..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

It's A Geek World ...

So we’re at the world premiere of The Core.  I’m standing with a circle of friends, the stars are milling around being thin and precious, everybody’s happy, the reviews are good -- one of those little victory moments you hold onto in a Hollywood career.  My mom, who I’d flown in from Boston, comes up and takes my arm.  I look down at her, waiting for the loving praise for my big-ass big budget sci-fi movie:

“Wow, John.  All those years of being a geek and not dating paid off.”

… ah.

Two things now happen.  One: my vindictively-delighted friends lift my mom onto their shoulders and carry her around so she can repeat this to everyone at the party.  Two: I’m left to reflect on the nature of the word “geek.”

“Geek,” of course, used to mean “freak,” specifically those who bit the heads off chickens.  Some echoes of this origin can be seen on website message boards, where geeks bite the heads off other posters who dare disagree with their love of Battlestar Galactica.   “Geek” then evolved to mean “nerd,” as in Freaks and Geeks.  Geeks liked science fiction, fantasy, comic books, math… geeks were uncool.  We geeks lived a life of the mind.

Now, geeks run the frickin’ world.

Something happened.  Out there in the tech world, the guys who got on the ’Net first because they desperately wanted to post on alt.rec.star_wars_slashfic became entrepreneurs.  In entertainment, the First Geek Lucas (He Who has Fallen But Must Still Be Respected) suddenly made more damn money than any suit had ever imagined could be possible.  It turns out a “life of the mind” meant “imagination” -- geeks were dreamers.  And now, suddenly, those dreams were gold.

Geeks are not satisfied with the world as is.  We want jetpacks, aliens, kung fu, heroes, transhumanist implants, zombies and superpowers.  Sadly, we tend to obsess over hot Asian chicks with superpowers, but whatever.  We want books to explore the possibilities, movies to showcase our dreams, comics to create detailed alternate worlds.  And when we get these things and bring them to the popular culture, they’re embraced, and more people are assimilated into our ranks.  Sweet God, there are even girl geeks now.  When did that happen?

Geek culture is now the imagination boundary for pop culture.  We love comic books because their narrative structure allows deep character development combined with amazing visuals.  We introduced those books to a world that thought they were “funny books” and the damn things took off.  We love sci-fi because it stirs the soul, and pushes us to visualize a future most would think impossible, but we only consider “delayed.”   We obsessively dig up the fringe.  Geeks dragged imaginative images from other cultures -- specifically Japan and China -- onto American shores.  Geeks revel in finding things no one else has seen. (“Dude, it’s a third-gen bootleg, but Brotherhood of the Wolf will destroy you.”)   Geeks, through our combination of obsession and imagination, have become the pioneers of culture’s far edges.  We plumb the undiscovered country, send back the maps, and the next thing you know mullet-headed ranchers in Wyoming are raving about The Matrix.

In Hollywood, there’s a brotherhood of the geek.  Dean Devlin is a guy who’s genuinely excited that he’s going to make a giant robot movie.  Groups of screenwriters will gather to chuckle about the latest comics or innovative little film we caught on bootleg.  The Wachowski brothers create cool shots just because they are so damn cool, not because some test audience demands it…  Put it this way: this year studios paid me to write a Catwoman script, adapt Greg Rucka’s gritty retro spy thriller Queen and Country, and labor lovingly at the feet of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy.  I just wrote a magic samurai swordfight set on a vast burning bridge for DreamWorks.  My buddy Andy Cosby created the TV show Haunted, about a psychic PI, and is now writing a movie about a nightmare hunter.  Nick Nunziata over at CHUD started a film web site out of Atlanta named after a cheap horror movie.  Now he does film commentary on CNN.   And Harry Knowles, bloody hell -- love him or hate him, he’s got A-list Hollywood screenwriters calling him at his home at Austin and sucking up to him like Darrin from Bewitched sucking up to a new client. 

When else in cultural history could a geek have this many opportunities to work on projects he loves?

This website is a great way to track the projects which excite you, the films of imagination, of drama, of just stone-cold coolness.  But there’s more --

-- get off your ass and get in here.

I never went to film school.  I had no family and no contacts in Hollywood.  Almost no working writer I’m friends with went to film school.  Many of them didn’t get into Hollywood until their late 20s, early 30s.   Two writers I’m working with sold their first horror script when they were 42.  Right now there’s digital video, comics -- so you can’t get published as a comic book writer?  Go to Yahoo!, check out the art websites, hook up with somebody trying to prove their chops and do it on-line.  Nothing cheaper than server space.  You want to write novels?  A page a day is a book a year, or three feature scripts a year.  A.  Single.  Page.  Asimov once said “We write 999 pages so the thousandth page is good.”  But a page a day gets you to the thousandth a lot faster.

Whether you’re inspired by the work you see and love, or pissed off because you think you can do better, there’s now NO EXCUSE for you not to get involved.  Even if you can’t bail on the day job, a couple hours a week as a hobby with the tech available can allow you to express the geek dreams within.  Maybe you’ll never make a living at it -- few of us are that lucky.  But you can attract others who share your imagination.  You can share your life of the mind.

You want my job -- come and get it.  I’m sure as hell no smarter than anyone reading this column.  Maybe I had a smidge of luck, but hell, plenty of us spent years sleeping in our cars, stalking luck like the girl who dumped us at the prom.  You go grab fate by the balls, you beat it into shape by working your ass off, and you dream like the crazed manga-loving geek you are.

It’s a Geek World, brothers and sister.  I got a twenty-sided die, the DVD of Ultraviolet, and a Green Lantern T-shirt.  Let’s ride.

John Rogers, the screenwriter of The Core, knew he was going to marry his wife-to-be when she stole his complete collection of The Tick.

A Geek Responds ...

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