Qué Pasa with Dolores; Mark Medoff

oom senate is set they bustled with dolores is made possible in part by members valley abstract and title companies and western new mexico title company with locations of five or seven south golden bening and to fourteen west broadway silver city and by ugly duckling that regard which locations in las cruces alma mortal bening and el paso america's second car goes to go i visit with tony award winner mark

madoff coming up next on gay pastor with a lot less nice boots rights award winning play his scripts for the movies had sepp one of the finest university leaders in the southwest lives in southern new mexico he was the subject of mike ferris senior protection student segment for keep us and we welcome you to keep us and we thank you for doing that segment word's come a semi what's it like to work with a tony award winner scary it really is selling running an

answer in short was in god's won tony awards this many players and it's it's scary you know and it's your first time out a year this visit my first time are producing area they show i wasn't like it was exciting i mean the man was just so while firemen read life and i mean the guy is so many disturbing goes is going after everything knives was it is our goal oh yes it is it is so easy i mean he was just the thing that you just was able to as tell you everything that you ever wanted to know about writing as we know it seems that most of the students on campus feel that way about him and i suppose that's why his glasses or is filled first he knows how to relate to to young people and he seems to genuinely enjoy them but i think you and i should stop talking about it i know from watching it work that it was a great experience and were looking forward to see what you did say ladies and gentlemen it's my pleasure to present mike ferris

documentary on mark madoff right now because the president right because if i didn't i could not function as an individual and i think that i have several roles husband father teacher and i've been writing since i was fifteen years old and started writing because i had the good fortune of teacher in high school and insisted that his english class write a short story and much to my surprise mine turned out to be better than everybody else's and so in effect he wrote a sentence across my life by giving him a possible for a store

and for years i was a closet writer because back in the fifties it was not deemed really masculine to be artistic one one was supposed to be a jock but i did write in secret by at the college essay again had the good fortune to run into a couple of teachers that were really wonderful and supportive and tough and i started writing very seriously than i would say for major eighteen on i have been committed to writing i think it was not really until i was about twenty seven and i had been here for years so before realize that no i've been writing in my head seriously since i was eighteen that i had not really totally committed myself to the prospect that i might not succeed at it and when i fully committed myself to the whole success failure axiom which i think goes something like this that you can succeed until you're willing to fail then my life changed and my work

and then once i realized that every time out i had to commit myself totally do whatever i was doing with the prospect that i might fail abysmally i was all set to go at a guy right because if i didn't i could not function as a human being in any other role and i think that i have several other very very important roles husband father teacher and i really don't think that i would work well in any of those rules if i did not write i know that physically if i don't write on any given day i do not feel as well as i do on the visit of iraq i know that writing gives me a high that unfortunately many other people have to use drugs to get and i also i exercised my writing i exercise every day if i don't it has the same effect on me that not writing is it bothers me physically therefore mentally and as long as i'm

writing as long as i'm exercising i find that i can function these other roles which i paid dearly lot but that i could not really perform the others without the first which is that right an idea shop from all sorts of places the first by had new york when a comeback red ryder starred because my wife and i walked into a diner in albuquerque one morning and there were two kids working behind the counter there and we listen to them for a few minutes and i whispered to her whispered or these people or play stride remember everything they say and on the way home i in fact she wrote down everything we could both remember and i immediately started adding stuff too and i wrote a one act play largely about them and i threw us into it in a different guise and i brought someone else into a man no year later i went back and we wrote it and turned it into essentially what it has now a second player in new york was a play called the wager which was really the first by a rodent was

the first thing i ever have done on stage in that was done here and that has started from a short story where i heard four or five pages of dialogue i kept hearing is one line in us response to that one line over and over my headset to start writing and when i wrote the response to the response and so forth and i realized one day that is really nothing but a nine pages of dialogue in the nation turned into what children of a lesser god started because i met a deaf woman who happened to be an actress who might happen to like and i said to her one night over a few drinks i'll write a play for you and so then i had to concoct one to figure out here and i really had no idea whatsoever at that time i like to read from my friends of like to write for the people i work with once in one work with again and again so i've written out twice for those frilly and i'm then raises mentioned earlier to write an adaptation of christmas carol for her we have a movie we were doing other console

story idea of work with delphi father who i met when he was in school here he we've worked together on how many times an averted another role for him to do in the new play were doing in santa fe in albuquerque so sometimes i'll think of a well known actor is to have a picture in my head but normally i don't normally i i see i often see myself in various guises and what i write when i first start out with kind of cloudy and the place in which i write the place i go to the right is a very mysterious kind of terrain are people are not necessarily totally clearly delineated i don't i don't now too many writers who were quite the way i do some of them will spend years and years on one thing only and i often think it would be wonderful at love that to stop writing films and plays for wellness write a book and stay home for four or five years not talk to anybody and i always think that right after i finished the project on stage or fail because i'm so

