After my vacation, I needed a vacation.
It’s been a busy couple of months. I took a 2 week vacation in July for my birthday in Las Vegas - some celebration with friends and the rest writing by day and being in Vegas by night... whatever money you bring to Vegas, stays in Vegas. After that I zipped back to Los Angeles for about a week, mailed some orders and searched my mailbox for the visa forms for China that were supposed to have been sent on June 24th - stressed over that for a while. Then zipped up to the Bay Area for a class reunion and to help my parents with a manual labor project at their house... oh how I just love doing heavy lifting! When I returned to Los Angeles... the China visa forms had *just* arrived (I had a friend checking my mail for them while I was away). Now I’m worried that the visa forms won’t make it through the Chinese government bureaucracy in time for me to teach my class. Oh, and I have to prep my London class right now - I’m hopping a plane in a few weeks for that non-stop orgy of film that is being on an international film fest jury... and then teach my class the day after closing ceremonies. Oh, then I fly back to Los Angeles for a week, and then hop a plane for Hong Kong (provided my Visa gets back to me in time) and do a class for the Hong Kong Film Academy. Now, somewhere in here I have some meetings on projects, including one on the big remake project - which seems as if it is going to get a major rewrite... which I will have to do in between all of this stuff because the sooner that rewrite gets done the sooner that project can happen and the sooner there will be a large payday for Bill.
So, it was important for me to have that time to relax and recharge my batteries.
Only, they didn’t seem to get fully charged and I don’t think they’re holding a charge like they used to.
There are all kinds of reasons for that - I’m sure age is a factor. When I was in my 20s I had all kinds of energy to do all kinds of things and didn’t seem to need much sleep. Now, well, I need to sleep. And I can’t go drinking every night and get up to go to work in the morning and take classes and make films and write scripts and... well, I can barely do any of that stuff now, even with 8 hours of sleep every night. Doing that manual labor, working on my parent’s house, just wiped me out every day. Sure, part of it was due to it being over 100' in Concord most of the time - but I just can’t do a day of hard work and then write a bunch of pages like I used to. I can either do the work or the pages, but not both. I’ve become a wimp.
I think another factor is burn out. When you first start writing there’s an excitement about it, and that elusive goal keeps you working harder and harder. But once you’ve achieved that goal and realized it ain’t everything you imagined... well, it’s just not as exciting anymore. My almost 20 year career has been frustrating. I put in a lot of work, and most of it leads to a dead end. I still do not understand why I don’t have an agent or manager - and why it’s easier for me to get a meeting on a studio lot than get an agent to read a script. What’s up with that? Meanwhile this guy who my friends and I think is the worst writer we have ever read (with the best networking skills) has just landed another assignment - and has an agent - and we all wonder how long this emperor will go before it is discovered he has no clothes. That assignment could have been mine or yours or any of my friend’s who actually can write, but this biz often makes no sense. These things slowly chip away at my energy
And then there are those little things in life that just seem to sap the energy from you... like a little wire causing a short that drains your battery over a period of time. When I began having problems with my laptop just before my high school reunion, someone online (I think Cathy) asked me how long I’ve had it... I couldn’t remember. Now I know that it was almost 3 years. Well, several months ago the battery stopped holding a charge - so two and a half hours of outdoor in the park writing time shrunk to 15 minutes. Hey, I can’t just ride my bike to the park and write anymore. Pisser. Now, somewhere along in there I wore the letters off the keys, and actually wore a crater in the shift key and a couple of others. I probably should have replaced the thing then, but it still had over 40g on the hard drive completely empty. The entire “D” drive was untouched! So I bought some colorful stick on letters... and my laptop looked festive! I think some computer company should offer colorful letters as an option. The laptop was fine after that, I just had to replace the letters every couple of weeks. Then, in Vegas, the whole H key decided to escape. Okay, time to replace the laptop... but it didn’t happen in that post-Vegas week, and while I was in the Bay Area for my reunion, the laptop just broke down. It began freezing up. Hey, I can make it through a couple of weeks like this and replace it when I get back to LA, right? Well, after a week of losing work because the damned thing froze up when I was almost finished with something but had not saved it, I realized I’d have to replace the laptop away from home... which lead to another week of pulling out my hair while I was trying to get info from the now almost dead laptop onto the new laptop... but every time I plugged in the migration cable the old laptop would crash. This was going on while I was half-asleep from doing manual labor at my parent’s house... which added to the frustration. Of course, eventually most of it was solved and I now have a new laptop that will probably need to be replaced in 2 years when it still has half of its hard drive untouched. But, as you folks reading this know, when something goes wrong with your computer, it’s a major thing. That computer is *my life*. That seemed to drain any energy I’d managed to save up over my 2 week vacation...
And I didn’t get much done at all while I was in the Bay Area... which means I have to get all of that stuff done now, plus the stuff that’s scheduled to do now, plus the rewrite in the script that was not on the schedule, plus some last minute stuff for the Film Fest, plus...
So I already seem to need another vacation. The batteries seem to take longer to charge and don’t seem to hold a charge as well...
- Bill
My continued attack on UK television's M4M2:
9/3 - 17:30 - Black Thunder - When the world's most powerful stealth jet fighter falls into enemy hands, only one man can get it back. Starring Michael Dudikoff.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Monday, August 24, 2009
Class Reunion
A week ago I went to a High School Class Reunion - a picnic in a park in my hometown. When the classmate organizing it first sent me an e-mail, I got kind of nostalgic, and spent a couple of days watching the openings of my favorite TV shows when I was a kid... you know, the HAWAII 5-0 theme still rocks. I’m sure part of the nostalgia thing was that I also had a birthday coming up - and it would be birthday and class reunion almost back-to-back. Now that both are in the past, it’s time for me to start thinking about the future again... and get back to work.
Oh, but that class reunion...
I attended my 10 year class reunion, but none of the others. Because I was still living and working in my home town, the 10 year wasn’t a big deal. I saw many people from high school in the grocery store or where they worked. And people hadn’t really changed that much - everyone was still on their first spouse. Some people had kids... but some people had kids (or were pregnant) their senior year of high school. The one person I most wanted to see at my 10 year was my friend Daryl, who got into all kinds of mischief with me (and Todd, and others) in high school. We pulled all kinds of pranks and found new ways to rebel against the world - we commandeered room 312 and took it as our student lounge. This involved changing the locks on the door. We organized the pot smoking kids to sit on the roof over the faculty lounge and blow smoke into their air vent. Because back in those old days you needed a hall pass to be anywhere on campus when class was in session, we, um, found the spare time stamp machine and the box of hall passes and created our own. I’m sure the statute of limitations applies to all of these crimes, now... or maybe I’ll be blogging from jail for a while.
Most of our pranks were just small every-day things - pushing someone’s car across the parking lot to another space and then trying to convince them that they had parked it there, putting a notice in the faculty lounge to bring cookies or cupcakes for everyone in your 3rd period class (for some reason the teachers who fell for this and brought cupcakes for the class were never *my* teachers or Daryl’s teachers or Todd’s teachers). The strangest prank we did - and it was ongoing - was to *dress* the statue in the school library. The old librarian had this statue of - some Greek dude, I forget who, now - and it was he wanted everyone to respect the statue... which meant we had to come up with some prank to disrespect it. So, once or twice a month we would create a diversion to keep the old librarian occupied as we dressed the statue in clothes we bought from Goodwill. That old Greek dude was in drag half the time, sometimes in School Colors before a big football game, but always wearing something weird. At first the old librarian would freak out and remove the clothes, screaming at anyone in the library about the sacrilege... but the next day we’d get the statue dressed again, and eventually the old librarian just gave up. But he still ranted it all the time and eventually quit - so they hired a cool new librarian, Dot Caveny, who like the statue dressed in strange clothes. We continued dressing the statue until we graduated, and then some other kids took over. Besides coming up with many of these pranks, I was never without a special notebook where I was writing a fictionalized version of our antics as a novel. I still have all of those notebooks in storage somewhere.
When Daryl was a no-show at the 10 year reunion, we joked that he was probably either on the road to making his first million or in prison for conning a millionaire. Every year when I drive back to my hometown from Los Angeles, I go to many of my old haunts and used to bump into Dot Caveny at TR’s Bar & Grill in Concord. A bunch of teachers used to hang out there after work, and she was in that group. One year I drove up just to go to her birthday party there. We would talk of the old days, and debate whether Daryl had made his first billion by now or was up for parole. Had to be one of the two - he was too intelligent and too clever to be working some boring normal job. Well, TR’s closed - it’s now a pizza joint - and I haven’t seen Dot in years. I hope she’s okay.
Oh, but that class reunion...
I haven’t seen Daryl since graduation, and he was supposed to attend this reunion. Which meant, I had to be there.
And all of us are going to be, you know, old.
Well, here’s what I learned from going to this reunion - people age at different rates. These people are all the same age as I am (give-or-take) yet some looked and acted old and others were still full of energy and could have passed for at least a decade younger than they were. The hot busty high school cheerleader? Still pretty hot! I imagine if you removed her bra at this point (something I fantasized about often while in high school), they’d hit the floor and bounce, but she still looked great - and was flirty and the same firecracker she was many years ago. The school stud - still on the prowl. He was hitting on every woman there... and he looked great. Probably some Just For Men products involved, though. One thing that’s funny - people still hung out with their old cliques (leaving the braniac social misfits to talk amongst ourselves for much of the time). Another thing that was interesting was that most of the guys have jobs where they do some form of manual labor for a living - though at this point they usually supervise others doing the labor. Our high school seemed to produce people who do remodels or put in pools and jacuzzis or repair cars. Not a lot of computer programmers or dot-com millionaires. Bill Gates did not go to my high school.
As the reunion progressed, we realized we were all waiting for Daryl’s entrance. Would he drive up in a limousine from his LearJet which landed at Buchanan Field? Would a prison van pull up and release him, in shackles, to attend the reunion but keep him from wandering any further than his chains allowed? Would he zoom in wearing a jet pack? Would he show up with Lindsey Lohan on one arm and a champagne glass in hand? What if he’d had full identity changing plastic surgery and we didn’t recognize him? It was difficult enough to recognize some of the people at the reunion, just because they looked, you know, old.
As we waited for Daryl to show, we swapped stories about him. One of the gals talked about how he was her lab partner, and kept breaking beakers and petri dishes... and *she* had to go get the replacements so that he wouldn’t get in even more trouble. I told about the time Daryl “borrowed” his dad’s prized Cadillac and we swiped some little flags from the Veteran’s Graveyard and taped them to the front and rear of the Caddy, and “motorcaded” through town, trying to see how many cars would move to the side of the road to let us pass by. Everyone had a great story about the legendary Daryl...
But as the sun began to set and the reunion picnic broke up, Daryl still had not arrived. He was either buying the Oakland As as an investment, or they wouldn’t release him from that Federal Prison because they needed him to play tennis against Bernie Madhof's Federal Prison’s tennis team. Whatever the reason, we all left having not seen him... but still having experienced the fun he had brought into our lives many years ago. He was a real character - and maybe it’s better that we didn’t get to see the 9-5 married-with-two-kids version that he may have become. Daryl is a legend who will live on in all of our memories, even when the hot cheerleader starts to look like an apple doll.
I wish I could *create* a character than interesting and dynamic and memorable.
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
Blue Books are back!
- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: What's your story? and the mess that is DREAMCATCHER.
Movies: Though I haven't seen many movies, I have seen DISTRICT 9, and tomorrow I'll share my thoughts on it.
Meanwhile, films to avoid on UK's M4M2 Channel...
8/25 - 15:30 - Steel Sharks - When a United States submarine is seized by terrorists, a rescue attempt by Elite Navy Seals goes awry. The submarine crew wages a silent war beneath the waves in this tense undersea thriller.
8/28 - 14:15 - Crash Dive - The crew of a nuclear submarine rescues supposed victims of a boat disaster, but the victims turn out to be terrorists intent on capturing nuclear weapons aboard the sub.
8/29 - 18:30 - Black Thunder - When the world's most powerful stealth jet fighter falls into enemy hands, only one man can get it back. Starring Michael Dudikoff.
I am so sorry.
- Bill
Oh, but that class reunion...
I attended my 10 year class reunion, but none of the others. Because I was still living and working in my home town, the 10 year wasn’t a big deal. I saw many people from high school in the grocery store or where they worked. And people hadn’t really changed that much - everyone was still on their first spouse. Some people had kids... but some people had kids (or were pregnant) their senior year of high school. The one person I most wanted to see at my 10 year was my friend Daryl, who got into all kinds of mischief with me (and Todd, and others) in high school. We pulled all kinds of pranks and found new ways to rebel against the world - we commandeered room 312 and took it as our student lounge. This involved changing the locks on the door. We organized the pot smoking kids to sit on the roof over the faculty lounge and blow smoke into their air vent. Because back in those old days you needed a hall pass to be anywhere on campus when class was in session, we, um, found the spare time stamp machine and the box of hall passes and created our own. I’m sure the statute of limitations applies to all of these crimes, now... or maybe I’ll be blogging from jail for a while.
Most of our pranks were just small every-day things - pushing someone’s car across the parking lot to another space and then trying to convince them that they had parked it there, putting a notice in the faculty lounge to bring cookies or cupcakes for everyone in your 3rd period class (for some reason the teachers who fell for this and brought cupcakes for the class were never *my* teachers or Daryl’s teachers or Todd’s teachers). The strangest prank we did - and it was ongoing - was to *dress* the statue in the school library. The old librarian had this statue of - some Greek dude, I forget who, now - and it was he wanted everyone to respect the statue... which meant we had to come up with some prank to disrespect it. So, once or twice a month we would create a diversion to keep the old librarian occupied as we dressed the statue in clothes we bought from Goodwill. That old Greek dude was in drag half the time, sometimes in School Colors before a big football game, but always wearing something weird. At first the old librarian would freak out and remove the clothes, screaming at anyone in the library about the sacrilege... but the next day we’d get the statue dressed again, and eventually the old librarian just gave up. But he still ranted it all the time and eventually quit - so they hired a cool new librarian, Dot Caveny, who like the statue dressed in strange clothes. We continued dressing the statue until we graduated, and then some other kids took over. Besides coming up with many of these pranks, I was never without a special notebook where I was writing a fictionalized version of our antics as a novel. I still have all of those notebooks in storage somewhere.
When Daryl was a no-show at the 10 year reunion, we joked that he was probably either on the road to making his first million or in prison for conning a millionaire. Every year when I drive back to my hometown from Los Angeles, I go to many of my old haunts and used to bump into Dot Caveny at TR’s Bar & Grill in Concord. A bunch of teachers used to hang out there after work, and she was in that group. One year I drove up just to go to her birthday party there. We would talk of the old days, and debate whether Daryl had made his first billion by now or was up for parole. Had to be one of the two - he was too intelligent and too clever to be working some boring normal job. Well, TR’s closed - it’s now a pizza joint - and I haven’t seen Dot in years. I hope she’s okay.
Oh, but that class reunion...
I haven’t seen Daryl since graduation, and he was supposed to attend this reunion. Which meant, I had to be there.
And all of us are going to be, you know, old.
Well, here’s what I learned from going to this reunion - people age at different rates. These people are all the same age as I am (give-or-take) yet some looked and acted old and others were still full of energy and could have passed for at least a decade younger than they were. The hot busty high school cheerleader? Still pretty hot! I imagine if you removed her bra at this point (something I fantasized about often while in high school), they’d hit the floor and bounce, but she still looked great - and was flirty and the same firecracker she was many years ago. The school stud - still on the prowl. He was hitting on every woman there... and he looked great. Probably some Just For Men products involved, though. One thing that’s funny - people still hung out with their old cliques (leaving the braniac social misfits to talk amongst ourselves for much of the time). Another thing that was interesting was that most of the guys have jobs where they do some form of manual labor for a living - though at this point they usually supervise others doing the labor. Our high school seemed to produce people who do remodels or put in pools and jacuzzis or repair cars. Not a lot of computer programmers or dot-com millionaires. Bill Gates did not go to my high school.
As the reunion progressed, we realized we were all waiting for Daryl’s entrance. Would he drive up in a limousine from his LearJet which landed at Buchanan Field? Would a prison van pull up and release him, in shackles, to attend the reunion but keep him from wandering any further than his chains allowed? Would he zoom in wearing a jet pack? Would he show up with Lindsey Lohan on one arm and a champagne glass in hand? What if he’d had full identity changing plastic surgery and we didn’t recognize him? It was difficult enough to recognize some of the people at the reunion, just because they looked, you know, old.
