A New York State of Mind

Well, I'm in NYC right now, sitting in a room on the upper east side (the picture to the left is the view outside my window). Tomorrow morning, my colleague and friend Brian and I will meet with a producer who is interested in turning my first feature, The Proper Care & Feeding of an American Messiah, into a hybrid reality/mock doc TV show.

The whole thing is just weird on so many levels. Good-weird, but weird nonetheless.

I was born in New York, so visiting always feels like coming home in a way, but we left NY when I was eight year old, so I am completely lost in the city, no different than any other tourist.

I was reflecting today about the path my life has taken the past several years. Since I took the job teaching film at Baylor, I've been blessed in many ways. I was able to start making films regularly, for one thing, which yielded my first feature film. That film yielded several clips that I put online. Those clips were seen by a producer who thought the character in them was real. So impressed was he that he wanted to make a show out of him. That's a testament to the performer, Dustin Olson, as well.

And that's what has me sitting here in NYC right now.

That move to Texas also provided me the opportunity to meet Brian Elliott, who has become a close friend and trusted collaborator - he, too, is part of the reason I'm sitting here right now, because he produced the film and helped make it happen when I had been at Baylor for less than a year and knew nothing of the city and had no way to pull off the logistics of a feature.

This is all apropos of nothing, really. Nothing may come of this meeting tomorrow, though I hope something does. But really, I was just doing some thinking about the weird ways life works out, and how my move to Texas eventually led me here.