Driven To Tell Stories
As a writer, the stories I tell come from two sources: my imagination and real life.
If you ask me which is more interesting to me, I can answer without hesitation. Real life! In fact, there is a hand painted sign up in my office that reads “I can’t make this crap up.” While I might toil over a heated keyboard to tell the stories that percolate in my mind, real life writes itself. All I do is document it. It’s a fabulous parlor trick.
When I was a child, living in an abusive home with alcoholic parents and the equally screwed up supporting cast members they called friends, an active imagination was my greatest survival tool. I’d climb up on a garage roof in the morning with books, pads and pencils and read or write until the sun went down (quietly sneaking down only for food and bathroom breaks). It was an elevated heaven where I could hear the goings-on of Hades below.
Later, as a teenager living with the guardians who became my stand-in Parental Units, I had a ringside seat to crazy. Both the personal and professional lives of everyone connected to my new home was… a little mad. In a loveable King George from Hamilton kind of way. I feverishly journaled and documented everyone from the fantastic staff who worked in my family’s home (with 11 bathrooms, to give you reference of scope), the employees of the 60,000 sq. ft. health & fitness publishing offices and my larger-than-life Maternal and Paternal Units who ran the whole show. [The resident Grand Matriarch who lived to 107 was the only grounded person in the grandstands, but that is a book for another time.] Truly, this was a world where there were three rings in motion at all times. Making the decision to attend a high school of performing arts to be an actress and singer was simply the natural progression of storytelling for me.
Once I started my own family, I tried desperately to keep the stories of my own home free of any dramatic narrative. [If you want to share a mug of coffee or something stronger, I’ll let you in on how that worked out.] Oh, sure I had a lot of spinning plates of my own, working in animation production then quitting to raise my own two colorful little characters. Plus, I still had my incredibly close connection to the big top of the big wigs of bodybuilding. But all of the writing I did went into articles and children’s chapter books. I mostly just jotted down notes about real life, which was… still mighty crazy. Adding on-air radio talent to my resume at this time, seemed like the right thing to do, so I did. An open microphone to tell more stories? Yes, please.
In the mid-aughts, it was suggested that I craft a trailer for one of my kids’ books I’d written about a bicycle riding mermaid. Playing with the visual digital medium was a whole new world of storytelling for me. The alchemy of this new art of storytelling was one I wanted to roll around in. While animated television shows were my jam more than a decade before, this was an entirely different and magical animal.
My first short film -- based on a true story from my senior year of high school when my Maternal Unit insisted on an elaborate funeral for a stray cat I’d had for a month -- was nearly word-for-word except for the fantasy ending (no humans were actually harmed in the making of this film). The experience made me realize how much I really liked filmmaking and I made the decision that this was going to be the next 50 years of storytelling for me. I was a writer and producer on that short, but took on a number of roles in subsequent projects. Being a slightly caffeinated, multi-hyphenated storyteller suits me. There have been a few “Pick a lane!” naysayers along the way, but nobody has ever told a man they couldn’t be a writer-actor-producer-director. Therefore, nobody’s going to tell me that I can’t work until I’m 100 wearing ALL the hats.[The title of Grand Matriarch sounds mighty appealing, too.]
So much growth came from the seed that was planted with that first short film and I’m grateful for the push from my production partner at that time. It led to my finding my way onto more sets and soundstages, ultimately working with my current team of Tequila Mockingbird. Together (and independently), Rookie and Cameron and I have created short films, music videos, pilots, web series, documentaries and more. Our small (but mighty) production company has done a lot of work and met a lot of people and we’ve never met a project we didn’t like (we DO reserve the right to not work with a**holes though. Happy to see that Olivia Wilde marches to that motto, too).
During the lockdown storytelling became challenging, but not impossible. We did lose work as a number of productions shut down. Other projects had to be rescheduled and moved one, two, three times or more. Whatever. We pushed on. Storytellers tell stories, even if it’s just within the four walls of their minds. So? Scripts were written. Existing footage edited. The crafting continued no matter what.
Then, one day… the phone rang. A friend had a friend that needed help with an audiobook. Okaaaay. Not normally in our wheelhouse, but a story’s a story and we’ll help you tell it! We started working with bodybuilder Tony Pearson who had written the untold story of his life and had begun to narrate it for Amazon, where his memoir is available in paperback. We all bought copies of the book and were moved by the unvarnished telling of the abuse he endured as a child at the hands of a relative. Despite the nightmare of his childhood, he went on to become a champion in his field. This was a documentary we wanted to make. This was a story I understood, from many angles.
I’m in a unique position to help my team tell this story, having spent years walking in the world of bodybuilding as a creative, not an athlete or “in the business” (as my bank account will attest) I had a view unlike many others who were immersed in the sometimes convoluted business and politics of the sport. I’ve lived a long time and I’ve met a lot of bodybuilders who felt they didn’t get a fair shake due to the business and politics of it all. I feel for them, but... not my circus, not my clowns. My role is not to gloss over nor apologize for that very complicated back business story, but only to show the human side of one man’s journey to become a competitive bodybuilder. This is not just a story for bodybuilders, but for anyone who never played a team sport or got picked last for kickball at recess. It shows how the solitary act of picking up a weight... is transformative.
In December 2020, we approached Tony with the necessary legal paperwork to officially start working on the documentary Driven - Tony Pearson. We had already shot a short proof-of-concept film in November at Tony’s final competition (at the age of 63!) and assembled a trailer so we could start applying to grants, angel investors and companies for product integration. Because we’re an independent film production company and none of us are independently wealthy*, we have to go out into the world with our hands/hats out to get our funding. We have nearly half of our narrative shot (out of pocket), but we have a wildly talented animation artist onboard who will craft the flashbacks of Tony’s childhood and a marvelous composer with a haunting score at the ready. They need to be paid. Our team also plans to travel to Memphis, TN and St. Louis, MO to capture the flavor of the places Tony lived in his early years. Travel ain’t cheap. When all of the audio and video is in our hands to tell this story, we’d like to make sure we honor the value of the production crew and everyone involved with post-production, too. That’s going to involve payroll. This is one reason why we have fiscal sponsorship through Fractured Atlas. We invite you to pass this information along to anyone who might be interested in a 100% Tax Deductible way to support independent filmmakers.
As a team Tequila Mockingbird Productions is driven to tell stories. We’d love to have you along for the ride.
xo - t.
*”If you didn’t earn it, you don’t deserve it.” - Joe Weider
