Idea Book: Joey Mazzentine.

I spent half of college working for a little show called Sesame Street. One of the executive producers pulled me aside one day, profusely apologized, then sent me on a coffee order. (She liked a venti coffee, cream on the side because she didn't trust the business in the fridge.) When I returned chirpily with her java, she asked me what I was studying in school. "Screenwriting." I said.

"Oh, brilliant! Let's sit you down with Joey."

"Really?"

Joey Mazz is my forever art crush. The dude is SO F%!&ING COOL. His office has a metric crapton of action figures carefully aligned on three large shelves, he took the time to remember every interns name, he's married to broadway actress Carrie Butler, and oh yeah-- he's the head writer of Sesame Street.

He said something to me during our meeting, (during a time when I wasn't flailing about the Bob & Doug McKenzie figurines on his desk) which in hindsight seems really obvious.

WRITE WHAT YOU LOVE.

Crazy simple, right? It isn't as though my friends and I had been doing anything any differently, but it helped to be able to compartmentalize my thoughts a little.

This week's idea book prompt is about compiling what you love in a tangible form.

The first time I started thinking about this, I made a list in my journal at the time. My thought process was to come up with things that were pleasing to me in a variety of consumable mediums.

I remember listing things like:

• Loud Hawaiian shirts.
• Retro-futuristic electronica music.
• Not thinking people are going to get what they want, and then they do. (Like when Edward Scissorhands gets to hug the love of his cookie-heart life, Kim.)

The latest list I made included things like:

• Hospitals. Dreamy hospitals, old hospitals, sterile hospitals, creepy hospitals.
• Children who aren't super self aware.
• A relationship that hasn't formed which both characters avoid because they know it wouldn't work, but makes the fans look like cereal meme guy.

The way

you compile your Joey Mazzentine is up to you.

Visually?

Text?

Anything is cool, as long as it demonstrates what you love. Or, things that you love that you want to or find yourself incorporating into your work already. Things that pique your interest in some way.

Happy compiling~!

-Mac

Image of Joey: (x)