Part I: Little Wings and Synaesthesia
After moving countries 7 times, I had just moved back to Amsterdam. But of all places, I was actually on a marine school trip on a boat in the miserably grey middle of the ocean, somewhere off the gloomy and eternally damp Netherlands’ coast.
In that rocking hull, I first truly fell in love with art. My new friends and I were relaxing in our cramped and wet room, when one of them started talking about how they were a guitarist, and began playing a song that I wish I could listen to for the first time forever.
Little Wing by Stevie Ray Vaughan. It was like nothing I had ever heard before. Its undulating waves of blues, tantalizing trills, beautifully oscillating chord changes embellished with suave glissandos of emotion blew my mind. I sat there listening, awestruck by what felt like the lightning of divine inspiration, and on the spot I made up my mind. I was going to learn electric guitar, and master my first performance art.
Inevitably, the COVID-19 pandemic descended, and when school closed and I became trapped in my surprisingly stereotypically idyllic Amsterdam apartment, I saw a golden opportunity. I finally had the time to commit to the greatest project I had ever undertaken. After playing at least 4 hours a day for 6 months, bleeding from my fingers, a lot of music theory, and even more joint pain, I had transformed an ambitious folly into determined belief and then into concrete reality. I was now a guitarist. If you played any song (even one I did not know), I could listen to it for 5 seconds and solo to it, improvise wonderful melodies and even do exactly what Stevie was doing on Little Wing. I learned hundreds of songs, mastered the art of improvisation, and had made what seemed impossible true - a little wing had helped me fly.
It is ironic then, that I am neither studying music nor pursuing a career in it. In fact, my performance art of choice, and the one I believe I have mastered the most is in a completely different medium.
But this experience was a crucial pivot point for me. Up until that point, I had never truly committed myself to an art, and never really believed that I could master one. Guitar gave me a gift much more powerful than music; belief that I could do anything if I put my mind to it, even in something so mystical and creative as the arts that frequently required so much proactive internal drive. By mastering guitar and music, I had also mastered my own sheer will to make what I wanted happen.
This would lead to a certain variety of synaesthesia, where I transformed the determination I had learned through music into skill in a completely new and unfamiliar medium; screenwriting.
Part II: On the Road
Writing was always a natural strength for me. I achieved good grades in my classes, but in subjects like Math or Physics, I had to work day and night to get those treasured As on my transcript soon to be sent out to colleges. In English, it was a whole different story; the class was more of a playground for me than an academic subject. Sometimes inspiration would strike and words would just flow from me onto the page - I ended up being nationally commended in a poetry competition that I had entered for fun, and ever since then, I believed in my writing ability.
So even though my career dream was always to be an entrepreneur, I had this recurring fantasy of being a successful writer - partly because I felt like I could make it happen, but mostly because I just loved weaving together stories. I would read Frank Herbert’s stunning masterpiece Dune and suddenly a short story would impulsively explode onto the page.
Then I read Kerouac’s seminal fictionalized autobiography On the Road, the single most important book I have ever read, as well as my favorite book. Kerouac is the Stevie Ray Vaughan of authors; his unique stream of consciousness writing style is essentially improvisation on the page, and the results were just as world-shatteringly sublime. But Kerouac’s journeys also illuminated an important philosophical question. In On The Road, the Kerouac and his friends are looking for this mystical something, “It”, and to find “It” they adventure across America and live life to the fullest. What “It” actually meant was never truly explained, but it was clear from context that it was a euphoric sense of meaning and profundity. “It” is the eureka moment and the feeling you get from it. “It” is that elated feeling of serenity, insanity, and adrenaline you are engulfed by when you surf a 10-foot wave for the first time. “It” is your purpose in life.
On the Road made me wonder, what was “It” for me and in what ways would I find “It”?
I am reminded of a passage in the book that I related to especially then, “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road”. But what was ahead of me? What road would I take when infinite possibilities presented themselves? This was a question that became increasingly more pressing for me as I made the best decision of my life; to go to college at USC. At 3am on a night in late March, I got an admission update from the dream that was Southern California; I didn’t even pause to read the message - as soon as I saw the confetti, I started shouting uncontrollably in wild happiness, waking up everyone in the building.
To quote Kerouac, “There was nothing to talk about anymore. The only thing to do was go”.
Part III: Living above the Clouds
Arriving at USC for freshman year was one of the craziest things I have ever done. Unlike most of my fellow students, I had never been able to visit the university before, and had never stayed in LA before. Plus, I had to move to a whole new continent all by myself. It was a bit like going on a blind date, except that the date was the beginning of an eternal and unbreakable marriage - on a different planet.
Thankfully the date went very well. I made a ton of friends (many of which I still have to this day), and love my wonderful and insane new home. Like Kerouac, I was living life to the fullest, and in the forever sunny beauty of Southern California, I was (and still am) living above the clouds, where it never rains and you can always reach up to the golden sun to grasp the alluring opportunities that await at every corner. I did Californian things - I learnt to surf (I surf almost every day now), partied harder than I thought possible in dirty yards, took up a screenwriting minor at the best film school in the world just for fun, went on dreamy dates on Hollywood rooftops, and got my first serving of In-N-Out. Fantasy became reality. After moving countries 9 times, I had finally found a place that I might just call home… forever!