As we waited for Daryl to show, we swapped stories about him. One of the gals talked about how he was her lab partner, and kept breaking beakers and petri dishes... and *she* had to go get the replacements so that he wouldn’t get in even more trouble. I told about the time Daryl “borrowed” his dad’s prized Cadillac and we swiped some little flags from the Veteran’s Graveyard and taped them to the front and rear of the Caddy, and “motorcaded” through town, trying to see how many cars would move to the side of the road to let us pass by. Everyone had a great story about the legendary Daryl...
But as the sun began to set and the reunion picnic broke up, Daryl still had not arrived. He was either buying the Oakland As as an investment, or they wouldn’t release him from that Federal Prison because they needed him to play tennis against Bernie Madhof's Federal Prison’s tennis team. Whatever the reason, we all left having not seen him... but still having experienced the fun he had brought into our lives many years ago. He was a real character - and maybe it’s better that we didn’t get to see the 9-5 married-with-two-kids version that he may have become. Daryl is a legend who will live on in all of our memories, even when the hot cheerleader starts to look like an apple doll.
I wish I could *create* a character than interesting and dynamic and memorable.
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
Blue Books are back!
- Bill
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: What's your story? and the mess that is DREAMCATCHER.
Movies: Though I haven't seen many movies, I have seen DISTRICT 9, and tomorrow I'll share my thoughts on it.
Meanwhile, films to avoid on UK's M4M2 Channel...
8/25 - 15:30 - Steel Sharks - When a United States submarine is seized by terrorists, a rescue attempt by Elite Navy Seals goes awry. The submarine crew wages a silent war beneath the waves in this tense undersea thriller.
8/28 - 14:15 - Crash Dive - The crew of a nuclear submarine rescues supposed victims of a boat disaster, but the victims turn out to be terrorists intent on capturing nuclear weapons aboard the sub.
8/29 - 18:30 - Black Thunder - When the world's most powerful stealth jet fighter falls into enemy hands, only one man can get it back. Starring Michael Dudikoff.
I am so sorry.
- Bill
Friday, August 21, 2009
Sorry, no Fridays With Hitchcock This Week!
I'm tired and was busy doing other things... but you can scroll down and find ROPE and a bunch of others!
- Bill
- Bill
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
The Spin
I wish I could say I read every one of those blogs over there –> every day. Some get read almost every day, some I forget about then go over and catch up on, some of those bloggers post so infrequently I’ll check back after a month a find only one new post (some - no new posts!), and some... well, I hardly ever read. Sorry if that is yours.
When I check my blog hits (almost every day) I like to check out where people came from - what website they were on immediately before coming here. Usually people come from my website or a link I’ve placed somewhere or some other screenwriting or filmmaking website. Most people probably do what I do - I kind of cycle through the websites I regularly read to see if there’s anything new and exciting. Of course, a few of you come here directly from a graphic gay porn site - I still am not sure whether my website is popular in the gay world for some reason, if many gay people are interested in writing screenplays, or if it’s just some of you screwing around with me because you know I check out where my readers come from. You may owe an apology to that little girl and her mom who were sitting behind me in Starbucks last week. That kid may grow up to think all guys can do that without needing immediate medical attention.
So, every once in a while I trace a hit back to some blog I’m unfamiliar with - usually in the film or screenwriting world, but sometimes other types of blogs. And if they look interesting, I read them. If I liked it, I may read it a few more times... and if it’s always interesting I may add it to the list. When I found the homicide blog, I kept reading it and thought it might also be of interest to some of you, so it went on the list. But there are other blogs that never make the list... because they are boring.
I recently read a blog that was film reviews that didn’t make the cut. Here’s why - instead of really digging into the films, he would say whether he liked the film or not and then gave a practically scene-by-scene summary of the movie. No play in the summary was a critique or details on why he liked or disliked this scene - it was just the story. And, told in the blandest possible way. Kind of a book report. This happened then this happened then this happened. I actually read 3 entries to see if maybe this guy was just having a bad day, but *all* of the “reviews” were like that. “I liked HANGOVER. These four guys have a bachelor party in Las Vegas...” and then what happened in the movie told in the most unemotional way possible. This guy’s reviews could make a comedy seem like an episode of DRAGNET.
Another blog that didn’t make the cut was by a woman who worked for an ad agency, who told what happened at the office, Now, I’ve watched THE OFFICE and seen OFFICE SPACE and watched a couple of episodes of MAD MEN and read all of Ernest Lehman’s short stories and probably expected to read a sarcastic blog about working in an office... or maybe an expose of the cut throat business world, or maybe some rants about how stupid fellow employees are or corporate politics are. Instead, this blog was more DRAGNET - her boss wanted the Soams File on is desk by 3:30 so that he could prep for his 4:00 meeting but Gary wasn’t finished with his report, so the file wasn’t ready until after 4:00 and... It was like reading the diary or a boring person. A robot could have written this blog! Maybe a robot *did* write the blog... or a pod person.
Another blog kind of had the opposite problem, though really it’s the same problem. This guy’s blog was all this guy’s opinions on the way the film business is run. A complete angry rant (I read a couple) about how he could run the business so much better. The problem here was that it was kind of this guy’s propoganda - his beliefs on how Hollywood should be - but if you read two blog entries, you’ve read them all. Hey, a robot or pod person could have written *this* blog, too. Just programmed to drone on and on about what was wrong with Hollywood in a way that was almost impersonal.
Bland. Uninteresting. Not entertaining.
It’s life as an office worker... but without a “spin”, without a “take”. Just the life, not a way of looking at that life.
Pulp novelist John D. MacDonald said if you gave the same news story to 10 different writers you’d end up getting 10 different stories. Because each writer would find a different way of telling the story, and find a different way of looking at the story, and find different parts of the story that appealed to them. A writer takes reality and runs it through their unique filter, and it comes out unique.
I once checked into a hotel, and when I got to my room the message light was blinking on my phone. What? Seems the person who checked out never retrieved their message. Because I didn’t know that when I saw the blinking light, I listened to the voice mail... some personal stuff from some stranger’s life.
Okay - your character checks in, sees the blinking message light, plays the message... What is the message and what happens next?
Do you think we all came up with the same story from that jumping off point? I think if we each wrote a script with that as the opening scene, we’d have a bunch of different scripts in different genres, and no two would be the same. Sure, a handful of people might write rom-coms with that as the set up, but after that first scene they’d go in their separate directions.
Have you ever seen the movie MIRACLE MILE? Guy answers a pay phone, voice on the other end says...
Whether we are writing our blogs or writing our scripts, we have to give that reader a unique and entertaining experience. We aren’t just telling them what happens, we are doing it in an exciting and interesting and amusing way. We aren’t just writing a film review that tells you what happened, we want to give it our spin, our take. We want to leave our finger prints on the review so it doesn’t look like a robot wrote it. Maybe the review is funny. Maybe the reviews point out how out of touch Hollywood is with real life. Maybe it’s a Pauline Kael review all about how this movie made *you* feel while watching it - and the review tells us as much about the reviewer as the film. Maybe look at films from a scientific standpoint or a historical standpoint or a social standpoint... you have some *point* you are making in your reviews. It’s more than just telling us what happened - a robot could do that - you are adding a context.
And hopefully, you are trying to be entertaining in some way. Even if I am reading a book for research - for information - I would like to have that information given to me in a way that is a pleasant reading experience. Facts can be presented in a way that amazes the reader, amuses the reader. They are still the facts. You can also bore me to death with the exact same facts.
The most entertaining reviews are usually for bad movies - many of the TRANSFORMERS 2 reviews were incredibly funny. It’s much easier to pull off the gloves and say funny things about a bad movie that say something funny about CITIZEN KANE. Comedy comes from pain and suffering, and no, I haven’t seen the new Rob Schnider movie yet. But a good review can show me the beauty of a film I have never seen, or show me some aspect of a film that I hadn’t noticed at first.
Hey, I’ve had a few boring blog entries. There are times when I realize I need to post something and I write up some rant or something. But even when I’m writing a review of 4 FAST 4 FURIOUS, I start out trying to find a spin or a take on the film. Something that makes it *my* review, not a robot’s. Usually I find some way to use the film as a screenwriting lesson. What did this film do right or where did it go wrong... and how can we apply this to our scripts? Some of my blog entries that I like use small incidents to illustrate a larger point... or use humor to illustrate a larger point. I do wish I had more funny blog entries. Sometimes my blog entries are just information oriented. I’m sorry for the you tube fillers - if something makes me laugh or just amazes me with weirdness, I’ll post it as a filler. I’m guessing you could just look at the youtube filler posts and learn something about me - they aren’t just “this is a new movie trailer that I really don’t care about” posts. I don’t think a robot could have posted those.
What are you trying to say with this blog entry?
What makes this blog entry entertaining?
What makes this blog entry uniquely yours?
I’m sure by now you’ve realized this isn’t really about blog entries - it’s about your screenplays. Sure, it began with me reading a bunch of blogs that didn't make the cut to get listed over there -> but writing seems to be writing, whether it's blogs or screenplays.
You don’t want to write bland, book report screenplays that read like a robot wrote them. You want to infuse your scripts with your unique personality and viewpoint, and make them *entertaining*. Get *inside* the story instead of telling it from the outside. Find the most interesting angle for the story. But, you know, if those three bloggers read it and learned something, I might try their blogs again and might even put them over there on the list.
- Bill
And once again, my sincere apologies to everyone in the UK who might accidentally channel surf past M4M2 and see...
8/6 - 19:10 - Steel Sharks - When a United States submarine is seized by terrorists, a rescue attempt by Elite Navy Seals goes awry. The submarine crew wages a silent war beneath the waves in this tense undersea thriller.
8/8 - 15:40 - Steel Sharks - When a United States submarine is seized by terrorists, a rescue attempt by Elite Navy Seals goes awry. The submarine crew wages a silent war beneath the waves in this tense undersea thriller.
8/9 - 10:20 - Crash Dive - The crew of a nuclear submarine rescues supposed victims of a boat disaster, but the victims turn out to be terrorists intent on capturing nuclear weapons aboard the sub.
- Bill
When I check my blog hits (almost every day) I like to check out where people came from - what website they were on immediately before coming here. Usually people come from my website or a link I’ve placed somewhere or some other screenwriting or filmmaking website. Most people probably do what I do - I kind of cycle through the websites I regularly read to see if there’s anything new and exciting. Of course, a few of you come here directly from a graphic gay porn site - I still am not sure whether my website is popular in the gay world for some reason, if many gay people are interested in writing screenplays, or if it’s just some of you screwing around with me because you know I check out where my readers come from. You may owe an apology to that little girl and her mom who were sitting behind me in Starbucks last week. That kid may grow up to think all guys can do that without needing immediate medical attention.
So, every once in a while I trace a hit back to some blog I’m unfamiliar with - usually in the film or screenwriting world, but sometimes other types of blogs. And if they look interesting, I read them. If I liked it, I may read it a few more times... and if it’s always interesting I may add it to the list. When I found the homicide blog, I kept reading it and thought it might also be of interest to some of you, so it went on the list. But there are other blogs that never make the list... because they are boring.
I recently read a blog that was film reviews that didn’t make the cut. Here’s why - instead of really digging into the films, he would say whether he liked the film or not and then gave a practically scene-by-scene summary of the movie. No play in the summary was a critique or details on why he liked or disliked this scene - it was just the story. And, told in the blandest possible way. Kind of a book report. This happened then this happened then this happened. I actually read 3 entries to see if maybe this guy was just having a bad day, but *all* of the “reviews” were like that. “I liked HANGOVER. These four guys have a bachelor party in Las Vegas...” and then what happened in the movie told in the most unemotional way possible. This guy’s reviews could make a comedy seem like an episode of DRAGNET.
Another blog that didn’t make the cut was by a woman who worked for an ad agency, who told what happened at the office, Now, I’ve watched THE OFFICE and seen OFFICE SPACE and watched a couple of episodes of MAD MEN and read all of Ernest Lehman’s short stories and probably expected to read a sarcastic blog about working in an office... or maybe an expose of the cut throat business world, or maybe some rants about how stupid fellow employees are or corporate politics are. Instead, this blog was more DRAGNET - her boss wanted the Soams File on is desk by 3:30 so that he could prep for his 4:00 meeting but Gary wasn’t finished with his report, so the file wasn’t ready until after 4:00 and... It was like reading the diary or a boring person. A robot could have written this blog! Maybe a robot *did* write the blog... or a pod person.
Another blog kind of had the opposite problem, though really it’s the same problem. This guy’s blog was all this guy’s opinions on the way the film business is run. A complete angry rant (I read a couple) about how he could run the business so much better. The problem here was that it was kind of this guy’s propoganda - his beliefs on how Hollywood should be - but if you read two blog entries, you’ve read them all. Hey, a robot or pod person could have written *this* blog, too. Just programmed to drone on and on about what was wrong with Hollywood in a way that was almost impersonal.
Bland. Uninteresting. Not entertaining.
It’s life as an office worker... but without a “spin”, without a “take”. Just the life, not a way of looking at that life.
Pulp novelist John D. MacDonald said if you gave the same news story to 10 different writers you’d end up getting 10 different stories. Because each writer would find a different way of telling the story, and find a different way of looking at the story, and find different parts of the story that appealed to them. A writer takes reality and runs it through their unique filter, and it comes out unique.
I once checked into a hotel, and when I got to my room the message light was blinking on my phone. What? Seems the person who checked out never retrieved their message. Because I didn’t know that when I saw the blinking light, I listened to the voice mail... some personal stuff from some stranger’s life.
Okay - your character checks in, sees the blinking message light, plays the message... What is the message and what happens next?
Do you think we all came up with the same story from that jumping off point? I think if we each wrote a script with that as the opening scene, we’d have a bunch of different scripts in different genres, and no two would be the same. Sure, a handful of people might write rom-coms with that as the set up, but after that first scene they’d go in their separate directions.
Have you ever seen the movie MIRACLE MILE? Guy answers a pay phone, voice on the other end says...
Whether we are writing our blogs or writing our scripts, we have to give that reader a unique and entertaining experience. We aren’t just telling them what happens, we are doing it in an exciting and interesting and amusing way. We aren’t just writing a film review that tells you what happened, we want to give it our spin, our take. We want to leave our finger prints on the review so it doesn’t look like a robot wrote it. Maybe the review is funny. Maybe the reviews point out how out of touch Hollywood is with real life. Maybe it’s a Pauline Kael review all about how this movie made *you* feel while watching it - and the review tells us as much about the reviewer as the film. Maybe look at films from a scientific standpoint or a historical standpoint or a social standpoint... you have some *point* you are making in your reviews. It’s more than just telling us what happened - a robot could do that - you are adding a context.
And hopefully, you are trying to be entertaining in some way. Even if I am reading a book for research - for information - I would like to have that information given to me in a way that is a pleasant reading experience. Facts can be presented in a way that amazes the reader, amuses the reader. They are still the facts. You can also bore me to death with the exact same facts.
The most entertaining reviews are usually for bad movies - many of the TRANSFORMERS 2 reviews were incredibly funny. It’s much easier to pull off the gloves and say funny things about a bad movie that say something funny about CITIZEN KANE. Comedy comes from pain and suffering, and no, I haven’t seen the new Rob Schnider movie yet. But a good review can show me the beauty of a film I have never seen, or show me some aspect of a film that I hadn’t noticed at first.
Hey, I’ve had a few boring blog entries. There are times when I realize I need to post something and I write up some rant or something. But even when I’m writing a review of 4 FAST 4 FURIOUS, I start out trying to find a spin or a take on the film. Something that makes it *my* review, not a robot’s. Usually I find some way to use the film as a screenwriting lesson. What did this film do right or where did it go wrong... and how can we apply this to our scripts? Some of my blog entries that I like use small incidents to illustrate a larger point... or use humor to illustrate a larger point. I do wish I had more funny blog entries. Sometimes my blog entries are just information oriented. I’m sorry for the you tube fillers - if something makes me laugh or just amazes me with weirdness, I’ll post it as a filler. I’m guessing you could just look at the youtube filler posts and learn something about me - they aren’t just “this is a new movie trailer that I really don’t care about” posts. I don’t think a robot could have posted those.
What are you trying to say with this blog entry?
What makes this blog entry entertaining?
What makes this blog entry uniquely yours?
I’m sure by now you’ve realized this isn’t really about blog entries - it’s about your screenplays. Sure, it began with me reading a bunch of blogs that didn't make the cut to get listed over there -> but writing seems to be writing, whether it's blogs or screenplays.
You don’t want to write bland, book report screenplays that read like a robot wrote them. You want to infuse your scripts with your unique personality and viewpoint, and make them *entertaining*. Get *inside* the story instead of telling it from the outside. Find the most interesting angle for the story. But, you know, if those three bloggers read it and learned something, I might try their blogs again and might even put them over there on the list.
