Jason Driskill

Have I mentioned that I’ve been writing a television program?

No?

Well I am.  And I must say that writing in the format for television is even more fun than watching television.

Although I’m not ready to unveil my project (even in its raw script form) I have completed solid drafts for three episodes, rough drafts for three episodes, and very nearly completed final drafts for two episodes.  It’s thrilling to see such an absurd amount of progress in something that’s happenstance - this is not my main focus, but rather a side effect of the other things that are going on.

Unlike my visual arts endeavors, I have realized that building a narrative mythology does not require focusing on any single particular theme, but rather layers of themes.  I’ve crafted a homosexual relationship between two of the main characters, for instance.  One of the characters is pretty much me: nerdy, guarded, an unlikely candidate for romance.  He is cynical and scared of commitment for fear of being rejected.  The boyfriend is a conglomeration of several of my own past infatuations - athletic, confident, popular, alpha in every way.  As I was until age twenty, the boyfriend is not in touch with the reality of his sexual interest even as it’s playing itself out right under his nose.  Like me, he knows my fantasies and my crushes but hasn’t quite realized that they’re “gay.”

Delightfully this sort of storytelling also lets me work beyond the issues of gender/sexuality to which I am content to limit my focus in my art practice.   One of my characters visits Albania.  Another tends to assume that everyone wants to sleep with her, whether it’s true or not.  Another one is transformed by witnessing a few different traumatic events.  One is an artist - not just any kind of artist, but a graffiti artist (go figure) and over the course of time I plan to develop his perspective in the same way my own was developed through my time in art school…  I don’t see realistic artist-development in the fiction media, only the mystified art-star.  I want to present a more realistic (albeit romanticised) idea of how an artist learns and enters the art world - some of the choices he/she has to make, aspire to, sacrifices, etc.

There’s more.  Lots of sci-fi elements.  Issues of power and privilege.  Cold-war fall-out and government conspiracy.  Dealing with some of the issues that lay beneath the human psyche, like death and friendship and hate and obsession.  I’m making it sound a lot more intellectual than it really is.  It is a goofy sci-fi teen drama.
I’m perplexed as to what to do with these scripts.  I want to do something with them independently.  I would love to animate them myself, but have begun to realize how unrealistic that really is.  Maybe graphic novel - story panels - is the way to go.  Maybe they need to exist as books rather than scripts, so that I can include more visual description.  They’re heavily inspired by stories I drew as a high school student, so I cannot envision them being live-action or super-realistic.  They have to embody a sketchy, graphic, comic-ish aesthetic that my original sketches had over seventeen years ago when I was trying to make sense of teenage angst and social awkwardness.

I will keep you posted as they continue to develop!