Home For The Holidays Recap (part 2)

I was going to do blog entries over the holidays, but just never really got around to it. Instead I did all kinds of other things, including a bunch of new Script Tips. So here is the capsule version in two parts...

PART TWO: GUYS MOVIE PROJECT

Part of the holidays is spending time with old friends, and this year that focused on our movie project. Before I even went home, I sent Van and John an e-mail reminding them of the project so that they could be thinking about it before our first meeting. I decided to change the logline slightly, to make it a more dramatic situation.

NEAR HIT
Building Contractor Dave Jackson checks into a San Francisco hotel for his second honeymoon... without his wife. She's just begun divorce proceedings against him. He's alone in the city. A knock at the door. When Jackson answers, no one there. Just a manila envelope. Inside the envelope: A man's photo, several bundles of hundred dollar bills, and a 357 Magnum. Jackson realizes the envelope has been delivered to the wrong room... And the hit man is after him! Caught between hitman and victim, regular guy Dave Jackson must fight to survive.

In the earlier version he was in the hotel for a class reunion, which doesn’t make as much sense as the second honeymoon thing... and getting dumped by your wife also makes for a juicy opening scene.

Now, our meetings work like this: we meet in some restaurant, have dinner, see a movie, then head to a bar and talk about the project... and anything else. John and Van both have experience making short films, and Van has DPed some features, and one of the great things about this project is that we already have some equipment and access to some of the things we will need - and we are making lists of things we have or can get to increase production value along with story ideas. Sometimes these are the same thing - if someone has access to a cool location, that location may spark a scene. For me (the guy who has to write this) the most important things are the cliffhangers - we need 11 of them. This is a multiple experiment: Though the main reason for making this film is probably just to have a good time with old friends, I also have a bunch of articles on writing on a budget and tricks for making a low budget project look like a big budget film, and I’m gong to fold that into a book on making your own film... and it would be stupid of me not to have actually done it. So making this movie is research for that book - so I’ll be writing some new articles that will take the film from planning stages to the shelf at Blockbuster (hopefully). But the other part of the experiment is “new media”. It’s being written as a 12 part web series, so that I can learn about that and include it in the book. You guys will probably get some of this before anyone else as blog entries. But the key to the webisodes are strong cliff hangers at the end of each episode - I’m modeling this after the old movie serials and kind of after the TV show 24. But the cliffhangers are the tough part, so much of our meetings (when we aren’t just hanging out) is trying to figure out those 11 cliffhangers.

Well, John and Van are completely different types. John is someone who thinks over a situation before he acts... Van acts first, thinks later. John is funny because he will start to say something, then stop mid sentence to think, then complete his sentence (or, stop again after a few words). Van just blurts stuff out. So at our first meeting, John says almost nothing about the stuff I’ve e-mailed him. Van is coming up with crazy ideas that make no sense. “What if the guy goes back to the hotel, and his wife’s super-hot friend is there, and they have wild monkey sex... then his wife walks in!” “Okay, Van, but why would he go back to the hotel if he knows that’s where the hit man is staying?” “He forgets his keys? Hey, maybe he *knows* the super-hot friend will be there?” John just sits there - maybe thinking.

Van’s idea ended up being great... because it sparked a better idea (from me) - since this hotel room was supposed to be for a second honeymoon/anniversary thing, what if the *wife* shows up at the hotel to make up with him? And the hit man captures her? Okay, that’s a cliff hanger! It also sets up a scene where the hit man uses the wife to lure the hero into a trap - which can be another cliff hanger!

Meanwhile, nothing from John on the story stuff from the e-mail.

