A Conversation in a Sauna

(Or, Why I Abandoned My Screenplay...)

Like all the best ideas, this one started with a conversation in a sauna.

I was sitting there alone, sweating away following a pull day at the gym. A few minutes in, a trim middle-aged man entered and sat down opposite me. He fidgeted immediately and made grunting noises, wanting my attention. I tried to ignore him, valuing the peace and stillness of a sauna, but I found myself dragged in when he asked what I'd been working on. I answered, reluctantly asked him the same, and he responded: "Oh I do all sorts, whatever I feel like on the day."

He then described his burgeoning career as a fitness content creator. The man was buzzing, having recently passed 10,000 total likes on TikTok. He filmed himself doing exercises, and had gained a community who posted encouraging comments to each other.

It wasn't completely positive. Without me getting a word in, he ranted about how the gym let local school groups use the facilities during his workout session. On one occasion he was streaming live on TikTok while on a treadmill when he noticed two girls filming him back. He went to tell their teacher, yet they acted like nothing could be done. The next thing he knew, the girls were following him and commenting on his TikTok. A week later, he showed this to the teacher, who took them to one side and "gave them a bollocking."

Barely pausing between thoughts: "People are like 'why are you filming in the gym?' But in my mind it's okay to do so, half the people in here are doing it and management told me I could film anywhere except the changing room." However, he explained, he did stream in there once, and got his old account banned from TikTok because he caught a patron walking past in the nude. "Okay, my fault for putting the video up without realising." Management got involved after the patron complained to them. The man had managed to delete any trace of the video beforehand and "got away with it."

I almost broke my neck from whiplash as he launched into saying, "Look, I'm 47. I'm not on Facebook or Twitter or anything, just social media. But it's crazy what happens once you reach 10,000 likes. I keep getting fellas from the gym DM'ing me. Never the ladies! They ask me to be their friend, or for training or diet tips, and I tell them I'm not interested in any of that."

"Good for you," was my sole contribution to this conversation.

He laughed: "There was the time a bloke DM'd me. They said they were in [redacted village near where I live], and that they had a nice arse. And, look, mate, I'm as straight as they come, y'know what I mean? The only reason I'd go over to [village] is to knock on the door and punch him square in the face."

As a gay man, I had to hold my tongue here. Something intriguing was formulating in my head and I needed the conversation to continue. So, I nodded as the anecdotes rolled on until I had no water left in my body to sweat and had to excuse myself.

I hurriedly showered, changed, and sprinted to the Caffè Nero around the corner. I typed everything out into iOS Notes before a single detail could leave my brain. Within 5 minutes, I had an outline for a screenplay idea.

Can you call copying verbatim what I'd been told and twisting it into a black comedy for my own amusement an "idea"?

It was exciting to be writing a screenplay again. Growing up, I dreamt of someday being a film and TV screenwriter. I love the visual immediacy of a screenplay, and I could never find that excitement trying to write prose. Unfortunately, the reality of breaking into the biz, paired with a writer's block that meant I didn't finish a script for 13 years, led me to accept staying forever at a hobbyist level. Building the blocks for this script — Google Doc name: "Crazy Horse Play" — gave me a rush I'd not felt in years. Simply the act of creating something was more exhilarating than any pump.

I developed the man's ramblings by adding two new elements. First, as revenge for his homophobia, I imagined him knocking on the door of the man who'd DM'd him, and reacting differently once it opened. Second, I wanted to explore my feelings as a queer man in an ultra-masculine, "alpha male" pursuit like bodybuilding, and the thin line between admiration and attraction. My research turned up plenty of stories of straight OnlyFans creators with male audiences: some who are gay-for-pay and go home to their knowing female partners, and others who come to realise all the time spent carving their bodies into Greek statues wasn't for the attention of women after all.

I still debate whether my spin of "what if he's gay, lol" was immature and reflective of my experience of not coming out until age 34 despite the signs for 20+ years, but the story naturally developed into this.

