Friend and satirist Lein Shory of Irate Savant fame is back in form with a new blog. Funny stuff. If the publishing industry weren’t all aflutter with self-pity and panic, they would have snapped up his darkly comic first novel months ago. As far as I know it’s still available.
Archives for category: Misc.
So I’m reading a book on economics and the fall of the Soviet Union last week and one line suddenly jumps out at me. In moments I’m recalling Boris Yeltsin standing on the tank talking about democracy. I still remember the feeling vividly. I’d been thinking of my childhood years in West Berlin and what it felt like after the Wall came down and how there was this limitless possibility and hope, and also a little sadness over the fact that I couldn’t be there. It was similar to the feelings surrounding tomorrow’s inauguration.
And then of course it all went to hell shortly thereafter. I hope Mr. Obama’s quiet revolution fares better than Yeltsin’s.
In any case, within minutes I saw an entire script unfolding before me. Ideas are cheap. Any writer probably gets a dozen every day. But a few really have that spark, that sense that they could become a real story. But once you get an idea with the appropriate fire, the question becomes, “when do I start?”
There are no formulas, rules or truths, and any self-proclaimed guru who tries to sell you one is full of shit. Only the formatting guidelines of a script are set in stone, and beyond 12-point Courier and the appropriate margins, anything goes. Sure the three act structure can work, though it doesn’t have to. If there is a gun in the first act, you’d better use it by the third…unless you can make it work otherwise.
And then there’s the question of research. A lot of writers immerse themselves in the world they’re about to be writing in for a long period of time before they get started. It’s probably a good practice, but I can’t work that way. For me, too much research tends to shape the story and take it off course into the weeds of detail, especially in a period piece. So when I get an idea for a script and I don’t have an ongoing project, I’ll wait as long as I can, which usually means a week or two. And then it will either fade or I just have to jump in and race through the first draft in a few weeks.
I don’t slow down for research on that first draft. What I can’t find out in short magazine articles and Wikipedia will have to wait. I’ll save the heavy research, that involving travel or books over 500 pages, for somewhere between the first and second drafts. Often I’ll find that some of the assumptions I made in the first draft hold true. Other instances will have me rewriting to correct some factual errors.
I’m not a big fan of advance research, but that’s just me. Maybe you’re the sort who needs an idea to gestate for a period of time before getting to work. I know some writers who wait years. There are no rules, though. Beware of people who try to tell you that there are.
“We are the tools of our tools,” or so Henry David Thoreau famously said. It’s true. As a species, our single greatest flaw is our obsession with inanimate objects. How many folks died for the shiny yellow metal stuff? What about blood diamonds? How many newspapers did we deliver so we could buy that Red Ryder BB gun, only to play with it for a day and then throw it in a box under the bed for the next 20 years? How many extra hours do us workin’ folks put in for an extra bedroom on the house, power locks on the car or just to have the latest gizmo or doodad, or to have real hardwood in our floors instead of that laminated stuff that looks exactly the same.
I have to admit that I’ve fallen victim to that material cycle that Thoreau warned about, even after reading Walden twice. My latest gadget of obsession is the iPhone. I know I’m about two years late on this little fad. But the old bag phone had to go. I’ll miss it. With the shoulder strap it was handy in dark alleys for self-defense.
So I’ve been obsessed with this little thing and how you can use your fingers to make stuff glide around. I downloaded games (ostensibly for my daughter) and even watched videos. The size of the screen, unlike my old phone, actually allows you to watch video rather than just preview it. I could even see myself sitting in an airport lobby and watching a feature film on this device.
So here’s where we get to the crossover with the film industry. Whenever I experience a new gadget, like those mini LCD projectors that can turn any blank wall into a movie screen with the help of an iPod or laptop, I wonder what that means for the future of feature films. Is some new technology going to suck theatres dry and eliminate the revenue stream in an industry in which I’m just beginning to play a part. I wonder if I should feel like a saddlemaker in 1902 or a punch card operator or the publisher of a major urban newspaper. Is our medium going to experience obliteration due to technology, home theaters or even the economic crunch?
The answer is no. I’d be naive to expect that the business model and process behind what makes people sit down in a stadium seat and chew popped corn drenched in fake butter-syrup will not change. The process of how people will find their way to the cinema might work totally different. But people will still go.
I have faith in this for several reasons. First, the original Great Depression saw a rise in filmgoing. Today it’s a twenty-dollar escape from your woes. We’re social animals, and even if we are going bankrupt and it would be cheaper to sit in front of our big LCD screen before it’s repossessed, we would rather experience something in the company of other humans. That’s why people go to the bar and spend five bucks per stout rather than sit at home with their own keg and suck it back for fifty cents a glass. It’s why people go to nightclubs instead of stay at home with a strobe light. Even those in search of solitude will sign up for a ten-day Sierra Club hike rather than strike out alone across the wilderness. Most of us are social creatures at least part of the time.