EVERYTHING IS DIFFERENT

One of the things about being home for the holidays is seeing how much everything has changed. Back in the old days, John, Van and I would probably be drinking in TR’S BAR & GRILL in Concord. The downtown section of Concord had become a slum - pawn shops and sleazy bars and dirty and ugly. So the city decided to renovate the area a few decades back. The big concern was the old bank building, which was built in the 20s or 30s and looks just like those banks they rob in 1930s gangster movies. It was a cool building... then a pawn shop. But when they kicked out the pawn shop, TR’s moved in, and went with the old building motif. They put in an upscale bar and restaurant that looked like something from the 20s or 30s - wood and leather and all kinds of Teddy Roosevelt memorabilia like dead animal heads that watched you drink. (Yes, I know Roosevelt was dead by the 1920s, but this was an old bank building, not a log cabin in the woods.) The great thing about TR’s was that it was both an upscale bar and a neighborhood bar. The Old Hideout Bar down the street was a really low end neighborhood bar where all of Concord’s drunks congregated. When they closed that to put up some more reputable business, the drunks moved down to TR’s... and were not kicked out. This gave the place lots of atmosphere - it was like a speakeasy, with wealthy clientele sitting next to people who spent the better part of the day drinking. And the drunks were always on their best behavior at TR’s - because they *would* be booted if they caused trouble. So they didn’t bother anyone, but would add their 2 cents to any sports or political debate; and were respectful of everyone else in the bar. TR’s was a great place to just drink, or to take a date you want to impress for dinner. A fun place...

And now it’s gone. A pizza joint has taken it’s place, and that once beautifully rebuilt downtown section seems to be taking the slow slide back to crummy. Give it a decade, there may be a pawnshop back in the bank building.

The other big change is John’s Theatre has been closed down by the city of Pleasant Hill and may be bulldozed. I know Van from the Film Appreciation Class at Diablo Valley College and even though John also took that class I mostly know him through the acting classes at DVC and the guy who ran the theatre program, Les Abbott. John is an actor who makes movies, and has remained involved with community theatre. One of the oldest buildings in Pleasant Hill (next door to Concord) is the old school house, and it had fallen into disrepair, so the city was looking for people to help renovate it and use it as a city building. The theatre company John was involved with, Onstage (my sister was a musician in their first show, directed by Les) was looking for a home... and was a perfect fit for the old school house. John (building contractor by day) built a beautiful 99 seat theatre inside the old schoolhouse, and for 20 years they’ve been doing shows there. In fact, they often have a New Year’s Eve party that I’m invited to as a friend of the theatre. When I first moved to Los Angeles, I was appearing in a show at the school house theatre... as a TV announcer who interacts with people on stage when they turn on the TV. This year they didn’t have a New Year’s Eve party because they didn’t a theatre, the city of Pleasant Hill has closed the building because it’s potentially unsafe because it is old. Um, yeah. It’s a historical building. Of course it’s old. They found some sort of code violation, which John offered to repair... but something is going on behind the scenes and they declined his offer and shut the theatre. It’s a shame, because it’s the only place to see live plays in town, and they really try to do something interesting and different instead of the same old community theatre musical crap.

NEW YEARS EVE

So, John, Van and I had a couple more meetings on the project, and Van kept coming up with crazy ideas, and John kept coming up with nothing. I was getting worried - I needed John to come up with some great ideas, if nothing else, so that he would have some of his story material in the screenplay. I want this to be *our* project, not *my* project. One of our meetings, John does come up with a potential actress, and we also talk about some locations... but not enough to balance Van’s crazy-creative ideas.

Because the Onstage New Years’s Eve party is canceled, and Van (who is some sort of unexplainable chick magnet) is going to be without a date on NYE, the three of us decide to do the usual NYE thing... which is pretty much what we’ve already been doing. Many times the three of us have done the bachelor New Year’s Eve...