- Bill
And once again, my sincere apologies to everyone in the UK who might accidentally channel surf past M4M2 and see...
8/6 - 19:10 - Steel Sharks - When a United States submarine is seized by terrorists, a rescue attempt by Elite Navy Seals goes awry. The submarine crew wages a silent war beneath the waves in this tense undersea thriller.
8/8 - 15:40 - Steel Sharks - When a United States submarine is seized by terrorists, a rescue attempt by Elite Navy Seals goes awry. The submarine crew wages a silent war beneath the waves in this tense undersea thriller.
8/9 - 10:20 - Crash Dive - The crew of a nuclear submarine rescues supposed victims of a boat disaster, but the victims turn out to be terrorists intent on capturing nuclear weapons aboard the sub.
- Bill
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Rest In Peace - Blake Snyder
Screenwriter and screenwriting teacher Blake Snyder has passed away. His book SAVE THE CAT and his follow up books are used by many screenwriters, and were an inspiration to many. He offered advice, helped writers, and was one of the few professional writers who taught screenwriting and was really good at it.
- Bill
- Bill
Thursday, July 30, 2009
UNDER THE MOUNTAIN
My friend Jonathan King has a new movie coming out! He made the brilliant killer sheep movie BLACK SHEEP, and now he's made an epic fantasy movie from a popular young adult novel... and I believe Disney has the film in the USA. They are going after that Potter crowd now that they are down to the last book.
Here's the trailer...
Today is a travel day, but by Monday I'll probably be able to send out CD orders, so click & order over the weekend if you want...
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Nice Antagonists and Ralph Bellamy.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Some *other* Casino Hotel Buffett where I ate way too much.
Here's the trailer...
Today is a travel day, but by Monday I'll probably be able to send out CD orders, so click & order over the weekend if you want...
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
- Bill
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Nice Antagonists and Ralph Bellamy.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Some *other* Casino Hotel Buffett where I ate way too much.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
5 Minutes Of Raw Emotion
On 5 Blocks Of Video Screen
In downtown Vegas they have the Freemont Street Experience. The Freemont Street Experience probably used to mean drug addicts and really skanky hookers and people vomiting up free cut-rate casino drinks on the sidewalks, but downtown Vegas has had a major face lift and now it’s like a big fun street fair. The old hotels have been given new facades and there are dozens of security people pushing the undesirables further south on Freemont Street and dozens of clean up folks who remove litter before you get a chance to see it. Downtown is clean... unless you stray from the tourist areas.
Now the Freemont Street Experience is a 5 block long overhead video screen on a section of street closed to car traffic and turned into a huge outdoor mall kind of thing... except instead of shops there are older casinos and one strip club. But even the strip club looks like something from Disneyland. This is now a family destination. There are street performers and a place to get your picture taken with a (tamely dressed) showgirl or a Chippendale type guy and two bandstands with live music... and that huge TV screen.
This year is the 40th anniversary of man landing on the moon, and the theme is Summer Of ‘69. Everything is tye-dyed! You can win a tye-dyed Teddy Bear if you win a slot jackpot. Another casino is giving away some 1969 vintage muscle cars if you win a jackpot. I bought a tye-dyed T shirt. They have the life-size prop Apollo space capsule used in Ron Howard’s APOLLO 13 movie on display. Every Saturday night throughout summer they have a live band - and not just any bands, they have big groups who had hits in 1969. Last Saturday I saw JEFFERSON STARSHIP play... as a bunch of crazy people bounced beach balls through the crowd and threw frisbees through the crowd. Kind of cool to catch a frisbee thrown by a stranger on the opposite side of the audience and throw it back to... someone. These concerts are completely free, you just wander out of a casino and there you are! The kicked off the summer with GUESS WHO and BLOOD SWEAT & TEARS, wish I’d been here for that. A couple of years ago I watched The Beach Boys play while eating a hamburger in a casino McDonalds. John Stamos was playing with them at the time. The great thing about these free Saturday concerts throughout summer is that it hits a bullseye with their demographic. Lots of Baby Boomers go to the downtown casinos who may have seen Jefferson Starship in concert when they were kids. So you have this great nostalgia thing, and Starship is playing all of the hits (back when they were Airplane) and however many original members of the group who are still alive get to pay their mortgages. The cool thing for us old coots is - man, I’ve never been that close to the band! I did a bunch of Day On The Greens at Kezar (San Francisco) and you needed binoculars to see the bands... but on Freemont Street you could stand right on the edge of the stage (for free) and after the concert you could probably talk to Paul Kantner. Some people did. I just wandered into a casino to lose more money at blackjack.
And if you were away from the bandstand? Well, all you had to do was look up at the 4 block long TV screen and there was Starship. The music was blasted up and down the street through the sound system. Anywhere on Freemont Street was like being near the bandstand.
But that huge overhead screen isn’t just for showing the band playing on stage, every hour after dark they have a show. A 5 block long music video. Since this is the largest video screen in the world, and 5 blocks long but only the size of the street wide, these music videos are unique. They can only play one place in the world - the Freemont Street Experience. Because the screen is so long, and people watching it on one end won’t be able to see what is in the middle, let alone on the other end; the videos tend to have the main action in a couple of places on the screen, but some things blast down the whole screen to give you an idea of the size of the screen - really cool when they do that. One of the videos has dueling electric guitars on opposite sides of the screen - 5 blocks away from each other. I don’t know the copyright and clearance issues with doing a one of a kind music video, but all of these are made of existing footage and some great CGI work and animation. They have to use what they’ve got for the most part, which makes these all the more amazing.
They have a song, around 5 minutes, to put images to. And not just any images - they need to make this an amazing experience that will make you come back every night (and lose money playing blackjack in the nearby casinos between shows). And that means, these images need to make you feel something. They need to tell you a story that is full of big emotional moments. And they only have the picture part - they are stuck with whatever words the song has and can’t add their own. I strongly suspect whoever makes these is a music fan who owns all of the albums of the artist featured (partly because the album covers - vinyl album covers - are often used as part of the video, and also because they often seem to find hidden meanings in the lyrics that they can illustrate with images). I’ve seen a couple while I’ve been here - and both of them made me cry and also vocally cheer. And, when I looked around, I wasn’t the only one. Imagine - you have around 5 minutes worth of images, and you have to make people cry and then cheer. Not easy to do.
AMERICAN PIE by Don Maclean just kicks ass. The song is great, but the images take us back to the early days of rock and roll, and take us through the events of the 60s... eventually coming to a roll-call of rock stars who died before their time: pictures of all of these great musicians whose songs are part of your personal soundtrack, who are dead now. And the video doesn’t just show Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper - it would probably have shown Michael Jackson if they had made it today. And just when you’ve been taken back to your youth by the song and the images, and then see those iconic musicians from your youth who are no longer with us (and had a cry) the images take a cue from the song and bring us back to the great world we live in today, where that great music still lives on within us... and you can’t help but cheer.
And all of that with about 5 minutes of images and a song you’ve heard a million times before.
WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS by Queen gives us some great concert footage, some of which has been run through some animation program so that it’s like the TRON version of the concert, and all kinds of great images... and when we get back to the We Are The Champions chorus, the screen shows us hundreds of every-day heroes: firemen, teachers, soldiers, nurses, police officers, doctors... some famous heroes in there, too. But the images celebrate just regular people who have made a difference, even if it’s just a small one. And as these images tumble over us, danged if we don’t cry (everyone around me was getting misty eyed) and then we go back to some great Queen rock to make us cheer. Sure, there’s kind of a formula at work on these music videos, but you can’t end with us crying - this is rock and roll. We really are the champions, my friend.
You know, I’ve seen hundreds of movies that never made me cry or cheer. I’ve seen hundreds of movies that never made me feel anything at all (other than a desire to have my $11.50 and 2 hours back). So here are a bunch of 5 minute music videos that make me cry and cheer - mostly due to some great images in conjunction with some old song I’ve heard a million times before.
And the big lesson here is that we have 110 minutes of images, the folks making these music videos have 5 minutes. They manage to find strong emotional images and combinations of images that make the audience feel something. We need to be able to make the audience feel something just with the image part of our screenplays - and do it as effectively as these music videos do. And if we can bring strong emotions to the audience every five minutes? I think they’ll come back again and again to experience these emotions again.
At $11.50 a ticket.
Emotional images. They aren’t just for Vegas street music videos.
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Strange Devices and the HULK.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Some *other* Casino Hotel Buffett where I ate way too much.
Now the Freemont Street Experience is a 5 block long overhead video screen on a section of street closed to car traffic and turned into a huge outdoor mall kind of thing... except instead of shops there are older casinos and one strip club. But even the strip club looks like something from Disneyland. This is now a family destination. There are street performers and a place to get your picture taken with a (tamely dressed) showgirl or a Chippendale type guy and two bandstands with live music... and that huge TV screen.
This year is the 40th anniversary of man landing on the moon, and the theme is Summer Of ‘69. Everything is tye-dyed! You can win a tye-dyed Teddy Bear if you win a slot jackpot. Another casino is giving away some 1969 vintage muscle cars if you win a jackpot. I bought a tye-dyed T shirt. They have the life-size prop Apollo space capsule used in Ron Howard’s APOLLO 13 movie on display. Every Saturday night throughout summer they have a live band - and not just any bands, they have big groups who had hits in 1969. Last Saturday I saw JEFFERSON STARSHIP play... as a bunch of crazy people bounced beach balls through the crowd and threw frisbees through the crowd. Kind of cool to catch a frisbee thrown by a stranger on the opposite side of the audience and throw it back to... someone. These concerts are completely free, you just wander out of a casino and there you are! The kicked off the summer with GUESS WHO and BLOOD SWEAT & TEARS, wish I’d been here for that. A couple of years ago I watched The Beach Boys play while eating a hamburger in a casino McDonalds. John Stamos was playing with them at the time. The great thing about these free Saturday concerts throughout summer is that it hits a bullseye with their demographic. Lots of Baby Boomers go to the downtown casinos who may have seen Jefferson Starship in concert when they were kids. So you have this great nostalgia thing, and Starship is playing all of the hits (back when they were Airplane) and however many original members of the group who are still alive get to pay their mortgages. The cool thing for us old coots is - man, I’ve never been that close to the band! I did a bunch of Day On The Greens at Kezar (San Francisco) and you needed binoculars to see the bands... but on Freemont Street you could stand right on the edge of the stage (for free) and after the concert you could probably talk to Paul Kantner. Some people did. I just wandered into a casino to lose more money at blackjack.
And if you were away from the bandstand? Well, all you had to do was look up at the 4 block long TV screen and there was Starship. The music was blasted up and down the street through the sound system. Anywhere on Freemont Street was like being near the bandstand.
But that huge overhead screen isn’t just for showing the band playing on stage, every hour after dark they have a show. A 5 block long music video. Since this is the largest video screen in the world, and 5 blocks long but only the size of the street wide, these music videos are unique. They can only play one place in the world - the Freemont Street Experience. Because the screen is so long, and people watching it on one end won’t be able to see what is in the middle, let alone on the other end; the videos tend to have the main action in a couple of places on the screen, but some things blast down the whole screen to give you an idea of the size of the screen - really cool when they do that. One of the videos has dueling electric guitars on opposite sides of the screen - 5 blocks away from each other. I don’t know the copyright and clearance issues with doing a one of a kind music video, but all of these are made of existing footage and some great CGI work and animation. They have to use what they’ve got for the most part, which makes these all the more amazing.
They have a song, around 5 minutes, to put images to. And not just any images - they need to make this an amazing experience that will make you come back every night (and lose money playing blackjack in the nearby casinos between shows). And that means, these images need to make you feel something. They need to tell you a story that is full of big emotional moments. And they only have the picture part - they are stuck with whatever words the song has and can’t add their own. I strongly suspect whoever makes these is a music fan who owns all of the albums of the artist featured (partly because the album covers - vinyl album covers - are often used as part of the video, and also because they often seem to find hidden meanings in the lyrics that they can illustrate with images). I’ve seen a couple while I’ve been here - and both of them made me cry and also vocally cheer. And, when I looked around, I wasn’t the only one. Imagine - you have around 5 minutes worth of images, and you have to make people cry and then cheer. Not easy to do.
AMERICAN PIE by Don Maclean just kicks ass. The song is great, but the images take us back to the early days of rock and roll, and take us through the events of the 60s... eventually coming to a roll-call of rock stars who died before their time: pictures of all of these great musicians whose songs are part of your personal soundtrack, who are dead now. And the video doesn’t just show Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper - it would probably have shown Michael Jackson if they had made it today. And just when you’ve been taken back to your youth by the song and the images, and then see those iconic musicians from your youth who are no longer with us (and had a cry) the images take a cue from the song and bring us back to the great world we live in today, where that great music still lives on within us... and you can’t help but cheer.
And all of that with about 5 minutes of images and a song you’ve heard a million times before.
WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS by Queen gives us some great concert footage, some of which has been run through some animation program so that it’s like the TRON version of the concert, and all kinds of great images... and when we get back to the We Are The Champions chorus, the screen shows us hundreds of every-day heroes: firemen, teachers, soldiers, nurses, police officers, doctors... some famous heroes in there, too. But the images celebrate just regular people who have made a difference, even if it’s just a small one. And as these images tumble over us, danged if we don’t cry (everyone around me was getting misty eyed) and then we go back to some great Queen rock to make us cheer. Sure, there’s kind of a formula at work on these music videos, but you can’t end with us crying - this is rock and roll. We really are the champions, my friend.
You know, I’ve seen hundreds of movies that never made me cry or cheer. I’ve seen hundreds of movies that never made me feel anything at all (other than a desire to have my $11.50 and 2 hours back). So here are a bunch of 5 minute music videos that make me cry and cheer - mostly due to some great images in conjunction with some old song I’ve heard a million times before.
And the big lesson here is that we have 110 minutes of images, the folks making these music videos have 5 minutes. They manage to find strong emotional images and combinations of images that make the audience feel something. We need to be able to make the audience feel something just with the image part of our screenplays - and do it as effectively as these music videos do. And if we can bring strong emotions to the audience every five minutes? I think they’ll come back again and again to experience these emotions again.
At $11.50 a ticket.
Emotional images. They aren’t just for Vegas street music videos.
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
- Bill
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Strange Devices and the HULK.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Some *other* Casino Hotel Buffett where I ate way too much.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Today Man First Set Foot On The Moon
As I'm sure you have heard by now, the original NASA footage of man first setting for on the moon was taped over with episodes of SILVER SPOONS during Reagan administration cut backs. If they'd only had enough money to buy a new tape...
But, as I'm sure you have also heard, there were some other tapes of the first landing on the moon, and NASA has hired a bunch of Hollywood technical wizards to clean the footage up so that it fits today's HiDef broadcast standards.
Here is that original footage of the first lunar explorers - cleaned up by Hollywood. Some of this is never before seen footage, hidden in a top secret NASA vault until it was released under the Freedom Of Information Act. As you can see, the Hollywood tech guys have restored this historical event to it's natural state...
Today is also my birthday... partially ruined when I was a kid because everyone was more interested in the danged moon landing. Damn you NASA! You ruined my young life! Couldn't you have done it a day later and ruined some other kid's birthday?
Anyway - what is the proper way to celebrate Moon Day?
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: 3 Act Conflict and Tools Not Rules.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Dude, I'm in Vegas - you stand in line for an hour at the Rio so that you can spend the next two hours eating more than you can eat. They need monitors who come by your table and tell you and your friends, "I'm sorry, that's all you can eat." (But, it's wafer thin...)
But, as I'm sure you have also heard, there were some other tapes of the first landing on the moon, and NASA has hired a bunch of Hollywood technical wizards to clean the footage up so that it fits today's HiDef broadcast standards.
Here is that original footage of the first lunar explorers - cleaned up by Hollywood. Some of this is never before seen footage, hidden in a top secret NASA vault until it was released under the Freedom Of Information Act. As you can see, the Hollywood tech guys have restored this historical event to it's natural state...
Today is also my birthday... partially ruined when I was a kid because everyone was more interested in the danged moon landing. Damn you NASA! You ruined my young life! Couldn't you have done it a day later and ruined some other kid's birthday?
Anyway - what is the proper way to celebrate Moon Day?
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
- Bill
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: 3 Act Conflict and Tools Not Rules.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Dude, I'm in Vegas - you stand in line for an hour at the Rio so that you can spend the next two hours eating more than you can eat. They need monitors who come by your table and tell you and your friends, "I'm sorry, that's all you can eat." (But, it's wafer thin...)
Friday, July 10, 2009
Thursday, July 09, 2009
Crispen Glover Sings Michael Jackson
It's crazy actor Crispen Glover's music video for Michael Jackson's BEN... which makes some kind of sense because Glover starred in the remake of WILLARD.
