Archive For June 12, 2017

If I Wrote The Opening Scene to the Barry Levinson/Al Pacino Penn State Movie

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If I Wrote The Opening Scene to the Barry Levinson/Al Pacino Penn State Movie

Spoiler Alert:  I don’t know Barry Levinson.

Also, I am not close personal friends with Al Pacino.

But I have been fascinated by the recent announcement that Levinson will be directing, and Pacino will be starring, in an HBO movie about Penn State, tentatively called “Happy Valley”.

The official logline for the film reads: “After becoming the winningest coach in college football history, Joe Paterno is embroiled in Penn State’s Jerry Sandusky sexual abuse scandal, challenging his legacy and forcing him to face questions of institutional failure on behalf of the victims.”

I don’t know Levinson, or Pacino, and I know there’s already three pro writers on this project already whom I also don’t know personally (for the record, Debora Cahn (Grey’s Anatomy), John C. Richards (Nurse Betty), and David McKenna (American History X)).  I also know that it’s based on the book by Joe Posanski (called Paterno, released shortly after the Sandusky scandal came to light), another artist whom I also don’t know personally.

What I do know, though, is that a great movie about Joe Paterno and the scandal can be made, and the opening scene should be what I wrote below – formed almost entirely from Paterno’s own words.
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Still Sad And Upset, I Try to Relearn How To Write In A Vastly Altered New World

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Still Sad And Upset, I Try to Relearn How To Write In A Vastly Altered New World

I used to know how to write.

Sure, I have written a lot about Lehigh football, the Patriot League, the NFL, and whatever else I damn well please over the course of the last fourteen or more years.  Maybe I didn’t write particularly great all the time — but sometimes, maybe more by accident than by design, the writing turned out OK.

But the one constant was that I wrote.  I’d sit in front of the warm glow of the laptop monitor and write.  I’d start in the bedroom, before my tired wife would kick me out and I’d write on the laptop in the office so that the clicking of the keys didn’t irritate her.

What I did know how to do was to put my face in front of the laptop and write about the sports subjects that interested me.

But these last few months, I’ve found it harder to come up with the energy to come up with posts every week.  Since it’s the offseason, I’ve got some time to try to analyze it and think it through, and I think I’ve come up with a few reasons why.

If there is one simple answer to the question, it is: today’s world.
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