I spent the better part of my day today applying to a television writing program with the Sundance Film Festival. It was not your typical application process, where you submit your script and logline, pay your $50 application fee and then you’re done. For this application, I had to answer a series of essay questions, which is a type of writing that I have not engaged in with any regularity for <checks watch> about a hundred and seventy-five years.
But write those essays I did. And as it turns out, it was a fantastic way of clarifying some ideas for my long-suffering TV pilot “Calamity Jen” that I feel will benefit not only that piece, but any and all of my future TV writing projects.
Now, the odds that I will actually get into this program at Sundance are just slightly better than my odds of winning the lottery or being struck by lightning. But, you know, nothing ventured, nothing blah, blah, blah.
Still, I hate to think that any form of writing I engage in will go to waste. And so, for your reading enjoyment, I present one of those said essays. The questions posed to me for this particular essay were:
“What is your personal connection to the material? Why are you the best person to tell this story? Why tell this story now?”
For context, the logline for “Calamity Jen” is: After a series of climate-related disasters devastate the country, a once promising young actress attempts to rebuild her life by joining an inept theater troupe as they navigate a lawless, post-apocalyptic America.
Here’s what I came up with, in exactly the 250 words I was allotted …
***
There’s only one place I’ve ever felt I truly fit in — with my community of theater misfits.
Maybe because of this, I’ve always loved the vicarious thrill of dystopian fiction. My favorite books are “The Stand,” “The Road” and “Station Eleven.” I was obsessed with “The Walking Dead.” “The Last of Us” now promises to surpass that.
And that episode of “The Twilight Zone,” where the world is annihilated and Burgess Meredith’s sad little bookworm finally gets the chance to read all the books he wants? Those crushed glasses will haunt me until I die.
But consuming all those stories left me with a nagging hypothetical: if society collapsed, what would I DO?
And it may not be hypothetical! The planet is dying! We’ve endured a global pandemic, and experts think it may not be the last! America, that shining city on a hill, is so fractured that democratic self-rule may become a thing of the past!
So, yeah. That question of what I would do in the Apocalypse has nagged at me.
But if the pandemic taught me anything, it’s that theater people like myself will keep finding ways to put on shows, even if it’s over Zoom.
And that may not be a bad thing! Because when the world is at its lowest, that’s when we need art the most. I think stories like “Calamity Jen” need to be told. And if we can have a few laughs along the way, then so much the better.
Geoffrey Scheer 