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Man With A Plan and why it's good to be organized.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Del Taco #6.
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
- Bill
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Man With A Plan and why it's good to be organized.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Del Taco #6.
Friday, July 03, 2009
July Issue of Script Magazine out now!
THE JULY ISSUE TABLE OF CONTENTS:
First Time's a Charm: Away We Go
Knee-deep in serious solo projects, prose-stylist marrieds Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida took the plunge into screenwriting with a whimsical 1970's-style road movie brimming with heart. Learn how an offbeat take on relationships and parenthood turned into a darlin' screenplay.
Good Character: Dexter
It's not every day that the audience is encouraged to root for a serial killer, but Dexter Morgan isn't your typical murderer, and the characters that populate his show aren't your typical supporting players. Executive Producers Melissa Rosenberg and Scott Buck share their secrets for killing them with character on the award-winning Showtime series.
Scene Fix: Andromache
Greek tragedies are fertile ground for screen epics. But other than retread an existing story, Kellie Rice decided to pick up where Euripides left off -- after the fall of Troy. Screenwriting duo Derek Haas and Michael Brandt assist Rice with a pivotal scene from her prize-winning script Andromache.
Going Global: Screenwriting in the International Marketplace
Production -- check. Effects -- check. Screenwriting -- check? With all of the film-industry vocations that have seen an increase in outsourcing, can screenwriting be far behind? Ray Morton examines the possible globe-trotting trajectory of one of Hollywood's biggest exports: story structure.
Basterd's Father -- A History of Tarantino
Does Quentin Tarantino's forthcoming Inglorious Basterds fall in line with the rest of the auteur's canon, or is it a startling departure? Through examining QT's past works and influences, William Martell analyzes the devices at work in this World War II film.
How to Show, Don't Tell
A character doesn't feel sad; he curls up in the fetal position in his empty studio apartment next to a bottle of cheap tequila. Whether writing fantasy or nonfiction, poetry or screenplays, the most successful stories are shown, not told. Mystery Man explains how writers can put this age-old mantra to use.
The Days Before, The Days Before
The story of Chad St. John and his time-travel epic The Days Before offers a glimpse into the many people an players involved in a spec sale. From bartending to a position on a movie star's payroll to sold screenwriter, St. John's journey is the stuff of Hollywood happy endings.
Independents: Anatomy of an Action Scene, Part 2
In the last issue, "Independents" looked at how action develops character. This time learn how to search the set for weapons, add ironic twists, and create high-concept scenes as William Martell continues his exploration of effective action.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Deadline
It's do or die as the deadline looms like the embodiment of evil above the writer's head. But Don Handfield, equipped with the teachings of the great Michael Jordan, has another way to view the writer's worst enemy. Learn his secret to harnessing the power of the deadline -- a term with a fittingly depressing origin.
Writers on Writing: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
On the eve of the 2007 WGA writers strike, Stuart Beattie was asked to write a script for a movie about one of the most iconic action figures in American history. Read his account of what it took to pull together this action-packed, monster of a film that kept him writing past The End.
Writers on Writing: The Hurt Locker
As a journalist embedded with an Army bomb-squad unit during some of the most intense fighting of the war in Iraq, Mark Boal was an eyewitness to the horror and heroism of combat. After arriving Stateside, he was persuaded to turn his experience into a screenplay. Here, he relives his battle to turn solid reporting into effective film fiction.
For more info:
http://www.ScriptMag.com
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First Time's a Charm: Away We Go
Knee-deep in serious solo projects, prose-stylist marrieds Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida took the plunge into screenwriting with a whimsical 1970's-style road movie brimming with heart. Learn how an offbeat take on relationships and parenthood turned into a darlin' screenplay.
Good Character: Dexter
It's not every day that the audience is encouraged to root for a serial killer, but Dexter Morgan isn't your typical murderer, and the characters that populate his show aren't your typical supporting players. Executive Producers Melissa Rosenberg and Scott Buck share their secrets for killing them with character on the award-winning Showtime series.
Scene Fix: Andromache
Greek tragedies are fertile ground for screen epics. But other than retread an existing story, Kellie Rice decided to pick up where Euripides left off -- after the fall of Troy. Screenwriting duo Derek Haas and Michael Brandt assist Rice with a pivotal scene from her prize-winning script Andromache.
Going Global: Screenwriting in the International Marketplace
Production -- check. Effects -- check. Screenwriting -- check? With all of the film-industry vocations that have seen an increase in outsourcing, can screenwriting be far behind? Ray Morton examines the possible globe-trotting trajectory of one of Hollywood's biggest exports: story structure.
Basterd's Father -- A History of Tarantino
Does Quentin Tarantino's forthcoming Inglorious Basterds fall in line with the rest of the auteur's canon, or is it a startling departure? Through examining QT's past works and influences, William Martell analyzes the devices at work in this World War II film.
How to Show, Don't Tell
A character doesn't feel sad; he curls up in the fetal position in his empty studio apartment next to a bottle of cheap tequila. Whether writing fantasy or nonfiction, poetry or screenplays, the most successful stories are shown, not told. Mystery Man explains how writers can put this age-old mantra to use.
The Days Before, The Days Before
The story of Chad St. John and his time-travel epic The Days Before offers a glimpse into the many people an players involved in a spec sale. From bartending to a position on a movie star's payroll to sold screenwriter, St. John's journey is the stuff of Hollywood happy endings.
Independents: Anatomy of an Action Scene, Part 2
In the last issue, "Independents" looked at how action develops character. This time learn how to search the set for weapons, add ironic twists, and create high-concept scenes as William Martell continues his exploration of effective action.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Deadline
It's do or die as the deadline looms like the embodiment of evil above the writer's head. But Don Handfield, equipped with the teachings of the great Michael Jordan, has another way to view the writer's worst enemy. Learn his secret to harnessing the power of the deadline -- a term with a fittingly depressing origin.
Writers on Writing: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
On the eve of the 2007 WGA writers strike, Stuart Beattie was asked to write a script for a movie about one of the most iconic action figures in American history. Read his account of what it took to pull together this action-packed, monster of a film that kept him writing past The End.
Writers on Writing: The Hurt Locker
As a journalist embedded with an Army bomb-squad unit during some of the most intense fighting of the war in Iraq, Mark Boal was an eyewitness to the horror and heroism of combat. After arriving Stateside, he was persuaded to turn his experience into a screenplay. Here, he relives his battle to turn solid reporting into effective film fiction.
For more info:
http://www.ScriptMag.com
width=100>
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Blue Book Black Out In 2 Weeks!
I am going on vacation.
July is my birthday month. Ages ago when they had the Las Vegas Screenwriting conference in July, I would hang around in Vegas another week to celebrate my birthday. Hey, the Conference was paying for my plane ticket or gasoline & mileage. Sometimes friends would stop by for a weekend, sometimes I’d have a girlfriend who join me, sometimes it would just be me in Vegas. When the Screenwriting Conference self destructed, VSDA kind of took its place - I’d attend the event with some friends, and I had other friends who work for studios and would be there working. We’d grab dinners together and hang out in Vegas, and when the event was over I’d stick around for my birthday. Sometimes I’d be in Vegas for a little over a week after the event, and I’d do exactly what I do when I’m home in Studio City - find someplace and write all day. Big difference was - when I clocked out after finishing my pages, I was in Vegas, baby!
Last year, no VSDA... they haven’t only changed their name, they’ve stopped the expensive party in Vegas every July! I wasn’t in Vegas last year to miss it, because I thought I’d be spending my birthday month in Hawaii while they shot my movie... only that never happened. So last year? No vacation. Okay, I went back to the East Bay for Christmas and hung out with some friends, but that’s the holidays... my parents have some chores waiting for me. Last year I *did* spend my birthday with a bunch of friends, we had dinner and saw DARK KNIGHT... on opening night.
But this year - I’m going to Vegas! For 2 weeks - much of that is going to be work with a change of venue, with a few days of celebration when some friend zip over for the weekend. But here’s the thing - I also have a high school reunion in mid-August and some other family things. Though I’ll be back in Studio City for about a week in between, I don’t want to spend any of that week standing in line at the post office... and I don’t want to lug a bunch of Blue Books with me. The CDs are fairly portable, the booklets are heavy and bulky and I don’t want to drag them around with me.
So, no Blue Book orders will be processed after July 13.
They’ll be available again around August 24.
So order them now or order them later.
Blue Book Order Page.
"Bill Martell is one of Hollywood's best action-adventure writers, with 17 produced films and TV shows to his credit. His "little blue books" on the art of screenplay writing are legendary," Best Selling novelist Dale Brown ("Strike Force", "Flight Of The Old Dog").
- Bill
July is my birthday month. Ages ago when they had the Las Vegas Screenwriting conference in July, I would hang around in Vegas another week to celebrate my birthday. Hey, the Conference was paying for my plane ticket or gasoline & mileage. Sometimes friends would stop by for a weekend, sometimes I’d have a girlfriend who join me, sometimes it would just be me in Vegas. When the Screenwriting Conference self destructed, VSDA kind of took its place - I’d attend the event with some friends, and I had other friends who work for studios and would be there working. We’d grab dinners together and hang out in Vegas, and when the event was over I’d stick around for my birthday. Sometimes I’d be in Vegas for a little over a week after the event, and I’d do exactly what I do when I’m home in Studio City - find someplace and write all day. Big difference was - when I clocked out after finishing my pages, I was in Vegas, baby!
Last year, no VSDA... they haven’t only changed their name, they’ve stopped the expensive party in Vegas every July! I wasn’t in Vegas last year to miss it, because I thought I’d be spending my birthday month in Hawaii while they shot my movie... only that never happened. So last year? No vacation. Okay, I went back to the East Bay for Christmas and hung out with some friends, but that’s the holidays... my parents have some chores waiting for me. Last year I *did* spend my birthday with a bunch of friends, we had dinner and saw DARK KNIGHT... on opening night.
But this year - I’m going to Vegas! For 2 weeks - much of that is going to be work with a change of venue, with a few days of celebration when some friend zip over for the weekend. But here’s the thing - I also have a high school reunion in mid-August and some other family things. Though I’ll be back in Studio City for about a week in between, I don’t want to spend any of that week standing in line at the post office... and I don’t want to lug a bunch of Blue Books with me. The CDs are fairly portable, the booklets are heavy and bulky and I don’t want to drag them around with me.
So, no Blue Book orders will be processed after July 13.
They’ll be available again around August 24.
So order them now or order them later.
Blue Book Order Page.
"Bill Martell is one of Hollywood's best action-adventure writers, with 17 produced films and TV shows to his credit. His "little blue books" on the art of screenplay writing are legendary," Best Selling novelist Dale Brown ("Strike Force", "Flight Of The Old Dog").
- Bill
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
RIP: Karl Malden & Harve Presnell
Wow! Two more stars leave this earth...
When I was a kid living in the East Bay Area, San Francisco was that big city really close... that we never went to. When we took that once every two years trip to the zoo - we went to Oakland. But the big city was right there... only a BART train trip away. We listened to KSFO radio from San Francisco, and watched Channel 4 News from San Francisco. But we never went there. So as a kid most of what I knew about San Francisco came from TV shows like SAN FRANCISCO BEAT (syndicated version of the old B&W show THE LINE UP) and STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO with Karl Malden and Michael Douglas. Stone and Keller. I watched it every week. When I made my ill-advised Super 8mm feature a few years later, one of my actresses had been an *extra* on STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO! That was exciting! I also tracked down the novel STREETS was based on by Caroline Weston, which took place in... Santa Barbara! But still had that concept of generation gap detectives, each saw a different world and each had different ways of dealing with it. Hey, there were some sequel novels - read those, too. Still have 'em somewhere.
So Karl Malden came into my parent's home once a week, and because it was a cop show that took place in that big city close by, it was one of my favorite shows. And when there was some movie on with Karl Malden, I'd watch it. Now, he's gone.
Streets Of San Francisco:
The "Farrah" for today is great character actor Harve Presnell. He was in every movie you've ever seen as the crusty but clever old guy. I went to the evil IMDB to see if he was ever a guest star on STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO, but he wasn't doing movies and TV back then. Presnell was a big Broadway musical star who "retired" to film & TV work. So while STREETS was on, he was still singing on stage in some big hit musical that my parents may have had the Original Cast Recording album of.
When he retired to TV and movies, he ended up being in all kinds of films, from FACE/OFF as Travolta's FBI Chief boss to LEGALLY BLONDE to SAVING PRIVATE RYAN to... well, just think back to any big movie that had a crusty but charming old guy and he was probably the actor playing that role. He was gruff but there was always a twinkle in his eyes. The movie you'd instantly remember him from is FARGO, as William Macy's father in law. Macy's whole plan revolves around kidnaping his own wife and getting the money from Presnell... only Presnell isn't some weak idiot like Macy's character - he's more like Eastwood in GRAN TORINO... he wants to kick some kidnaper ass.
Fargo:
Both of these actors were big stars in their time, and could just steal the screen from any other actor in the scene. Both did all kinds of great chararcter work - not the star, but the actors who often end up doing the heavy lifting and real acting. And now, both are gone.
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: The Act One Fake Out and KING KONG.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Dead Chicken at El Pollo Loco.
And I am very sorry to everyone in the UK for this...
7/2 - M4M2 - 19:05 - Steel Sharks - When a United States submarine is seized by terrorists, a rescue attempt by Elite Navy Seals goes awry. The submarine crew wages a silent war beneath the waves in this tense undersea thriller.
7/4 - M4M2 - 15:00 - Crash Dive - The crew of a nuclear submarine rescues supposed victims of a boat disaster, but the victims turn out to be terrorists intent on capturing nuclear weapons aboard the sub.
But it *is* Independence Day, so maybe it's part of that.
- Bill
When I was a kid living in the East Bay Area, San Francisco was that big city really close... that we never went to. When we took that once every two years trip to the zoo - we went to Oakland. But the big city was right there... only a BART train trip away. We listened to KSFO radio from San Francisco, and watched Channel 4 News from San Francisco. But we never went there. So as a kid most of what I knew about San Francisco came from TV shows like SAN FRANCISCO BEAT (syndicated version of the old B&W show THE LINE UP) and STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO with Karl Malden and Michael Douglas. Stone and Keller. I watched it every week. When I made my ill-advised Super 8mm feature a few years later, one of my actresses had been an *extra* on STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO! That was exciting! I also tracked down the novel STREETS was based on by Caroline Weston, which took place in... Santa Barbara! But still had that concept of generation gap detectives, each saw a different world and each had different ways of dealing with it. Hey, there were some sequel novels - read those, too. Still have 'em somewhere.
So Karl Malden came into my parent's home once a week, and because it was a cop show that took place in that big city close by, it was one of my favorite shows. And when there was some movie on with Karl Malden, I'd watch it. Now, he's gone.
Streets Of San Francisco:
The "Farrah" for today is great character actor Harve Presnell. He was in every movie you've ever seen as the crusty but clever old guy. I went to the evil IMDB to see if he was ever a guest star on STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO, but he wasn't doing movies and TV back then. Presnell was a big Broadway musical star who "retired" to film & TV work. So while STREETS was on, he was still singing on stage in some big hit musical that my parents may have had the Original Cast Recording album of.
When he retired to TV and movies, he ended up being in all kinds of films, from FACE/OFF as Travolta's FBI Chief boss to LEGALLY BLONDE to SAVING PRIVATE RYAN to... well, just think back to any big movie that had a crusty but charming old guy and he was probably the actor playing that role. He was gruff but there was always a twinkle in his eyes. The movie you'd instantly remember him from is FARGO, as William Macy's father in law. Macy's whole plan revolves around kidnaping his own wife and getting the money from Presnell... only Presnell isn't some weak idiot like Macy's character - he's more like Eastwood in GRAN TORINO... he wants to kick some kidnaper ass.
Fargo:
Both of these actors were big stars in their time, and could just steal the screen from any other actor in the scene. Both did all kinds of great chararcter work - not the star, but the actors who often end up doing the heavy lifting and real acting. And now, both are gone.
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
- Bill
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: The Act One Fake Out and KING KONG.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Dead Chicken at El Pollo Loco.
And I am very sorry to everyone in the UK for this...
7/2 - M4M2 - 19:05 - Steel Sharks - When a United States submarine is seized by terrorists, a rescue attempt by Elite Navy Seals goes awry. The submarine crew wages a silent war beneath the waves in this tense undersea thriller.
7/4 - M4M2 - 15:00 - Crash Dive - The crew of a nuclear submarine rescues supposed victims of a boat disaster, but the victims turn out to be terrorists intent on capturing nuclear weapons aboard the sub.
