The Power of Great Storytelling

February 24, 2012 //
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I just took my daughter to the premier of Justin Smith’s documentary, Relentless, about a team of student engineers who build and race formula cars. I’ve never been a car guy. To emphasize that point, I drive a moss-covered Pontiac Vibe mini wagon, which is noted for two things: it has a standard electric outlet in the dashboard and it’s the least stolen car in the US. My daughter isn’t really a gearhead either. She arrived at the premier in multicolored tights, a pink skirt and red glitter shoes. She’s something of  a girly-girl.

But a solid documentary is one that pulls in an audience and makes them passionate about a subject in which they had little interest or knowledge before the lights go down. Justin pulled that off in Relentless, carrying the audience through an emotional arc of a championship bid in a very intense competition. It’s a moving and inspirational experience.

I have to admit that I have stakes in the project since it was produced in part to promote Oregon State University and celebrate the accomplishments of some amazing students. But I know that the film was a success, because I watched those students squirm in the row in front of me as they relived the highs and lows of the year that the film depicted.

On the drive home, my eight year old daughter, who had previously pretty much decided that her career ambition is to work at PetCo, said to me, “I think I want to build and drive race cars.” I consider that clear evidence of the film’s success.

Remix: part 4

February 17, 2012 //
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Part 4 or the fantastic series Everything is a Remix by Kirby Ferguson is out. An impressive, polished series that makes you think. It’s a meditation on creativity, the nature of ideas, the inanity of intellectual property laws and litigious society. Looking forward to his next project, which sounds quite ambitious.

Ode on a Smith Corona

February 10, 2012 //
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TypewriterI bought a typewriter off of Craig’s List today. It’s a manual Smith Corona Galaxie XII that I picked up from a house on a Portland side street for thirty bucks. I’m fairly well convinced that it’s quite possibly one of the more beautiful objects I’ve ever owned. Off the top of my head, the only thing that comes close is a powder blue Kramer electric guitar or maybe my Sage fly rod–well, not actually the rod itself but rather its smooth cork handle.

Technically the typewriter isn’t mine. I bought it as a prop for an upcoming scene of our feature film project, Vintage, which is about a washed up writer. Interesting that all of the main characters I write are often washed up writers of some sort or another.

It’s been a long while since I’ve hammered out any prose, being absorbed as I have by our ongoing documentary project and various other efforts, the job, family and occasional fishing trips notwithstanding. But when I brought the Smith Corona home and took it out of its case, laying it on the dining room table, I was struck with the overwhelming urge to try to become Ernest Hemingway again. There’s something about the smooth keys, the elegant slope of them rising up to the platen, the swinging arc of the keybars and that musical, mechanical thunk as they slam home. A typewriter is a thing of beauty and it makes you want to write with an urgency that a laptop or yellow legal pad just can’t inspire.

We live in an era of disposable objects. Our iPhones and MacBooks are lovely, but they’re designed with planned obsolescence in mind. They’re meant to be discarded after a couple years. But a manual Smith Corona, with it’s metal shell, steel keys, rugged case and anvil-like heft is an object that is built to withstand the ages.

Sitting in front of this old typewriter. Just breathing in the oil, ink and metal smell of it, made me fell more like a writer than I have in quite some time.

No excuses

November 27, 2011 //
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Werner Herzog has been in the business of encouraging young filmmakers since famously eating his shoes in a bet to inspire Errol Morris to make his first film in the 70s. In a recent interview on The Business, Herzog offered some more advice to filmmakers.

Herzog declares that, because of the digital tools available today, there are no excuses for aspiring filmmakers to not make features.

Today it is fairly easy to make a feature film for, say, $10,000…earn the money, don’t wait for financiers. Don’t waste your life to promote your project.

Herzog says that he’d rather see filmmakers working for half a year to earn the money to make their films working as “a bouncer in a sex club” or as a “guard at an insane asylum.” He says there are fringe benefits to working day jobs beyond just scraping together money to self-finance films.

