If you've been yearning for a cabin in the woods or a room of your own in order to finish your masterpiece, you may want to reconsider the perfect conditions for creativity. Let Nick Schenk by your guide. In today's Los Angeles Times, there's an article by Patrick Goldstein about Schenk, who wrote the screenplay for the Clint Eastwood movie, Gran Torina.
Schenk says he wrote the script, using a pen and a pad of paper, sitting at night in a bar called Grumpy's in northeast Minneapolis. It was a good release for Schenk, who was holding down a series of day jobs, driving a fruit truck and doing construction work. "I just scribbled away every night," he told me. "The bartender there is a friend, so sometimes I'd ask him questions about where I was going with the story as I was writing. When it came, the words just came. One night, I knocked off 25 pages right there in the bar."
Twenty five pages in a night -- at a bar? There's more....
Schenk says he was told over and over not to write a script that had an elderly guy as its center. "They said it would never get made, because you're not supposed to write about old people, especially a guy that sounds like a super-racist," he explains. "But I'm not the kind of person that listens to that stuff. I just knew this character well. When I was working construction, I'd meet a lot of guys like Walt Kowalski. Because I liked history, I'd always be the one that the older guys on the site would tell their stories to."
The lesson? If you have a story to tell, just tell it.
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