One memorable year, San Francisco decided to have this big free outdoor concert with fireworks. Cool! On New Years Eve, the BART trains run until 3am, so everyone takes the train to avoid driving drunk. So that year our plan was to eat dinner, see a movie, then find a cheap bar and have a bunch of drinks - because the free concert was no alcohol, and there were police searching everybody’s bags and patting you down for weapons. We did all of the above, but hit a snag when it came to cheap bars - on New Year’s Eve even the worst bar hires a band and has a hefty cover charge. We ended up walking halfway across the city until we found a restaurant with a bar that had no cover charge. After drinking, we made our way to the concert area, went through the search (they didn’t find the booze inside us) and discovered that everyone else got their way early... and we were too far away from the music to hear any of it. Place was so crowded you couldn’t *move*, let alone get to the porta-potties. You had to plan your piss about 2 hours in advance to give you time to get there. And somehow, people got booze past the police. In one case, I saw a guy pull a bottle out of the bottom of a trash can - he had hidden it there in the morning! We stayed for the midnight fireworks, then split and found a bar for a last couple of drinks... then I went down to the BART station (subway) to hop a train back to Concord. The station is packed almost as tight as the concert was... hundreds of people! And the trains come... full of passengers... and the doors don’t open. They just zoom away. Then a couple of empty trains zoom past without stopping. People are getting angry. Finally, just before the riot starts, a train comes and opens it’s doors and we cram in. Now we have a full train - overflowing almost. And this train zooms past other stations without stopping, and I get it. The BART train goes *under* the Bay. When they had the earthquake, the bridges went down, the BART tunnels were completely unharmed. But it’s a long ride underground... with a bunch of really drunk people... and one of them pukes. On the far end of the train car. But a chain reaction starts - you know how it is - and suddenly everyone is puking. By the time we reach Oakland, the floor of the train is a river. Yech! Problem is, Concord is end of the line, and I have to ride this puke train all the way there. When the train banks on corners, the river flows one way. When the train comes to a stop, the river flows another way. Yech! It takes everything I’ve got not to add to the river. I finally get home, and want to burn my shoes. Worst train ride ever.

This year, no concert. You see, it rains in San Francisco, making an outdoor concert silly. They still have fireworks, though, but we’re gonna ditch them. The plan is - dinner, movie, drinks. And we have a great plan. One year we went to this cool and usually crowded sports bar near the Metreon Cinemas, and found out the danged place closes at 9pm on New Year’s Eve! You see, they let their employees have the night off to go to parties. So what that means is that no one goes there on New Year’s Eve, and it’s pretty easy to get in... you have your pick of tables. Then the movie - again, people are partying so you can pick whatever seat you want. After that comes the hard part - finding a bar in San Francisco without a cover charge and some live band blasting music so loud we can’t talk. But Van knows about this bar in Chinatown, where they have a *different* New Year’s Eve (I think it’s today). And this bar has a ton of character - it’s a landmark kind of place, one of the oldest bars in the city, and a neighborhood bar filled with Chinese drunks... and enough other people know about it that there are always a group of hot gals who end up there on New Year’s Eve and some college kids who go there to avoid the crowds. The best/worst thing about this place is you go down a bunch of flights of stairs into some sub-sub-sub basement that seems to be miles below street level to get to the restrooms. Keeps you in shape.

So we start at the sports bar... and who shows up but Janet Englebert and her boyfriend! I went to high school with Janet, we were in a bunch of plays together, and I had a major crush on her. The great thing about being the heterosexual guy in the high school drama department is that you often get to see girls in their underwear doing quick costume changes backstage. Okay, this is probably getting pervy, so I’ll get back to New Year’s Eve... I haven’t seen Janet in decades! She starred in one of my super-8mm movies, playing the Grace Kelley role from HIGH NOON in my FISTFUL OF MOZZARELLA movie, and Van played the Man With No Social Security Number (male lead). He’s kept in contact with her all of these years, and invited her and her boyfriend along. Janet brought a bunch of pictures of me from one of the high school shows - it didn’t look anything like me. It was great to see that stuff again. We talked about the old days, and all of the people we went to school with back then. Here’s the thing - Janet hasn’t changed a bit. She looks exactly like she did in the photos.

From there we went to different movies, and John, Van and I went to Chinatown while Janet and her boyfriend went somewhere else. The bartender in the Chinatown bar is a character, and bought us a couple of rounds. We talked a little about the movie, but again - John just wasn’t coming up with anything and Van was coming up with crazy ideas that might have worked if we were doing a sci-fi film.

