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I have had to learn the simplest things last. Which made for difficulties.

— Charles Olson

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Dear Bees,

It is my distinct pleasure to welcome Tony Tost to the Butch Gets Schooled Series. I would be remiss in not acknowledging the deep influence he has had on how I think about art. Specifically, when it comes to the mythic. The mythic is something that has tied together Tony’s progression from poet and academic to TV and film. We both share an affinity for it, although from different starting points— Tony’s sensibility coming out of a trailer park, mine out of a rainforest soaked in religion. And our vocational trajectories have taken us elsewhere in terms of how we perceive and express the mythic— Tony’s to Hollywood, mine to a psychologist’s office.
Still, the strategies discussed here, ones used to develop mythic storytelling and persona, are invaluable ways to look at and create art. They remain meaningful as their shapes and forms change throughout our artistic lives.

I find many contemporary offerings lacking when it comes to the mythic. They seem more concerned with socio-political relevance in an a-historical vacuum, which, for me, is no relevance at all. As the scope of that has no history, it has no future. Or, rather, as that kind of art does not seek to step out of time to pursue a deeper set of truths, it limits the frequencies it can exist on. I cannot say that that kind of art holds my interest in any meaningful way.

Below, Tony’s bio. I deeply admire what he has done as an artist. I hope to continue to glean from his projects the same visceral intelligence and “tingle” that mark his best work:

Tony Tost’s first feature film as a writer-director — the modern-day western crime film Americana, starring Sydney Sweeney, Paul Walter Hauser, and Halsey — will hit theaters this summer on August 22nd. Tost was also the showrunner and executive producer of the second season of the Rian Johnson-Natasha Lyonne mystery series Poker Face, which debuts on Peacock on May 8th.

Previously, Tost was the creator and showrunner of Damnation, a neo-western TV series about the labor wars in middle America. He was also a writer and producer on the western mystery series Longmire and was nominated for a WGA award for his work on The Terror: Infamy. He’s the author of a book about Johnny Cash as well as two poetry collections, including Invisible Bride, winner of the 2003 Walt Whitman Award.

Tost received a Ph.D. in English from Duke University and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Arkansas. Before that, he attended Green River Community College and College of the Ozarks.

He splits his time between Los Angeles and Arkansas with his wife and two sons.

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Butch
Tony, thank you for taking the time to sit down and have this conversation with me. First, can you talk about what art, film, literature, music you are immersed in right now?

Tony
In terms of film, I’m a bit scattershot right now, but I’m trying to immerse myself in possible filmmaking models for what I’m hoping to be my second movie as a writer-director.

This movie I’m hopefully making later this year is a 24 hour kidnapping ordeal based on a real life incident in Alabama a few years ago. My primary reference points for how I think the film should feel are Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon and Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. But there’s a whole bunch of other filmmakers and movies that I’m rewatching and considering. Pictures by William Friedkin, the Safdie brothers, Jonathan Demme, Sean Baker, Elaine May, Jacques Audiard, Jules Dassin.
I’m going for a sort of real time documentarian immediacy, but one that’s cut through with some good genre storytelling too. So I find myself watching and rewatching a handful of films to crib camera moves and filmmaking techniques from them.

But I also just watch stuff to watch stuff. My all-time favorite filmmaker is Howard Hawks and I’m obsessively rewatching his movies — Rio Bravo, Only Angels Have Wings, The Big Sleep, Red River, His Girl Friday, and many others. He has a genius for getting real lived-in textures and relationships in his scenes while always keeping the story moving.

Also my teenage sons are budding cinephiles, so I’ll watch a lot of stuff with them.
Most of my reading falls into two camps. One camp is reading anything I can find on my filmmaking heroes. This means interviews and biographies about Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, Robert Altman, Sam Peckinpah, Martin Scorsese, John Ford. I’m trying to absorb their techniques, attitudes, experiences, values.

The other camp is reading big old biographies on (usually) classic Hollywood figures. Over the last year or so, this has included comprehensive biographies of Robert Mitchum, Ava Gardner, John Wayne, Mike Nichols, Hawks, Wilder, Lubitsch, Elaine May, Stanley Kubrick. I find these to be a ton of fun. But they also indirectly help me navigate the often brutal business of working in Hollywood. If nothing else, it’s reassuring to learn that even my heroes had countless setbacks and heartbreaks between their triumphs.

