To make a good movie, you must be willing to kill your darlings. That's an old writing maxim, and it means cutting good scenes, facts and details. Otherwise, we'd be sitting through four-hour movies.
The same is true when you're making a good feature story.
I experienced that while working on a story about actor Ray Wise's return to his hometown of Akron in April.
The multitalented 78-year-old actor, who played Laura Palmer's dad in "Twin Peaks," has had hundreds of roles over his long career. He delivered countless great anecdotes over nearly an hour and a half before an audience at The Nightlight Cinema.
Not all of them could make it into my story, but as a fanboy, they were all darlings. As a reporter, I had to choose which would make it and which would not.
I've been a Ray Wise fan since my childhood, when I first saw him play the U.S. president in the As I grew older, I started noticing him pop up all over the place, and grew to appreciate his aptitude for comedy, pathos and horror. From his disturbing take on Leland Palmer to his role as a campaign manager in the hilarious and starkly prescient "Bob Roberts" to an in "Tim and Eric's Awesome Show." No role is too small or too weird for Wise.
There were a variety of bits and pieces I learned about Wise's career that were a bit too niche too share in the story, but might be fascinating for uber fans like me.
Take, for example, how he got linked up with the comedy duo of Tim and Eric. He said they reached out to him because they were big Twin peaks fans. He enjoyed his first experience working with them on their Adult Swim show so much that he accepted a role in "Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie" without looking at the script. Without too many disgusting details, he ended up playing an alternative medicine doctor who used feces to "heal" people.
"We have a wonderful relationship and they're two crazy guys. They don't get any crazier than those guys," Wise told me after the show.
On the topic of Twin Peaks, which is what drew many to his speech, he shared a ton of fun little details that were fascinating, but didn't contribute to the narrative in my story. For example, he has a silly rivalry of sorts with "Twin Peaks" costar Kyle McLaughlin. The two love giving each other grief. Wise saw a big cardboard cutout of McLaughlin at a hotel in Snoqualmie, Wash., where some of Twin Peaks was shot. Of course, he defaced it.
"I had to (draw) a mustache on it and that started the trend and now I can't look at his picture without putting a mustache on him," Wise told the audience.
Some bits from his talk were too juicy to not include in the story, like Wise's penchant for spoilers and his story about the Queen of England watching Twin Peaks. Sometimes you just run out of room, though. Wise and his manager Mike McGraner had a lot to say about the late great David Lynch that I wished I had the space for. Wise described Lynch as a one-of-a-kind soul, child-like in his wonder of the world. He saw beauty in horror.
"Everybody has secrets. And some of those secrets you'll never, ever want to tell to anyone else alive," Wise said. "And it's a sure bet you're going to take one or two of them to your grave without ever telling anybody. And that's part of being a human being, to have those secrets. And David was enthralled with that whole aspect of being human. And he always felt that 'everything may seem normal to you, but it ain't normal to me.' And we'll find that abnormality if we dig deep enough. And he spent a lifetime digging, digging deeper."
In many ways, journalism is like that. Peeling back the layers of history, culture and human emotion to figure out why things are the way they are.
Every person we talk to, every little fact, is important to the overall narrative of a story, just like every actor's role helps paint the overall picture. And that was a good reminder from Wise. He had great stories from the set, no matter how small a role might be.
Like when he stalked a young Jamie Lee Curtis as a villain in the "Charlie's Angels" TV show, and his character got eaten by an alligator. Or when he played a wise guy gangster on "Robocop," where he recalled Dutch director Paul Verhoeven's signature profanity after each take, no matter how good it might have been: "Well, anyway, we are (expletived), I suppose."
I cover education, but pitched my editors on a story about Wise because, frankly, I'm such a big fan. Doing that story offered a great reminder of the important role we, as journalists, play.
Just like being an actor on the screen, we share stories in the hopes that they will have resonance with our audience. Staying within our word count is the only tricky part.
