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.
Archives for category: Films
I 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.
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.
We’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign for our current documentary film project. It feels strange asking for money, but then that’s how it works in the indie film world. I suppose I’m getting used to it. And Kickstarter is much better than going door to door selling overpriced caramel corn like when I was in the Boy Scouts.
Ultimately, it’s about building an audience as much as it is about raising a few bucks so that we can travel to places and shove cameras in peoples’ faces.
Since our subtitle is “An American Wine Movie,” and we are trying to tap into a national personality trait that makes folks in the New World chuck everything to follow a crazy dream, we decided to end our campaign on July 4th.
I hate the telephone. Absolutely hate it. I’ve always sought ways to avoid it, whether it’s been using email, writing letters or driving dozens or even hundreds of miles to talk to someone in person.
I’m not generally an introvert. I’ve got no qualms about presenting to a large group of people or walking into someone’s house or place of business to interview them. But preparing for a phone call always sets my heart to pounding and raises the hair on the back of my neck. I unequivocally despise it. You’d think I was back in high school and was working up the nerve and trying to control the squelch in my voice before asking Tiffany Meyer out.
Still, even in this age of email, text, Skype, Facebook, etc, you still have to make phone calls. If you’re making a movie, you have to make a lot of phone calls. People talk about needing cameras, talent, the right mics. They tell you you need a plan or a story or a vision. You need money. You need experience or you need to go to film school. But none of that means anything if you don’t pick up the phone to line up talent, call investors, build a crew, ask people to interview, get directions, ask questions.
Filmmaking is picking up the phone. It doesn’t matter if you have a RED camera, Canon 7D, Bolex 8mm, brilliant script, amazing actor or a fascinating documentary subject. It doesn’t matter if you know After Effects or Final Cut. If you can’t pick up the phone and ask somebody to sit for an interview or help you finish the project in some way, by investing or lending support, then you’re never going to finish something worthwhile.
So the most important part of moving any project forward is the thing that I least like to do: pick up the phone. I don’t even like to call to make restaurant reservations and here I am about to phone a well-respected, award-winning winemaker and ask him to help me with a film project, giving up a couple days of his time, free of charge, doing something that most people hate even more that I hate the telephone: sitting in front of the camera.
Can you tell I’m procrastinating?
Okay, here I go, I’m making the call now.
Our short film, A Country Wedding, will be screening this Saturday, October 16 at the Salem Film Festival. It seems like ages ago that we wrapped production and eventually premiered at the Da Vinci FF, so I’m excited to get back and see it on a big screen again.
Here’s the blurb from IMDB:
Infatuated with his cousin Charity since childhood, Jake is an emotional wreck as he’s forced to not only attend her shotgun wedding to the town loser, but to also serve as the best man. When called upon to make a speech that he was unprepared to give, Jake finds himself admitting his true feelings for his cousin in front of the entire congregation. A Country Wedding is a sad, funny, small town tale of love gone wrong.
So come check it out if you’re in the mid-valley area this weekend.