Putting the Mega in Jesus Christ
I'm putting together two pitch packages - one for this site and one for a super secret project you'll hear nothing about until April at the earliest. While putting together the pitch for The Moose I'm compiling some stats on what I've done in the past year here. I isolated the publishable stories, not the blurbs or the ramblings. My original estimate for words published for this year-long project was 168,000 words – 240 stories in a year at around 700 words a piece. That’s close to three industry-standard novels.
The count so far, with seven stories left to go - I’m a couple of hundred words away from 200,000. If you add in the blurbs and the two weeks of guest stories there has been 276,443 wordspublished on the Moose in a year. If you add that little 50,000 word novel I wrote in November the number climbs up to 326,443 words in a year - and that's not counting the 17 Here's the Thing..., two books I edited and full-time job I worked. Not to pat my own back but "fuck yeah".
I don’t know - something to be proud of. And they’re entertaining, I think, people keep coming back – you know? The Saturday after this is all said and done I’ll post the numbers for the pitch packet including some thoughts on the experience, my favorite stories, shit like that.
But for now, seven stories to go.
_____________________________
First semester senior year I decided to try my hand at directing for my troupe’s Fall One-Act festival. I decided on a play, “Judgment Call” by Frederick Stroppel – a ten minute show about umpire’s dealing with life after a bad call leads to a player committing suicide.
Of course I did a baseball show, what did you expect?
I presented the play to my troupe and it was accepted, I began to prepare for auditions. There were three one-acts in the festival – Q was doing Nina Shengold’s “Anything for You” and this girl Katie was doing Israel Horowitz’s “Line”. Since my cast was all men and Q’s cast was all women we didn’t butt heads. But Katie – oh man did we get off on the wrong foot.
She wanted all of the best actors that auditioned with us and she wouldn’t budge. It got to the point where we had to get the president of the troupe involved and he had to basically tell her that she couldn’t have everyone she wanted, Q and I had the right to at least two of her first picks. I ended up nabbing two of the three actors I wanted and Q got one of the two he wanted.
Directing was fun and working with an all male cast made it more of a bonding thing than a work thing. We went to ballgames together, watched baseball movies – I tried to get these guys in a baseball state of mind. I stressed timing as being more important than the lines themselves – we’d have exercises where we’d sit around a table and deliver our lines while staying stationary to ensure we grasped the beats between lines, I was kind of notorious for putting a ruler to the knuckles if a line came too fast or too slow.
Another advantage of an all male cast – no-one will complain if you physically abuse them during rehearsals.
By the time the one-act festival rolled around my play was the tightest, and that’s more than my ego talking – everyone was saying it. Just delivered perfectly, everyone hit their lines just right and the comedy came out strong as did the drama. After the show people who’ve worked with us in the past were telling me they wanted to be in the next show I directed - I was even considering pitching a full length for next semester I was so excited with the response for this one.
But the theater gods had something else in store for me.
Before the second night of the one-act festival I was messing around on stage and belting out some show tunes. Greg, the troupe’s president, overhears me and asks if I’d want to do a one-man musical. I tell him, “sure, let me write one.”
Guam and I sit down and within a week have a pitch for Jesus Christ Megastar. We pitched it to the troupe and it was instantly turned down. Didn’t have a “story”, as if a musical really needs that.
We retooled the story and repitched. Greg loved it but the other two people in charge; they weren’t so down with the one-man musical that’s potentially offensive to every religion on earth. We got the go ahead to put it on BUT we had to produce it ourselves. Every penny for that play came out of mine and Guam’s pockets.
I already talked enough about the play (right here and here, mainly, along with audio samples) so I won’t rehash all those details.
We recorded the soundtrack in the Tower’s music room; a little place none of us knew existed until the day Q showed it to us. We had a little two line mixer and recorder, made the cheapest recordings imaginable and sold the CDs at 5 bucks a pop to turn a slight profit on the show.
The recordings and the writing sessions and the rehearsals – it was all captured on film. For Robin’s project she was doing a documentary on the making of Jesus Christ Megastar. It was entirely her idea, she followed us around for a couple of weeks with lights and cameras and make-up kits, interviewing us and pulling quotes for her film.
She screened the documentary one evening for some subset of her film school. I couldn’t make it, unfortunately – I actually never got to see the final version although I helped out a bit with the editing. Apparently there was one line that caused a lot of discussion amongst the people she screened it for – I said that JCMS was my last creative endeaver – that after it was all said and done I go into the real world, put on my tie and start earning a paycheck.
That sparked a bit of back-and-forth over why I felt like I couldn’t find time to create just because I was going into the “real world”. Robin couldn’t answer for me and I wasn’t able to defend myself but, six years later I’d say they were all right – you can create and work full time, JCMS wasn’t my last hurrah, just the start of a thought I’ve yet to finish.
The following year the people within the troupe who refused to pay for the play decided to try and emulate what we’ve done with JCMS and produced what they called the “Senior Play”, completely cheapening what we managed to achieve. For JCMS, there were people who came out to every show. We were signing autographs when it was finished. I was getting email requests for the video, people who were willing to buy a copy off of me. From what I understand, the Senior Play couldn’t even compete with JCMS, a five man musical, written and produced over one semester.
