Blogging herein is to be suspended, until I can come up with a topic that doesn't piss somebody the hell off.
Which is to say, see you in a coupla months or so. Maybe.
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
American Idyll
Making bad music is hard.
Outta Sync is, as you may recall, about a brand-new boy band comprised of middle-aged geezers like me. The footage we saw at the party was delightful, and it included a rough cut of the music video that the boys made. That we made. But for music, we've only ever had the ragged demo that Bill Robens cut, ages ago. When we shot the video that's what we were all singing to, and no one had ever given any thought to whether there would be solo lines or any of that, so we all just sang everything.
Well, now there are solo lines--based mostly on who happens to be front-and-center in a given shot. (Has there ever been a case where the video was made before the song?) The tempo can't change without also having to futz around with film speeds; and if Bill comes up with a great new line, well too bad, we just can't change the song at this point. You might think that none of this really matters, because the song and the video are supposed to be bad, so why not just slap something together and let it be what it is?
To answer that, let me tell you a brief story.
Several years ago, freshly arrived in Chicago, Marc Rosenbush cast me in a one-act he was directing. (We knew each other at Emerson and didn't much care for each other; then happened to move to Chicago on the same weekend and he needed an actor but didn't know anyone, so that's the start of that.) It was a play called "cont(r)act," written by our friend Max Burbank (who may be a distant relative, since my grandmother was a Burbank). In it, there were these dance interludes where the girl (Suzanne Carney) dances elegantly and I dance comically. Easy enough for Suzanne, who is an actual dancer. Me, I tried very hard to dance comically. After only a couple rounds of this, Marc took me to one side. "Just dance the best you can. Trust me, it'll be funny." So I did, and it was, because I am not a dancer and my best efforts are just plain comical.
The lesson, of course, is that you can't just slap something together and hope it'll work. You have to work very hard to get the result you want, and if that result is supposed to be a bad song, then you achieve it by treating the song exactly as if it were a cut for Sgt. Pepper. And last night, we met for our first rehearsal.
There are all the usual problems: Doug Clayton is directing a play and had call-backs tonight so he couldn't be there; Ezra was cutting film all day and was wiped out so he couldn't be there, even though he's the only true tenor in the group; and future rehearsals are still tenuous because Bill Robens and Dan Wingard are starting a show at Theatre of NOTE. I wish the phrase "herding cats" hadn't become such a cliché, because that's exactly what it's like trying to coordinate actors' schedules.
Now bear in mind, I am not musical. I love music, but I am not a musician. I love to sing, but I am not a singer. My pitch can wander if I don't pay careful attention, and my sense of rhythm is not what you'd call accurate. I took music theory in college and didn't do very well, not because the teacher was bad (in fact Tony Tommasini is now one of the music critics for the New York Times), but because I just couldn't wrap my head around the mathematical complexities of music.
With that said, I still have certain minor gifts that enable me to get along. I have a decent voice with a decent range, and my time singing madrigals taught me how to listen. But with this song, "2BX2U," much of what I learned with the madrigals is working against me: I learned to blend, but now they want our voices to compete; I learned to sing prettily, but now they want us rough; and of course I learned to sing in Latin, but now we sing of "Like a Roman in a roamin' region" for no good reason at all.
Nonetheless, there were moments. The guy who cowrote the song, Bill Newlin, would lead each of us through our individual melodies then we would put it all together--and suddenly, out would come this big great chord, and even with two voices missing we would all suddenly get very excited about the work we were doing.
Because it feels good to make a really good bad song. Remember that when you hear the final product, and please, forgive us for it.
Outta Sync is, as you may recall, about a brand-new boy band comprised of middle-aged geezers like me. The footage we saw at the party was delightful, and it included a rough cut of the music video that the boys made. That we made. But for music, we've only ever had the ragged demo that Bill Robens cut, ages ago. When we shot the video that's what we were all singing to, and no one had ever given any thought to whether there would be solo lines or any of that, so we all just sang everything.
Well, now there are solo lines--based mostly on who happens to be front-and-center in a given shot. (Has there ever been a case where the video was made before the song?) The tempo can't change without also having to futz around with film speeds; and if Bill comes up with a great new line, well too bad, we just can't change the song at this point. You might think that none of this really matters, because the song and the video are supposed to be bad, so why not just slap something together and let it be what it is?
