Free Will
“Take devalued ideas…or demeaning words and transform them into things that are useful.”
Not what I wanted to hear from my man Rob Breszny, astrologist to the stars. My personal translation of his Cancer horoscope this week: The rejection letter from ITVS is in the mail. Get ready.
This is a big deal right now. Today or tomorrow, we should hear about our proposal to ITVS LINCS. Submitted in conjunction with WHYY Philadelphia, this is seriously the strongest proposal I’ve ever developed. We had letters of support from WGBH-Boston, KETC-St Louis, KET-Kentucky, WQED-Pittsburgh, and a host of other stations. We had backing from almost a dozen national and local organizations. We have a killer advisory board made up of PBS all stars. Our treatment was tight and the work sample…well, it was the best we had at the time.
If we get the grant, it provides all the funding we need to finish and guarantees us some sort of national PBS broadcast. If we don’t, its probably another year of grinding.
As much as I don’t want to get thrown into a funk by being rejected, I know that the grind approach will at least guarantee that the film goes directly to its primary audience–Philly public high school students. The challenge with that route is just scraping together the dollars and the energy to take the show on the road myself.
But obviously, I want to get it. Being funded by ITVS, however, presents potentially a deeper challenge, to my integrity. ‘Cause once there’s another audience lined up, that’s when we’ll all see how serious I am about making sure that this remains a film for Philly kids and other young people in similar situations.
So the real prayer right now is that no matter what happens, hope that fate presents me with an opportunity to do what I know is right. I really believe that being funded by LINCS will put First Person on a whole new level in terms of our ability to not only reach people–including youth–with the film, but to build up our exciting new outreach effort.
And I really believe that not being funded will provide me an opportunity to see how much fight I really have left in me on this one.
September 2nd, 2007 at 12:43 pm
As I read your blog, I thought of the poem “Hope” by Vaclav Haval. I share with you the following excerpts: “Hope…is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. …Hope in this deep and poiwerful sense is not the same as joy that things are going well or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. …It is hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually try new things…”