AND NOW, THE PUNCHLINE

Our last dinner & drinks meeting didn’t have a movie. Van doesn’t just know every hole in the wall bar, he knows ever hole in the wall place to eat. I have eaten some of the best meals I’ve ever had at places in the Bay Area that Van knows about. Probably the best breakfast I have ever eaten was as this neighborhood place in Oakland that served home fries that were amazing. So, Van had just been paid for a job and had this Italian restaurant he wanted to go to - called Jackson Filmore - which is the cross streets where it’s located. The food was great, reasonably priced, and the waiters were great. Afterwards, Van asked what kind of bar we would like to go to - a fancy place, or a dive? We picked dive - and it was a great neighborhood Tiki Bar place. Great atmosphere and cheap beer - what more could you want?

So, we start talking about the movie project, and I finally ask John if he has any ideas... and he says, “I would if I knew what the story was.” Seems his spam filter had been removing all of the e-mails I had been sending him. Van was getting them, John was not. So we spent the last night the three of us were together to discuss the movie project telling John what the movie project *was*.

- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: All About Running Gags old tip from 2001, completely rewritten.
Yesterday’s Dinner: El Pollo Loco chicken, black beans, corn.
Pages: Working on the rewrite of the remake project.

Old Friends And Hollywood Friends

Sorry I haven’t been posting more, but I’ve been recording and editing new audio classes and hanging out with old friends. That’s the great thing about being in my home town for an extended period - I have more time to hang out with friends.

I have two groups of old friends - the folks from that big table at the back of Denny’s from my film student days who are still around, and the guys I used to work with. Over the years, the guys I used to work with have scattered - all of them have new jobs, most of them have moved. I used to visit my old boss every year and go out for beers with a few of the warehouse guys - but that was several phone numbers ago. Used to be, people had a phone number, they had it for life. My parents still have the exact same phone number as when I was a kid - only the area code has changed. Now, people change cell phone companies and land-line companies every year - and their numbers change with them. They move every few years - a new apartment, then a starter home, then a new home, a few missed payments and they’re in an apartment somewhere, then a condo somewhere on the outskirts of town where you can still afford a place. Or maybe they took a new job in another state. Or got married and moved away. Or got divorced and moved away. All of those phone numbers, all of those addresses - I’ve lost track of all of those guys, now.

The people I haven’t lost track of, that I see every year and talk to on the phone about once a month, are the film guys. Sure, some are MIA, some I just don’t talk to, and some have been banished... but the handful that are left I’ve been hanging out with. Paul lives in another country, now - but I saw him when he came to LA a couple of months ago for the You Thought They Were Dead Actor’s Autograph Convention. I plan on seeing Bruce sometime while I’m here - he was the TA for the DVC Film Appreciation Class before Tom Ross and I took over... I wonder what happened to Tom Ross? Anyway, the main two guys left - my oldest friends - Van and John. I’ve been hanging out with them since I got here.

DVC - Diablo Valley Community College - still in the news for the Sex For Grades scandal. Never had anything like that when I was there - or, maybe they did... the reason why they needed two teaching assistants is that the teacher was often with some female student. I assume the female student passed the class - so I guess that was sex-for-grades.

Anyway - I’ve known Van and John forever. Sometime I’ll tell some stories of the months after my first film NINJA BUSTERS limped to a finish and killed my first screenwriting career and Van and I did carpet and linoleum to pay the rent. That’s still Van’s day job. John does construction - mostly home remodels. John could retire any time he wants - a few years ago he bought a fixer-upper duplex in San Francisco and turned it into a 8 unit apartment building. The rents not only pay for the place, but supply John with an income. He took a year off and made short films - entered them in contests - won a couple. But missed having his construction crew nail his feet to the roof of a house before lunch, so now he’s back working on houses.

The three of us are going to do dinner and a movie on Sunday, but I’ve already seen a couple of movies with John and spent a day hanging out with Van eating pizza and drinking beer... and talking movies.

