Five reasons why Dwayne Johnson is redefining film in the twenty-first century:

1. His acceptance into the pool of A-list actors signifies a shift in what is culturally acceptable in lead male roles. Not only is The Rock a person of color, he represents the de-colonization of previously white dominated elite circles in Hollywood.
2. An serious devotion to family values, health and well-being reorients the rhetoric of Hollywood lifestyles. The Rock swears by the importance of family time, eliminating harmful nutrients from his diet, and a dedication to fitness that is otherwise superseded by jaded capitalist extremism typically displayed by the rich and famous.
3. The sheer mass of his torso is so difficult to film using industry standards that wide screen, 70 mm, and IMAX technologies are showing an increase in production usage just to fit his massive frame into his scenes.
4. The Rock’s behind the scenes transparency, as displayed through his instagram, facebook, and twitter feeds, reveals the tedious nature and long-term expectations actors and public figures must endure. Illuminating the process and cumbersome toil that actors perform off screen allows us to better judge the depth of dedication and earnestness of product when viewing and critiqing film.
5. He has proven that muscle and humor are aligned and can lead to a fairly successful career, if you do it right. How do you do it right? Find out by reading the critically acclaimed autobiography, The Rock Says…

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Characters. Someone who finally gets to sing. Someone who finally gets fit. Someone who finally opens her mouth. Someone who…

A rural gal, with no water, a failed marriage, and 500 cows. Who will help? Who will she turn to? What happens when she finds out that the only person who can get her through this, is herself.

When saving salmon doesn’t happen in the river, it happens in community centers, boardrooms, and city hall. Join Chad as he gets to know his worst enemy, and learns that they might have more in common that they think.

What’s an old story of mine that I can tell already?

Kashmir. He was a rich Muslim man, young and early in his career, until he used instagram to meet a poor American girl. What troubles will they encounter as she earns enough money to reach him. She’ll go through Delhi, he’ll confront his own sexuality, and together they will explore the cultural differences that bring them together. They end in London, watching a cricket game, and she learns about faith and her own self. Let’s him be more sexual than he would think he was, and her more disciplined than she thought she would be. She finds Islam, he gets to London, but they don’t become lovers. Instead, they become the best of friends.

Hawaii. She’s going through the family history after her father’s death and learns about island life, through that she finds out why her dad acted the way he did. A dive into the human spirit, Hawaiian culture, growing up in the vietnam era, and getting closer to your parents even when they are no longer with us. Vignettes of her interactions with him appear between historic stories about Hawaii and war. Informed by oral histories of family members, research into family lineage, research into political and cultural history of Honolulu at the time. The island is in the midst of war and has a great military presence as is. How many recruits came from the island? What other options were there for people in those years? What was the political landscape, and how was it interpreted by the family? How will our family history be written when these stories are fragmented across an ocean? What is shared and what is different?

London. You fall in love with a boy you meet on Tinder, you travel across the ocean to meet him after only seeing him once.

Japan. You learn about trains. You learn about islands. You learn about people, and your own inadequacy.

Portland. You suddenly are the master of your own destiny. Finally, a real chance to fuck it all up. What will you do?

Stories I can tell right now: Love stories of the poor and infamous.

You’re young and you want to fall in love. It’s all love. ahahah. Okay, why not? Why not do some funny telling of what happens to you, based on truth, but blurred by memory, and each one comes with some moral tale, or some takeaway, some lesson that helps daters who need advice. You could start with a scenario that you “always” hear about. If this were a manga, it would be about a country girl who dates for the first time in the city. Stories always begin with, “I used to date a guy there…” This works for me because I have lived so much of my life through men, through meeting them and trying to figure out what makes them tick. This would be like the vagina monologues, but with a dating advice tone and a story arc where you learn to stop identifying yourself through other people. Each chapter is a new guy. Some or short, some are long. In blog form, you would spend each dating tip on a scenario. The blogs could help you suss out how scenarios would go, and the lessons you could learn from them. The blogs could also be super funny, snarky, vile. Remember, don’t hold back. Write like you’re Kate, but with a different moral compass.

You could seek an animator at some point if you wanted to make this a video thing. Or an instagram. Well, the instagram would be photographs of people dating either memes or backdrops for text “advice” over them. Then you could get into a whole dating advice world where people ask for advice and you build a story/scenario around it. You could also move this into dj, an oral history project collecting stories of living through men. Could speak to a culture in which women are replicating patriarchy even in their dating life, and what is healthy and what isn’t. What do we bring to the table? Then turn it into celebrating everyday women who are radical and interesting, and the men who are totally into them.

I think we’ve thought of this before.