Jim Harris

    Jim Harris is a failed screenplay writer. Seventeen production companies turned down his latest work, To Hell and Back Again: A Love Story. The plot follows a young man with a proclivity for falling inescapably in love with nearly every woman that he meets. He worships these women, but is unable to connect with them and truly create the bonds of love and compassion that he feels so desperately in his heart. He doesn’t understand love, though he thinks he does, because he cannot understand other people, and he cannot understand other people because he cannot understand himself. The movie follows his failings as a romantic; his story is a Greek Tragedy of infinite longing and a man’s disconnect from himself, his lovers, and reality. Jim Harris’ movie was to follow his character’s cosmic crisis throughout a lifetime, through failures and ultimately self-realization.
    A great litany of reasons were given to Jim in explanation of his screenplay being rejected, but the rejections followed a general pattern: the movie was deemed too depressing for modern audiences, there wasn’t enough flash and flair and there was too much brooding, and there was no definite happy ending. Even though Jim’s protagonist reaches a state of self-realization by the end of the movie, there’s no true climax or resolution. The character simply realizes his mistakes, his ignorance, and his shortcomings and sets off to reconcile the past, future, and present. The audience is left to contemplate their own lives when compared to his. In short: the movie was too open-ended and required too much thinking on the audience’s part to be “commercially viable”.
    Jim Harris’ movie was semi-autobiographical. This was always an issue when presenting his movie to the production companies, they couldn’t connect with Jim’s characters, because they refused to seem them as the real people that they were. The movie executives had little patience for or understanding of characters, in a studio executive’s mind characters were merely the canvases to throw a famous actor upon, a way to present a face to sell. Characters could not become real people that simply did not exist, because they could not be understood as such.
    Jim had recreated and fictionalized himself in his screenplay. First and foremost it was an act of self-expression, it was an act of personal confrontation. But Jim also hoped to use his movie as an act of reconciliation, by sharing himself in a way that he was thus far completely unable to do, by trying his hardest to apologize and to be just happy for once, Jim sought to rectify every intentional and unintentional injury he had inflicted on those he tried so hard to love.
    Jim was never happy with his work. From conception until completion, Jim viewed any piece of art that he created as an amorphous, ever changing work of expression, shifting from mood to mood and from inspiration to inspiration. The Jim that had written something last week was a different Jim than the one who had written something this week, and in bringing the work together Jim meshed his ever changing consciousness into a creature with its own unique life. Nothing was ever finished, and nothing was ever perfect. It was all simply a snapshot at any given time of human experience, a beast so cruel and metamorphic as to never be fully understood or conquered.
    It is said that if you truly love something, you’ll let it go. Jim Harris had undertaken the mostly noble of all human actions: he had created. And now that he had bared his soul to the world, and found the world unreceptive, he had to let his screenplay die. To Jim, it wasn’t important for his movie to be made, what mattered was that he had proven to himself that he could lay himself naked before all and come out alive. He had shown himself who he really was, and he had not shied away. He had given himself in to complete and utter honesty, and now found himself invincible. If his art was only to survive Jim’s own consciousness, it had found its audience.
    Jim Harris was ready to begin living, whatever came his way.