Whenever any of us get together, that’s what we talk about - movies. And if the movie is from the 1980s or late 70s, chances are we all saw it together. We are the “survivors” of a big group of film folks that went to the Capri (Crapy) movie theater in Concord once a week... and a couple of other theaters in town as well. The Century in Pleasant Hill, where I was acting manager in High School, the Festival in Walnut Creek and the Regency in Pleasant Hill. There would be days when I’d just be driving down the street - maybe heading to Hop Sings Chinese Take Out (no tables - just take out) and see Van’s red Bronco in a movie theater parking lot and pull in... then wander down the aisles until I spotted him. I remember the day the forklift ran over my foot and the boss made me complete my shift. I drove to the Crapy - my foot swelling up like crazy - and pulled into the parking lot... found John, Van and the rest of the gang in theater, and they took me to the emergency room. I had no idea they would be in the theater - nothing planned - that’s just where you might expect to find them. Anyway - we saw *thousands* of movies together.

Now, here’s the strange thing... these two guys know more about movies than my friends in Los Angeles... who are in the business (or trying to break in). Not just the watching movies part - they know more about *making* movies.

HOLLYWOOD FRIENDS

I have a handful of people I hang out with in Los Angeles - and whenever I actually think about them, I wonder if it’s time to “upgrade”. My Hollywood Friends fall into two categories - screenwriters I’ve known since moving to LA and people I know from my neighborhood. There used to be a guy who was a member of both groups, David, but he finally quit trying to break in and broke out - he lives in Texas, now. The people in my neighborhood are all on the fringes of the biz or trying to break in. Actors, writers, directors... and some production people. After a couple of times hanging out with Van and John I realized they know more about movies than the guys I know in LA who are *working in the business* or trying to break in. And that makes no sense to me.

All of the breaking in director guys I know - some I’ve talked about here - aren’t guys who can hold up their end of a conversation on film theory or film history or even just film making. One director I know is completely unable to think visually, and just sets up the camera and has the actors act in front of it. The result looks like a filmed stage play - you keep looking for the proscenium arch on the sides of the screen. And he’s constantly breaking the 180 rule. And *not* shooting close ups of *objects* even if they are critical to the scene. Often his films have these weird jump cuts - because he has nothing to cut to except the exact same shot from the same angle. And he’s directing low budget movies.

CROSSOVER NIGHTMARES

John and Van and I know a director working in the biz (actually, we know a couple) - this is a hometown guy who began making short films. It’s strange, because he wasn’t someone who was a movie addict, and you could never talk movies with him - he’d hardly seen any. But he decided to make short films one day. I helped him on a couple, then stopped. A local actor who John and I both know ended up starring in some of his shorts. His shorts did not win awards... but he *did* use them to find funding to make more shorts. It was strange on his film sets - he seemed to have no idea what he wanted. You’d set up shot after shot until he found the one he liked. And he wasn’t able to communicated very well. The films of his that I worked on were disasters... and tough on the friends he rounded up to crew for him...

A couple of years ago he called me - he had just moved to Los Angeles to further his film career. I’ve had dinner with him many times since he moved to LA... and he now knows how to fake talking about films. He’ll gush over some director, but the more you talk to him the more you realize he’s never seen any movies from this director - he just knows the name. Maybe he’s read a synopsis of their important films. But he still doesn’t seem like a guy who loves movies - or even likes them. I have no idea what his motivations for becoming a director are. Anyway, he found an investor and made an indie film that came out on DVD... and it was the topic of conversation one of the days John and I hung out.

John and I discussed *film making* and this guy’s films in a way the director and I could never discuss. We talked about his shot choice - which makes no sense. We talked about the emotional reactions of his characters - which make no sense. We talked about his complete inability to create suspense or reveal information - probably because he has no idea what shots are required, and has never actually watched any suspense films (just read the synopsis). We talked about a scene in his film that didn’t work, and John came up with a great idea to make it work that was different than the idea I had come up with.

A couple of days later, Van and I are in Melos Pizza in Pleasant Hill talking about the same movie, and Van comes up with a third great idea on how to make that crappy scene work. So there were all kinds of ways to make the scene work - but the director couldn’t come up with any of them. Van and I talk about some other scenes from the film, and again - we can discuss the “mechanics” of the scene from a film maker’s perspective - how the shots need to add up, what shots and angles and camera moves you need, what real people would do in this situation and what things they could do that would create a reaction in the audience.

