creator note - extra save

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THE ULYSSES FACTOR

My mother dreamed of being a novelist herself, and early on she nourished my literary inclinations. When I turned ten she bought me a portable electric typewriter - I started typing, and I've just never stopped. At Princeton I took a lit course studying James Joyce's vast experimental novel Ulysses, and somehow (perhaps to my commercial detriment) seriously imprinted on his stream-of-consciousness mythic/erotic story-telling style.

I also signed up for a creative writing course with William Goldman, who was hiding out at Princeton while writing his remarkable screenplay Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. For a whole semester eight of us met two afternoons a week, reading new scenes and helping him get all the ingredients working together - action-adventure, historic romance, and cowboy humor. Having grown up on a cattle ranch, I was of help with the latter as I imprinted on the screenplay.

As my Princeton eating-club's token cowboy I discovered that, being a fourth-generation California country boy, my regional accent, vocabulary and literary style carried a particular Okie/cowboy edge that New York editors would ever after be trying to alter. But even now, HEART FORCE is clearly a California tale, with West Coast attitudes and perspectives banging up against East Coast assumptions as well as south-of-the-border magical-realism visions. And Jack Hadley has emerged as the quintessential (but not stereotyped) California character. He tells the HIGH HEART story from his scientific perspective as he (and the audience) venture deeper and deeper into Mahalena's 'a la nueva' visionary realms.

During my senior year I worked almost full-time at a federal LSD research center set up by the Kennedy's. I experimented with LSD there, and also did hypnotic research examining how interior imagination and exterior sensory-events interact to create our subjective experience. HEART FORCE would never have emerged without that phase of my life. Humphry Osmond, the head of the Institute (who had taken peyote with Aldous Huxley with a Canadian Indian tribe) deeply impressed me with the ongoing interaction of spiritual and psychological dimensions. The detailed shamanic experiences in HEART FORCE pay homage to Dr. Osmond's early work.

L.A. INDUSTRY NOTES

Then there was the American Film Institute in its early Doheny Mansion days. I came in the back door through Paul Davids because we were working together on an exposé screenplay about the Institute. The intimate AFI seminars with leading directors of the day were invaluable to me as a budding screenwriter - but I soon bombed out of all that. Unlike Paul who went on to succeed with his directing work, my personality wasn't at all suited to being a director. However, I did learn first-hand what directors need from a screenplay in order to bring it fully to life.

Reece Halsey, a famous old-time film agent, kindly took me under his wing and got me some TV writing jobs, but they soon bored me. Then one fateful evening Reese took me to dinner and told me something that forever altered my life flow. He said, "John, you're not going to like what I have to say but I'm going to say it anyway. There are a thousand young writers in Hollywood right now trying to break in - but they've had almost no real life experience to draw from, so they really don't have much to say. My advice to you is to pack up and get out of town, get out and really live life for a while - then come back with something unique to write about."

I took his advice - I went off and finished my therapy training, and plunged into a number of deep relationships. I got banged around in business - and I regularly took off on journeys into native cultures. But I kept on writing screenplays, and returned to Hollywood several times with rather far-out scripts in hand. I got a few optioned and one script into production - but I was still struggling to gain clarity on what I really wanted to communicate through film.

Basically, Hollywood didn't want spiritual films and I wrote screenplays that back then always had a slight esoteric edge to them. So I gave up on Hollywood ... until I returned to California ten years ago - and found cable streaming tech taking hold of the industry. Ah! Finally I could write my peculiar type of story - and perhaps get it made. But rather than finishing just one script or pilot and trying to sell it to the highest bidder, I decided to complete all the various stories I'd been working on, and then get fully involved in finding just the right team to make each of them.

That writing process has consumed seven years of wonderful exciting teamwork with fellow writers. And now we have in hand all those screenplays, plus several highly-commercial projects that have come through friends and clients. HEART FORCE lies at the center of all this. Now it's time to move it into production.

THE SHAMAN DILEMMA

Three of our scripts are admittedly underlaid with fairly radical shamanic themes. HEART FORCE is one of those three, so let me clarify - I use the term shamanic somewhat differently than most people do. I've included this shamanic element in my deeper stories because in certain dramatic contexts, it naturally lurk and shines on the fringes of reality. I call it the 'what-if' factor. It's where myth has visible intercourse with waking reality.

I spent most of my first year of life on the edge of the Apache reservation in eastern Arizona. Then when I was five my family lived in the edge of the Pima and Papago reservations where my dad ranched. I was somehow deeply touched by all that. And then later on I got caught up in anthropology, read the Yaqui shamanic tales by Carlos Castaneda, and spent time with indigenous American communities. The shamanic edge has seriously fascinated me.

I don't practice shamanism but I very much respect it. And I've studied the universal battle that emerges when male ego powerplays take over any spiritual tradition. This priestly-cult drama seems to emerge in most religions at one point or another, and it's a powerful tool for digging deep into the male-female dilemma. That's why the physical presence of the Mayan jade-phallus artifact is so important to this series. And Abierta, Mahalena's teacher and the fully awakened bruja of HEART FORCE, is for me the the embodiment of a new 'a la nueva' thrust beyond priestly-cult dominance.

I personally neither engage in nor denigrate indigenous shamanic realms. I don't practice them in my everyday life, I don't belong to any religion, sect or philosophy. I prefer to see all of this through the eyes of an anthropologist and psychologist, observing without judging. In HEART FORCE especially I respect each character's attitude toward shamanism. And as a writer I love to mix just a touch of mystic imagination and mythic transcendence into otherwise quite reality-based plots.

I've experienced radical events in Mexico and Guatemala while observing shamanic rituals - and almost got myself killed getting too engaged with one particular brujo down at the lake (Alehandro). HEART FORCE attempts to dramatize all this and then point toward a resolution that might finally pull humanity out of the shamanic dark ages, while elevating the 'a la nueva' shamanic brightness. With my three shamanic-laced stories, their director will of necessity need to share similar views of shamanism if the films are to succeed at deeper levels.

In this light I have included two shamanic-tinged hypnotic scenes in HEART FORCE, drawn from my work with Humphry Osmond, to give the audience an intimate taste of what this is all about. With Jack Hadley we've created a very sharp science-based psychologist who gets in way over his head - but is courageous enough to keep looking. He represents the average viewer of this series, providing a ballast for people wanting to dip at least a bit into the possibility of altered states and expanded dimensions.

MYTH AND/OR REALITY?

It's true that HEART FORCE is at times right on the edge of supernatural and sci fi fantasy - but it walks a tight line that never goes too far! As I mentioned before, I prefer to see this series as a mythic tale in the spirit of lucid dreaming, integrating the twin realities we're all born into - dream reality and waking reality. And of course, in the middle of these two lies our amazing power of imagination, that expansive mythic realm of human consciousness. I very much look forward to coming together with like-minded filmmakers who will strive to shed clarity on this unique HEART FORCE 'lucid tale' challenge.

I have yet to come across a movie shot the way I think HEART FORCE must be shot in order to walk this delicate line between reality and myth. It's not occult, it's not horror, it's not dreamy fantasy and its not Marvel at all. Our lucid tale is, drawn from real life - and it must find its own special expression.