Collaboration in Arts is a Fucking Joke.

I used to think that it really was possible to enjoy the beauty of the collaborative process in the creative arts - especially the performing arts. It's not so much an issue in other art processes; many of those come to life with the stroke of a pen or brush, or the shutter click of a camera - and they are more expressive and work better when solitary more often than not.

But in the performing arts, whereupon you have actors, directors, dancers, musicians; and you work with playwrights, designers, choreographers to make a dream come to life - one creates, if you will, an EVENT on stage.

Heh. Bullshit.

I am in the throes of surviving something akin to a nuclear holocaust after my most recent forray into the world of "collaborative arts". What a crock of steaming shit.

Working on a film that we already had our doubts about: a remake of a classic set in the world of the contemporary, whose director had the vision of Mr. Magoo; a cast of mostly half-baked actors with the talent of an acorn, surrounded by a indestructible wall of masturbatory and (un-deserving) self-righteousness fanning the flames of their egos that would make even the most indignant divas seem like meek toddlers from a Feed the Children commercial; an assistant director who was so focused on the term "assistant" that he chose to rise above it and thereby be an insulting prick to each and every one of us; a producer who couldn't find her own ass with two hands and a road map, and spent the entire budget on setting the location shoot overseas because of the "gorgeous landscape", and leaving the cast with basically a fig leaf to cover their privates and enough money to simply buy booze to try to forget this nightmare.

I have to ask - really, I have to - what is the fucking point? Why call it a collaboration when it is nothing more than an opportunity for people to spin in their own little orbits and maybe bump into each other in an attempt to get to the desired end?

Art is not supposed to suck this badly, I'm sorry. People are not supposed to be so ruthless and stupid at the same time. Film is supposed to take life to a new level, a heightened reality and a vision, and mold it into cinema and move an audience - be it to tears, anger, laughter - anything.

I just find, as I sit here in my honeywagon (can I really call it that? it doesn't even have a toilet), chewing on a celery stick from a really tired Craft Service station, that perhaps I need to rethink my expectations. I have been around this industry since I was a child, and I'm still shocked at how much it sucks. How the people with no clue are the ones in charge. How a young man, a fellow actor (if I can call someone who acts to himself and acts on his lines an actor), who has the audacity to tell me how to say my lines so that he will look better (and continuously upstages me until the director says something) can not know that he is a fucking tool?

I am convinced that everyone is sleeping with everyone on this set. That's why it's all going to hell in a hand-basket; nobody is calling anyone else out because they're schtupping each other.

The irony is that I'm the only one not getting laid, yet I'm actually the only one really getting fucked.