After seeing the film at the premiere, I talked to the director about the same scenes... and it was like speaking to someone from another culture. The most obvious thing in many of these scenes was that the characters did not react like real people react. He blamed all of this on the actors. In fact, he blamed everything on somebody else. Except this guy wrote the script, cast the film, directed it, etc. No one else to blame - he was in charge! One of the things we all mentioned was a fight scene that was shot in a master and not a single punch even came close. After the premiere, I asked him about this, and he blamed the two actors. Um, that’s why you shoot all of those close ups of punches landing - so you can cut to them when the wide shot makes it seem obvious that the swing was a complete miss. That’s why you don’t just shoot a master - but do that Robert Rodriguez thing where every take is a different angle, so you can cut it together and have lots of different shots - using the speed of *editing* to make up for the slow punch swings. But I’m sure the director never saw EL MARIACHI or watched any of the RR film lessons on the DVDs or read REBEL WITHOUT A CREW... he just read the synopsis so that he could “pass” as a guy who knew what he was talking about when he was talking to other guys in the biz who only read synopsis.

Where is the fun in that? Why would you want to *sound* like you have seen a film, without the pleasure of actually seeing it? Why would you want to gpthrough the hell of making a film, if you don’t love films?

The more I talked to both John and Van about this film, the more I realized that the obvious solutions to all of the film making problems could not only be solved in a number of different ways - but the director didn’t think of any of them... and my friends back home who probably thought they weren’t talented enough to go to Hollywood and make film, could. Woody Allen was right, 98% of success is just showing up. This guy showed up in Hollywood, and now he’s got an indie film on the shelf at Bloockbuster.

Crap.

Pisses me off and also makes me think I’m blowing it.

Because *I* know more than these Hollywood guys do, and yet if someone were to offer me a director job tomorrow I would think I don’t know enough to be a director. Because I know how much you really have to know... as opposed to these ignorant guys who have no idea how much they don’t know. I have to *think less*... and show up more.

So that’s going to be a New Years Resolution I’ll probably forget by the end of January.

Meanwhile, I’m having all kinds of great conversations about film - the kind I never have in Los Angeles - here in my home town. Van and I had a great conversation about Joseph H. Lewis’ GUN CRAZY - that bank robbery scene that was all shot from the backseat of the getaway car - while having a beer or six at Farrington’s Bar in Pleasant Hill. Farrington’s is in a strip mall where the Pleasant Hill Motor Movies used to be and features all kinds of pictures of the old drive in, plus movie posters and art from the drive in.

Joseph H. Lewis is one of those guys who knew how to turn a no money movie into *art* back in the late 40s and 50s. That lead to a discussion of Lewis’ BIG COMBO, and the way he used fog to cover the bad sets - or lack of an airport in the big airport scene. Shot it in some warehouse and claimed it was an empty hanger at the airport, fogged the street outside the warehouse and put in a strobing searchlight and airplane sounds. You’d swear you were at an airport. And that lead to a discussion of the end of GUN CRAZY, which also used fog to cover a lack of budget. Our fugitive Bonnie & Clyde type couple escapes into a marsh... and as they hide in the fog, we hear dozens of dogs and hundreds of policemen searching for them. Can’t see all of those people because of the fog, but we hear them. And that might seem like a cheat to you, but it works really well because the fog is a *plus* - we worry that the policemen may be closer than we think. Any moment, they could break out of that fig and capture our couple. Okay, none of my friends in LA could discuss these films... which is why I’m thinking I need a “friend upgrade”. I casually know people who probably have seen all the Lewis films - I need to hang out more with *those* people and less with the others.

My old friends, my film friends from my hometown - we’ve *really* seen all of these movies. We can really discuss how and why they work (or don’t). And that’s the best part about this extended holiday vacation - I get to talk film after a year of just talking film business in Los Angeles. Nothing gives me more pleasure than talking about films... except seeing them on the big screen.

- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Ummm, something? All I know is that *Monday* I have a new tip on SUPERBAD.

Yesterday’s Dinner: Some Mexican place on Grand Avenue in Oakland a couple of blocks from the Grand Lake movie theater where John and I saw BLADE RUNNER. I had the taco plate - kind of disappointing. The food seemed home made in the worst sense - I kept thinking that I could have made these tacos myself. The rice was kind of blah and the refried beans were *runny*. When you spend money for food in a restaurant, you want the food to be something special, something that you *couldn’t* throw together at home in a couple of minutes. After dinner, John and I had a couple of beers at Smitty’s Bar on Grand - a place that has probably been there for a hundred years.

Movies: ENCHANTED. A really fun film that manages to be both cynical and romantic. I love how there are parallels between fairy tale land and NYC - like the horse drawn carriages and the grand ball at the end. If you *hate* fairy tale movies, this is the film for you because so much of the humor comes from fairy take characters having to deal with ugly reality. Nothing is more fun than seeing some fairy tale Princess get mugged by a dirty smelly homeless guy. If you *love* fairy tale movies, this is the film for you because it becomes a fairy tale in real life by the end. And you’ll just want to break out in song in public... and wonder if cockroaches really can clean tough soap scum stains from your shower.

Movies: BLADE RUNNER: FINAL CUT. First, let me set the stage.... John is doing a remodel job in Oakland, so we decided to catch a movie at the old Grand Lake. A huge movie palace from the 1930s that seems big enough to house the entire population of Oakland. Huge, beautiful, ornate. I took the BART train into Oakland’s 19th Street station and walked around Lake Merritt to the theater - a beautiful walk full of memories. I passed Children’s Fairy Land, a special place to go on your birthday before you became a teenager and thought it was silly. The lake itself - an oasis in the middle of Oakland. No paddle boats yesterday because it was sprinkling. After a wonderful walk, I grabbed a coffee in a place next door to the cinema called Day Of The Dead Café. Had a conversation with a couple of locals about the Raiders - total strangers... I think that’s the cool thing about sports and movies and TV - it’s common ground for conversations with people you don’t know... and something you can share. Brings us together. John shows, we go to the cinema, it’s *free popcorn night* - sweet! The Grand Lake has been chopped into 3 screens, now - two downstairs and one upstairs. BLADE RUNNER was playing upstairs in what used to be the balcony... I swear, as many seats up there as in the biggest cinema in Burbank! Houselights lower, the movie begins....

Okay, I’m gonna get flack for this, but the more I see BLADE RUNNER, the less I like it. When it first came out, the special effects were amazing, but the story and over-production design aspects were disappointing. As years pass, the FX work (still great) has kind of faded - so many movies these days have *tons* of amazing FX work, that the novelty has worn off. That makes the over-production designed aspects really stick out - the over-the-top wardrobe and hair, the *indoor* rain and mud and filth in a building owned by a genius tech guy who is probably a billionaire. The anti-tech equipment that looked like an antique in 1977 when the film came out. And just the *lack of logic* behind the production design and costuming. Rachel is dressed, hair styled, and made up to look like a freakin’ Mattel doll, and we’re supposed to be surprised that she’s a replicant? None of the other Repicants look and act that fake.

Every room is *filled* with dense smoke - even if the characters don’t smoke. There is junk and clutter everywhere - and even a small apartment has a piano! The top scientist dude lives in a dump where it rains indoors and dresses like an escapee from a Village People video. And when we get to the story - you’d think one of the things they’d do in the “Final Cut” would be to remove the duplicate scenes. M. Emmett Walsh gives the complete back story on the four repicants once in his office, then again - almost word for word - in the screening room with slides. Harrison Ford is *amazed* that Rachel has had a memory implant, and Tyrell says it’s something brand new - yet Roy Batty and all of his crew have had memory implants... and Roy is 4 years old. The very next scene after Ford is amazed at the concept of memory implants, he knows all about them and tells an overly-production-designed Rachel every single memory she has... you see, only a scene later knowing all of the false memories and where they came from are part of Ford’s job... and he spits them out just like he does every other day.