But it *is* Independence Day, so maybe it's part of that.
- Bill
"My name is John Dillinger, and I rob banks."
Before Michael Mann's PUBLIC ENEMIES, John Millius made this great version of the John Dillinger vs. Melvin Purvis story that focused on the struggle between two powerful men. Millius was great at that - his WIND AND THE LION is one of my favorite films, and takes two larger than life men and pits them against each other. Here we get Dillinger working his press, and Purvis and the FBI trying to counter-act with their own press releases to the newspapers. And we get a great look at Depression Era America, where the real enemy was poverty and unemployment... and a guy like Dillinger could become famous for robbing the banks that foreclosed on farmers. Dillinger became a folk hero by *not* taking people's money, only the bank's.
I've used clips from the Millius film in my 2 day class - it has some great writing. The supporting characters are all really well drawn, even if they only spend a small amount of time on screen. One of the interesting things with Millius films is that his heroes and villains respect each other, even though they are coming from different sides. So instead of cardboard villains, you get fully formed characters who are not all bad. In RED DAWN the Cuban military leader allows Patrick Swayze to carry off his wounded brother - even though they are enemies. Millius villians respect the heroes... and vice versa.
And the great thing about DILLINGER is Warren Oates. This may be his finest role. Oates was a character actor of great charisma who stole many a scene from the movie's star. You might actually see a bad movie because he was in it - knowing he'd give a great performance. He's one of the reasons I saw Spielberg's flop 1941. Here he doesn't have to steal the film from the lead, because *he's* the star.
Dillinger (1973)
John Sayles wrote a John Dillinger movie for Roger Corman starring, um, Robert Conrad as Dillinger. Sayles took the story from the Lady In Red's POV, played by the always hot Pamela Sue Martin and showed Depression Era America's effect on women. But still, there were shoot outs and car wrecks and nekkid girls...
Hey, and here's the trailer for the 1945 movie starring Lawrence Tierney (from RESERVOIR DOGS):
Which brings us to Michael Mann's movie, which opens today. How will it compare?
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Who's driving? (the story) and JUMPER.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Tuna melt at Johnny Rockets.
Bicycle: Short bike ride on Sunday to see a play in NoHo.
I've used clips from the Millius film in my 2 day class - it has some great writing. The supporting characters are all really well drawn, even if they only spend a small amount of time on screen. One of the interesting things with Millius films is that his heroes and villains respect each other, even though they are coming from different sides. So instead of cardboard villains, you get fully formed characters who are not all bad. In RED DAWN the Cuban military leader allows Patrick Swayze to carry off his wounded brother - even though they are enemies. Millius villians respect the heroes... and vice versa.
And the great thing about DILLINGER is Warren Oates. This may be his finest role. Oates was a character actor of great charisma who stole many a scene from the movie's star. You might actually see a bad movie because he was in it - knowing he'd give a great performance. He's one of the reasons I saw Spielberg's flop 1941. Here he doesn't have to steal the film from the lead, because *he's* the star.
Dillinger (1973)
John Sayles wrote a John Dillinger movie for Roger Corman starring, um, Robert Conrad as Dillinger. Sayles took the story from the Lady In Red's POV, played by the always hot Pamela Sue Martin and showed Depression Era America's effect on women. But still, there were shoot outs and car wrecks and nekkid girls...
Hey, and here's the trailer for the 1945 movie starring Lawrence Tierney (from RESERVOIR DOGS):
Which brings us to Michael Mann's movie, which opens today. How will it compare?
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
- Bill
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Who's driving? (the story) and JUMPER.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Tuna melt at Johnny Rockets.
Bicycle: Short bike ride on Sunday to see a play in NoHo.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
IMDB hates screenwriters
UPDATE: Two days after posting this and contacting some WGA board members, IMDB has managed to see the error of their ways and change it back to the way it was.
IMDB has just *dumped* screenwriters from the main page for every movie. Director is listed, cast is listed... not screenwriter! We get dumped to the bottom of the page with the running time and Swedish Censor Board Rating and other "additional details". I looked up BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, and Charlie Kaufman has been pushed down there with the statistics - he's the only *person* down there! That's kind of a Charlie Kaufman script idea in the making.
Though the WGA should begin an anti-IMDB/Amazon campaign, while we are waiting for that to happen, why not write them? And spread this to any writer friends you have. If they get thousands of letters, they may read one of them.
IMDb.com, Inc.
P.O. Box 81226
Seattle, WA 98108-1226
I can't tell you how angry this makes me. We work our asses off, we get crapped on again and again, we only get mentioned in reviews when the critic hates the film and mentions all of the script defects caused by those crap notes we hated or the director's stupid idea or the star's rewrite, and now *this*? If there was an IMDB employee in this Starbucks I would kick them in the face - even though that is not one of my skills and I would land on my ass.
I don't understand the *purpose* for this change.
- Bill
IMDB has just *dumped* screenwriters from the main page for every movie. Director is listed, cast is listed... not screenwriter! We get dumped to the bottom of the page with the running time and Swedish Censor Board Rating and other "additional details". I looked up BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, and Charlie Kaufman has been pushed down there with the statistics - he's the only *person* down there! That's kind of a Charlie Kaufman script idea in the making.
Though the WGA should begin an anti-IMDB/Amazon campaign, while we are waiting for that to happen, why not write them? And spread this to any writer friends you have. If they get thousands of letters, they may read one of them.
IMDb.com, Inc.
P.O. Box 81226
Seattle, WA 98108-1226
I can't tell you how angry this makes me. We work our asses off, we get crapped on again and again, we only get mentioned in reviews when the critic hates the film and mentions all of the script defects caused by those crap notes we hated or the director's stupid idea or the star's rewrite, and now *this*? If there was an IMDB employee in this Starbucks I would kick them in the face - even though that is not one of my skills and I would land on my ass.
I don't understand the *purpose* for this change.
- Bill
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Best Transformers 2 Review
I haven't seen it, and it seems like my boycott thing was a complete failure. The reviews - like Ebert's hysterical piece and his blog entry on how TRANSFORMERS 2 signals the end of the world, are great reading - funnier than most movies - but this review will save you having to ever see the movie...
TOPLESS ROBOT!
Enjoy.
- Bill
TOPLESS ROBOT!
Enjoy.
- Bill
Thursday, June 25, 2009
RIP - Happens In Threes
They say celeb deaths comes in threes, and today's pair close out the set. All three were part of my generation's pop culture.
When you're a kid, being old enough to stay up and watch THE TONIGHT SHOW was a rite of passage. You always knew who Johhny and Ed were, but to see them on the show... that meant you were almost an adult. Ed McMahon was a great straight man for Johnny, and his phrases are used by people today (including me). He did a bunch of commercials, and even popped up in some movies that I saw at the drive in... as the evil mob boss.
Ed McMahon in SLAUGHTER'S BIG RIP OFF...
When I learned of Farrah's passing this morning I mentioned on a message board that my collection of shorts - SHORTS OF BILL MARTELL - featured her iconic poster on a pair of boxers. She was on the shorts. There was an iron on transfer of her poster, and the girl I was dating back then did the ironing. The film's titles played over the shorts with her iconic image. That was the joke - that her poster was everywhere. She was everywhere. Later she struggled to fit in as an actress, rather than a sex symbol. She made a great TV film THE BURNING BED, and then tried to catch that lightning in a bottle again, with mixed results.
Farrah Fawcett in EXTREMITIES...
I remember watching dance shows on Sunday afternoons, like SOUL TRAIN with Don Cornelius. I always joke that growing up in the East East Bay Area, you could turn your radio dial in one direction and get the Oakland stations and in the other direction and get the Stockton stations... I went for Oakland and MoTown over Country Western. I have no idea on what show I first saw The Jackson 5, but they had pop hit after pop hit. Michael grew up as I did, went out on his own, and managed to be a huge hit machine in the 80s... Can you remember the first time you saw the THRILLER video? Wow! I remember dancing in clubs with a succession of girls to Billy Jean and a bunch of his other songs. But the song I most remember by Jackson was from a horror movie.
Michael Jackson... BEN theme...
All will be missed. Already, I can't get that BEN theme out of my head.
- Bill
When you're a kid, being old enough to stay up and watch THE TONIGHT SHOW was a rite of passage. You always knew who Johhny and Ed were, but to see them on the show... that meant you were almost an adult. Ed McMahon was a great straight man for Johnny, and his phrases are used by people today (including me). He did a bunch of commercials, and even popped up in some movies that I saw at the drive in... as the evil mob boss.
Ed McMahon in SLAUGHTER'S BIG RIP OFF...
When I learned of Farrah's passing this morning I mentioned on a message board that my collection of shorts - SHORTS OF BILL MARTELL - featured her iconic poster on a pair of boxers. She was on the shorts. There was an iron on transfer of her poster, and the girl I was dating back then did the ironing. The film's titles played over the shorts with her iconic image. That was the joke - that her poster was everywhere. She was everywhere. Later she struggled to fit in as an actress, rather than a sex symbol. She made a great TV film THE BURNING BED, and then tried to catch that lightning in a bottle again, with mixed results.
Farrah Fawcett in EXTREMITIES...
I remember watching dance shows on Sunday afternoons, like SOUL TRAIN with Don Cornelius. I always joke that growing up in the East East Bay Area, you could turn your radio dial in one direction and get the Oakland stations and in the other direction and get the Stockton stations... I went for Oakland and MoTown over Country Western. I have no idea on what show I first saw The Jackson 5, but they had pop hit after pop hit. Michael grew up as I did, went out on his own, and managed to be a huge hit machine in the 80s... Can you remember the first time you saw the THRILLER video? Wow! I remember dancing in clubs with a succession of girls to Billy Jean and a bunch of his other songs. But the song I most remember by Jackson was from a horror movie.
Michael Jackson... BEN theme...
All will be missed. Already, I can't get that BEN theme out of my head.
- Bill
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Please Be Careful!
Just saw this on the news, and it's kind of disturbing. I know that many of you folks are too busy writing to watch the news, so you may have missed all of these events when they happened. When I was riding my bike last night, I thought I may have seen one of these escapees...
- Bill
- Bill
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Flash Mob: Skip TRANSFORMERS this weekend.
Let's see how much power the audience has. This weekend has been set aside for TRANSFORMERS 2... no other major releases will open. In limited release we have Katheryn Bigelow's HURT LOCKER which looks great... and I think she's a great director who deserves a big break. If you are interested in that film, and you live in one of the cities where it's playing, why not see HURT LOCKER instead of TRANSFORMERS 2?
If you don't live in one of those cities, why not skip TRANSFORMERS and see UP or HANGOVER or PROPOSAL again? Or whatever movie that's slipped past in the glut of summer movies and may be on its way out of cinemas? If you're going to see a movie this weekend, why does it have to be the new one?
Michael Bay got paid $80 million for the first TRANSFORMERS, let's see if we can make him sweat a little?
Pass it on... It will be a fun little game for all of us to play - and be sure to tell anyone you know in Hollywood's coveted 15-25 year old demographic to play along. See something *other than* TRANSFORMERS 2 this weekend and see what happens. Let's see if we can make it #2 instead of #1! Now *that* would be messing with Hollywood!
- Bill
If you don't live in one of those cities, why not skip TRANSFORMERS and see UP or HANGOVER or PROPOSAL again? Or whatever movie that's slipped past in the glut of summer movies and may be on its way out of cinemas? If you're going to see a movie this weekend, why does it have to be the new one?
Michael Bay got paid $80 million for the first TRANSFORMERS, let's see if we can make him sweat a little?
Pass it on... It will be a fun little game for all of us to play - and be sure to tell anyone you know in Hollywood's coveted 15-25 year old demographic to play along. See something *other than* TRANSFORMERS 2 this weekend and see what happens. Let's see if we can make it #2 instead of #1! Now *that* would be messing with Hollywood!
- Bill
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
What Should I Write?
So, I have finished the country western bar thriller, COWBOY NIGHTS, and now I'm outlining two future scripts - the action flick CONTAINED and the thriller I plan to make myself NEAR HIT, and I'm getting ready to jump back into SECOND SON and finishing that sucker.
But I also have to write a new article for Script Magazine by the end of the month... and have no idea what that will be. In the current issue I have part one of my piece on Action Scenes, in the issue before that I had an article on Character Driven scripts; and next issue I have *ten pages* of material: part two of my Action Scenes article and a piece on the new Tarantino movie. But what should come next?
What do you think?
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Mixed Genre Salads and SLITHER.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Burger King - which cost me $10!
Bicycle: Nice day so I rode to a distant Starbucks.
MOVIES: UP - When I first saw the trailer for UP, I didn’t think it looked very good. Some grumpy old guy and some overly cute kid and a dog... had Pixar reached the bottom of the creative barrel? I have loved all of the PIXAR movies, and even liked CARS (which is their worst so far, and still better than most of the movies I saw that year). Everyone has their favorite Pixar movie, and mine is THE INCREDIBLES... probably because it’s an action movie and kind of a 60s James Bond film, too. But I cried my eyes out at TOY STORY 2, and have used FINDING NEMO as an example in an article I wrote for Script Magazine. The amazing thing about Pixar is that they make great movies. Compare a Pixar film to a Dreamworks Animated film - Dreamworks movies are all about the gags - they are like some sitcom extended to 90 minutes. KUNG FU PANDA is all shtick - one gag after another. Hey, that’s great for adults, and kids like it, too... but the films always seem kind of hollow to me. All surface, without much underneath. Pixar films have fewer gags - and the gags they have are often character oriented - but they are all about heart. The first half of WALL-E is pretty much gag-free. It’s all about the character... all about the emotions. You may not laugh as much at a Pixar movie, but you feel more.
I’m sure a lot of people thought UP was a movie about an old guy with a floating house, and on some message boards I’ve read some posts from folks who saw the movie and *still* thought it was about an old guy with a floating house... how could they miss the whole story?
There is no house.
MILD SPOILERS
UP opens with a kid named Carl Fredrickson sitting in a movie theater watching a newsreel on amazing adventurer Charles Muntz - a cross between Doc Savage and Professor Challenger, who believes he has discovered a lost world in South America... and a rare prehistoric bird. Muntz has this amazing Zeppelin that he uses for his adventures - sailing above the clouds. On his way home from the movies, Carl meets a girl named Ellie who has turned an abandoned house into her adventurer’s clubhouse. She and Carl are two of a kind, and soon they are both dreaming if a life of thrilling adventure together. Ellie has a scrap book of all of Muntz’s adventures... and a big section left empty for *her* amazing adventures. She wants to live on the magical waterfall in the lost world. She makes Carl an official member of her adventure club with a special badge made from a grape soda bottle cap. They are a team!
That soda pop cap button is a symbol of their spirit of adventure.
Next we get an amazing montage, maybe 7 minutes, of Carl and Ellie’s entire lives. They grow up, get married, but the run-down house and fix it up, Carl gets a job selling balloons (which figure into the plot later), and soon they are old people, living in the house... and then Carl is alone. There’s a great line from Lennon (John, not Vladimir), “Life is what happens to you, While you're busy making other plans” and that’s what this sequence beautifully illustrates. After Ellie passes away, Carl finds her scrap book... with that whole section where she was going to put pictures of *her* adventures... their adventures. Instead, they just lived a fairly boring life in their house.
If this sequence doesn’t make you cry at least once, there is something wrong with your tear-duct plumbing. Completely silent, but jam-packed with emotions. The great thing about Pixar movies is that they love to tell te story visually - they know that is the direct path to the heart. No need to translate words into emotions, an image is an image. It’s a direct shot. We don’t need to wonder what the character means with those words, we just experience it. A child must learn to speak, learn to understand words... but they already know what they see. WALL-E does more with visual storytelling than any ten live action movies put together, and in UP we get the same ability to pull our heart strings, to make us feel genuine emotions, without dialogue. This is a powerful sequence.
One day a pudgy kid in a cub scout outfit, Russell, knocks on Carl’s door and wants to help him with something, anything, so that he can get the *one* merit badge he is missing from his sash. The sash is *filled* with merit badges, except for one empty spot. This is contrast in action - the best way to show something isn’t there is to show everything else that *is* there. The *only* empty space on his sash is the one merit badge. This also shows what a go-getter and a pest Russell is. The kid is relentless. Driven. And just will not shut up. Grumpy old Carl sends him on a wild goose chase to get rid of him.
When Carl comes across the drawing Ellie made as a kid of the house on the waterfall in the lost world, he gets an idea. His house is now in the center of a construction site, and he refuses to sell... because it’s Ellie’s house. Everything they had together. The house isn’t just a house, it’s symbolic of their whole relationship. Their love. He won’t let a construction crew tear it down to build a new skyscraper in its place. Everyone wants to put grumpy old Carl in a rest home, but that would mean leaving the house... and he can’t bring himself to do that. That would be leaving Ellie behind. So, on that day when they are going to come and take him away to the rest home, he fills a zillion helium balloons and ties them to the house... and floats the whole thing away.
