Inside the Untold Journey of Creating a Hit Movie Far from Hollywood Lights with Adam Burke and Jud Nichols
Adam Burke
I read a ton. You got a lot of time sitting there looking at a cement wall. So you can read or you can go sit and watch TV and I chose to read as much as I could. Joseph Campbell’s got a great book. It’s called The Hero’s Journey. There’s another one with the Save the Cat or something. You know, some of them landed more than others. But I think that the thing was is eventually I knew I just had to start putting pen to paper and I did have access once in a while to a typewriter. But other than that, it was pen and paper. And so yeah, I have notebooks and notebooks and notebooks full of stories that I brought back. And then I eventually set a goal for 30 shorts in 30 days. So, I wrote 30, like five-page shorts in 30 days. And that was challenging. You know, some days I just, I’d wake up, I’d be sitting in my bunk and they would just blow out on me. And some days I’d be sitting there staring at a blank page for an hour or two. And, you know, I have to go for a walk or something and try to figure out what it was that I wanted to get into. And some of them were trash, you know, so some of them I thought were pretty good. And a couple of those Judd and I ended up making together, which was fun. But the real moment that I knew that it was something I really wanted to do was, I was in there during COVID. And we got to a point where it had been like a year and a half since anybody had seen their family. And the mood in this place was just very depressing. People were moping around and you know, people hadn’t seen their family in a long time. And Christmas was coming up and I got the ear of a guard who allowed us to put on a play in a little theater that they had on at the prison. And so, he got us, you know, approved by the captain and the warden. And I wrote the screenplay for an actual play. And the screenplay wrote a play, it was a three-act play. And we had three musical acts in between; we got to perform it in front of all the inmates. And it was eye-opening, you know, I got I performed a little part and I directed and I did the casting and I got to work with these actors in a couple different rehearsals. And then at the end, there’s this huge applause and everybody walks out and it was this moment that like, the mood totally changed in this whole place because of something that happened between me and a pen and paper. And I knew I wanted to do more of that for sure.
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