Creative choices

So, I have a creative project I'm working on that I'm super pumped about. I've been putting words down in some volume and all of that, but now I'm having this --

You see, it's a project whose natural home is as a movie, or series. Without getting into details, as Stephen King put it in On Writing, I'm writing with the door closed, not because I'm afraid of my idea being stolen. Honestly, the idea really is fantastic, but this feels more than anything I've ever had like it's my inspiration that's driving it and making it so exciting to me. I don't know what someone else might do with it, but it would definitely be different than what I'm doing.

Despite that, it feels like it's ideally at a scale that I'm not sure I could recreate. If this were 1992, I'd be imagining I could pull that together in some way, because the indie dream was alive.

But for a nearly 50 year old guy in 2019, it seemed like a lot of steps that might be higher than I know how to climb. My knees aren't what they used to be, after all.

I've thought a lot about ideas that could be made on a micro-budget and make that part of the aesthetic of the work itself, but I couldn't imagine a version of this that would work that way in my head.

So, I'd started writing it as a novel.

Now, for me, the tradeoffs between moviemaking and novel writing is one I'm always torn about at this point in my life. What with the aching knees and such. So, I was able to start writing it as a novel and, unusually, not hating my own prose writing that much. Like maybe I could get it somewhere that would work eventually.

But then I was listening to the Adam Conover podcast, as I'm wont to do. He had Matt Stoller, author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. I haven't read his book, although I have read The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by Tim Wu, so I come into the discussion of the dangers of monopoly with at least that much information.

So, this discussion, however, is specifically Why Monopoly Power is Killing Hollywood, which felt a little like reinforcement of the reasons I didn't want to even start this as a movie project, but on another felt like a gauntlet being thrown down. This is especially true considering the themes of this project.

None of this should be interpreted at reflecting a decision. Or a question for anyone else. Just an explanation of my own thought process.

Also, I highly recommend Stoller's It's Time to Break Up Disney: Part One and Copyright, Antitrust, and Disney's Monopoly.