Being Geek Chic is a blog about one woman navigating the male-dominated industries of production and tech. It's written by Elizabeth Giorgi, Founder, CEO and Director of Mighteor - one of the world's first internet video production companies. Learn more about Mighteor here.
The things that often inspire me to sit down and start typing are a little bit… off. There is nothing I love writing about more than things that are a little weird, a little uncomfortable and yet all too ubiquitous to ignore. In fact, it’s not unusual for me to grab my laptop and start writing a sweet or touching film, only to abandon it after 30 minutes to pursue some strangely funny thought that entered my mind like a lost gnat.
This is exactly why I found myself compelled to write a film about dick pictures last year. I know I’ve told you about my adventure in Milan, Italy where I spent 10 days last year writing a film in the Wes Anderson Cafe. But what I didn’t tell you is that the film was about a recently single woman facing the realities of a dating world where intimacy is traded for smartphone photos of our private parts. In fact, it’s called Private Parts.
The funny thing about writing a movie about dick pictures is that while I’m really proud of the film, it’s kind of a hilarious phenomena to explain to my mentors and family why it’s doing so well in competition. In fact, this strangely saccharine script about dick pictures was not only the runner up at IndieFest, it was a finalist at the Seattle International Film Festival.
Just like my characters, I’m having to face that really bizarre experience of talking about my very intimate inspiration. Inevitably, if you tell people that your movie is about guys sending women pictures of their penises, people ask if you have received one. The answer is yes. And I think more of us have than we would ever admit. I’m not pretending to be a nun-wannabe over here. But I can tell you this: the number of times it was exciting is equal in measure to the number of times it was totally unexpected and a little bit gross.
And to be fair, it’s not as if I haven’t sent a scandalous photo of my own ever. I too have traded in intimacy with pixels.
To this day, I don’t know how I feel about sending sexy pictures back and forth with boyfriends or random partners. If I’m being totally honest, I always get more of a thrill from the weird gifs of my boyfriend’s face contorting one way or another than anything else. But these photos, they reveal something about how we form our relationships now that have never been part of our romantic entanglements before. And if you don’t believe me, you just need to know that there are now lawyers out there that have cease and desist letters on file for divorcees and the broken hearted to prevent their own private images from being saved or shared.
Alas, it turns out that our most private moments reveal some of the most profound truths of our humanity.
I’m proud of the script and if you live in Seattle, I’d love for you to join us for a live reading at SIFF in December! For those that don’t know: “SIFF Catalyst First Draft live script table read series, now in its fourth year, features unproduced scripts that were finalists in the 2016 Catalyst Screenplay Competition.”
Private Parts will be read December 14th. You can RSVP here. And maybe when it’s done, we can trade a few stories about our own adventures in exchanging our private parts.
Fact: I write about my life. I’m not an open book. But I’m definitely a mildly opaque one. And sometimes, mining my life for content, actually works out pretty damn well for me.
At least it did last week.
On Thursday, I got some really big, totally huge news. The screenplay I wrote while in Italy last summer was selected as a finalist for Seattle International Film Festival’s first Catalyst Screenwriting Competition. It’s exciting for a number of rather huge reasons: first, it was an artistic validation unlike anything I had ever experienced before. Second, it feels like the crazy chance I took diving into writing for a few weeks and stepping away from my business was actually worth it.
When you run a small business, even a creative one, taking a vacation can seem like an absurd luxury. And while I want to go into the reasons why it’s imperative that even new #girlbosses step away from their work and relax once in a while, I’ll save that for another day. Instead, I want to focus on that bit about validation.
The script, Private Parts, is about modern dating in the age of sharing digital nudes before we even know someone’s middle name. It’s a portrait of contemporary intimacy, if you will. And inside that script are about four different men that I dated in the last year before meeting my current beau, R. Of course their names were all changed, but their role in my life and the way that I saw them as people is all there. And while I could feel guilty about including their stories and their qualities with the world, I don’t. And to be honest, I refuse to. Because here’s the thing: I don’t hide what I do. And what I do, is create.
Recently, I asked R: “How would you feel if I wrote about you?” His answer was simple: “Just don’t do it on the blog.” Who knows what is in our future, but already I know where our story begins. And that’s what I love most about my life right now. For the first time, I feel like I understand why we keep doing this even when we don’t get validation from the powers that be. It’s because I don’t know how to live my life any other way. I don’t even know how to date without knowing that I will probably need to write about it later.
The big heartbreaks? Catalogued in history in ways that are implicit and subtle. The strange sexual interactions? Remembered forever through various characters whose names all start with the letter E. The bizarre encounters between humans just trying to figure it out? Still being worked out privately in Final Draft. One particular ex is everywhere. He’s in Private Parts. He’s in my upcoming short film, Victoriana. And I could feel bad, but that’s what you get for cheating.
