STORIES DON’T LIE (SORTA)
2016 - the first pilot piece I ever put to page, put out to the world. Not entirely out there, just outside the confinements of my hard drive. Thing is, it still is on page. Unproduced, having seen in and out of more mailboxes than I can remember to count. One physical copy made it through the doors of a production house (yes, trust issues). It must’ve never made way outside of their walls because no feedback made it back to me. Tsk.
January 2016; peep the date stamped on the screenshot. That’s way before streamers showed any signs of interest in this market; just 4 months after Showmax launched in SA, and about 2 weeks after Netflix went live there. This was when we only had Nairobi Half Life to say, hey world, look, here’s something we’re most proud of so far.
Still, it remains on page. Why?
Might have been the first draft that I kept pushing out. It definitely was trash.
Or my pitching skills were not as good. I must’ve been terrible.
Or the business overall just wasn’t receptive to stories in that category and of such scale.
Let’s shelve what I think, for now. Here’s the thinking I got from those considerate enough to have bounced some feedback:
No! It’s not what the market wants.
Well, a bunch of streamers are sniffing about our space for good stories so how about now?
No! It’s not what we want.
Jeez. The heck do you want?
Jeez. The heck do you want!?
Ah… see, then we were getting somewhere. My script, too. At this point, it had shifted from the confinements of my drives to the cloud.
After harrowing silent rejections that got me burrowing under, over and around the system, it finally hit me. Maybe they are right. The heck do I want? Only that, it was no dialogue. Not feedback, either. It was all self-talk. The heck do I want? For years, I kept asking myself. Until recently, when I almost suffocated myself to literal death with a mask stuck on my face. Hopping from one identity to the next, realizing that the question had gradually been morphing into a - who the heck am I? I didn’t know. I was lost. But what’s Lens Don’t Lie (LDL) got to do with all this? It’s what it’s got, in it. Skeletons. Shadows. Dark corners. Dirty drawers. Me. All of which I’ve been hoping to hide that from anyone who may pick up the slightest idea that I was writing about most of my experiences, and I still kept wondering why it remained on page. I’ve grown into the realization that it may have been an act of sabotage on my part, barricading my own way by typical syndromes that every artist would resonate with.
Lesson learnt? Being an artist, and to a greater extent, being as a writer demands absolute surrender to that which channels out and onto the page. This is an act of surrender; of putting myself out there again and again even in the shitstorm of NOs pounding down on me. ‘Coz hey, look who’s made it out of the confinements of my hard drive, to the cloud and now on my website. Where this story’s going, I don’t know for sure. What I do know now, I hope, is that these stories are no good staying on page. Times are changing, and so are the ways in which we tell stories. Here’s to LDL and where she’ll be heading next.