With Russell on the front porch, scared to death.
Carl’s plan is to float his house, Ellie’s house, to South America and that lost world and land it on the waterfall... just like in Ellie’s childhood drawing. To take that adventure he and Ellie never got around to... to take *Ellie* to that waterfall. The house is not a house at all, it is symbolic of his relationship with Ellie, and so it is symbolic of Ellie - the woman he loved his entire life. There is no house, it is a symbol. Everything in this film is a symbol. The house - the memories of his relationship with Ellie - lift him high above the clouds and carry him off on an adventure.
If it weren’t for the damned kid...
One of the cool things about UP is that it has these sly references to adventure fiction and movies, so when the flying house hits a storm, you can’t help but think of the hot air balloon that hits a storm in MYSTERIOUS ISLAND and gets knocked off course... ending up on that mysterious island of the title. When I was a kid, MYSTERIOUS ISLAND was one of my favorite films, and the cool idea that a bunch of escaping Civil War POWs could end up in this lost world kind of place where Captain Nemo docks his submarine when he isn’t out battling giant squids was really cool. The Bernard Herrmann music in that film was fantastic, and I’m listening to it right now as I type this. I’m sure, as a kid, the other thing I liked about MYSTERIOUS ISLAND was they found some shipwrecked women who ended up wearing skimpy animal furs until they found a trunk full of dresses on the sand. But there are no women in UP... unless you watched the Russ Meyer version by mistake.
Instead Carl and Russell and the house end up blown into that Lost World... but the house loses a bunch of balloons in the process, and now is skimming over the ground. Carl ends up dragging the house behind him as they make their way through the jungle to the waterfall in the distance. What was once buoyant and uplifting has become something that may get caught in the trees. Something that must be jockeyed and taken care of every single minute. What was once keeping him afloat now seems to be dragging him down. As much as he loved Ellie, as much as his past dreams excited him, now they are becoming a problem. There is no house.
As Carl and Russell drag the house across the landscape, they discover a silly looking giant bird, that Russell names Kevin. In MYSTERIOUS ISLAND there was also a giant bird - this huge thing that they tried to ride and eventually ate for dinner - drumsticks the size of a Volkswagen. Here, they don’t eat Kevin, but the danged bird keeps following them and this gets on Carl’s nerves. He wants to bird to go away. But Russell keeps feeding Kevin bits of his candy bar, and the bird keeps following them...
And they also meet the misfit dog, Dug, who has been sent to find the bird... by Muntz! Muntz has a huge pack of dogs with “speech collars” so that they can have conversations with their master. These collars are a great gag - they have controls for different languages, and when the evil Alpha Dog gets his collar bumped he speaks in a high funny helium balloon voice. It’s all connected to balloons!
That giant prehistoric bird that Carl wants to get rid of is the bird of happiness for old adventurer Muntz - proof that this species exists, proof that the lost world exists, proof that he is not a fake. Muntz as sent his dogs out to find it, but Alpha and the others are looking one place, while doofus dog Dug has actually found the giant bird. Grumpy Carl wants to be rid of the bird, Muntz will do anything to capture it.
One thing they discover - Kevin is a girl... and a mom... and has a bunch of hungry little birds waiting for her at home. Kevin has a future generation to take care of. Carl has no future, he’s dragging his past behind him. Muntz only has a future if he can capture that bird. Is Kevin a symbol, too?
Now Carl and Russell and Kevin and Dug go on this journey across the lost world, and Carl discovers that his childhood idol, Muntz, has feet of clay. He’s a ruthless opportunist... who will do anything to capture Kevin the bird. Carl’s entire childhood - and maybe his adulthood, too - was based on worshiping adventurer Muntz, but the real man is not the fantasy. And Carl’s life ended up being not the childhood fantasy, but a ho-hum reality. Now he’s stuck dragging this damned house behind him, and it keeps getting stuck in trees... and when they go to Muntz’s cave, it almost doesn’t make it in.
In Muntz’s old zeppelin, Dug the dog is picked on by Alpha and the others in the pack, and must wear the Cone Of Shame. Just like the missing merit badge, the Cone Of Same is a symbol that shows us who is “bottom dog”... and it’s always Dug.
Eventually, Carl and Russell and Dug will team up to fight Muntz and rescue Kevin, but to do that, Carl will need an airship that can take on Muntz’s zeppelin. So he will have to make the house lighter... by throwing out all of the things that he and Ellie collected over their lifetime. Pictures of her. Memories of her. He must throw all of these things out of the house... including the his & hers chairs that were the first things they bought for the house... and still remain in the house. This is an emotional scene. Hey, do you think throwing all of these things out of te house so that it can float again is symbolic?
And eventually, Carl will learn to let go of the house. To let go of is past life with Ellie, as great as that was, and look forward to his current life and his future life. This isn’t a movie about a man with a floating house, it’s a movie about a man with a past... and a future. But he must let go of one, to grab hold of the other. If you haven't seen it, yet, check it out. A great film for adults as well as kids, and a great lesson in how to use symbols to tell your story.
- Bill
But I also have to write a new article for Script Magazine by the end of the month... and have no idea what that will be. In the current issue I have part one of my piece on Action Scenes, in the issue before that I had an article on Character Driven scripts; and next issue I have *ten pages* of material: part two of my Action Scenes article and a piece on the new Tarantino movie. But what should come next?
What do you think?
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
- Bill
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Mixed Genre Salads and SLITHER.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Burger King - which cost me $10!
Bicycle: Nice day so I rode to a distant Starbucks.
MOVIES: UP - When I first saw the trailer for UP, I didn’t think it looked very good. Some grumpy old guy and some overly cute kid and a dog... had Pixar reached the bottom of the creative barrel? I have loved all of the PIXAR movies, and even liked CARS (which is their worst so far, and still better than most of the movies I saw that year). Everyone has their favorite Pixar movie, and mine is THE INCREDIBLES... probably because it’s an action movie and kind of a 60s James Bond film, too. But I cried my eyes out at TOY STORY 2, and have used FINDING NEMO as an example in an article I wrote for Script Magazine. The amazing thing about Pixar is that they make great movies. Compare a Pixar film to a Dreamworks Animated film - Dreamworks movies are all about the gags - they are like some sitcom extended to 90 minutes. KUNG FU PANDA is all shtick - one gag after another. Hey, that’s great for adults, and kids like it, too... but the films always seem kind of hollow to me. All surface, without much underneath. Pixar films have fewer gags - and the gags they have are often character oriented - but they are all about heart. The first half of WALL-E is pretty much gag-free. It’s all about the character... all about the emotions. You may not laugh as much at a Pixar movie, but you feel more.
I’m sure a lot of people thought UP was a movie about an old guy with a floating house, and on some message boards I’ve read some posts from folks who saw the movie and *still* thought it was about an old guy with a floating house... how could they miss the whole story?
There is no house.
MILD SPOILERS
UP opens with a kid named Carl Fredrickson sitting in a movie theater watching a newsreel on amazing adventurer Charles Muntz - a cross between Doc Savage and Professor Challenger, who believes he has discovered a lost world in South America... and a rare prehistoric bird. Muntz has this amazing Zeppelin that he uses for his adventures - sailing above the clouds. On his way home from the movies, Carl meets a girl named Ellie who has turned an abandoned house into her adventurer’s clubhouse. She and Carl are two of a kind, and soon they are both dreaming if a life of thrilling adventure together. Ellie has a scrap book of all of Muntz’s adventures... and a big section left empty for *her* amazing adventures. She wants to live on the magical waterfall in the lost world. She makes Carl an official member of her adventure club with a special badge made from a grape soda bottle cap. They are a team!
That soda pop cap button is a symbol of their spirit of adventure.
Next we get an amazing montage, maybe 7 minutes, of Carl and Ellie’s entire lives. They grow up, get married, but the run-down house and fix it up, Carl gets a job selling balloons (which figure into the plot later), and soon they are old people, living in the house... and then Carl is alone. There’s a great line from Lennon (John, not Vladimir), “Life is what happens to you, While you're busy making other plans” and that’s what this sequence beautifully illustrates. After Ellie passes away, Carl finds her scrap book... with that whole section where she was going to put pictures of *her* adventures... their adventures. Instead, they just lived a fairly boring life in their house.
If this sequence doesn’t make you cry at least once, there is something wrong with your tear-duct plumbing. Completely silent, but jam-packed with emotions. The great thing about Pixar movies is that they love to tell te story visually - they know that is the direct path to the heart. No need to translate words into emotions, an image is an image. It’s a direct shot. We don’t need to wonder what the character means with those words, we just experience it. A child must learn to speak, learn to understand words... but they already know what they see. WALL-E does more with visual storytelling than any ten live action movies put together, and in UP we get the same ability to pull our heart strings, to make us feel genuine emotions, without dialogue. This is a powerful sequence.
One day a pudgy kid in a cub scout outfit, Russell, knocks on Carl’s door and wants to help him with something, anything, so that he can get the *one* merit badge he is missing from his sash. The sash is *filled* with merit badges, except for one empty spot. This is contrast in action - the best way to show something isn’t there is to show everything else that *is* there. The *only* empty space on his sash is the one merit badge. This also shows what a go-getter and a pest Russell is. The kid is relentless. Driven. And just will not shut up. Grumpy old Carl sends him on a wild goose chase to get rid of him.
When Carl comes across the drawing Ellie made as a kid of the house on the waterfall in the lost world, he gets an idea. His house is now in the center of a construction site, and he refuses to sell... because it’s Ellie’s house. Everything they had together. The house isn’t just a house, it’s symbolic of their whole relationship. Their love. He won’t let a construction crew tear it down to build a new skyscraper in its place. Everyone wants to put grumpy old Carl in a rest home, but that would mean leaving the house... and he can’t bring himself to do that. That would be leaving Ellie behind. So, on that day when they are going to come and take him away to the rest home, he fills a zillion helium balloons and ties them to the house... and floats the whole thing away.
With Russell on the front porch, scared to death.
Carl’s plan is to float his house, Ellie’s house, to South America and that lost world and land it on the waterfall... just like in Ellie’s childhood drawing. To take that adventure he and Ellie never got around to... to take *Ellie* to that waterfall. The house is not a house at all, it is symbolic of his relationship with Ellie, and so it is symbolic of Ellie - the woman he loved his entire life. There is no house, it is a symbol. Everything in this film is a symbol. The house - the memories of his relationship with Ellie - lift him high above the clouds and carry him off on an adventure.
If it weren’t for the damned kid...
One of the cool things about UP is that it has these sly references to adventure fiction and movies, so when the flying house hits a storm, you can’t help but think of the hot air balloon that hits a storm in MYSTERIOUS ISLAND and gets knocked off course... ending up on that mysterious island of the title. When I was a kid, MYSTERIOUS ISLAND was one of my favorite films, and the cool idea that a bunch of escaping Civil War POWs could end up in this lost world kind of place where Captain Nemo docks his submarine when he isn’t out battling giant squids was really cool. The Bernard Herrmann music in that film was fantastic, and I’m listening to it right now as I type this. I’m sure, as a kid, the other thing I liked about MYSTERIOUS ISLAND was they found some shipwrecked women who ended up wearing skimpy animal furs until they found a trunk full of dresses on the sand. But there are no women in UP... unless you watched the Russ Meyer version by mistake.
Instead Carl and Russell and the house end up blown into that Lost World... but the house loses a bunch of balloons in the process, and now is skimming over the ground. Carl ends up dragging the house behind him as they make their way through the jungle to the waterfall in the distance. What was once buoyant and uplifting has become something that may get caught in the trees. Something that must be jockeyed and taken care of every single minute. What was once keeping him afloat now seems to be dragging him down. As much as he loved Ellie, as much as his past dreams excited him, now they are becoming a problem. There is no house.
As Carl and Russell drag the house across the landscape, they discover a silly looking giant bird, that Russell names Kevin. In MYSTERIOUS ISLAND there was also a giant bird - this huge thing that they tried to ride and eventually ate for dinner - drumsticks the size of a Volkswagen. Here, they don’t eat Kevin, but the danged bird keeps following them and this gets on Carl’s nerves. He wants to bird to go away. But Russell keeps feeding Kevin bits of his candy bar, and the bird keeps following them...
And they also meet the misfit dog, Dug, who has been sent to find the bird... by Muntz! Muntz has a huge pack of dogs with “speech collars” so that they can have conversations with their master. These collars are a great gag - they have controls for different languages, and when the evil Alpha Dog gets his collar bumped he speaks in a high funny helium balloon voice. It’s all connected to balloons!
That giant prehistoric bird that Carl wants to get rid of is the bird of happiness for old adventurer Muntz - proof that this species exists, proof that the lost world exists, proof that he is not a fake. Muntz as sent his dogs out to find it, but Alpha and the others are looking one place, while doofus dog Dug has actually found the giant bird. Grumpy Carl wants to be rid of the bird, Muntz will do anything to capture it.
One thing they discover - Kevin is a girl... and a mom... and has a bunch of hungry little birds waiting for her at home. Kevin has a future generation to take care of. Carl has no future, he’s dragging his past behind him. Muntz only has a future if he can capture that bird. Is Kevin a symbol, too?
Now Carl and Russell and Kevin and Dug go on this journey across the lost world, and Carl discovers that his childhood idol, Muntz, has feet of clay. He’s a ruthless opportunist... who will do anything to capture Kevin the bird. Carl’s entire childhood - and maybe his adulthood, too - was based on worshiping adventurer Muntz, but the real man is not the fantasy. And Carl’s life ended up being not the childhood fantasy, but a ho-hum reality. Now he’s stuck dragging this damned house behind him, and it keeps getting stuck in trees... and when they go to Muntz’s cave, it almost doesn’t make it in.
In Muntz’s old zeppelin, Dug the dog is picked on by Alpha and the others in the pack, and must wear the Cone Of Shame. Just like the missing merit badge, the Cone Of Same is a symbol that shows us who is “bottom dog”... and it’s always Dug.
Eventually, Carl and Russell and Dug will team up to fight Muntz and rescue Kevin, but to do that, Carl will need an airship that can take on Muntz’s zeppelin. So he will have to make the house lighter... by throwing out all of the things that he and Ellie collected over their lifetime. Pictures of her. Memories of her. He must throw all of these things out of the house... including the his & hers chairs that were the first things they bought for the house... and still remain in the house. This is an emotional scene. Hey, do you think throwing all of these things out of te house so that it can float again is symbolic?
And eventually, Carl will learn to let go of the house. To let go of is past life with Ellie, as great as that was, and look forward to his current life and his future life. This isn’t a movie about a man with a floating house, it’s a movie about a man with a past... and a future. But he must let go of one, to grab hold of the other. If you haven't seen it, yet, check it out. A great film for adults as well as kids, and a great lesson in how to use symbols to tell your story.
- Bill
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Cool Guys Don't Look At Explosions
JJ Abrams kicks Ray Manzarek's ass on the boards in this Shamberg song from the MTV Movie Awards about action movie explosions. I had to post it here eventually - it's all about action movies...
- Bill
- Bill
Friday, June 12, 2009
This Week In Review....
It blew.
Started off okay - I finished a script! Wrote fade out on COWBOY NIGHTS, the country western bar thriller on Monday. Was supposed tp have it finished on Thursday, then Friday, then... well, it was great to finally finish it. The plan for this week was to outline and plan two scripts, and write up treatments for each. The NEAR HIT script I had planned on filming in a couple of months, and an action-thriller thing called CONTAINED. That would set both of those up to be written over the next few months. Then, I was going to spend the rest of this month finishing SECOND SON, which was set aside to work on the studio remake project...
But everything went off the rails on Tuesday.
I have always had problems sleeping. Well, for some reason (maybe excited because I finished the script) I could not sleep Monday... and this created a strange ping-pong effect where one night I slept too little and the next I overslept - and then couldn’t sleep the following night. Anyway, the result is - no outlines, no treatments... and no Hitchcock today. Just a complete bust of a week.
And, I have this list of “brain dead” tasks that I can do, but for some reason when I am brain dead I never remember to do any of them.
I also have a huge stack of DVDs to watch, but I don’t stick ‘em in the machine because I’m too tired to really watch them, and what if one is really good? I’d want to be fully awake while I watch it, right? So - I haven’t watched any of tem (and I’ll bet most of them are okay at best). I think watching a movie (with an end) would help me fall asleep more than watching ABC World News Now... which goes on forever, and kind of loops, so you end up watching the exact same story again two hours later.
