Meet William Keiser | Screenwriter

We had the good fortune of connecting with William Keiser and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi William, have you ever found yourself in a spot where you had to decide whether to give up or keep going? How did you make the choice?
I love giving up. Giving up is sensuous and eternal. Thomas Mann questions (in ‘Death in Venice’): “is not nothingness a form of perfection?” I love giving up.

But the reality is that it’s actually harder to maintain than persevering. I’m quixotic and enjoy the challenge of resisting gravity, so continuing also becomes a form of giving up. So I don’t know how to answer this question, really.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I write teen dramas at the intersection of art, history, and politics. I also write prose and dance around. Most of this is in service of building artistic community to support emerging artists who are equally rebellious, rigorous, curious, and vulnerable.

It’s been unbelievably easy! The entertainment industry is open, diverse, rewards intellectual rigor, and interested in new voices. My values always align with the capital interests of the studios.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I’ll rent a vintage car and drive you down Mulholland. We then head to the Mount Wilson observatory and huddle for warmth while checking out the 100-inch telescope, and go to the beach for a surfing lesson. At Santee Alley we consider buying live bunnies and enormous plastic rifles, but settle instead on heaps of gold-plated evil-eye jewelry. After a long nap, or perhaps a visit to the bathhouse (ooh!), we’ll change into cowboy boots and “hand-distressed” mesh and scowl at the passersby at La Poubelle, then giggle at UCB Harold night. For actual food that feeds our bodies, we’ll dine at the Dresden Room.

As night falls, we begin at Francois Ghebaly gallery for Zak Schlegel’s and Denna Thompsen’s dance salon “Congress.” As soon as the performers bow, we frantically purchase rave tickets on an unlisted website. An address is sent to our phones and we pack into the car again, where we re-enact the scene from The Idol in which Lily-Rose Depp and The Weeknd suck each other’s faces. After midnight (first we discuss Azealia Banks in the context of 20th century art and the Vienna Secession), we arrive at a warehouse encircled by barbed-wire. There, we will pump fist for 30-40 minutes in the sunglasses we remembered to bring, and then go home and sleep, because LA is, after all, a work town, and we are VERY, VERY BUSY.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
In college, I studied under Dr. Judith Hamera, whose class “Dancing the State” invited us to see dance as a political act. Dr. Hamera is simultaneously the fiercest, most brilliant, most uncompromising, and kindest person.

My mentor, Kahina Haynes, is the executive director of Dance Institute of Washington, a DC-based nonprofit which makes the field of dance more equitable. She teaches me what it means to be a creative leader.

I also want to shout out my artistic circle, the “Shakthians”: fiction writer Charity Young, poets Ben Togut and Joseph Felkers, and in particular, the eponymous and unwieldy Shakthi Shrima. We are building a movement around depth and panache in a society that increasingly mandates and platforms shallowness.

Website: https://www.williamskeiser.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/keiserwilhelm/

Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@keiserwilhelm

Image Credits
Carson Stachura, Benjamin Freeman, Jody Bolt, Joseph May.