However, I also faced the existential crisis that almost every student does when they get to college: I’m getting a degree. What in the world do I want to do with it? College is not like high school. High school sets you up for college. College sets you up for life, so you better figure out what you want to do as soon as possible. Additionally, I was not just at any college, I was at USC - a college that people fraudulently paid millions of dollars just to get into - I had to think big and do something.
I had a very strong sense of purpose. I just had no idea what that purpose was.
As a business major, I tried consulting, and had a fascinating experience working at a USC consulting club with Airbnb to reformulate their Gen Z marketing strategy. I did a marketing internship at an LA film company which was a great experience that taught me an invaluable skill; how to make people want a product - how to sell and make entertainment or performance art, that people want to see. It was a lot of fun, and helped develop my professional confidence and skills enormously. But I still wanted to pursue my dream of entrepreneurship - and I did not want to sell out to become a consultant with an MBA at MicKinsey or vanish into the mire of Orwellian corporate hegemony. I felt like if I did that, I would probably be successful and pretty happy. But at the same time, there was the terrifying threat of boredom and lost opportunity: did I really want to spend 16 hours a day talking to suits copy pasted from The Office and Mad Men about “digital strategy” while poring through the excel spreadsheet of the day? It’s a financially sound backup plan, but one that I would not take if I could help it.
There were more exciting things I could do.
Part IV: The Edge of Tomorrow
I had begun to love the screenwriting format and prefer it to the novel or short story as I believe the screen is a more relevant storytelling medium today. I started to balance my efforts between business and screenwriting more. I wanted to master the art of screenwriting and understand the DNA of a good story for the screen. I felt inspired by the stunning visuals and compelling story telling of Michael Mann in Heat, the dichotomously comedic and action-packed dialogue of Shane Black in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and the equally breathtaking and heartrending suspense of Godard’s Breathless. I examined the details of the pilot episode of Breaking Bad and the sequences of Edge of Tomorrow as if they were Da Vinci’s brushstrokes in Mona Lisa’s timelessly iconic smile. As I mastered these skills while studying these works and honing my craft daily, I discovered a very niche but lucrative and thrilling career-path that combined my interest in entrepreneurship, entertainment business, and creativity: becoming a Producer-Writer. Even in Hollywood, the term “producer” is vaguely understood. But the type of producer I wanted to be was a developer and creator of ideas that I would build out until they were ready for the big screen. I would attach actors and directors, make high-stakes deals with screenwriters and studio executives, and bring my stories to life. A somewhat unholy but epic combination of Jerry Bruckheimer and Martin Scorsese; the man behind the movie who made it all happen with equal parts fancy business-savvy Malibu dinners, a perceptively analytical eye for an entertaining story, and the visionary screenwriting skill for magnificent storytelling.
There was just one problem: it seemed impossible. A 20-year-old international student producer who was still in college? Unheard of. If it was a hypothetical, I could probably make every single executive at Paramount headquarters laugh hysterically. In an industry built on nepotism where you’re either an insider or an outsider, how could I break in?
Thankfully, I had a few tricks up my sleeve. First of all, my business and marketing experience taught me how to sell a product, and how to identify what was marketable. Secondly, my relentless pursuit of screenwriting had given me the ability to both ideate and understand what external ideas/intellectual property was worth developing. Thirdly, I went to USC: the best entertainment business college in the world. If this outlandish dream was possible anywhere, it was possible here, the epicenter of global entertainment.
I also had nothing to lose - a dangerously powerful trait.
Through unstoppable but seemingly endless hours networking and working on my craft, I finally secured a coveted producer/development internship at Radar Pictures. This is the firm that created Jumanji, Riddick, and The Wheel of Time; an invaluable opportunity. Under the generous mentorship of my colleagues and generous USC Marshall/SCA professors, I managed to blow past all expectations and take the first steps to become a runaway success. I broke record after record at Radar, and have begun to capture that lightning in a bottle that is my dream of being a producer-writer. I have now graduated to working on my own projects in speculative collaboration with Radar, and am producing two of my own projects that are moving forward at a furiously exciting pace: a groundbreaking reality series, and a feature film based on a bestselling novel. Against all odds, and even to my surprise, I am a real Producer-Writer.
If you told me that I would be here two years ago when I was leaving high school for college in California, I would have laughed just as much as those Paramount executives would. Not to mention the almost ridiculous possibility of being a businessman… and an artist all rolled into one? Much less while being a student at the same time. But at one point I did not think I would be a guitarist either. Living in Northern Europe, I also never thought I’d be surfing 10-foot foot waves at 5am in Malibu (or surfing at all). If there is anything I have learnt on this wild odyssey, it is that anything is possible; if you shoot for the moon, you should at least land among the stars. So shoot for them today, because today is the edge of tomorrow, and by then you might be a magnificently twinkling ball of light living up in the clouds in a city of angels whose little wings can help you soar much higher than you might think.