Probably adding to my inability to sleep is my lack of bike riding over the past week. The weather in Los Angeles has been weird - it’s overcast and threatening to rain every day. The weather people all call it “June Gloom” - but this is the worst it has ever been. I know that raindrops are not going to kill me, but it often looks really nasty out there and I don’t want to get caught far away from home in a major downpour. I have rode a block or two to the corner Starbucks a couple of times, but that’s not a bike ride. I think the lack of exercise isn’t helping at all.
I hope to finish up the I CONFESS Hitchcock entry tomorrow and put it up... but I still haven’t decided if I should do the outlines and treatments next week, or jump into finishing up SECOND SON so that I’ll have it finished more or less by the end of the month. I have to get this sleep thing under control. Yes, I’m taking some over the counter stuff, but it’s not working well - last night I got a little sleepy, went to bed... and after laying there for over an hour without falling asleep, I felt like I was wasting time... and tried to get some work done until I was really sleepy. That was around 4am... and I slept for 4 hours and woke up and couldn’t fall back asleep for a couple of hours. I went without any coffee or caffeine for a couple of days during the week - and that made me even more brain dead, but didn’t seem to help me get my sleep pattern back under control.
I’m going to try to get to sleep early tonight - and try to keep from giving up after a couple of hours of just laying there... I think that’s the real problem - if I don’t fall asleep after a while, I get impatient and sit at the computer. So tonight: I’m going to watch a DVD, then keep trying to fall asleep until I succeed. If you read some quip by me on Facebook or some screenwriting message board at 5am, you will know that I have failed....
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Voice Over Narration and your typical monkey funeral.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Fish & Chips at home.
Pages: Was going to write new tips, treatments, and a blog entry every day... completely failed at that.
MOVIES: DRAG ME TO HELL - One of the best reviewed films of the year is a horror flick from Sam Raimi (no kidding, check out Rotten Tomatoes) and it’s one of the best times I’ve had sitting in a cinema all year - a crazy funhouse ride at a disreputable carnival that has you laughing as much as screaming. Though I always stress the importance of having a unique idea, this film gives us horror plot #17 (the gypsy curse one, see THINNER and a few dozen other films) but shows us the importance of *execution*. A good script needs a great idea, well written. Here we just get some great writing and directing and it overcomes the tired concept. Oh, if you are wondering why SPIDER-MAN’s Sam Raimi is directing this film, the guy has a whole bunch of horror skeletons in his closet, including the EVIL DEAD movies. For more on the EVIL DEAD flicks, check out But The Third One Was Great blog, which features those films this week!
In DRAG ME TO HELL, Alison Lohman plays a nice girl destined to always finish last. She used to be fat, has a white-trash Southern accent she’s desperately trying to lose, and is doing her damndest to move up a couple of rungs on the social ladder. She works as a loan officer at a bank, and covets the empty Vice President desk across from her - the name plate is empty as if to visually announce Your Name Here. Her boss is played by David Paymer, kind of the older male version of her... and to keep his job, the person he needs to promote to VP has to be someone strong and aggressive. That’s not Alison, but it is the new guy Reggie Lee who seems to have seen WALL STREET a few too many times and actually believes that Greed Is Good. Alison and Reggie quietly battle it out at the bank every day, each hoping to slide their name into that empty VP name plate.
When a really gross phlegm spewing one eyed old gypsy woman comes in, home in foreclosure, and begs for Alison to give her a third extension; she puts the promotion over compassion. The old woman begs... and Alison calls security on her and has her removed from the bank. This puts her at the top of the promotion list, and the top of the gypsy woman’s shit list.
On her lunch hour, Alison visits her boyfriend Justin Long at the University where he’s a first year professor, and I kept waiting for the “I’m A PC” guy to pop up behind him. Justin is arranging a meet-the-tight-assed-upper-class parents dinner, and Alison is afraid to go - she’s fat white trash. As she leaves his office, she overhears his half of a phone conversation with his mother... and knows his parents will hate her and maybe worries that Justin might be charity-dating her. One of the great things about this film is that it’s all about the characters... and still a horror film. There are so many little background thing on Alison’s character peppered through the film that we really get to know and care about her. Hey, she was in the 4H (or, that reasonable facsimile of the 4H the lawyers and E&O insurance folks signed off on). And the film is really about her character arc, from meek bank employee to bad ass demon fighter who will do things you and I wouldn’t dream of doing.
At the end of the work day she goes to the empty underground garage to grab her subcompact crapo car... and notices the old gypsie woman’s ancient rusted out 70s lemon in the garage. Now, you may not know this, but that car has probably been in more movies that David Paymer. It was Uncle Ben’s car in SPIDER-MAN... and has been featured in every film Sam Raimi has directed. It falls from the sky in ARMY OF DARKNESS... It was Raimi’s personal car for years, and when he could afford better, he kept it and uses it in every film. Here it works wonderfully as the barely running gypsy’s car.
One of the great things about this funhouse ride of a film is that there are no shortage of jump moments. And great jump moments - not some silly cat (though, there are a couple of those) but real scares from unexpected sources. Be prepared to spend half of the movie about a foot above your seat. One great series of jump moments is in the spooky garage, when the gypsie shows up and puts her curse on Alison. This film manages to get us to jump over a handkerchief... and it’s the skill of Raimi that the handkerchief also manages to be creeps and suspenseful and build dread in other scenes. You are scared of a piece of cloth!
Once the curse is on Alison she will die within 3 days and be dragged to hell. But those three days will be hell on earth. And all kinds of sick fun.
One of my favorite scenes has Alison go to the gypsy’s daughter’s house to beg that the curse be removed. The daughter doesn’t live in some magical castle with dark windows - this is Los Angeles, she lives in a typical house in the city with no yard and an ally running down the back where the garbage dumpsters are. It’s plain. She goes there, wants to see the gypsy woman, the daughter says she has caused enough trouble - getting the woman kicked out of her house... but Alison barges in... and she’s in some stranger’s house. And this is uncomfortable. And Raimi finds ways to ramp up the feelings of discomfort, including having the entire gypsy family there for dinner. She’s completely out numbered, and all of these people hate her. This could be a scene from a drama... and it *is* a big dramatic scene... but this is also a horror film. Drama *and* horror. And after the drama scene, we get some horror. Sick, disgusting, and funny horror.
Raimi does a great job of building dread with some very simple things. When Alison comes home one night, she is alone in a dark, spooky... but completely normal house. There is these terrible noise - link fingers on a chalk board - that ends up being the wind blowing open a rusted metal gate. So many everyday things are turned into terror by Raimi that you worry about going home after the film. By creating terror and building dread with normal things you’d find in almost every house, he gets us where we live. This isn’t some alien world - this is a house just like the one you live in. Raimi did this in the EVIL DEAD movies with tree branches in the wind... which become something else entirely. He can make the raisins in a cake creepy and threatening.
By the way - one of the cool things about the film is how ex-fatty Alison seems to constantly be attacked by *food*. It’s like the curse knows her weakness, knows what scares her on a more emotional level (that she’s going to gain the weight back, or maybe people still think of her as the fat girl) and finds ways to attack her using the things she *emotionally* fears most. Food becomes scary in this film... in that wacky funhouse way.
Oh, and there’s some between the lines social message in this film. Alison is white trash who is social climbing and hopes to marry wealthy Justin. To do that, she must foreclose on the home of someone one rung beneath her in society... turn against someone similar to her, the same way she is turning against her accent and her 4H past and everything that made her who she used to be. Trash the poor so that she can become rich. Again - this is a horror movie, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be more going on in it... in fact, there should always be more than just the surface story.
DRAG ME TO HELL Is rated PG-13, and many horror fans have discounted it before even seeing it. How can you make a good horror movie that isn’t R rated? Well, Raimi knows how to do that. He substitutes gross for gore - and keeps the gross coming! If you’ve seen the trailer, you know there’s a scene where the gypsy woman vomits all kinds of bugs and worms and icky stuff on Alison Lohman’s face. In her eyes, in her mouth, up her nose, in her ears. This is worse that seeing a half gallon of blood spraying from someone’s neck. Your brain knows the blood geyser is fake, but these insects and worms in her mouth and nose? Um, they probably really did that. Yech! You won’t see severed limbs in this film, but you will see things that are worse. This film doesn’t wimp out at all - it just has a different kind of horror. It’s gross (in a fun way).
Which I think brings us to another thing those pimple faced horror fans have complained about on several of the message boards I frequent - that somehow this subgenre of horror is less valid than SAW and FRIDAY THE 13th. That funhouse horror movies are lesser films because they make you laugh. Hey! BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN! Plus a million other flicks, some starring Vincent Price, some starring the late great Bob Quarry (in one of my films, lived in my neighborhood, just passed away, miss that guy!), and of course the Raimi EVIL DEAD movies. If anything, the funhouse style horror films are *more* legit than torture porn and slasher films - they’ve been around longer. These films are crazy scary rides with all kinds of sick laughs.
And DRAG ME TO HELL is full of sick humor. “Here, kitty kitty...”
One of the cool things about this film is the Multicultural Curse. The film opens in the 1940s when a child has been cursed by a gypsy and the immigrant parents take him to a female Hispanic medium who tries to lift the curse... and fails. The boy is dragged to hell by all kinds of demons. That’s what Alison is in for. After she is cursed, she goes to an Indian store front psychic played by Dileep Rao. Dileep plays the role as if he always has one eyebrow raised quizzically. As if *he* doesn’t believe what is happening. He manages to be both the psychic *and* the skeptic at the same time. He also manages to be funny with the non-funny straight man lines. And he manages to play his store front psychic in such a way that we do not know if he’s for real or just a scam artist. This is like the Whoopi Goldberg role in GHOST - does this mean Dileep will be nominated for an Oscar? Oh, wait, this is both a horror film *and* a comedy. When Dileep is overwhelmed by the curse, he knows right where to take Alison - to the female Hispanic woman from the opening scene, who is now an old woman.
And this is where we get the real star of the movie... a goat. It’s always funny when there is an animal in a long scene filled with special effects and crazy horror stuff, because the animal has no idea what is going on. There is a long seance scene with the goat tethered to the table, and it was funny to watch the goat’s reactions (when I was supposed to be watching Alison or Dileep). The goat was completely confused at all times.
Okay, now I don’t want to spoil the film, but I want to talk about one of the great things in this film - the Twist On A Twist. This is one of those great techniques that Raimi uses which elevates this film from your standard horror film to one hell of a great ride that you probably want to take again. There is a twist in the film that you see coming from a mile away. It is set up, it is confirmed, and you suddenly know exactly what is gong to happen. You figure out the twist... and want to yell at Alison that she is making a big mistake, because there’s this twist thing she hasn’t figured out but you have. Here’s the thing - Raimi *wants* you to figure out the twist. That creates audience superiority and creates suspense. You know what’s going to happen! You know the very very bad thing that Alison hasn’t figured out yet! But what you haven’t figured out is the twist on the twist - because what you think is going to happen is *half* right. But if you were really paying close attention, you would realize that the twist you think is going to happen isn’t going to happen... something even stranger is. And that’s the part you don’t see coming at all. The twist on the twist. So, Raimi sets it up so that you know *part* of what will happen, but still be shocked and surprised by the other part. Great technique!
One of the strange things about DRAG ME TO HELL is that it’s one of the best reviewed films so far this year... but no one is going to see it! You would think a fun film with great reviews would have opened at #1 and done great business. So why isn’t it tearing up the box office? My guess is that the sophisticated audience member who would see any other film with this many great reviews is staying away because it’s a horror movie... they are like Justin’s parents. The average audience member is also staying away because it’s a horror movie - those films are crap made for hard core horror fans. And the hard core horror fans are staying away... because it’s one of the best reviewed films of the year! Hey, that stamp of society’s approval means this can’t be a dark, edgy, nasty horror film... it’s probably some watered down safe movie! The critics *great* reviews may have doomed this film! If you look at horror films the critics have loved in the past - SLITHER, BLACK SHEEP, etc - all of those films died at the box office. Good reviews scare away the horror audience. Yet films with *awful* reviews like FRIDAY THE 13th and BLOODY VALENTINE did great business... maybe even because of the bad reviews. If the critics hate this film, it’s gotta be good!
DRAG ME TO HELL is the most fun I’ve had at the movies in a long time. Too bad the film seems to be cursed.
- Bill
Started off okay - I finished a script! Wrote fade out on COWBOY NIGHTS, the country western bar thriller on Monday. Was supposed tp have it finished on Thursday, then Friday, then... well, it was great to finally finish it. The plan for this week was to outline and plan two scripts, and write up treatments for each. The NEAR HIT script I had planned on filming in a couple of months, and an action-thriller thing called CONTAINED. That would set both of those up to be written over the next few months. Then, I was going to spend the rest of this month finishing SECOND SON, which was set aside to work on the studio remake project...
But everything went off the rails on Tuesday.
I have always had problems sleeping. Well, for some reason (maybe excited because I finished the script) I could not sleep Monday... and this created a strange ping-pong effect where one night I slept too little and the next I overslept - and then couldn’t sleep the following night. Anyway, the result is - no outlines, no treatments... and no Hitchcock today. Just a complete bust of a week.
And, I have this list of “brain dead” tasks that I can do, but for some reason when I am brain dead I never remember to do any of them.
I also have a huge stack of DVDs to watch, but I don’t stick ‘em in the machine because I’m too tired to really watch them, and what if one is really good? I’d want to be fully awake while I watch it, right? So - I haven’t watched any of tem (and I’ll bet most of them are okay at best). I think watching a movie (with an end) would help me fall asleep more than watching ABC World News Now... which goes on forever, and kind of loops, so you end up watching the exact same story again two hours later.
Probably adding to my inability to sleep is my lack of bike riding over the past week. The weather in Los Angeles has been weird - it’s overcast and threatening to rain every day. The weather people all call it “June Gloom” - but this is the worst it has ever been. I know that raindrops are not going to kill me, but it often looks really nasty out there and I don’t want to get caught far away from home in a major downpour. I have rode a block or two to the corner Starbucks a couple of times, but that’s not a bike ride. I think the lack of exercise isn’t helping at all.
I hope to finish up the I CONFESS Hitchcock entry tomorrow and put it up... but I still haven’t decided if I should do the outlines and treatments next week, or jump into finishing up SECOND SON so that I’ll have it finished more or less by the end of the month. I have to get this sleep thing under control. Yes, I’m taking some over the counter stuff, but it’s not working well - last night I got a little sleepy, went to bed... and after laying there for over an hour without falling asleep, I felt like I was wasting time... and tried to get some work done until I was really sleepy. That was around 4am... and I slept for 4 hours and woke up and couldn’t fall back asleep for a couple of hours. I went without any coffee or caffeine for a couple of days during the week - and that made me even more brain dead, but didn’t seem to help me get my sleep pattern back under control.
I’m going to try to get to sleep early tonight - and try to keep from giving up after a couple of hours of just laying there... I think that’s the real problem - if I don’t fall asleep after a while, I get impatient and sit at the computer. So tonight: I’m going to watch a DVD, then keep trying to fall asleep until I succeed. If you read some quip by me on Facebook or some screenwriting message board at 5am, you will know that I have failed....
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
- Bill
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Voice Over Narration and your typical monkey funeral.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Fish & Chips at home.
Pages: Was going to write new tips, treatments, and a blog entry every day... completely failed at that.
MOVIES: DRAG ME TO HELL - One of the best reviewed films of the year is a horror flick from Sam Raimi (no kidding, check out Rotten Tomatoes) and it’s one of the best times I’ve had sitting in a cinema all year - a crazy funhouse ride at a disreputable carnival that has you laughing as much as screaming. Though I always stress the importance of having a unique idea, this film gives us horror plot #17 (the gypsy curse one, see THINNER and a few dozen other films) but shows us the importance of *execution*. A good script needs a great idea, well written. Here we just get some great writing and directing and it overcomes the tired concept. Oh, if you are wondering why SPIDER-MAN’s Sam Raimi is directing this film, the guy has a whole bunch of horror skeletons in his closet, including the EVIL DEAD movies. For more on the EVIL DEAD flicks, check out But The Third One Was Great blog, which features those films this week!
In DRAG ME TO HELL, Alison Lohman plays a nice girl destined to always finish last. She used to be fat, has a white-trash Southern accent she’s desperately trying to lose, and is doing her damndest to move up a couple of rungs on the social ladder. She works as a loan officer at a bank, and covets the empty Vice President desk across from her - the name plate is empty as if to visually announce Your Name Here. Her boss is played by David Paymer, kind of the older male version of her... and to keep his job, the person he needs to promote to VP has to be someone strong and aggressive. That’s not Alison, but it is the new guy Reggie Lee who seems to have seen WALL STREET a few too many times and actually believes that Greed Is Good. Alison and Reggie quietly battle it out at the bank every day, each hoping to slide their name into that empty VP name plate.
