Far from Pittsburgh, but never away
I didn't come to Pittsburgh for Thanksgiving. And as much I as I wanted to be back in the 'Burgh for the weekend, it is clear that in my mind I've never really left. Where I am in physical space is irrelevant.
Sure, in Southern California, we play the Turkey Bowl on the beach, rotisserie our turkey outside while the early game plays, and let the kids swim while we get the table set for company. The temperature outside doesn't interfere with the way I see the world. The way I see the world is from the perspective of my upbringing.
Case in point: A morning in early November. I've made my coffee, kids are off to school and I'm hunched over the computer to work on my new projects, two set in Pittsburgh.
Both projects are not particularly fast-tracked due to their darker, realistic subject matter (one a contemporary look at gun and drug crime in Pittsburgh, the other a historical piece that traces the steel industry and coal industry and unionization in the 1890s). Out my home office window, a never-ending stream of Prius (Pri-i?), women in yoga gear and gardeners pass by. The mailman approaches, carrying his bundle of bills.
Which reminds me -- I should probably be writing scripts that actually pay.
My agents have sent over projects for hire -- but I can't seem to commit to sending a remake of "Oh, God" or "Look Who's Talking" back into the world, or somehow getting my hands on one of the second-tier superhero franchises (Flash, Flash Gordon, The Flash -- who knew they were different?).
What I write generally doesn't involve explosions, superhuman powers, high concepts or ticking clocks. What I write, usually, is set in Pittsburgh and is about what I remember and romanticize about my hometown.
It's always been that way.
The first story I wrote, in 1976 when I was 8, was set on an imaginary farm located on an imaginary bluff above the very real Monongahela River. The only two characters were cows, a mother and her calf. The calf fell to its death off the bluff and the mother, seeing its body below, jumped to save it and died as well. In the end, the sun set over the water on a cold night and the river carried them away. Clearly, I had set the tone of the rest of my life of writing blockbusters.
Writers write for many things, love being the primary objective, so I immediately gave the finished story to my mother. She read the pages and stared at me, concerned, said very little and handed it to my grandmother who read it and immediately proclaimed me a genius. I could hear them, later, in the next room, discussing the pages.
My mother: "Do you think there's something wrong with him?"
My grandmother: "He's artistic."
My mother: "But the story is so depressing."
My grandmother: "I like depressing. It's wonderful. Life is hard like that."
Somehow, in those exchanges, in the act of writing "The End" and in handing those pages to my family, in the resulting discussion and attention (to my pages), in my mother's being concerned about the author of the story (me!) and not the cows, in my grandmother's Eastern European response, seeing herself in the cows and the tragedies of day-to-day life, another writer was born.
Not just another writer. Another writer from Pittsburgh. Art, like anything else, grows out of the artist's circumstances. Had I been born in Philadelphia or Chicago or Los Angeles, I would not be the writer that I am, perhaps not a writer at all. Dead cows on the banks of the Monongahela seem like a stretch, I know, but that story made lots of sense for the Pittsburgh of 1976 I was living in. Given, in 1976, this story was not exactly the zeitgeist of the country.
The country may have been focused on Concordes jetting around at the speed or sound or disco dancers tripping the proverbial light fantastic at Studio 54, but in Pittsburgh trains loaded with coal and steel were moving on trestles high above the rivers and not far from those bridges cows were grazing on farms south of my grandparents' home in Monessen on Route 51.
What I felt was that people were worried about their jobs, money was tight and the weather was damn cold. What I knew is that we huddled together for Steelers games and family events. What I heard, was told, was that if one of us fell, someone else was going to jump in after them. So my cow story wasn't really meant to be sad and pathetic. I thought it was uplifting.
Again, I point out -- blockbusters have evaded me.
To write about Pittsburgh demands examination of the city's character. To me, Pittsburgh's most important quality is its citywide sense of empathy. Tough guys call it pride, but I know better. Pittsburghers see themselves in each other and empathize.
It's the things we share: the sports teams or the work ethic, the accent, the food, the triumphs and tragedies. These things are owned by the entire city. For better or for worse. A Steelers win is a city win, a loss belongs to everyone. Same is true for other aspects of the community. For me, if a story is set there then I understand it to its core, I belong to it and it belongs to me. No other city works that way for me, not even Los Angeles, my adopted home, the place I've lived in for 17 years. Hell, I only spent my first 18 years in Pittsburgh, but those 18 are indelible. They don't wash off.
Be it a good union story set in the steel mills of the 1890s, a Joe Namath biopic, a medical breakthrough at UPMC, a sad and tragic murder of a childhood friend or a long talk with a former U.S. attorney from our region, if the frame of the story is Pittsburgh, then I empathize with the players inside the tale and can write it. After all, the trick to writing well is no different than that empathy the city promotes -- a good writer roots for all of his characters and wants to understand and own all of their sorrows and successes.
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