No, not the cheesy 70s film with Chuckles Heston... we had an earthquake here at 12:58am (a 4.6 on the other side of the valley). Did it wake me up? No - I was still awake. It did remind me of the Northridge quake over a decade ago, that struck in the early morning when I was asleep - and trashed my old apartment building, not to mention knocked out water and power for a few days. We had to go to a public park to get water... and nobody in my neighborhood bathed for about a week. We were ripe. I was one of the lucky ones - I didn’t have a job in public. During the aftershocks of the quake I got a phone call from Ashok Amritraj that he was buying my script THE VICTIM'S WIFE. Thank God the water was fixed before I had to go to my first meeting! But that script sale started a domino run of sales that accounted for most of my produced material. Strange, because those sales were not all to the same company. That year I sold three scripts to three different companies... all in the same couple of months after the quake.
But this quake was just a little shaking - no buildings pancaked, nobody died.
No big change in my career.
Just another day in sunny Los Angeles.
THIS BLOG IS MURDER
You may have noticed some new blog links have popped up on the right (I finally got around to adding a group, and now I have a new group to add). One that you may not know about is The Homicide Report...
Los Angeles Times reporter Jill Leovy wondered who all of those people getting killed in the city were. One day they were a name in the paper, the next day they were old news. So she decided to devote a blog to the murder victims of Los Angeles. She lists their names and as much information as she can find, and often follows up with interviews and articles about the families with profiles of the victims.
There is no discrimination in her blog. It doesn’t matter whether the person killed was an innocent victim, a police officer, or a criminal. All of them have a story. All of them are died violently. All of them left behind friends and family. She tells their story. She turns crime stats into people.
You may cry when you read these stories. You may get angry. But you will come to know these people whose lives came to an abrupt end.
- Bill
DVDs GET CARTER - the original good version. I saw this ages ago on the big screen, probably at some revival house in Berkeley. Bought it on DVD... and I can't believe how much I've cribbed from this film. A toast from this film ends up a toast in one of mine. The idea of sudden and unexpected action is something I use. This film is both brutally violent and nostalgic. The idea of going home and hanging out with people who were childhood friends... and now may be your enemy... is just an amazing concept. And the film has twists that knock you off your feet. One that is so powerful... and Caine's acting is so amazing... that you gasp. At it's core, this film is *emotional* even though Caine usually holds his emotions in check. By the way, if you like the BOURNE movies, you should check this out. Very realistic, and Hodges does some interesting framing and composition.
Pages: Fell off the train on SLEEPER, wrote half a page yesterday... but I also wrote a 10 page article for Script Magazine, so it wasn't like I was doing nothing. Actually I did 5 pages on the article yesterday and 5 pages the day before. That's kind of the probem with maintaining that 5 pages a day now - I always seem to have a zillion other things to do. There's always a deadline for me to make.
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