sick of it all and so disappointed in the ultimate outcome and then after i have sat around for a rather pointed out with those people are going to get onstage so i don't know how unusual it is but i know i'm very comfortable with it and that it's a way of working has developed from me over a period of years and then i i feel blessed to be able to leap from one world to another in the flick of my wrist was a turning of the imaginary dial my hand through the glorious detail the move from one world total world to another there's a great career for things not necessarily the same day by the main differences this morning i got up and working on a movie called last wish based on very rowling's book for goldie hawn so i worked on that for a couple hours very early this morning then i hate to a christmas carol with me to the gym with him working on new adaptation of christmas carol for falls for the plays scrooge and then i went to a two hour rehearsal of the

adaptation undoing of shakespeare's macbeth and at the same time the same week have been working on a new play called the heart out right that goes into rehearsal here a couple weeks ago an incentive in albuquerque the summer and i usually work on things in a very it rotation of maybe a week a week art maybe day to day or sometimes i will work on one thing for a few hours and turn my head to nothing and it is very very much like a series of compartments or a television set at the one and i literally can move myself totally from one world to another in the flock of my arrest turning from channel thirteen the journal told off the is a movie about a young man who were senior public library who are having a very difficult time that his life is in his late twenties and he considers himself a failure and through the request of a friend he ends up impersonating a cup and falls along political and through his experience with her and with the turning to

be a cop the changes among apology is an idea that was brought them a buyer a former agent of mine and now producer and that was something that he you read into things new york magazine about an artist a conceptual artist you had an idea to do a conceptual art piece where people would call a number of phone number and that they would make apologies apologize for anything confessed anything no names he put up flyers all over town saying that i'm not the police nobody is going to try to track her down i'm just going to use this in a public performance is so we took that idea and we turned it into a whole story turned it into a thriller there's one guy who actually called it was very frank and said that he had murdered today another never attracted noun we then took that

idea and exploded into something where first the artist arts very innocently thinking she's doing a bizarre case for the simplest artistic reasons and then finds itself and broiled a very complex moral question where first she thinks she has the name of another killer and then this guy starts the other guy the one who's really killing people stars chasing her because he offended or so it ends up being but the couple gets involved becomes involved with the artist and again i hope that it will become apparent that they learn something from each other and i've just finished another film script based on a novel co clare is higher for warner brothers which is about a black woman from jamaica and a thirteen year old boy whose parents divorce a black woman living in the house and i love it and it scares me that a lot of the producers of the warner brothers' lot of an attendee one is very small pictures of which you've done well maybe we'll develop its audience and i'm working on

last wish for goldie hawn and i'm working on this new play called the hard outright which has a rehearsal couple of days weitz directed macbeth then i'll live issue militarily all the police a computer about three four plays in progress and i thought probably have in my head two or three other things that i'm ready to bill unless they're working on the way they created piece with a bunch of students in the department and a bunch of factly re work of the piece they were working on a piece called children going forth from the whitman poem having to do with what's going on in the world we live in and what hope there is for us and we'll feel we have to protect some sort of hope for the future of those children who are over there now and the children who live in the house with me in their children and hopefully their children's job is very desolate difference

between writing for the theater and writing for the screen in the theater the writer is the first word and the last word he ultimately has control of everything he does it is going to go down the tubes is going to be the one to make the decisions that lead and other tips and in film you're hired hand and they are extremely well paid once you have turned in the material the studio or the producer owns the material and have the right to do the literal whatever he may want to in exchange for a very formal event there's also the difference in the theater and film that in the theater you work with a much smaller more easily intimate group than you do in film and fill it was on the second of a hundred fifty people standing there and although five of them and yet you can be sure that as in the theater everybody's got a suggestion for you about how to make that work better from a writer's point of view there's no question

but that the theater is a writer's medium whereas film as a director producers me and many screenwriters about screenwriting with the best of intentions but find out along the way that the only way that it will maintain an accounting control of their work is to become successful at it and nafta they can then become producers and r directors also wears in the cedar year you're protected by everyone around you because everyone assumes that it is your right to to change everything you want him to change and nothing if they can't convince a lot of things you ever get used to rejection i remember as a very young writer hearing scott fitzgerald's notion that writers don't have the paper the walls of his bedroom with rejection slips before he should have expected anything accepted for publication and i went through a long period like most young writers threw of having my work ship back just about as fast as a ship it out

and david souter noted never gets easier i can say that that even where i am now where i know my work's going to be down i still suffer when anyone from a friend or my wife to the new york times critic says i don't like that for whatever reason i don't like this this little bitty part of it still hurts the same than the major difference is in the recovery right the not words when i was younger i could be that devastated by a a xeroxed formal rejection slip for weeks now i'm under twenty four hours so that if a play opens it it had bad notices twenty four hours later a rebound they'll be back to work on something else but i do i do think as much as i would like for there to be a way for there to be no clinics that they're really part of the game obviously for someone writing film and theater an audience is crucial to my

soul of an audience waits to its fate and screams that marvelous words if they're low fare jiggle you get walkouts or you can target the reception this tepid dr hertz this is terrible but i do a rebound the best advice i've gotten about movies is from a producer working with renault and he said because i was talking to about a movie that i have coming out which is not going to be as good as i imagined it would be and he said two things they never are and he said forget it and get on to the next thing so that when it's released no matter how it's received all of their energy bill will be was something else which is what i do when the pharaoh time opens a migraine is already deeply immersed in the next thing i'm going to write that the former protection under well is very young i got involved in acting and my mother put me on stage at about age six is a teddy bear believe in a christmas pageant and i was hooked and i acted for a long time until i got into in the

