devalues this type of creativity. By the account’s standard of commodified creativity, these flashes of genius are less valuable than hours of pushing pixels around until I come up with a serviceable starting point of an idea. This does not motivate one to create brilliance, though I won’t allow the status quo to sap my artistic energies; even if it means underselling myself from time to time. I’m not saying that what I was going in to this meeting with was genius either, but, for now, it’s all I had.

 

After the Inland Empire’s traffic, after negotiating the 10 101 transition, and after 20 minutes of circling for parking, I arrive at the studios offices; a place just South of Hollywood Blvd. (a sidewalk made famous). The sterile lobby and aspiring receptionist led to the aforementioned conference room and the meet began. The greeting and then mutual admiration portion of the meeting concluded; the pointed question was asked.

 

“So, what have you got for us?”

 

I explained that I understood what the screenwriter and director were trying to do with them film. Contextualizing the moments captured in the photographs in a effort to give them more impact while elucidating the interconnectivity between all the characters (a clear metaphor for the connections between all Americans, or even, the world). The creation of the Photographer as a character was a mistake in my opinion. An audience surrogate is a narrative crutch, and, in this case, it blunted the impact of the movie. It created an unnecessary obfuscation and distance from the subjects of the film. We are observing a detached observer of events instead of connecting with the characters whose emotions fuel the storyline. The whole point of the protests was to share and spotlight the anger and pain of a marginalized community; this additional detachment erodes at the impact. When I saw the original photo essay, with its undeniable, striking images, I knew the history of those captured in the images; not the literal events, but the whole host of circumstance and story that led to those single moments. Though these stories are varied, my mind does not select a single narrative to explain the moment, but, instead, the moments are the culmination of all of those narratives; they are all stories at once. This is their power. This is art’s power. The movie had expelled those possibilities and then withdrew an additional step away. The movie was essentially a frame within a frame within a frame; I did not want the comic book to become another stratum of emotional compartmentalization. I want the comic to push in closer. Art is about choices; what to leave in; what to exclude. As an illustrator, my job is to abbreviate reality, not to reflect it. A photographer’s artistic synthesis is (amongst other things) about framing - how much or little context to include; where the lie of art finds its edges. I want to explore those edges. The comicbook should be from an unseen protagonist or protagonists’ point-of-view. You will see his (or her) hands and camera in the foreground with the image of what will be photographed on the camera’s screen; and, in the background, a broader view of the scene. The comic book will be commentary about commentary; a work or art about creating works of art. You will see the frame of the camera lens and it will force you to reconcile with the frame of the comic panel. It will emphasize the broader scope of existence by accentuating a narrowing of scope. The comic book should also be wordless; each panel only loosely a continuation of the action in the panel before - unencumbered by the literal. I want to deconstruct notions of narrative. - This is the bullshit that I walked in to this meeting. And this is what they said “yes” to.

 

This would have been great news if I had any idea how I was going to pull it off.

 

“Yes” in the room was such a rarity that I had no response for it. The talk of rate and deliverables was muted by shock and I am unsure of contractual stipulations volleyed or agreed upon. By the time I return to Phoenix, the first draft of a contract is in my inbox - the rate is enough to trump my concerns and I am quick to provide an E-signature. The first portion of my payment schedule arrives via wire. Now to begin. How to begin?

 

Cross-medium adaptation is nothing new to art, nor is cross-medium extrapolation, but these stakes are high. I am aiming for “Splinter of the Mind’s Eye” and hoping to dodge “Christmas Special”. The “signed-off on” methodology has solidified my strategy, but my tactics are still amorphous. As this is to be wordless, I don’t even have the luxury of a script that I can call a first draft. Distilling story into a series of images short be old hat at this point; pictorial representation of high concept began before Lascaux. The ancients fashioned their pigments from scorched wood and bone char; taking the remnants of the dead and giving life to ideas in permanent synthesis of their world. Art deals in ideas; representations. The artist, subject, medium, and viewer all create the work; each bring to the work their set of representational limitations. This story should about more than characters; it should equally be about the environment that they dwell in; the place, the community, the authority. How it informs their lives and how their lives inform the scenes. This feedback loop of institutionalized subjugation was always going to explode. Like all feedback, if left unattended, it will only grow to a deafening pitch. I begin to obsess about the environment that brought first hums of the feedback that engulfed this city, it’s a trick I employ to break a story; I obsess about details and hope to find an angle or cohesive attribute in the minutiae. What is the prevalent architecture of the area? What kind of tear gas do the police use? What are the majority of protest signs written on? All caps? What kind of camera was used in the original photo essay?

 

Equipment and accoutrement are always a good place to start. I begin to research cameras and after a bit, I conclude that modern, digital cameras are cold are remote and the playground of tech-heads obsessed with lenses. No one need know the “sunny 16 rule” anymore, or have a film speed preference. I am not waxing nostalgic or lamenting the bygone days of fixer baths and enlarger, but I do think that modern photography has created a greater chasm between the subject and artist. The photographer of old had to not only be there for the initial shot, but then process and shepherd the image into existence; PhotoShop just isn’t the same as wetting ones hands in a stop bath to ensure the perfect image; a perfect happenstance of chemicals and light. I understand the millennial obsession with antiquated technologies (record players, typewriters, et al) - they were robbed of a machine age and have the inherent human need to see how things work. You can’t see the gears turning on information architecture, but you can watch the needle drop onto a vinyl record or feel the film advance with your thumb upon a camera’s lever. Shutter speed and F-stop settings created an intimacy with you and your subject. The medium was an extension of the artist and now it is merely an intermediary; a middle man. Perhaps that was the real feat of Matthews’ essay; he captured such raw, smoldering humanity with such a cold instrument. When I see the long form of muscular young men, hands up and silhouetted against the brilliant flames, I can smell the smoke and feel the heat of both the fires and their outrage. Matthews wrote a treatise on the inequities of a free nation without scribing a single word. His poetry of passion better understood than any line of dialogue in the movie spawned from his efforts. Perhaps some ideas need not be translated. Some truths are only so when spoken in their native tongues. I think Matthews knew this and that is why he distanced himself from the movie, but still took the studio’s money. He knew that no four-quadrant film could assail the continuous-tone truth contained in his work; because it was never his, he had just been a witness. Having realized this, I now know what approach I should take for book: none.

 

I won’t do it. There is no room for me to succeed here; the best I could hope for is “competent”. I don’t want my first foray into the professional comics world to be mediocre at best. I can wait for a project that has more to offer than money. I’ll have to give the money back; I’ll have to make the money to give the money back - shit! That whole sentiment of “you can’t put a price integrity”, well, I kind of can. As I have this thought the phone rings; Melinda calling. I’m sure she wants to see how it’s going and I have yet to mentally script my speech conceding defeat; I’ll have to be agreeable, buy some time, and drop the job later in the week. I answer and she greets meet in a solemn tone. She explains that the CEO of her studio was reviewing the status of all current projects and that he did understand my tack on the “whole Ferguson thing”.

 

“Do you need me to come in and meet with him? Or, maybe write up a rationale for him to review?” - Like I said, I was not ready to seize this opportunity to drop the job. Coward - I know.

 

“No, his mind is made up. We’re going drop the project. You can keep the initial payment for the work you’ve done so far.”

 

I thank her for the opportunity and the compensation, then I double-down on feigning enthusiasm for the project that was to be. We both agree that it could have been great and it is a shame it will never see the light of day. As we say our goodbyes, she asks if I “would be available to do other projects for the studio?”

 

I say “Yes!”

 

I regretted it almost the second I heard the word.