Haley walked into my shot but I didn’t mind. Image © Jain Lemos.
There are two metro boxes of my ideas that I’ve been carrying around with me for 20 years or more. I tend to move around, so I only seem to look into these boxes when I am packing and unpacking. Some of the files are filled with handwritten journal pages, there are at least four partial novels, dozens of book proposals and three finished screenplays. One of these days…
I heard Matthew McConaughey say that it took years to get Dallas Buyers Club made. Screenwriter Craig Borten reportedly drafted 10 different scripts and still had trouble finding anyone to invest in the project. This is a recurring theme in the arts. Timing has to be right but it’s also critical to keep trying.
Another path is to take existing content and repackage it into a new medium. When I was working full time on photo book projects in the late 90s, I came across an archive of outtakes from a series of cookbooks. The images were high-quality medium-format chromes of non-recipe shots including vineyards, farms, country roads, gardens and vistas. (I could have easily made 10 more books but I couldn’t find anyone to pay for the time it would take to create them.)
Don’t forget to look back into old boxes and picture folders to see what might be relevant or recyclable. Sometimes the older the better. Find a way to tie a subject into something current, maybe like the building of the George Washington Bridge. Ha.