To answer that, let me tell you a brief story.
Several years ago, freshly arrived in Chicago, Marc Rosenbush cast me in a one-act he was directing. (We knew each other at Emerson and didn't much care for each other; then happened to move to Chicago on the same weekend and he needed an actor but didn't know anyone, so that's the start of that.) It was a play called "cont(r)act," written by our friend Max Burbank (who may be a distant relative, since my grandmother was a Burbank). In it, there were these dance interludes where the girl (Suzanne Carney) dances elegantly and I dance comically. Easy enough for Suzanne, who is an actual dancer. Me, I tried very hard to dance comically. After only a couple rounds of this, Marc took me to one side. "Just dance the best you can. Trust me, it'll be funny." So I did, and it was, because I am not a dancer and my best efforts are just plain comical.
The lesson, of course, is that you can't just slap something together and hope it'll work. You have to work very hard to get the result you want, and if that result is supposed to be a bad song, then you achieve it by treating the song exactly as if it were a cut for Sgt. Pepper. And last night, we met for our first rehearsal.
There are all the usual problems: Doug Clayton is directing a play and had call-backs tonight so he couldn't be there; Ezra was cutting film all day and was wiped out so he couldn't be there, even though he's the only true tenor in the group; and future rehearsals are still tenuous because Bill Robens and Dan Wingard are starting a show at Theatre of NOTE. I wish the phrase "herding cats" hadn't become such a cliché, because that's exactly what it's like trying to coordinate actors' schedules.
Now bear in mind, I am not musical. I love music, but I am not a musician. I love to sing, but I am not a singer. My pitch can wander if I don't pay careful attention, and my sense of rhythm is not what you'd call accurate. I took music theory in college and didn't do very well, not because the teacher was bad (in fact Tony Tommasini is now one of the music critics for the New York Times), but because I just couldn't wrap my head around the mathematical complexities of music.
With that said, I still have certain minor gifts that enable me to get along. I have a decent voice with a decent range, and my time singing madrigals taught me how to listen. But with this song, "2BX2U," much of what I learned with the madrigals is working against me: I learned to blend, but now they want our voices to compete; I learned to sing prettily, but now they want us rough; and of course I learned to sing in Latin, but now we sing of "Like a Roman in a roamin' region" for no good reason at all.
Nonetheless, there were moments. The guy who cowrote the song, Bill Newlin, would lead each of us through our individual melodies then we would put it all together--and suddenly, out would come this big great chord, and even with two voices missing we would all suddenly get very excited about the work we were doing.
Because it feels good to make a really good bad song. Remember that when you hear the final product, and please, forgive us for it.
Monday, September 12, 2005
On Liberalism
Let's start with Churchill. He is reputed to have said "Any 20 year-old who isn't a liberal doesn't have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn't a conservative doesn't have a brain." (This might be apocryphal, and after searching through several Google pages I have yet to find this quote properly attributed to a particular speech or moment in time--it isn't even consistently worded.) Now this can certainly be taken at face value--Churchill was the toriest of Tories, and played highly partisan politics all his life. But I'm also tempted to look at this as something of an excuse he might once have made for the period when he ditched the Tory Party and joined Lloyd George's Labour Party--which was not so much an ideological decision as it was practical: the Tories had collectively dismissed Churchill to the corner of the room, so to speak, and only Lloyd George was offering him any chance at influence and power. So it's definitely tempting to think that, whenever Churchill said this (if he said it), he might have been trying to assign loftier goals to his period with Labour.
But I've often wondered whether there might be yet another way to look at what Churchill said. Was Churchill speaking strictly of parties, or was he perhaps speaking more broadly than that? Liberalism can be defined as a broadness of approach, a belief that there is more than one way to skin a cat, that it is in one's best interest to try any number of solutions to a problem. Conservatism, on the other hand, can be defined as holding fast to certain core principles and not wasting time and resources on other methods. To put it in modern political terms, the capital-C Conservative approach to the economy seems to revolve principally around tax cuts, in the belief that if The People have more money and The Government less, The People will do a better job of spending that money and so buoying the econonmy than The Government ever could. Liberals, however, might argue that The Government's higher taxation, when directed to a wide variety of socially beneficial programs, creates a safety net for all of The People that allows them to better flourish in the long run.