And I still have no idea how Edward James Olmos knows what Harrison Ford was fantasizing about - how can anyone know what another person is thinking? Let alone *why* Ford would think about unicorns, or why - if that was implanted - they would decide to have a tough guy think about unicorns. Or why hire a replicant to be a blade runner, or... well, nothing is logical in this film. If you really look at the story, it makes no sense - Brion James is wearing a hospital gown when he’s being scanned in the opening scene - but has managed to smuggle in a gun. Um, I don’t want to know how he did that, but if *I* were looking for dangerous replicants who had killed a whole bunch of people, I might have the suspects pass through a metal detector. Later, Ford finds photos in his hotel room - but not any sort of real photo - the one that ends up being a clue is a photo of an empty hotel room. Um, who takes photos of an empty room and thinks they are so valuable they will risk their lives going back to retrieve them? The empty room photo has a stupid clue - in the mirror is a reflection of a woman off camera- Joanna Cassidy. Ford takes the photo and a snake skin scale that was *easily found* in the hotel room and without much work - just some time killing - traces them to Joanna Cassidy. She escapes, there’s a big chase, he shoots her, in this new version they have *Cassidy* - not the burley stuntman - crash through the window and die on the sidewalk... where Brion James is waiting to meet her. Huh? How could he be waiting to meet her there if this was where the chase ended? Makes zero sense.

A similar nonsense scene happens a minute later where M. Emmett Walsh tells Ford that Rachel has split - no one can find her... and when he drives away, she’s standing *right behind his car*! Man, if Walsh had just looked through his car window, he could have captured her! Okay, how did Rachel know to be there? Or, *why* was she there? The story makes no sense!

Batty and Brion James go to see eyeball guy James Hong to find out how they can extend their lives. Hong says the only one who can hep them is Tyrell... and this is new information for them... except the opening scene is Brion James being scanned because he’s infiltrated the Tyrell Corp to get to Tyrell. Later, they tell Sebastian that Tyrell is impossible to get to and they need his help... but Sebastian basically just saunters up to Tyrell’s *bedroom* with Batty. Easy to get to. No security at all. Just an elevator that pauses before Tyrell gives the okay. The elevator doesn’t have a freakin’ *camera* in it, or sensors, or anything else. There’s a video pay phone in a bar, but no camera in the elevator that leads right into the richest man in the world’s *bedroom*. And he has no guards or assistants or even a panic button. You know, when Van and I were installing carpets a few years after this film came out we did a bunch of dentist’s offices - and they had alarms up the wazzoo - pressure alarms under the carpets, door alarms, etc. All of that because they had laughing gas that might be stolen. It’s as if no one ever thought through anything in this story... and didn’t worry about things like duplicate scenes when they made the Final Cut. Second time I’ve seen the FINAL CUT... and I thought the first time I wasn’t thrilled because I may have been in a bad mood. This time I was in a good mood... and liked it even less! Okay... now I expect a million responses that I just don’t understand the brilliance of BLADE RUNNER.

DVDS: All three CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON movies. First one, pretty good. The music is way over the top, but it has some real suspense and real thrills and actually has an environmental message (great shot of a cigarette butt being thrown into the lagoon... camera dips underwater to show the Creature looking up at the butt and garbage floating in his pool). Second movie REVENGE OF THE CREATURE - great idea - Creature at Marine World on display. Science poking and prodding. Way too much exposition, but makes up for it with suspense and hand-on-shoulder shock moments (about two dozen of them - everyone in this film enters a room by sneaking up behind the person on camera and grabbing their shoulder!). Great scene with a lost dog in the darkness... and the creature lurking. Third film CREATURE WALKS AMONG US - almost impossible to watch it’s so bad. It’s all exposition - people sitting around table on board a ship *talking* about what happened. And the dialogue is just awful. The characters are cliches of cliches. Nothing scary. Hey... and the third film was the one written by Gary Ross’ father. Yikes!

Pages: Editing audio and working on the book rewrite.
- Bill