Fleeting Presence

Anonymous asked: are you planning to go see 'the beatles: the lost concert' film?

No. I didn’t know it existed until now. I was never a huge Beatles fan.

The last audience question from the NYT TimesTalk with Philip Seymour Hoffman and John Patrick Shanley (who wrote Doubt):

Audience member: I’m hoping to be an actor/playwright when I’m older, and I’d only ever read Doubt, and I haven’t … I hadn’t even … and I’d seen Charlie Wilson’s War and really admired that movie and I’m intending to see Synechdoche, New York soon, but I’m wondering, do you ever feel like, as artists, when you want to achieve something, your past or something about you is holding you back from that further goal as an artist that you would like to achieve?

John Patrick Shanley: I remember – you know, I’ve been a writer since I was 10, 11 years old, and I wrote intermittently at first, and then I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote, and I became a playwright and I was writing play after play after play, and I was failing, and I was very poor, and I was really struggling. It was very hard. And that went on for probably the better part of 14 years. But I kept saying, ‘I feel like there’s an obstruction in my throat, and if I can get that out of my throat, I can say all of these things that I have inside of me to say.’ So I was very aware. You know, in other words, I wasn’t writing these things and thinking, ‘This is great, why doesn’t anybody want, you know, even people actually, they did put them on, and you know, sometimes they were OK, but I felt, ‘I’m not doing it. I’m not doing that thing that I want to do. I’m not saying that thing that’s all around me and in me to say.’ And then I reached a point of despair. Everything was going, I was poverty stricken, my marriage was falling apart, it was like a bad situation. And I sat down and I wrote this little play, and I just wrote what happened, from my point of view. That was all I did, I just wrote what happened. It was like a 15-page play. And then I put the play on, and the audience came, and I got this reaction from the audience that I’d never gotten before. It was like a big reaction. And I could tell it was different then anything that had happened before. And I remember my feeling so, well, I felt this mild feeling of disappointment. I went ‘Oh, that’s what they want. The truth.’ Which, for me, you know, I undervalued so much, that I was disappointed to find out that that’s what– and then once I stopped undervaluing the truth – my truth – you know, then I started to enjoy it, and be able to build on it. And I started to talk– that audience was talking to me, and I didn’t like what they were saying at first, and then I thought, ‘No, let them in, talk to them.’ And I did, and then I started to enjoy it, and I’d go like, ‘Oh, they like me when I’m angry. They don’t mind if I’m– actually, I thought the world would end if I got angry and showed my anger. They actually seem happy about it.’ And when I told my darkest secrets, they busted out laughing. And I was like, ‘Whoa! Well, OK. That’s what’s going on, that’s what’s going on.’ And so that was sort of my experience.