I wrote the first draft in six weeks. I was so pleased at how much fun I had, laughing at my own jokes and the situations I put my main character in. I’m influenced primarily by comedy: entering each scene and trying to find its most absurdist angle, and structurally relying on relentless set-up and pay-off. Tonally, I aimed for a film I'd quite like to watch on MUBI, with touchpoints of Lynch and Cronenberg. Whether I achieved any of that is in the eye of the reader, but we'll get to that…

When I reviewed it a couple of months later, I felt like it lacked some honesty. I couldn't figure out what that was until, in the New Year, I watched Heated Rivalry and Pillion in quick succession. I also read Some Dance to Remember by Jack Fritscher, a memoir-novel about the gay scene in 1970s San Francisco. January was a very horny month. All three pieces are explicit in how sex is depicted, veering so close to hardcore pornography that it was thrilling. The lightbulb went off: I needed to do the same. My script dwelt a lot on close-ups of male bodies, of flesh and muscle; intentionally homoerotic. Every body part was described in extreme close-up at some point, except…

If I made the creative decision to flinch in the intimate moments, the whole screenplay would become disingenuous. I remembered the recent, problematic film Magazine Dreams, and how I hated it for a single scene. There's a sequence in which the lead, a deluded amateur bodybuilder, meets his Mr Olympia-shaped hero. The hero seduces him, and it cuts to the next morning, where he's sat up in bed, dismayed, after having his brains screwed out. It was framed as though it was missing a trumpet going “whomp whomp”; to me showing a certain cowardice from the director. We needed to see two giant men slapping meat, damn it.

My second draft was better for it. Those sex scenes gave real weight to my main character's inner turmoil, of being pulled between the man he wants to be and the man he thinks he should be — because, crucially, he's enjoying himself. The decision too refined other parts of the story: the main character's arc is happier and ends on him finding love, while his female ex-partner comes alive in her own right rather than as an ancillary part of the tale. I was confident come the end of the second draft that I had something readable. I mean, I could’ve tinkered with the words here and there forever, but I was at least ready to show this screenplay to the world.

The problem is, getting feedback on a screenplay is impossible. I sought out volunteers/victims, and the scarce few who put their hand up never got back to me. Fair enough. Nobody actually wants to read a screenplay, especially for fun.

My partner took three months to read it. Though he had an excuse: after a four-year build-up of me saying "I'm a writer" and not producing owt, he was a bit scared it would turn out to be crap. He said he liked it a lot. A relief to hear, yet there's only so much weight you can put on the opinion of a loved one. It was the first time he'd ever read a script too. I could've presented it in Wingdings and he'd have assumed that was the industry-standard font.

I did have a plan. Wanting to reach out to like-minded individuals, earlier this year I joined a regional screenwriting group. It meets monthly for industry-tailored talks and advice, plus feedback on one or two members' scripts. I found the other members' screenplays illuminating, even if they raised red flags about my own effort. This being a commercially driven medium to begin with, a mere blueprint for the visual form, I've fed back the phrase "would slot right in as a Sunday night 9pm drama on BBC One" to members in both a complimentary and derogatory sense. Having started Slow Horses on Apple TV while writing this post, I realise about 80% of the group’s scripts were basically Slow Horses. My extremely gay, sexually explicit black comedy was always going to provoke a divisive reaction.

Until the email came that wasn't much of a surprise. The organiser said that, due to the graphic nature of my script that some could see as exploitative, it would be unsuitable to present to the whole group. I was devastated at first, before I remembered the short screenplay we'd read that was an after-school special on the values of Christianity, and I thought, "fair enough." It was less about the queer themes than the words themselves, such as "piledrives him," "face fucks" and "I'm going to come."

To the organiser’s credit, they said they would talk to group members individually and bring a select few who'd be comfortable giving feedback.

That was a couple of months ago, with no update since… and, in all honesty, it’s time to abandon the project.

As I said above, I loved putting my piece together, and I'm proud of taking creative risks I'd have been too meek to take before I came out. But I've sat on a completed version of the script for a year, and it no longer represents what I want to create as a quote-unquote artist/creative type. "Crazy Horse Play" (not its final title btw) is 90% bleak, and I now want to move onto things that are lighter and more celebratory of my interests.

I'm not sure I want to screenwrite at the moment. I tried a new script over the summer but wasn't really feeling it. The lack of feedback means working in isolation, and I crave interactivity the most. Often I think I chose the wrong writing discipline, but I'd have been just as unread in prose, poetry and so on. Who reads anymore?

I am thankful for that weird conversation in the sauna for giving me the inspiration in the first place. Since then, I've used the sauna a dozen times in the hope of stumbling into a new story idea, with one rule: other people must start the conversation, not me. I have overheard a couple of interesting things, including one harrowing story between two others about men's mental health, and another on the trials and tribulations of competing in bodybuilding that is perhaps too similar to what I've already done.

So if you take away one thing from this 2,000-odd-word blog, it's this: need inspiration? Seek out a sauna. Also good for your circulation.