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The Bachelor: The Movie

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My favorite class I ever took here at Agnes was Dramatic Writing II, Intro to Screenwriting. It was incredibly labor intensive and the grading was merciless, but if I could take that class every semester I would.

We were supposed to come in with three movie ideas, and I spent hours laboring over three pitches: A teen adaptation of The Marriage of Figaro, a teen adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew where Petruchio was a trans lesbian, and a romantic comedy wherein a lesbian blackmails her way onto The Bachelor. We submitted the ideas anonymously, but I may as well have written my name all over them. They were very on brand.

The Bachelor idea was far and away the most popular, so I set about working on it. I interviewed past contestants, I cast it in my head, and begun scripting the first half. The work was slow, my professor would hold a ruler up to my script and hand it back if the text was 10.5 cpi (characters per inch).

I wrote 10 pages of script a week. I began to love my characters, Tasha, the headstrong lesbian, Jackie, her love interest who everyone seems to fall for, Gary, the fame-hungry bachelor, even Spatula, Tasha’s cat. They grew with me over the course of the year. As I matured, my characters matured.

Now I’m working on the screenplay as my senior seminar, and I keep falling in love with my work over and over.

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From Screen to Stage and Back to Screen

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Between my dual passions of theatre and film, I’ve always been torn between being on stage and being behind the camera. I was either acting or directing in plays or writing, acting in, and producing my own webseries. It wasn’t until Fall of 2017 that I was able to combine my two passions.

In Fall of 2016, Shipwrecked Comedy released Edgar Allan Poe’s Invite Only Murder Mystery Casual Dinner Party for Friends Potluck, known affectionately as Poe Party. It was a lavishly filmed webseries, paying homage to movies like Clue, while also nodding to classic literature. It was based on Edgar Allan Poe and his ghost manservant Lenore hosting a murder mystery dinner party for his author friends, only to have them get killed off for real.

Characters involved included Ernest Hemingway, Oscar Wilde, H.G. Wells, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, George Eliot, and other authors. George Eliot was my favorite. Author of Middlemarch and born Mary Ann Evans, George Eliot was portrayed as a woman trying (and failing) to pass as a man. She was played by Lauren Lopez, known for portraying Draco Malfoy in A Very Potter Musical. She was a delight in a too-big Indiana Jones hat and fake mustache. I was so sad when she was killed off.

The show ended around Halloween 2016, and lo and behold, by Halloween 2017, I was playing George Eliot on Agnes Scott’s stage. As soon as the school year started, I was approached by two students who had received permission from Shipwrecked to adapt Poe Party for stage. They asked me to adapt the script, as I had previous scripting experience from my webseries. I spent weeks slowly slicing away at the script until it was a tidy 1 hour. I immediately texted my best friend, the biggest poe party fan I knew, that she had to play Poe. Auditions were held, and we just baaarely had enough people to make it work. We had a cast. And me? I got to play George Eliot.

Rehearsals were so much fun. Everyone cared so deeply for the work we did, it was a student-led, student-directed performance. Costumes were scrounged up, I invested in a real hair fake mustache, everything felt perfect. But resources were limited. We could only perform this once, on Halloween night, and then never again. We were so proud of our work, we wanted it to live on. So I decided to film it. Over the course of many rehearsals, I slowly built close ups of as many scenes as I could. Then, on the actual performance, I set up a camera in the back of the theatre. The footage from that camera was electric. When our passionate cast got in front of a smart, enthusiastic Agnes audience, everything was funnier. The laugh as I died and finally dramatically “revealed” my true identity will always stay with me.

Cutting together that footage made me realize how similar my two passions were. Sure, it can be difficult to bridge the gap between the mediums theoretically, but in practice, it’s just a matter of staging. I can write a script and it would do just as well on stage as on film. I could study theatre and find a career in film, I could study film and find a career in theatre. It’s all storytelling, it’s all one.

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Getting Serious About Comedy

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Freelance writing is HARD. I still, technically, haven’t become a freelance author, I haven’t yet gotten paid for my work. It’s that cutthroat of a business. Almost all of my peers on Twitter are freelancers and get bylines all the time. I struggle to publish one or two pieces a year, but I have much more prolific success on my own personal Medium page.

By self-publishing, I can talk about whatever I want, which, 90% of the time, is television. I recap The Bachelor, I discuss Frasier, whatever. In June of 2018 Netflix released Nanette, a sort of anti-comedy comedy special by Hannah Gadsby. I had heard about Nanette from its run at the Edinburgh Fringe festival but when it was released on Netflix it took the Internet by storm. Everyone had a hot take about it, including me. But my hot take included references to a whole other work.

James Acaster’s Repertoire, a series of four connected stand up specials, was released on Netflix in April. I watched it maybe four or five times a day, discovering something new each time. It was low key, it was whimsical, it was silly, everything that Nanette was not. But I still found myself comparing the two.

At three AM one June night I started writing my thoughts of the works, about how Nanette is made for the cisgender and heterosexual, how it reinforces the hate I face every day, and how Repertoire is my escape into something else. I didn’t edit it at all, much to my own detriment. I had to retroactively correct many typos in the following weeks.

I published the piece at 8 am the next morning. My peers in publishing read it and started recommending it in threads debating the worth of Nanette. It easily became my most read piece on my Medium page.

In the early hours of the fourth of July, I weirdly woke up, not my usual routine at all. Groggily, I checked my phone. James Acaster just followed me on Twitter. The creator of Repertoire himself. I quickly gathered my thoughts, trying to figure out what to do next. Because he followed me, I was allowed to send him Direct Messages. I carefully composed a message with a link to my piece and how much Repertoire meant to me. Before my eyes, I watched him text a response.

He read my work. He loved it. He saw Nanette and it made his work seem frivolous, but my piece reminded him why he does comedy and why it’s worth it.

My work did that. My work encouraged someone who encouraged me. Skills that I learned and honed here at Agnes put me in touch with someone who saved my life. In the future, all I want to do is chase that feeling of worth I got when James responded to me. It means everything to me.

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New York Performance Reflections

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I grew more than I ever thought I could in completing my Global Contract objectives. I loved every poem I wrote, every outfit I drew, and I ended up switching my goals quite a bit. Instead of using descriptive writing to express my feelings towards paintings, I used a different medium to express myself: fashion design. Flipping through my journal, I can see my growth in those handful of designs based on artwork. My first design, the Lady with the Rose, is just a slightly updated version of the one in the work. My latest piece, the Piet Mondrian piece, is a vastly updated piece that takes into account the movements in fashion I learned from a book I bought in New York.

Creating looks based on art pieces and whole museums inspires me the way listening to poetry inspires me to write poetry. I had never really experienced that sort of fluidity from what I see to what I had in my mind to what I put on paper.

My definition of a global citizen has definitely changed. As someone who was lucky enough to live abroad, I had always subconsciously looked down upon people who never were able to live internationally. I now realize, especially after dinner at the tenement museum, that global influence can truly affect you without leaving your country. I had an authentic Cuban sandwich and authentic German Spatzle in the Lower East Side. These things instantly reminded me of my international homes, and just prove that you can be plenty cultured and become a global citizen without leaving your own country.

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