In the world of art, I’m mostly drawn to photography. My two favorite photographers are William Eggleston and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and I return to their work constantly. I also recently picked up a photography book first published in 2004 called Sleeping By The Mississippi by Alec Soth, which might very well be my favorite book of photography ever.

I’ve really been digging Maxfield Parrish’s paintings and illustrations for awhile.

Music-wise, I’m fairly voracious. I’m obsessively curating new playlists on Spotify. Many of these are built to inform various film and TV projects I’m either writing, brainstorming, or (hopefully) making. There’s a TV pilot I’ve written that’s a crime show set in the world of a Tennessee honky tonk. I’ve put together a 50+ hour playlist of honky tonk and classic country songs that I think could play on the honky tonk’s jukebox.

I’d say a little over half of my reading/listening/watching life is geared towards directly informing my own creative endeavors. I’m quite easily influenced, so I’ve had to learn how to curate to both inspire myself, but to also protect myself a bit artistically.

Before showrunning season two of Poker Face, I put together a playlist of tracks to set the vibe — and quite a lot of these tracks ended up making it into the season.

I listen to a lot of Tom Petty.

Butch
Let’s talk myth for a minute. What is your current perspective on it and how has that evolved for you?

Tony
In the present day, I think time has been flattened to a state of perpetual immediacy. We go from update to update without accumulating a deeper sense of time, or history, or tradition. We go from one algorithmically personalized moment to another like jumping from one bubble to another. We have been sold a promise of individualism and freedom, but what we get is a kind of cultural and historical amnesia.

A mythic story can expand our sensibilities beyond this atomized default orientation.
Myth sometimes gets framed as the opposite of the truth, a mere synonym for lying. But I think of a myth as being something closer to a collective dream. It can have a mixture of facts and untruths in it. It can veer to the dangerous or to the neutral or to the benign. But either way, a myth has a collective power that individualized truths can’t quite muster.

When we say a story or a figure is mythic, I think we mean it conjures up some power that transcends the merely immediate and the merely personal. Somehow it mingles the present with the collective past — and maybe the collective future.
In that way, a mythic story or a mythic figure can transcend a single lifespan and cross generations. Whatever its faults, it can also offer counsel from the past to the present.

I just saw Ryan Coogler’s excellent new film Sinners today and that is what I mean by a mythic story. There’s one scene in particular. A young bluesman plays for an all-Black juke joint in the Delta in 1932. And as he plays, he conjures up not just the spirit of African musician ancestors — who literally begin to appear and perform with him — but his song also conjures up the future in the form of an Afro-Futurist guitarist and a hip-hop DJ and dancers. The music transforms and congeals together into a single ever-evolving song.

It’s like the greatest evocation of the power of myth in recent cinematic history. And I think one reason why Sinners has such sensational word-of-mouth is that we’ve been starved of this kind of mythic power in our current cycle of reboots and rebrandings and rehashes.

Butch
How do you see myth relating to your own work? In terms of conceptualizing narrative, perhaps but also in terms of how you experience art?

Tony
I used to be a poet. Then I became a poet-academic-critic. Then I dumped all of that and jumped into screenwriting about 15 years ago. And semi-recently, I’ve added filmmaking to my artistic profile. That’s about 30 years of artistic creation and my attraction to myth is maybe the one constant tying these different evolutions together.

My best scripts have a touch of the mythic to them. I try to tell a story that not only speaks to the present, but to the past and future as well.

My first movie as a writer-director is called Americana and it’s coming out this August. When I decided that I wanted to write this movie, I knew I wanted to do a Western set in the modern day. I thought it would be interesting to re-access that mode of storytelling now that I recognize the extent to which traditional Westerns have pretty much universally been stories about the trials and tribulations and triumphs of white dudes.

So in writing and filming Americana, I wanted to conjure up — through choice of character traits, locations, costuming, dialogue — the spirit of a traditional Western. But then in the telling of the story, I wanted to methodically but pretty ruthlessly start sidelining the white dude characters while still maintaining the mythic structures and situations of the Western.

This wasn’t to make any political point. I don’t have any political insights to offer. It was more out of creative curiosity about the genre of the Western itself and what might happen if its center drifted away from its usual center and more towards its usually marginalized characters.