There are people with vision and then there are the blind people who try to follow in their footsteps – it’s true in theater much like it’s true in comics.
The count so far, with seven stories left to go - I’m a couple of hundred words away from 200,000. If you add in the blurbs and the two weeks of guest stories there has been 276,443 wordspublished on the Moose in a year. If you add that little 50,000 word novel I wrote in November the number climbs up to 326,443 words in a year - and that's not counting the 17 Here's the Thing..., two books I edited and full-time job I worked. Not to pat my own back but "fuck yeah".
I don’t know - something to be proud of. And they’re entertaining, I think, people keep coming back – you know? The Saturday after this is all said and done I’ll post the numbers for the pitch packet including some thoughts on the experience, my favorite stories, shit like that.
But for now, seven stories to go.
_____________________________
First semester senior year I decided to try my hand at directing for my troupe’s Fall One-Act festival. I decided on a play, “Judgment Call” by Frederick Stroppel – a ten minute show about umpire’s dealing with life after a bad call leads to a player committing suicide.
Of course I did a baseball show, what did you expect?
I presented the play to my troupe and it was accepted, I began to prepare for auditions. There were three one-acts in the festival – Q was doing Nina Shengold’s “Anything for You” and this girl Katie was doing Israel Horowitz’s “Line”. Since my cast was all men and Q’s cast was all women we didn’t butt heads. But Katie – oh man did we get off on the wrong foot.
She wanted all of the best actors that auditioned with us and she wouldn’t budge. It got to the point where we had to get the president of the troupe involved and he had to basically tell her that she couldn’t have everyone she wanted, Q and I had the right to at least two of her first picks. I ended up nabbing two of the three actors I wanted and Q got one of the two he wanted.
Directing was fun and working with an all male cast made it more of a bonding thing than a work thing. We went to ballgames together, watched baseball movies – I tried to get these guys in a baseball state of mind. I stressed timing as being more important than the lines themselves – we’d have exercises where we’d sit around a table and deliver our lines while staying stationary to ensure we grasped the beats between lines, I was kind of notorious for putting a ruler to the knuckles if a line came too fast or too slow.
Another advantage of an all male cast – no-one will complain if you physically abuse them during rehearsals.
By the time the one-act festival rolled around my play was the tightest, and that’s more than my ego talking – everyone was saying it. Just delivered perfectly, everyone hit their lines just right and the comedy came out strong as did the drama. After the show people who’ve worked with us in the past were telling me they wanted to be in the next show I directed - I was even considering pitching a full length for next semester I was so excited with the response for this one.
But the theater gods had something else in store for me.
Before the second night of the one-act festival I was messing around on stage and belting out some show tunes. Greg, the troupe’s president, overhears me and asks if I’d want to do a one-man musical. I tell him, “sure, let me write one.”
Guam and I sit down and within a week have a pitch for Jesus Christ Megastar. We pitched it to the troupe and it was instantly turned down. Didn’t have a “story”, as if a musical really needs that.
We retooled the story and repitched. Greg loved it but the other two people in charge; they weren’t so down with the one-man musical that’s potentially offensive to every religion on earth. We got the go ahead to put it on BUT we had to produce it ourselves. Every penny for that play came out of mine and Guam’s pockets.
I already talked enough about the play (right here and here, mainly, along with audio samples) so I won’t rehash all those details.
We recorded the soundtrack in the Tower’s music room; a little place none of us knew existed until the day Q showed it to us. We had a little two line mixer and recorder, made the cheapest recordings imaginable and sold the CDs at 5 bucks a pop to turn a slight profit on the show.
The recordings and the writing sessions and the rehearsals – it was all captured on film. For Robin’s project she was doing a documentary on the making of Jesus Christ Megastar. It was entirely her idea, she followed us around for a couple of weeks with lights and cameras and make-up kits, interviewing us and pulling quotes for her film.
She screened the documentary one evening for some subset of her film school. I couldn’t make it, unfortunately – I actually never got to see the final version although I helped out a bit with the editing. Apparently there was one line that caused a lot of discussion amongst the people she screened it for – I said that JCMS was my last creative endeaver – that after it was all said and done I go into the real world, put on my tie and start earning a paycheck.
That sparked a bit of back-and-forth over why I felt like I couldn’t find time to create just because I was going into the “real world”. Robin couldn’t answer for me and I wasn’t able to defend myself but, six years later I’d say they were all right – you can create and work full time, JCMS wasn’t my last hurrah, just the start of a thought I’ve yet to finish.
The following year the people within the troupe who refused to pay for the play decided to try and emulate what we’ve done with JCMS and produced what they called the “Senior Play”, completely cheapening what we managed to achieve. For JCMS, there were people who came out to every show. We were signing autographs when it was finished. I was getting email requests for the video, people who were willing to buy a copy off of me. From what I understand, the Senior Play couldn’t even compete with JCMS, a five man musical, written and produced over one semester.
There are people with vision and then there are the blind people who try to follow in their footsteps – it’s true in theater much like it’s true in comics.
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