So maybe Churchill meant this: maybe in your youth, when you don't really know anything, you are inclined to just keep trying things in the hope that they'll work; but by the time you've grown and matured, you've already experimented and you have a clearer, more practical experience of what and does not work. To put it another way: Ted Kennedy, at his advanced age, is as conservative in his Liberalism as Ronald Reagan was conservative in his Conservatism. It's not that Kennedy is necessarily right, or that Reagan was necessarily wrong, or vice versa; it's that they lived their lives and made certain decisions and reached certain conclusions, but in the end they both were/are very conservative even while standing on opposite sides of the ideological fence.
Me, I'm a liberal Liberal. But I'm definitely getting more conservative, now that I'm forty--I've seen a lot of things tried that didn't really pan out that well. But there's this live John Lennon recording when he spoke to an audience and said (I'm quoting from memory) "Okay, so flower power didn't work out, big deal, let's try something else." I'm a confirmed Roosevelt Democrat and always have been--and remember that in the first several years of his administration, FDR was willing to try anything and everything to resolve the Depression. When something didn't work out, he discarded it and tried something different. That may make governance a bit more chaotic (a bit?), but when it yields bonanzas like Social Security, then it's hard to argue with the approach. I think of it as governmental empiricism: the evidence of things seen. If an idea works, you will see the results you want to see; if it doesn't work, you see results you don't want to see and you move on. It is, as near as can be, the scientific method applied to government: create a theory, test it, and if the experiment doesn't work then you create a new theory. This, to me, is Liberalism--in the inherently chaotic world of government, it is the most creative and the most scientific approach to the host of problems that government must deal with.
And as you would guess from calling myself a Roosevelt Democrat, yes, I do generally believe in a big federal government. There are things that only the feds can do: if left to their own devices, the Southern states would have never ratified any civil rights legislation. It took, let's be blunt about it, considerable federal bullying for the South to toe that particular line, and I firmly believe that the nation is a better nation because of it--even though the Democrats clearly paid a price for doing the right thing (Nixon's infamous, and highly effective, Southern Strategy).
All of which is in aid of my saying Yes, I am a proud Liberal. And anybody who wants to demonize the word "liberal," or the deeply-considered, deeply-felt reasons I have for being a Liberal, is just wasting my time. You won't ever catch me criticizing a Conservative for being a Conservative per se; there's nothing wrong with the philosophy, even if I disagree with its practical applications. And I wish like crazy that Democrats would wake up and stand up and declare that yes, they too are Liberals, and proud of it. Then maybe we could start to get something done around here.
Addendum, Sept. 19th: Just ran across a website dedicated to true-blue liberals; it'll even allow you to buy t-shirts and blue wristbands proclaiming your pride in liberal ideals. If you're one of us, the site is worth checking out.
But I've often wondered whether there might be yet another way to look at what Churchill said. Was Churchill speaking strictly of parties, or was he perhaps speaking more broadly than that? Liberalism can be defined as a broadness of approach, a belief that there is more than one way to skin a cat, that it is in one's best interest to try any number of solutions to a problem. Conservatism, on the other hand, can be defined as holding fast to certain core principles and not wasting time and resources on other methods. To put it in modern political terms, the capital-C Conservative approach to the economy seems to revolve principally around tax cuts, in the belief that if The People have more money and The Government less, The People will do a better job of spending that money and so buoying the econonmy than The Government ever could. Liberals, however, might argue that The Government's higher taxation, when directed to a wide variety of socially beneficial programs, creates a safety net for all of The People that allows them to better flourish in the long run.
So maybe Churchill meant this: maybe in your youth, when you don't really know anything, you are inclined to just keep trying things in the hope that they'll work; but by the time you've grown and matured, you've already experimented and you have a clearer, more practical experience of what and does not work. To put it another way: Ted Kennedy, at his advanced age, is as conservative in his Liberalism as Ronald Reagan was conservative in his Conservatism. It's not that Kennedy is necessarily right, or that Reagan was necessarily wrong, or vice versa; it's that they lived their lives and made certain decisions and reached certain conclusions, but in the end they both were/are very conservative even while standing on opposite sides of the ideological fence.
