Co-Creating with the Universe
A Lived Inquiry Transformative Media exploration of the experience of creative grace during the creation of one of my film projects
The following is my personal account of how I discovered one of the most powerful forms of transformative media practice I have ever encountered.
Most filmmakers, and artists in other mediums as well, will tell you that every project is different. Some are harrowing journeys of hard-won creation, others are fun adventures of effortless discovery, and everything in between. But some projects take on an almost magical or even mystical quality.
One of my favorite events talked about in the history of Hollywood is of the experiences of the cast and crew on the set of Miracle on 34th Street (1947). It was Natalie Wood’s first film. She was an 8 year old child at the time and when she first met her co-star who was playing Santa, Edmund Gwenn, he looked so much like the real Santa that she believed he was really Santa. No one could convince her otherwise and her constant state of awe and wonder was contagious. Everyone on the set played along and it became a magical journey for all of them.1
My journey was magical as well but in a very different way, it was a strange and wondrous almost mystical experience with synchronicities guiding me and the entire team every step of the way. As the synchronicities kept coming they started to feel like some kind of “creative grace” and that we were somehow Co-Creating with the Universe…here’s our story…
My first year of graduate school at the American Film Institute I experienced a form of creative inspiration that was different than the inner visions I was used to. The inspiration came in the form of synchronistic moments of grace. I found myself in a world that was guiding me through the creative process and speaking its story to me.
This journey of creative grace began with a seminar with actor-playwright Sam Shepard, who shared with us his process of writing stories by starting with a true-life event, character and/or emotional reality, and allowing the story to grow out of this human truth.
This idea resonated with me and I began to search for a human truth to use as the seed for my next video project. After weeks of searching the world around me and my memory for a true-life event, character or emotional reality, I came up with nothing that sparked my interest.
An old friend came to visit for the weekend and I put my search aside and just enjoyed her company. While we were dining at a restaurant in Malibu we had a weird and wonderful encounter with an old, seemingly insane vagrant who spoke to the empty seat across from him and instructed his invisible friend to "Write this down..."
The statements that followed were at first bizarre and nonsensical, yet soon his murmurings became not only coherent, but, in fact, strangely profound. There was something about this man and his words that sparked a story that needed to be told.
“Write this down…must go to Montana for Easter. What?… Oh, you see there is a little town in Montana that has an Easter Parade every year where they pick an ordinary guy off the street to carry the cross through town. I always wanted to be that guy…”
As I began to write the story of Write This Down, I had a series of synchronistic encounters with other homeless people who added to my story.
Once the script was written, a strange magic, or grace, took hold of the entire production: The right people and resources showed up; the cast and crew entered a state of communal fusion; there was a high degree of synchronicities experienced by the whole team; and the images and sounds that were being captured felt like they were filled with a magical blend of powerful emotions, laughter, tears, madness and sacred truths. We all had the sense that the story was coming through us onto the screen...a story with a life all its own.2
When we screened the video for the class the response was amazing. At first I thought it was a disaster because there was an incredibly long silence after the video was over. Everyone just sat there staring at the blank screen. Then, one by one people started to applaud and rise out of their seats, until I became the focal point of a powerful standing ovation. I noticed that tears were streaming from most of their eyes. I felt a wave of joy and then a profound sense that I had been an instrument of a force beyond me.
Years later, after a long sojourn to Europe, I revisited the story of Write This Down and turned it into a feature length screenplay with a writing partner. The creative grace returned in full force to guide us through the writing process.3
We walked the streets with the homeless, where destitute people came up to us and shared their stories; we would ask ourselves a question about the direction of the story and within a matter of minutes or hours the answer would come in the form of a phone call, a song on the radio or show on the TV, or a passing comment on the street.
One time we created an additional character and asked the question if we had created a believable real life character. We took a walk around the block and there was the character we created with the exact haircut and clothes and behavior patterns.
Perhaps the most profound example of this creative grace process was the time my writing partner and I were sitting on a bench on the Venice boardwalk discussing a major concern we had about the fabric of our story which had unfolded into a world in which both suffering and wondrous miracles happened to the homeless, a world of deep despair and yet, a world of powerful spirit and grace. We were asking ourselves the question if this mix of grit and grace was a reality or just our imagined vision.
Just then a young homeless man with one leg hobbled up to us on crutches and asked us for a cigarette. We said we were sorry but we both didn’t smoke.
The man said:
“Oh man, don’t be sorry. I wish I didn’t smoke, it’s a killer.”
We offered him some change and he thanked us and continued:
“You guys seem pretty cool. You want to hear something cool?”
We said “sure.”
He smiled and said:
“See these crutches, man, these brand new crutches. Well, yesterday I had a pair of old wooden crutches that were falling apart and I was freaking out and afraid they would break and I wouldn’t be able to walk, man. Then I was on the beach, man, and there were these brand new aluminum crutches just lying in the sand with no one around.”
He stopped talking and looked around as if he was about to tell us a profound secret. Then he turned back toward us and leaned in close and said:
“God is cool, man, God is cool.”
With that he smiled and then hobbled away. My partner and I just looked at each other. We knew we had just received the answer to our question.
Acknowledgments
I would like to gratefully acknowledge my writing partner Evan Lieberman who journeyed with me on the feature screenplay and added his genius and joyous spirit to the co-creative dance with the forces of the universe.
Deep bow to the entire cast and crew of the AFI video who collectively gave their whole hearts to bringing this work to the screen. You are forever in my heart.
And of course, my eternal gratitude to Sam Shepard for his teachings and inspiration.
NOTES
Natalie Wood’s belief that the Santa was real created a social contagion effect on the whole crew triggering creative team fusion. This appears to be a common trigger factor in this type of transformative media experience.
One of the transformative impact factors might have been the resonance of the script with the times. One of the characters in the script is a Vietnam war veteran who escapes from a VA hospital and takes hostages in a coffee shop, one of them being our homeless character. At the time of the video production there were just beginning to be some collective processing of the war through the moving image arts. I had taken the veteran’s dialogue from actual quotes from vets and when I worked with the actor we both felt a reverence for the dialogue. Knowing that the words his character was going to speak and the pain behind them were real, both of us felt a deep responsibility to do them justice. The very first scene we shot was one of his characters therapy sessions. The actor went so deep into the character that his performance had all of us in tears and it felt like a group therapy session for all of us where we processed our own sorrow about the war. From that moment on there was a sense of a fusion of the whole cast and crew that felt almost like a living organism and there was a clear and deep shared intention around the work. This is another example of the social contagion effect creating creative team fusion. As all the synchronicities started showing up we started playing into it. Every time any of us finished each other’s sentences or took care of something moments before having to be asked, we started to joke about who had the most psychic abilities. There was even a series of moments when I would ask someone to make sure the camera was on standby and miraculously it would put itself on standby right after I asked. It became another running joke with the team.
The return of the “creative grace” from the experience of the video production to the writing of the feature script may have been triggered by several factors. When we started to write the feature we watched the video numerous times and I shared with my writing partner all the stories from the previous experience with the creation of the video, including what I learned from Sam Shepard. We consciously decided to continue the same process, seeking the input from the universe. After all this we experienced a shared intentional field and as the synchronicities returned my writing partner was also swept away into the sense like we were co-creating with the universe.
To go deeper into Write This Down you can check out the archive articles on the student video, the feature screenplay and the “living story” process.
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