Deep in a box lived a screenplay called Anthony's Movie about a paranoid guy who kidnaps the man he believes had wronged his father. I thought this box was buried so deep that I won't actually see it again until I move. But I found a version of it from the early 1990s––not the one I wanted to see, actually––and I dutifully reproduced it above. But I'm not going to transcribe it because it just isn't that good. It's me working through my personal shit, nothing else.  

I first wrote it in Binghamton in 1983-84, when studying with my first real-life art hero, Ken Jacobs. I took an independent study with him on it but don't remember much of what he said, except for the day I saw him in the hallway after he first read it. 

"I like it,"he said, unable to stop and talk because he was on his way somewhere. I knew he wasn't lying because he had that slightly manic glint in his eye. (If you've ever met Ken, you know what I'm talking about.) "It's mean-spirited."

And so it is. Mean-spirited, obsessive. I remember very little about it except a man tied up with ropes, a whole lot of accusatory dialog, an obsession with class and failure (sound familiar?) and a photograph on the cover of the script. I pulled it out of the newspaper. "The United Auto Workers supports this struggle," I believe it says. A union man story, all the way. 

Simply put, Anthony's Movie hits on every single trope of father/son material I ever used. That's why I never finished. Because it offered me nothing new to discover and ultimately, for that very reason, bored me.