When a really gross phlegm spewing one eyed old gypsy woman comes in, home in foreclosure, and begs for Alison to give her a third extension; she puts the promotion over compassion. The old woman begs... and Alison calls security on her and has her removed from the bank. This puts her at the top of the promotion list, and the top of the gypsy woman’s shit list.
On her lunch hour, Alison visits her boyfriend Justin Long at the University where he’s a first year professor, and I kept waiting for the “I’m A PC” guy to pop up behind him. Justin is arranging a meet-the-tight-assed-upper-class parents dinner, and Alison is afraid to go - she’s fat white trash. As she leaves his office, she overhears his half of a phone conversation with his mother... and knows his parents will hate her and maybe worries that Justin might be charity-dating her. One of the great things about this film is that it’s all about the characters... and still a horror film. There are so many little background thing on Alison’s character peppered through the film that we really get to know and care about her. Hey, she was in the 4H (or, that reasonable facsimile of the 4H the lawyers and E&O insurance folks signed off on). And the film is really about her character arc, from meek bank employee to bad ass demon fighter who will do things you and I wouldn’t dream of doing.
At the end of the work day she goes to the empty underground garage to grab her subcompact crapo car... and notices the old gypsie woman’s ancient rusted out 70s lemon in the garage. Now, you may not know this, but that car has probably been in more movies that David Paymer. It was Uncle Ben’s car in SPIDER-MAN... and has been featured in every film Sam Raimi has directed. It falls from the sky in ARMY OF DARKNESS... It was Raimi’s personal car for years, and when he could afford better, he kept it and uses it in every film. Here it works wonderfully as the barely running gypsy’s car.
One of the great things about this funhouse ride of a film is that there are no shortage of jump moments. And great jump moments - not some silly cat (though, there are a couple of those) but real scares from unexpected sources. Be prepared to spend half of the movie about a foot above your seat. One great series of jump moments is in the spooky garage, when the gypsie shows up and puts her curse on Alison. This film manages to get us to jump over a handkerchief... and it’s the skill of Raimi that the handkerchief also manages to be creeps and suspenseful and build dread in other scenes. You are scared of a piece of cloth!
Once the curse is on Alison she will die within 3 days and be dragged to hell. But those three days will be hell on earth. And all kinds of sick fun.
One of my favorite scenes has Alison go to the gypsy’s daughter’s house to beg that the curse be removed. The daughter doesn’t live in some magical castle with dark windows - this is Los Angeles, she lives in a typical house in the city with no yard and an ally running down the back where the garbage dumpsters are. It’s plain. She goes there, wants to see the gypsy woman, the daughter says she has caused enough trouble - getting the woman kicked out of her house... but Alison barges in... and she’s in some stranger’s house. And this is uncomfortable. And Raimi finds ways to ramp up the feelings of discomfort, including having the entire gypsy family there for dinner. She’s completely out numbered, and all of these people hate her. This could be a scene from a drama... and it *is* a big dramatic scene... but this is also a horror film. Drama *and* horror. And after the drama scene, we get some horror. Sick, disgusting, and funny horror.
Raimi does a great job of building dread with some very simple things. When Alison comes home one night, she is alone in a dark, spooky... but completely normal house. There is these terrible noise - link fingers on a chalk board - that ends up being the wind blowing open a rusted metal gate. So many everyday things are turned into terror by Raimi that you worry about going home after the film. By creating terror and building dread with normal things you’d find in almost every house, he gets us where we live. This isn’t some alien world - this is a house just like the one you live in. Raimi did this in the EVIL DEAD movies with tree branches in the wind... which become something else entirely. He can make the raisins in a cake creepy and threatening.
By the way - one of the cool things about the film is how ex-fatty Alison seems to constantly be attacked by *food*. It’s like the curse knows her weakness, knows what scares her on a more emotional level (that she’s going to gain the weight back, or maybe people still think of her as the fat girl) and finds ways to attack her using the things she *emotionally* fears most. Food becomes scary in this film... in that wacky funhouse way.
Oh, and there’s some between the lines social message in this film. Alison is white trash who is social climbing and hopes to marry wealthy Justin. To do that, she must foreclose on the home of someone one rung beneath her in society... turn against someone similar to her, the same way she is turning against her accent and her 4H past and everything that made her who she used to be. Trash the poor so that she can become rich. Again - this is a horror movie, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be more going on in it... in fact, there should always be more than just the surface story.
DRAG ME TO HELL Is rated PG-13, and many horror fans have discounted it before even seeing it. How can you make a good horror movie that isn’t R rated? Well, Raimi knows how to do that. He substitutes gross for gore - and keeps the gross coming! If you’ve seen the trailer, you know there’s a scene where the gypsy woman vomits all kinds of bugs and worms and icky stuff on Alison Lohman’s face. In her eyes, in her mouth, up her nose, in her ears. This is worse that seeing a half gallon of blood spraying from someone’s neck. Your brain knows the blood geyser is fake, but these insects and worms in her mouth and nose? Um, they probably really did that. Yech! You won’t see severed limbs in this film, but you will see things that are worse. This film doesn’t wimp out at all - it just has a different kind of horror. It’s gross (in a fun way).
Which I think brings us to another thing those pimple faced horror fans have complained about on several of the message boards I frequent - that somehow this subgenre of horror is less valid than SAW and FRIDAY THE 13th. That funhouse horror movies are lesser films because they make you laugh. Hey! BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN! Plus a million other flicks, some starring Vincent Price, some starring the late great Bob Quarry (in one of my films, lived in my neighborhood, just passed away, miss that guy!), and of course the Raimi EVIL DEAD movies. If anything, the funhouse style horror films are *more* legit than torture porn and slasher films - they’ve been around longer. These films are crazy scary rides with all kinds of sick laughs.
And DRAG ME TO HELL is full of sick humor. “Here, kitty kitty...”
One of the cool things about this film is the Multicultural Curse. The film opens in the 1940s when a child has been cursed by a gypsy and the immigrant parents take him to a female Hispanic medium who tries to lift the curse... and fails. The boy is dragged to hell by all kinds of demons. That’s what Alison is in for. After she is cursed, she goes to an Indian store front psychic played by Dileep Rao. Dileep plays the role as if he always has one eyebrow raised quizzically. As if *he* doesn’t believe what is happening. He manages to be both the psychic *and* the skeptic at the same time. He also manages to be funny with the non-funny straight man lines. And he manages to play his store front psychic in such a way that we do not know if he’s for real or just a scam artist. This is like the Whoopi Goldberg role in GHOST - does this mean Dileep will be nominated for an Oscar? Oh, wait, this is both a horror film *and* a comedy. When Dileep is overwhelmed by the curse, he knows right where to take Alison - to the female Hispanic woman from the opening scene, who is now an old woman.
And this is where we get the real star of the movie... a goat. It’s always funny when there is an animal in a long scene filled with special effects and crazy horror stuff, because the animal has no idea what is going on. There is a long seance scene with the goat tethered to the table, and it was funny to watch the goat’s reactions (when I was supposed to be watching Alison or Dileep). The goat was completely confused at all times.
Okay, now I don’t want to spoil the film, but I want to talk about one of the great things in this film - the Twist On A Twist. This is one of those great techniques that Raimi uses which elevates this film from your standard horror film to one hell of a great ride that you probably want to take again. There is a twist in the film that you see coming from a mile away. It is set up, it is confirmed, and you suddenly know exactly what is gong to happen. You figure out the twist... and want to yell at Alison that she is making a big mistake, because there’s this twist thing she hasn’t figured out but you have. Here’s the thing - Raimi *wants* you to figure out the twist. That creates audience superiority and creates suspense. You know what’s going to happen! You know the very very bad thing that Alison hasn’t figured out yet! But what you haven’t figured out is the twist on the twist - because what you think is going to happen is *half* right. But if you were really paying close attention, you would realize that the twist you think is going to happen isn’t going to happen... something even stranger is. And that’s the part you don’t see coming at all. The twist on the twist. So, Raimi sets it up so that you know *part* of what will happen, but still be shocked and surprised by the other part. Great technique!
One of the strange things about DRAG ME TO HELL is that it’s one of the best reviewed films so far this year... but no one is going to see it! You would think a fun film with great reviews would have opened at #1 and done great business. So why isn’t it tearing up the box office? My guess is that the sophisticated audience member who would see any other film with this many great reviews is staying away because it’s a horror movie... they are like Justin’s parents. The average audience member is also staying away because it’s a horror movie - those films are crap made for hard core horror fans. And the hard core horror fans are staying away... because it’s one of the best reviewed films of the year! Hey, that stamp of society’s approval means this can’t be a dark, edgy, nasty horror film... it’s probably some watered down safe movie! The critics *great* reviews may have doomed this film! If you look at horror films the critics have loved in the past - SLITHER, BLACK SHEEP, etc - all of those films died at the box office. Good reviews scare away the horror audience. Yet films with *awful* reviews like FRIDAY THE 13th and BLOODY VALENTINE did great business... maybe even because of the bad reviews. If the critics hate this film, it’s gotta be good!
DRAG ME TO HELL is the most fun I’ve had at the movies in a long time. Too bad the film seems to be cursed.
- Bill
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Flash Mob - Can't Touch This!
I love the idea of flash mobs - and even have script idea about a flash mob that gets way out of hand and leads to world destruction.
This happened Thursday...
And HERE is an article about a different kind of flash mob - a Guerrilla Drive In Movie, where a secret radio transmission tells you the time and place where the movie will be projected on some wall... but an interesting and thematic wall! Cool stuff!
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Spade/Van Damme Rule and 50 FIRST DATES.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Islands fish tacos.
Movies: HANGOVER - laughed my butt off.
Pages: *Finished* the country western thiller!
- Bill
And again, my awful movies descend on the UK's Movies 4 Men channels...
M4M2: 6/10 - 13:20 - Black Thunder - When the world's most powerful stealth jet fighter falls into enemy hands, only one man can get it back. Starring Michael Dudikoff.
M4M1: 6/12 - 18:20 - Crash Dive - The crew of a nuclear submarine rescues supposed victims of a boat disaster, but the victims turn out to be terrorists intent on capturing nuclear weapons aboard the sub.
M4M1: 6/13 - 18:35 - Steel Sharks - When a United States submarine is seized by terrorists, a rescue attempt by Elite Navy Seals goes awry. The submarine crew wages a silent war beneath the waves in this tense undersea thriller.
M4M1: 6/14 - 12:15 - Crash Dive - The crew of a nuclear submarine rescues supposed victims of a boat disaster, but the victims turn out to be terrorists intent on capturing nuclear weapons aboard the sub.
M4M2: 6/15 - 14:45 - Crash Dive - The crew of a nuclear submarine rescues supposed victims of a boat disaster, but the victims turn out to be terrorists intent on capturing nuclear weapons aboard the sub.
I am so sorry....
- Bill
This happened Thursday...
And HERE is an article about a different kind of flash mob - a Guerrilla Drive In Movie, where a secret radio transmission tells you the time and place where the movie will be projected on some wall... but an interesting and thematic wall! Cool stuff!
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
- Bill
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Spade/Van Damme Rule and 50 FIRST DATES.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Islands fish tacos.
Movies: HANGOVER - laughed my butt off.
Pages: *Finished* the country western thiller!
- Bill
And again, my awful movies descend on the UK's Movies 4 Men channels...
M4M2: 6/10 - 13:20 - Black Thunder - When the world's most powerful stealth jet fighter falls into enemy hands, only one man can get it back. Starring Michael Dudikoff.
M4M1: 6/12 - 18:20 - Crash Dive - The crew of a nuclear submarine rescues supposed victims of a boat disaster, but the victims turn out to be terrorists intent on capturing nuclear weapons aboard the sub.
M4M1: 6/13 - 18:35 - Steel Sharks - When a United States submarine is seized by terrorists, a rescue attempt by Elite Navy Seals goes awry. The submarine crew wages a silent war beneath the waves in this tense undersea thriller.
M4M1: 6/14 - 12:15 - Crash Dive - The crew of a nuclear submarine rescues supposed victims of a boat disaster, but the victims turn out to be terrorists intent on capturing nuclear weapons aboard the sub.
M4M2: 6/15 - 14:45 - Crash Dive - The crew of a nuclear submarine rescues supposed victims of a boat disaster, but the victims turn out to be terrorists intent on capturing nuclear weapons aboard the sub.
I am so sorry....
- Bill
Friday, June 05, 2009
Black Sheep
I may have posted about this movie in the past - written & directed by Jonathan King from New Zealand... and funny as hell. After seeing DRAG ME TO HELL last night, I thought about the horror sub-genre of *funny* horror movies - and this one had me in stitches. Saw it a couple of times when it came out, own it on DVD. If you liked DRAG ME, throws this in the NetFlix cue. And yes - there is a romantic subplot with a sheep... that goes wrong.
- Bill
PS: Fridays With Hitchcock was not ready today, so look for I CONFESS next week.
- Bill
PS: Fridays With Hitchcock was not ready today, so look for I CONFESS next week.
We've Come A Long Way, Baby!
Swiped this off today's Time Magazine site.
When people ask me what my favorite Woody Allen movie is, I do not answer MANHATTAN or any of the serious ones... I answer BANANAS. It has about as many gags-per-minute as AIRPLANE! (which is a lot) and also managed to be topical and political and about heated toilet seats and Fidel Castro. But one of the scenes has been remade as a Bud Light commercial, which was deemed too dirty for TV (even though the 1971 movie probably plays on TV frequently), so it's available on the good old internet!
This scene from BANANAS (1971)...
Clearly inspired this Bud Light Commercial (now) that is too racy to show on TV and even gets blurred and bleeped on the internet!
We've come a long way, baby... Not!
- Bill
When people ask me what my favorite Woody Allen movie is, I do not answer MANHATTAN or any of the serious ones... I answer BANANAS. It has about as many gags-per-minute as AIRPLANE! (which is a lot) and also managed to be topical and political and about heated toilet seats and Fidel Castro. But one of the scenes has been remade as a Bud Light commercial, which was deemed too dirty for TV (even though the 1971 movie probably plays on TV frequently), so it's available on the good old internet!
This scene from BANANAS (1971)...
Clearly inspired this Bud Light Commercial (now) that is too racy to show on TV and even gets blurred and bleeped on the internet!
We've come a long way, baby... Not!
- Bill
Thursday, June 04, 2009
RIP: David Carradine
A couple of months ago, my article in Script Magazine featured Carradine in BOUND FOR GLORY as an example of a protagonist at war with the whole world. Carradine's performance in that film was amazing. Here's the trailer...
- Bill
- Bill
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Stand Up For Yourself!
British Government Public Service Message on Standing Up For Yourself:
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Unlikeable Leads and BAD SANTA.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Togo's sandwich - eaten while writing.
Pages 7.5 pages on the Country Western Thriller - in the homestretch!
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
- Bill
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Unlikeable Leads and BAD SANTA.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Togo's sandwich - eaten while writing.
Pages 7.5 pages on the Country Western Thriller - in the homestretch!
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Drag Me To Hell Poster - Is She Diggin' It?
Two great pieces in Patrick Goldstein's LA Times Blog on movie posters.
First he looks at the poster for DRAG ME TO HELL and wonders if that is a look of ecstacy... and what does that mean?
Drag Me To The Bedroom?
And then he looks at some other cool posters from the past.
Great Movie Posters.
I have a copy of the CHINATOWN poster, and my super 8mm feature had a great poster by mt friend Brenda that was modeled after it. For me, the modern practice of just throwing a bunch of star's faces around the film title isa terrible idea. A movie poster needs to show us what the movie is going to be - like DRAG ME and CHINATOWN and JAWS and many others that give us the story and the tone for the movie that we will see. CHINATOWN was at the height of Jack Nicholson's stardom, yet it's not all about Jack... it's his character and the woman who haunts him.
- Bill
First he looks at the poster for DRAG ME TO HELL and wonders if that is a look of ecstacy... and what does that mean?
Drag Me To The Bedroom?
And then he looks at some other cool posters from the past.
Great Movie Posters.
I have a copy of the CHINATOWN poster, and my super 8mm feature had a great poster by mt friend Brenda that was modeled after it. For me, the modern practice of just throwing a bunch of star's faces around the film title isa terrible idea. A movie poster needs to show us what the movie is going to be - like DRAG ME and CHINATOWN and JAWS and many others that give us the story and the tone for the movie that we will see. CHINATOWN was at the height of Jack Nicholson's stardom, yet it's not all about Jack... it's his character and the woman who haunts him.
- Bill
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