When I was in the fiction writing program at Columbia College, we were encouraged to write about our day jobs…the more menial and tedious, the better. Jobs were seen as the source of material for fiction. It’s the drama of everyday life that inspires us as storytellers. Maybe that’s why sophomore efforts by writers and filmmakers are often somewhat tepid: once they retreat to lives on the comfortable side of success, perhaps they lose touch with the source material that first inspired them.

The same is true for film: your menial job can keep “your finger on the pulse” of the origins of story. Herzog echoes this, adding the pragmatism of self-financing to the notion that having experience in everyday life can be more interesting that being isolated in academia or caught playing the financing game in LA. Of the latter, Herzog says:

[chasing financing is] a waste of time; it’s loss of life, not only waste of life. When you’re into filmmaking, you have to have your finger on the pulse of real life, of real, raw, essential life. So do that: work for half a year and then you can make the film.

And as for the technological advantages of making films in the digital age, Herzog says:

The instruments, the cameras are inexpensive and high-caliber. You can edit at home on your own laptop. So just go out and do it. There’s no excuse anymore, today there is no excuse.

Herzog is famous for making his own rules in filmmaking, and his biggest successes seem counter-intuitive, from Grizzly Man to Encounters at the End of the World, both unique and atypical documentaries. He drifts from nonfiction to narrative film, always changing genres, making his films on his own terms. It’s refreshing to see that he’s passionate about encouraging others to do the same.

 

Cooking for a sense of place

November 12, 2011 //
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Our cousin Eric recently graced us with a visit on his way to Okinawa for his first deployment as a Marine attorney. When someone visits you, it’s both an honor and a gift, and it leaves the host with a certain measure of responsibility. As this was Eric’s first visit to the Pacific Northwest, and his last stop on the way to overseas duty, that responsibility was, if anything, more acute.

Sisters mountains in Oregon

Preparing a meal is perhaps the quickest and most effective way to give someone a sense of place. Eric showed up at the Greyhound station on a redeye bus, so I sent him to the Coast for the day. He’d already offered to buy steaks, but I upped the ante by sending him to a favorite seafood shop on the bayfront in Newport. He returned with fresh halibut, scallops and crab meat in a bag of crushed ice, plus a bottle of pinot noir from a local vineyard. We added asparagus, scallions and fish sticks for Bailey and the result was quite nice.

Seafood meal

We then headed to the Cascades for a couple days of hiking and fishing the Deschutes. We didn’t land any trout large enough to grill on the fire, but we were fortunate enough to pass a stand in Sisters selling salmon jerky and fresh blue chanterelle mushrooms, which I’d never tried before. We cooked them in oil on a camp stove and ate them with of Painted Hills beef tenderloin filets next to the cerulean blue of the Metolius River burbling and hidden in the darkness just beyond the propane lantern light. The chanterelles were, if anything, cleaner and more earthy in taste than their pale cousins, and they glistened black in the camp light. We drank Black Butte Porter in the shadow of the actual Black Butte, reminding me of why Oregon is perhaps the best place in the world for beer.

Eric and Bailey fishing on the Deschutes

Eric is an avid traveller, eater and Anthony Bourdain fan, the sort of fellow to snap photos of what he eats, wherever he happens to be in the world. When someone visit’s it fine (and easy) to take him to your favorite restaurant, but I think that cooking something local is even more effective. And when your guest snaps a photo of what you prepared together, then you know you’ve had at least some measure of success.

And if Eric decides to return to sample some more of Oregon’s offerings, we’ll know we’ve made a lasting impression.

Making Vino

October 2, 2011 //
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While we’ve been busy making Vino Veritas, a documentary about the wine biz, I also recently made my first Willamette Valley pinot noir in the garage. Here’s a documentation of the process. Tough weather last year, and it shows, but the wine is soft and drinkable, if a bit bright. I hope the acid will settle out and allow it to age nicely.

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