Now, do I want a person sitting in a theater or at home to be aware of this intellectually? No. But I want them to feel it at some level. First, they probably feel a surprise at which characters start taking center stage. But hopefully they also feel a residual power as this mythic type of story pulls these other characters into its current.

I think myth has always been important to me. I became conscious of its draw when we were undergrads at College of the Ozarks. I was really pulled in by the fabulist aesthetic of poets like Charles Simic, Russell Edson, James Tate. And I also had a strong affinity for Kafka and Borges and Italo Calvino. So, I started digging around for more resources, which is when I discovered Jerome Rothenberg’s anthologies, particularly Technicians of the Sacred and Shaking the Pumpkin.

When I got deeper into my scholarly life as a Ph.D. student, it was the mythic element in the poetries and poetics of Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Gertrude Stein, and other experimental modernists that excited me there. I began to realize that these poets’ innovations weren’t in a temporal vacuum, but that they were actually drawing upon the ancient past to radically revise the present. That sort of temporal dexterity is what really got my synapses firing.

Around this time, I also wrote a book about Johnny Cash where I argued that he should be considered a great American novelist akin to Twain or Melville. The only difference was that Cash’s greatest literary creation was the mythic version of himself — the outlaw spiritualist who roamed the land singing to prisoners and on behalf of the Indigenous while occasionally getting thrown into jail himself. I was fascinated by how Cash took the materials of his own life, plus his voice, his lyrics, and the songs of others, to create this singular folk hero figure called the Man in Black.

When I’m experiencing art and when I’m making my own shit, I get the deepest tingle when there’s some kind of emotional bonding between the present moment and the deep past.

Butch
You mentioned once that securing enough money to support yourself is a technical issue for the artist to solve. Or that is how you saw it for yourself. Can you say more about that? I guess I’d like to understand more about what I see as a very pragmatic perspective from you when it comes to your sense of yourself as an artist. How did that perspective evolve?

Tony
When I frame making money as a technical issue for me to solve as an artist, it opens me up to discovering creative solutions to that perpetual problem. If that makes sense. I simply find it more useful to think of this as a recurring technical issue to be solved as opposed to a spiritual or personal burden to carry.

Like you, I don’t come from money. So money or capital or what-have-you has always been a ripe question for me. How to garner enough material support to have the time and freedom to pursue an artistic life.

When I was younger, I thought being a tenured professor would be the answer to the money question. But the deeper I got into academia, the more academia started to negatively affect my writing. After I got a tenure track creative writing gig, I immediately realized I didn’t have perhaps the resiliency to keep the politicking and careerism involved in academic life from poisoning the artistic well.
Weirdly, I’ve found Hollywood to be much more congenial to my artistic spirit, even though it’s supposed to be world headquarters for artistic compromise. I guess part of it is that there’s an entrepreneurial side to film and TV that I find liberating.
Whenever my career has stalled, I’ve simply locked myself in a room for a few months and reinvented myself with a new script. I will often write a script on my own for free, which is called a spec script. Because it’s a speculative venture.
My impression is that other writers at my level — fairly anonymous but also working steadily for over a decade — don’t write for free. They either get paid up front or they don’t write at all. Now, I don’t write for other people for free. I only write my own original stories that I control in a speculative manner.

Some of my spec scripts have generated zero dollars, while others have generated enough income to pay my bills for a year.

Going off and writing one of these spec scripts a thrilling roll of the dice that’s worked out for me a few times. It’s how Americana came into being, as well as Damnation. I don’t know if there’s an equivalent option in academia or poetry simply because in screenwriting, there’s always the possibility of making other people lots of money.

But it’s not just an issue of writing well. In film and TV, if you write the world’s greatest script but you can’t convince some entity to invest millions of dollars into filming that script, it’s pretty much for naught.

Raising enough money to get your script made is a technical issue you have to solve, just as — say — figuring out how to get necessary exposition about a character’s past into a scene without it being totally boring is a technical issue to solve.
You have to identity the problem, analyze what makes it a problem, brainstorm possible solutions, then trial-and-error your way until you find a solution that works for you.

