stranger than fiction

I think I'm going to add Nathan Helm to my list of heroes.

A "schmuck with a laptop," or a Hollywood screenwriter, Helm is featured in the March issue of Vanity Fair. (Yep, that's the one with the pseudo-scandalous nude cover.) One day, instead of pumping out dialouge and stage directions, Helm wrote a manifesto by which to live. And then he actually held himself to it. Now the principle photography for his screenplay Stranger Than Fiction, which stars Will Ferrell and Dustin Hoffman, has been completed.

Here's a sample of rules from The Manifesto:

Rule No. 1, Section One: "I will no longer allow financial need or career ambition to determine the direction of my work. I will not put myself in any position in which my work is owed to another party."

Rule No. 5, Section One: "Any deal struck in regards to my work will forgo any immediate financial gain if it may mean the surrender of creative control or participation in the work's development."

Rule No. 3: "I will not sell my work simply to the highest bidder, but instead to those parties that I feel will best represent and develop my work."

Helm's synopsis of Rule No. 2: "I won't take rewrite jobs. I won't script-doctor. There's a lot of money to be had, lots of money for spending two weeks of work on a script, but I can't do it. ... It would be very hypocritical of me to try to reserve all this creative power and try to hold on to my scripts as much as I can and then go take some first-time writer's script and bang it up."

Rule No. 6, Section One: "I will not write for writing's sake. I will write only when inspired to write." (all from "Leaving Schmuckville" by Jim Windolf, Vanity Fair No. 547, March 2006)

Helm's adherence to The Manifesto amazes me. It's one thing to outline how you'd like to live your life, to identify convictions you'd like to apply to your professional or personal encounters. But to actually hold yourself to those, to have a strong enough character to reject quick money and the easy way out - wow. Talk about a strong, beautiful character.

You don't find people like Helm too often. In fact, it's probably rarer and stranger than fiction.