In his winning proposal for the 2021 Jeffrey Ahn, Jr. Fellowship, Theodore Taplitz astounded the jury with a full-fledged script for his proposed narrative short film, Clark Gable, as well as the concept expressed in his project proposal (excerpted below): 

 

"Consciousness, mortality, and the hybrid reality between physical and psychological perception: these are the themes that have inspired the development of my latest concept, Clark Gable. On a more personal level, the idea stems from the immediate coping-mechanism response I experienced when someone close to me fell ill: my mind flitting from solution to increasingly unrealistic solution, trying to solve a problem I had no answer for. It is this magical-thinking state of consciousness that I intend to investigate in this project, the waking dream state that sudden trauma and loss induced in me, both the child-like, fairytale sense of infinite possibilities and the pervasive sense of disjointed, unstable wrongness that accompanied these feelings.

"Clark Gable will take the form of an experimental/narrative short film, exploring a young man’s efforts to reconnect with his non-responsive grandfather’s consciousness through electro-chemistry and the inscrutable spirit of Clark Gable that speaks to him through radio waves. The world of this film is ambiguously phantasmagorical – part reality, part memory, part psychological manifestation, with no clear dividing lines." 

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Theodore shot Clark Gable during the summer of 2021 in his hometown of LA before heading east for his freshman year at Columbia University, where he will study film.

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