When I’m writing a script, at first I’m just in love with the story and the characters. And I’m just trying to write something that gives me a tingle — of excitement, anticipation, emotion. Something visceral. But once I’ve done that, I kind of take my artist goggles off. And I look at the script again as what it really is at this stage: a fundraising letter. Before a script becomes a blueprint for a film or TV episode, it needs to convince executives and/or producers that it’ll gain them either profit and/or prestige

So I examine my script with this in mind. What elements will draw capital towards it? What elements will repel capital away? Is this a script that can be financed because of the big ideas and genre elements? Or will this be a script that can only be financed because it has attracted financially-valuable acting talent to it?

I think of myself as a populist screenwriter — I like working in historically popular genres such as crime, mystery, westerns — so I like to think that my best scripts naturally overlap in terms of their artistic and entrepreneurial ambitions.
But sometimes there’s a schism. It becomes therefore a technical problem for me as a writer to figure out how to adjust my script so it can attract enough capital or enough acting talent to get made without losing the qualities that made me want to write the story in the first place.

Because making those adjustments isn’t inherently an artistic compromise. To me, that’s a sophomoric conception of the artist’s role. I mean, I could just be stubborn and refuse to change a precious word. But it’s much more exciting to take a script that I love but don’t think can get made and to revise it with entrepreneurial ambitions in mind. Because if I do it right, the solutions I find will end up making the script artistically stronger.

I have a script right now where there’s three main roles. Two of the roles have had actors and their agents throwing themselves at them, while the third role has been a bit tougher sell.

This third role just happens to be the role most likely to get a high value actor to help our film budget. So, I recently revised the script to give that third role more juice and a stronger introduction. There’s more “actor bait” now.
And the ripple effect is that I think this revision — inspired by entrepreneurial fundraising necessities — has made the story itself more entertaining without losing any emotional resonance.

It took me awhile to realize that a sellout/authenticity dichotomy is a shitty framing device. I now believe it’s just as important for an artist to attract and keep an audience’s attention as it is for the artist to express him or herself.
Any means of doing this is valid, I think, just as long as you don’t allow it to diminish the work itself. One way is creating a public persona for yourself, to draw people to the work. Hitchcock was a genius at this. Spike Lee, too.

Via cameos, interviews, and power of personality, Hitchcock turned himself into a brand to be outsourced to TV programs (Alfred Hitchcock Presents) and talk shows. It’s a brilliantly creative solution to the technical problem of how to reliably attract audiences to your work. What Hitchcock did was make himself into his own sub-genre.

I don’t really have that option as I don’t have that kind of Hitchcock bigger-than-life personality. Or anything approaching his creative track record. But on a much less public level, I have made myself a kind of brand within the industry as one of the reliable screenwriters you can go to for a blue collar and/or flyover America story.
I’ve done this by being selective in the kinds of stories I tell. I’ve tended to choose stories that dovetail with my own biography as a small town trailer park guy. And I’ve buttressed this by emphasizing my blue collar background and perspective in my screenwriting substack and in interviews.

Framed one way, this is a self-limitation. Framed another way, it’s a creative solution to the technical question of “how do I get myself hired over other professionals in a very competitive industry.” Creating this lane for myself — one that I can both get paid in and do satisfying work in — has been as important a creative endeavor for me as anything else I’ve done.

I first started thinking about practical material matters like this when I was writing my dissertation, primarily on Ezra Pound. Through Pound and Olson and the scholar Eric Havelock (especially Preface to Plato), I came to learn about how the pre-Platonic poets would use rhythm and music to entrance their audience. This is how they attracted their audience to their poet-songs, and how they kept them there.

Pound framed that necessity to hypnotize the collective audience as a technical problem to solve. Without doing that, the song would have no audience and therefore no purpose and no life. For a Greek singer-poet, rhythm wasn’t a formal flourish like in a modern day sonnet — it was how the poet kept the audience listening so he could sing his poetic song.

It wasn’t a compromise for a pre-Platonic poet to entrance an audience. It was a precondition. Likewise, it’s not a compromise to attract financing to my film and TV projects. It’s a precondition.

Right now, I’m trying to figure out how to take the next step and go from being a writer-for-hire to a more independent filmmaker. It’ll take a couple of big creative entrepreneurial rolls of the dice, I’m sure, to try and pull this off.
Many screenwriters seem to look upon this as a vocation or a respectable career. I see it as being closer to a long term mutual con job where both me and the industry are alternately both the con artist and the mark. I like to think this gives me some sort of an advantage. Either because of clarity or self-deception.