high school in high school it just was not appropriate id same four the jocks do also be onstage it was considered somehow defeat so i tended to shy away from it carla didn't pay any attention or iona is literally forgot about a couple ending graduates go i was immersed in trying to write and i was also trying very hard to become a totally legit and when i got here i got involved with people in the theater who initially said wanted to write something and then some and coaxed me into play because i said well i used to love acting and to finally answer the question i do consider myself an actor i know there's no question that if i want to work with actor work as an actor and when i first got here i thought this was northern utah in the geographic morass of my brain and i thought my god i can stay active stance puts towels all around the poison i came from miami beach and

went to graduate school at stanford was used to the ocean lots of greenery and the first two years i was here i intended to retire i'm not retired resigned in the spring and go somewhere else and i turned down the job an argument to in florida and i couldn't figure out why i accepted in the third year i decided it must have something to do with the place i i was very surprised when i first came here thinking as i was at that time that i was only coming here because the job paid enough and was structured such that i would have plenty of time to learn to be a writer and the first day i walked into a class and started into relating with my students and i was shocked to discover that i was hooked on something that i'm still which is the classroom exchanged at the teaching of the students in the students' teaching and teacher and i'll never never lost interesting on in the classroom what's happened over the years is that because of my success as a writer i'm able to go into the classroom less and less which i find

frustrating i've had a fixation with the old west since i was a kid so i'm sure that that's part of that living in what remains of the old west and i began to realize that a great deal of it had to do with the university and with the people as bruises and as i've gotten older i know that's what it has to do with this is a great place to raise children it's a very civilized place to live people are very very nicely and you have only to go just about anywhere else to realize that that there's a level of civility here i don't know how we've managed to hang onto it but we are still hanging on there's also now the added fact that i've gotten so much support from people over the years in las cruces and el paso have supported me personally but i feel their support behind me i feel their interest in what i do i feel that there is perhaps more respect and envy so that i'm so comfortable living here

than in terms of developing a fear which i'm very interested in doing for this these two communities in syria the support that's been a building last four five years suggests that i would be foolish and disloyal to leave and in fact we've really only been tempted a couple times do you think about living most importantly my family has done for me in terms of its influences that it was noted in my eight early careers apart for being a very cynical ploy and i was i was one of the angry young man of my generation bebe barron is our children and they began to change all that and certainly when i wrote children of a lesser god i went through an enormous challenge there are a couple things that the root of the change was about to turn forty we have three daughters so i'm surrounded by women i

think that i had much of my life worked at being almost self consciously traditionally male unlike many many heterosexual male writers i focus my characters the predominant characters in the male gender and tended to it's like women or to say as i tried to in red ryder look how badly we treat women but not to give them large parts and with job of a lesser god i for the first time began to write a woman's role that was equivalent to they lead male role and when i finally came to grips with there was the need to deal with the female side of myself i have talked for years about the fact that i knew the writer's head of the end as androgynous as possible they have to be nailed it but i didn't i wasn't good and i was afraid of trying to be a good writer a female roles really deal with the female part of

my character and i know that the three very young ladies that i live with and stephanie my wife had an enormous effect on my growth in that realm and having begun to write i think very well for women i don't not feel diminished in the least as a man and in fact just recently one of the people on my staff former staff director is said about his new play ever interested in got to the point now rewrite better women than you do man and i said well good now i can go back to writing those horribly cynical macho male characters with a clear conscience i'm sure i won't i really i really do and write well for women back in seventy three or four when red ryder open in new york and i ended up playing other in chicago and new york and i didn't have the opportunity to direct in new york i started thinking oh boy amid the houston offer woody allen and stephan in our marriage we just had debbie at the time and she said very wisely

you have to make a choice probably not very far down the road whether you want to commit yourself to be married and the family or whether you would commit yourself to doing all those other things and i think i've never really regretted the decision which was to not try to be a pianist above or woody allen and do all those things because i don't think i could have i know i couldn't be living here and i couldn't be teaching and turned around the theater but i doubt that i could be married and had three children either i would much rather be with them learn without them much much was no questions stephanie used to kid me that in effect she she wrote me into marriage and show notes simply not true that i went willingly though with in a great deal of confusion about what sort of a father's day visit and that i really wanted and that there was a room in my very self absorbed where life for a whole family told her right and in fact there've been

more prolific i've had two regiment my day different beverly of the more prolific and certainly much much happier if i had to give up anything in life i'm sure i would give up i would give up the writing before i would give up the part of the part of the pope the pope the pope the pope to pop that every day i write is a form of exorcism for

me and i'm so full of anger and hostility and energy in various emotions frustrations that the writing is really an outlet for them that i i think unfortunately many people don't have so i consider myself enormously lucky to be able to do it and i'm going to enjoy it as much as i'm going to also a great deal of psychological satisfaction from there it is