CATHY LE'S MUNDANE MONDAY: "OLD PEOPLE AND NEW THINGS"

So I turned 18 on Sunday. I think it'll take some time to sink in that I'm now old.I mean, I know I'm not that old, but still. I wonder if things will change now. Will people stop helping me out because I'm no longer a small minor making films? Finding filming locations are so much easier when you're young because no one really expects pay. I've been working on developing a story for my next semester film project and find myself unable to think of ideas for a short film. I'm a long story/ feature film kind of person. I've got tons of stories for that. I wrote one at 3am on Wednesday (I tend to have my best creative moments that late, after I'm done with all the homework I've procrastinated on) and later that day during 6th period, presented it to Daniel Petrie Jr, a professional screenplay writer known for "The Big Easy" and "Beverly Hills Cop". I was just thinking how fortunate I was to have opportunities like this. Of course the film industry is about talent, but it's also about who you know and how lucky you are.I certainly hope I remain lucky. He didn't really get it the way that I had hoped he would. He understood the basics of it-- story line, characters, etc, but I don't think he got the feelings I hoped to get from my audience. It might have been the way I presented it.I'm not a very articulate speaker. It's usually better when people just read my scripts. The story was of course underdeveloped because well, I wrote it as I was falling out of consciousness into a land of slumber. But I realized something, as I was walking down the hall thinking about the advice he'd given me on how to better develop it: He is an old person. He was trying to help me give my story a bit more structure. After all, every story has a structure, right? But sometimes we forget that structure, what we know, is not law. And even if it was, laws can be broken. Artists are good at that. My story was ultimately about different points of views, inspired by Virginia Woolf and some Existentialist philosophy. And his advice for improvements made complete and total sense. But then I realized that my goal was to make people realize that things don't make sense. It's hard to do with film, because it's less focused this way, but I'm going to try. We tend stick to what we know. But perhaps, I'm still not old enough to stick inside the box.