Editor’s note: This column contains explicit language
It’s a rainy Tuesday in June, and I’m taking the twelfth step of drug rehabilitation, an interview with English professor and “Treme” writer Mari Kornhauser. The drug – Rick Blackwood, retired Navy Captain and, as of June 4, retired English professor. To kids like me, though, he’s just “Rick,” a street name that acquires a more profound flavor on the tongues of his students. And this isn’t that cheap Charlie Sheen shit, suffice it to say: Rick Blackwood is a hell of a drug. “There would be no [film] program at LSU without Rick,” Mari begins. “He’s probably one of the best teachers in the world.”
INT. 117 ALLEN HALL – DAY (FLASHBACK) It was 2010 and the first day of my Introduction to Writing Screenplays class – but it felt like 1987 and the first hour of Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket.” There were maybe twenty maggots in the outfit: among them were Will “Animal Mother” Glass, Joey “Cowboy” Wilson and David “Joker” Benedetto. And me, of course – Pvt. Gomer Pyle: in a world of shit. The professor was MIA, 45 minutes late or else KIA, though none of us had yet broken rank and gone AWOL. Hell, none of us breathed. Or blinked, even. This was a test, we were sure. A drill – for University alumnus Wilson, this was the professor’s initial “weeding-out.” Suddenly, a zipper chirruped somewhere behind me, and just as it did, the big-bad build of a biker – or else a bushwhacking Viet Cong – blocked the doorway. The badass was blue-jeaned, bomber-jacketed and bald-headed – and apologetic. University alumnus Glass recalled, flabbergasted, as if he were facing a fierce acid flashback: “He said – and I remember this exactly – ‘This class started at three, didn’t it? That’s my fuck-up – I would’ve been halfway to Chimes by now.” Welcome to Rick Blackwood’s world: planet Earth, third rock from the Sun. Welcome to the jungle. The four of us had become intertwined in a “complex world of possibilities, one wonderful, terrible and decidedly contradictory,” as Benedetto, an English senior recollected. He “taught us to write for a hostile audience,” Glass said, “to treat writing as an act of violence in itself.” The deadliest weapon in the world isn’t a marine and a rifle, as it turns out – but a writer and his pen.