Second…nothing happening now in technology even compares to the previous advances that issued in countless predictions for the industry’s demise. If film and theatres were going to die, then television would have killed it. Or VHS. Or DVD. Or home theatres. Or Netflix. The iPhone won’t kill cinema either. Actually, one of the first apps I downloaded for my iPhone was Flixster. That program finds your GPS location and then connects you with all the films playing in your area. You can watch the trailers, read reviews and then get directions to the cinema. Just like television advertising or film websites, this is a technological advance that can actually drive people to the theater.
Finally, I’m convinced that cinema has a bright future because when I went home for the holidays and returned to the theaters I used to haunt as a kid, I found that they have expanded the building to add another half dozen shows on any given night. They’ve also build a five storey parking garage. They’re doing well. Every show we wanted to see was sold out, so we bought tickets for the next showing. We waited patiently. And we enjoyed the hell out of the picture.
_So with the closing of several mini-majors this year, are indy films dying? Not according to Salon.
_Another slate of comics-based films is announced. I’ve never been into comics, but I suppose I should be judging from the percentage of financing that goes into these projects. It’s a natural fit…they’re storyboards waiting to happen, and with digital production techniques making so much more visually possible. I met with a small indy production company a few weeks ago, their tastes leaning greatly toward art house features. Still, one of the projects on their slate was an adaptation of a graphic novel. Comics are no longer the ugly and maligned stepchildren of the literary world; if anything, literature is.
_As a Web designer I’m noticing not without interest how pointless official movie sites are becoming. In a scan of The Wrestler’s official Web site, which is just a subsite of Searchlight’s main Web presence, I don’t see any interesting custom content about the film…just a link to the trailer and a generic aggregation of press releases, interviews, etc. There is a link to a Fox Searchlight “widget,” plus a plain “Share” section, which is a lackluster attempt at social media marketing. But I don’t see anything interesting, focused or innovative. One would think that focused, inexpensive Web and social media marekting would be perfect for this type of film. Any film, for that matter. Why is it always left out of the marketing plan?
I have to admit that I’m still giddy after last Tuesday when everything changed and it felt good to be American and not have to continuously say to anyone we meet from overseas, “We’re really not all like that. Really.”
So being a sappy Midwesterner who reads a lot of other sappy Midwesterners, I was very much struck by the elation in Garrison Keillor’s latest Salon piece. Because we actually have real, verifiable writer as president (elect). We have someone who can actually shape sentences, sculpt language. How rare is that? How many capable people get advanced degrees, MBAs and the like, and can’t even write a phrase that’s kind to the ear? How many of these politicians have to hire ghostwriters and speechwriters to make themselves sound coherent? And here we have an actual wordsmith on his way to Washington:
“And the coolest thing about him is the fact that back in the early ’90s, given a book contract after the hoo-ha about his becoming the First Black Editor of the Harvard Law Review (FBEHLR), instead of writing the basic exploitation book he could’ve written, he put his head down and worked hard for a few years and wrote a good book, an honest one, which, since his rise in politics, has earned the Obamas enough to buy a very nice house and put money in the bank. A successful American entrepreneur.”
The last American president to write a book all by his lonesome self, I believe, was Theodore Roosevelt, who, on graduation from Harvard, wrote “The Naval War of 1812,” and in my humble opinion, Obama’s is the better book for the general reader, but you be the judge.
So we will soon have someone who can write running the country. Imagine that. Only a few years ago we were noting how the Bush Administration was placing classic books under his arm as props trying to convince the public that he’s not as baseless as he seems, Laura’s earnest bookishness aside. There were all those reports of the famous Bush-Rove reading contest, though none of us believed it any more than we believe in Kim Jong Il’s library of literary achievements. Then Katrina hit and things started to slide for the radical right and they stopped attempting to make their commander look booksmart. And they’ll be gone along with their entire charade. They were always great at fiction (Mission Accomplished) even if they were lousy writers.
And now here we are feeling good as a country despite some really heavy shit happening on the markets and around the world. Someday W. will have his autobiography ghostwritten by someone who actually read all of those book he carried around, and it will sell quite a few copies before being ultimately remaindered.
But in the mean time we’ve got a guy who can write now in charge. Language does matter. Words are important. Writers can change the world. And the next chapter is starting to look pretty good.
I’m new to the Northwest, but there seems to be a vibrant local film scene.
The Northwest Film and Video festival is currently ongoing at the NW Film Center. I attended a couple events this weekend in Portland, and there’s that definite upstart energy you’d hope to find in that sort of venue. I’ll definitely be checking out more events and workshops up there. Gus Van Sant is perhaps their most noted alum.
At the NW I met the guys who made Cthulhu. Haven’t seen the film, but the trailer has a big film look. Tying into the Lovecraft mythos was a smart move and may make this film have a long-tail resonance like Bladerunner. Having heard their story, I’m sure these guys will be putting together new projects in the future. This film recently landed distribution, a major accomplishment for an indy film. It was shot in Oregon.
Reel Film Snobs is a local film program out of Salem. It’s a fun and refreshing alternative to the standard film review model.