Me, I'm a liberal Liberal. But I'm definitely getting more conservative, now that I'm forty--I've seen a lot of things tried that didn't really pan out that well. But there's this live John Lennon recording when he spoke to an audience and said (I'm quoting from memory) "Okay, so flower power didn't work out, big deal, let's try something else." I'm a confirmed Roosevelt Democrat and always have been--and remember that in the first several years of his administration, FDR was willing to try anything and everything to resolve the Depression. When something didn't work out, he discarded it and tried something different. That may make governance a bit more chaotic (a bit?), but when it yields bonanzas like Social Security, then it's hard to argue with the approach. I think of it as governmental empiricism: the evidence of things seen. If an idea works, you will see the results you want to see; if it doesn't work, you see results you don't want to see and you move on. It is, as near as can be, the scientific method applied to government: create a theory, test it, and if the experiment doesn't work then you create a new theory. This, to me, is Liberalism--in the inherently chaotic world of government, it is the most creative and the most scientific approach to the host of problems that government must deal with.
And as you would guess from calling myself a Roosevelt Democrat, yes, I do generally believe in a big federal government. There are things that only the feds can do: if left to their own devices, the Southern states would have never ratified any civil rights legislation. It took, let's be blunt about it, considerable federal bullying for the South to toe that particular line, and I firmly believe that the nation is a better nation because of it--even though the Democrats clearly paid a price for doing the right thing (Nixon's infamous, and highly effective, Southern Strategy).
All of which is in aid of my saying Yes, I am a proud Liberal. And anybody who wants to demonize the word "liberal," or the deeply-considered, deeply-felt reasons I have for being a Liberal, is just wasting my time. You won't ever catch me criticizing a Conservative for being a Conservative per se; there's nothing wrong with the philosophy, even if I disagree with its practical applications. And I wish like crazy that Democrats would wake up and stand up and declare that yes, they too are Liberals, and proud of it. Then maybe we could start to get something done around here.
Addendum, Sept. 19th: Just ran across a website dedicated to true-blue liberals; it'll even allow you to buy t-shirts and blue wristbands proclaiming your pride in liberal ideals. If you're one of us, the site is worth checking out.
Sunday, September 11, 2005
Yes and No
I am not going to join in on the chorus of people criticizing the government's response to Hurricane Katrina. There were mistakes made, sure, but it's dangerous to ever let ourselves believe any government is going to do everything perfectly, every time. The storm was a big one, and in all fairness, it didn't look like it was going to be as big as it was until shortly before it reached landfall.
Bear in mind what my mother reported from Miami, when Katrina was only a Category 1 storm: "Everyone is shocked," she wrote, "at the amount of damage done by this small Cat. 1 hurricane. They are saying that the damage looks more like a Cat. 3 or 4." The storm then lost strength as it traveled over the peninsula and, as experts had predicted, it got stronger again once it reached open water in the Gulf of Mexico. But I don't believe anyone predicted it would gain that much strength--and by the time it did, it was almost on top of everyone already. There was enough time, really, for only one thing: to order the evacuation of New Orleans and get everybody out. Every effort had to bend toward that goal; then as the storm came on, really the only thing anyone can do is batten down the hatches and wait till it's over. Then there were the living to help, but the living numbered in the tens of thousands, and no matter how much we might like to believe otherwise, it takes time to mobilize troops and get them in place.
Much as I hate to agree with anyone in this crummy administration, the argument that local authorities are always going to be the first responders in such a situation is absolutely right. And comparisons to September 11th (pause to reflect; and move on) aren't fair, because as horrible as that was, it was still pretty localized--if it hadn't been, my friend Ann who lived three blocks away would not still be alive. Hurricane Katrina affected the Gulf coasts of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, along with the major city of New Orleans. That's a huge territory to try and deal with all at once. So no: I will not jump on the backs of the administration for having been slow to respond. It was terrible watching those people suffer for all those days, but I refuse to use their misery to score cheap political points.
