The Handel story is an interesting one because to me it highlights a key difference between music and writing. A composer who hears a melody in his head can write down those notes and create masterpiece. A writer almost always think first in terms of scenes and images. He's then translating those scenes and images into words. In that sense, writing is a more difficult discipline than composing music.

I think if you asked Billy Wilder or Frank Darabont or the Epsteins and Howard Koch about their movies, they'd say the same thing Woody Allen says about his movies: it wasn't quite the perfection they had in mind. Or, it was just a good story and I never thought people would consider it a masterpiece.

We are our own worst enemies. We have very little capacity to see our own work for what it is. We get in our own ways. Perfectionism is a dangerous neurosis.

I liked your post the other day about Philip Dunne, who looked at screenwriting as a craft. Maybe we are all better off looking at it this way. In the end, we'd kill to have been a part of a 30% perfect movie like The Shawshank Redemption.

This is no epiphany as he would have readers believe. The human race has known since the beginning that communication on every level is "lost in translation." Each artist deals with it on the level dealt and with what methods and tools they've acquired.

There is little chance of true perfection in the personal cases he describes and suggests, for time would always provide psychic distance again and again, forever onward. That is why the best artists just "finally" finish what they do and "let go" Of course they re-read, re-listen, revisit, but if they are to go on, they must let go. I believe that will differ by degree for each artist. In his case it sounds that no matter the time, or what is revealed within it, he just can't let go.

What a great piece by Cunningham, thanks for sharing, Scott. And wow is "a cathedral made of fire" a beautiful description, and so entirely apt.

Plato, art is once removed from life, and life is once removed from perfection; Aristotle, art is imitation of life, a creative act applying a particular representation to a universal truth.

I always thought mathematicians had it nice, such precise renderings (and beautiful) that can't be mistaken for anything else, and musicians, they toggle right into our viscera. Words and spoken images on the other hand, the tools of the screenplay trade, can mean entirely different things to different people, and the scene we imagine so perfectly can be rendered thousands of different ways on paper which can be rendered thousands more different ways on film by actor and set and director. (And may we all be so derived!)

For fun consideration of what is and isn't lost in translation, French gypsy jazz here, with kazoo, English lyrics here. (If that video, my favorite version, doesn't work, try the official version.)