SHOT BY THE WRITER/TOM BENEDEK 1983-2004
at Bergamot Station art gallery Frank Pictures from September 12 -October 12, 2005.
With a professional screenwriting career spanning three decades, including Cocoon and Free Willy, Tom Benedek has done his share of hard time in development hell.
He needed to consolidate the boxes of pages and research materials from all the unmade movies - the Israeli spy script for Martin Scorsese; a Harold Ramis comedy for Michael J. Fox; the Jersey Films prison escape movie; the invention of Viagra comedy for Working Title; the Honey We Shrunk the Kids sequel for Disney - the solid scripts, the bad scripts, (The brilliant? The unlucky? Who knows?) but all, definitely assignments he no longer controlled and would either go nowhere or be completely rewritten by someone else.
Seeking closure, Tom fixed on the idea of some sort of memorial. The image of a screenplay, riddled with bullet holes and bronzed like a baby shoe stayed in his mind. He began spending time at a firing range near LAX under the tutelage of a former Navy Seal while learning about the process of casting a 120 page paper script into bronze sculpture. Once a few scripts were riddled with bullet holes, he realized that the effect of the ammunition on the paper itself was just as interesting as the bronzes.
Cinematographer Robert Elswit lent him his 8 x 10 view camera and Tom began shooting large format pictures that could be enlarged and do justice to the fascinating fibrous/typed words on paper detail of the "shot" scripts. These photographic studies began to transcend the joke he started with. The components of unrequited creative satisfaction and sad outrage were replaced with a transcendent inner celebration of the blank page, the typed word, that emotional fiber from which all writing springs. These inner landscapes of "shot" screenplays became a world of discovery and formidable expression as Tom returned to serious photography, which he had studied and practiced, when he studied cinematography, before his writing career began.
Motion Picture and TV agents at United Talent Agency took one look at his first 34" x 42" Iris prints and began buying them for their offices. Laurie Frank, the first gallery owner he showed his portfolio to, offered him the show which will open at Bergamot Station's Frank Pictures on September 12th.
SHOT BY THE WRITER is composed of 5 lost wax bronze sculptures of screenplays in various "poses" (GUNPLAY #1 - #5) and 14 photographs (PLOT HOLES #6-#20) representing the 21 writing projects permanently out of his grasp. This work, controlled from beginning to end by the artist, has become a very significant personal calling for Tom.
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