But here’s what is so surprising: the artistic validation feels so much more powerul than the closure I received from processing that experience through my writing. I never want to be cheated on again, but I’ll tell you this: I am weirdly delighted that it happened. The source material has provided immeasurable motivation. Just ask Beyonce.
There are two sorts of people who wander into Bar Luce, the Wes Anderson cafe, in Milano, Italy:
1. People who know what Bar Luce is.
2. People who don’t know what Bar Luce is. But they’re thirsty and it’s there.
As someone who planned her entire Italian getaway around getting to Milano as soon as she could so she could see the filmmaker’s thoughtfully designed cafe, I was clearly part of the first group. It was a silly little comedy to watch the intermingling of the second group with the first. The second is actually quite baffled by what’s going on, but seemed charmed that anyone could care so much about mint green tables and pink chairs. But for me, it wasn’t about the mint furniture, or the perfect pink fonts or the delicate layout of cakes - it was about something that Wes Anderson himself said about the place:
“I think it would be an even better place to write a movie,” Anderson says. “I tried to make it a bar I would want to spend my own non-fictional afternoons in.”
You can see now why it was so important to me. Plainly, it is:
1. The closest I will ever be to walking onto a Wes Anderson set.
2. The perfect setting to write a movie, as stated by Anderson himself.
3. In Italia. Perfecto.
It became this weird mecca. A place I must see. A necessary cornerstone in my healing process over the last 6 months. Again and again when people would ask what I would do in Italy for such a long time, I had been saying rather proudly: I’m going to Milan to write a movie. At Bar Luce. The Wes Anderson cafe.
And I did. I freaking did. All 98 pages.
No one questioned me. Why would they. I am nothing if not a person who does exactly what she says she is going to do. Plus, it seems like something a dramatic and artsy person like myself would embark on for no better reason than it sounds like a good idea after going through a dramatic break up. People have done far stupider things in reaction to heartache.
And while so much of it was perfect, there were some unexpected oddnesses to the whole ordeal. Turns out, Milano is not a city where people hang out in coffee shops working on their computers. Maybe that’s all of Italy. Either way, the idea that anyone would sit around and attend to… work… instead of having an espresso and moving on with their life is sort of comical to the Italians. And the adorable pink bow tied staff at Bar Luce were no exception. I appreciate this committment to efficiency. But I also don’t know how to function in such a paradigm. I love to write amongst the hustle and bustle of humans meeting and reading and networking and drinking. It’s productive and real and there is an energy to that. The temporary nature of the way Italians drink their coffee makes it much harder to enjoy all that.
And so instead, Bar Luce became a multi-day destination. Or, in my case, a multi-day, multi-meal destination where I would break conventional Italian norms in pursuit of increasing Final Draft page counts.
Here’s how I did it, should you ever want to embark on a similar quest: I would strategically arrive around 11 AM so I could reasonably consume coffee and then order lunch an hour later. While this isn’t traditional and probably made the wait staff feel like I was a total weirdo, it worked for me. It allowed me to be there for considerably longer and gave me the chance to people watch for the extended periods I would normally want to observe other humans. Frantically typing like a mad woman, I laid out each of the scenes of my next film. For the record, the film tells the story of a young photographer trying to understand the meaning of intimacy in the 21st century where so much of our lives are laid bare, including our bodies.
It would be unfair to say that the setting made my script better, but it felt like a worthwhile journey to experience. Writing a film can take months, but forcing myself to do it in a week in a limited number of visits to Luce gave me a sense of purpose that can sometimes go missing in the creative process. When you don’t have anything holding you to a deadline, it can be challenging to force yourself to impose an artificial one.
And that’s what Bar Luce did for me.
So yes, I wrote a film at Bar Luce. What you’re really wondering about is the sugar packets and cakes. I know. You can see my instagram video tour of the place here. Like a Wes Anderson movie, the style of Luce is entirely immersive. Everything about it oozes specialness. Sweetness even. The exact color of the pink. The floor and it’s distinct style of both being tacky and not tacky at the same time. The way it surprises you with its size and high ceilings. The adorable pink bow ties around the necks of all the staff. Even the tiny little single chair seating options with their pivoting desk spaces feel distinctly their own, like a throwback you didn’t even know you wanted to return.
It’s hard to imagine not knowing that it’s a special place.
In my week there, it was fun watching people realize it is.
And most importantly, it really felt dear to me to be able to write a film there. To do the thing that someone I admire so much suggested one do. There are very few “wins” when you’re living a creative life and this was definitely one for me.