Particularly when there are plenty of political points to be scored that aren't at all cheap. President Bush, for example, demonstrated stunning political tone-deafness by trying to keep to his schedule that first day, by giving speeches on Social Security and picking up that idiotic guitar. (His version of Dukakis in the tank, if you ask me.) Having just seen again footage of that moment when Bush was informed that a second plane had flown into the World Trade Center, I think we definitively know now that Bush is not quick on his feet. To put it mildly. Which would be okay, really, if the people around him--like, say, the people in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency--were quick on their feet.
I know, I just got through with a long defense of why the federal response wasn't as awful as everyone's claiming. But at the same time, it was no model of efficiency, either. But here's what happens when you hire your pals to run important government agencies. I won't belabor what others have written about so well, but clearly Michael Brown has no business even being an employee at FEMA, let alone its director. But in George Bush's world, loyalty is valued above all else, and Michael Brown had worshipped at the Republican altar sufficiently to be rewarded. Whether or not his appointment constituted good governance was, clearly, never once considered.
But worst of all was all those years of neglect before the storm ever came. As I noted before, John McPhee wrote powerfully of New Orleans's vulnerability to a major storm in 1989, and it was old news even then. But even though the city and state--not to mention the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers--had been pleading for money to reinforce the levee system, instead President Bush cut those funds. Why? Because he had a false war to pay for--and yes, I absolutely agree that those National Guardsmen should be at home defending their communities, and not overseas spilling their blood in a war of choice.
There's a new book called The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney. I haven't read it yet because it was only released two days ago, but I'm definitely interested because there seems to be a concerted effort by this administration in particular to dismiss science when it interferes with ideology. The warmer ocean water clearly contributed to Katrina's power, but Bush still insists that global warming is an unproven theory that needs "more study" (a few decades' more, if he could have his way). His U.S. Army Corps of Engineers knew the levee system could not stand up to a Category 4 storm, but he cut their funding because he needed the money for other, ideologically-driven purposes: tax cuts in a time of war; a war on the wrong people that only increases the national vulnerability to terrorism. And that's to say nothing of the utterly absurd "debate" over evolution.
As Salon writer Joe Conason asserts in a recent article (subscription required), Bush is unfit for command. Plain and simple. And the next three years look to be very long indeed.
Bear in mind what my mother reported from Miami, when Katrina was only a Category 1 storm: "Everyone is shocked," she wrote, "at the amount of damage done by this small Cat. 1 hurricane. They are saying that the damage looks more like a Cat. 3 or 4." The storm then lost strength as it traveled over the peninsula and, as experts had predicted, it got stronger again once it reached open water in the Gulf of Mexico. But I don't believe anyone predicted it would gain that much strength--and by the time it did, it was almost on top of everyone already. There was enough time, really, for only one thing: to order the evacuation of New Orleans and get everybody out. Every effort had to bend toward that goal; then as the storm came on, really the only thing anyone can do is batten down the hatches and wait till it's over. Then there were the living to help, but the living numbered in the tens of thousands, and no matter how much we might like to believe otherwise, it takes time to mobilize troops and get them in place.
Much as I hate to agree with anyone in this crummy administration, the argument that local authorities are always going to be the first responders in such a situation is absolutely right. And comparisons to September 11th (pause to reflect; and move on) aren't fair, because as horrible as that was, it was still pretty localized--if it hadn't been, my friend Ann who lived three blocks away would not still be alive. Hurricane Katrina affected the Gulf coasts of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, along with the major city of New Orleans. That's a huge territory to try and deal with all at once. So no: I will not jump on the backs of the administration for having been slow to respond. It was terrible watching those people suffer for all those days, but I refuse to use their misery to score cheap political points.
Particularly when there are plenty of political points to be scored that aren't at all cheap. President Bush, for example, demonstrated stunning political tone-deafness by trying to keep to his schedule that first day, by giving speeches on Social Security and picking up that idiotic guitar. (His version of Dukakis in the tank, if you ask me.) Having just seen again footage of that moment when Bush was informed that a second plane had flown into the World Trade Center, I think we definitively know now that Bush is not quick on his feet. To put it mildly. Which would be okay, really, if the people around him--like, say, the people in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency--were quick on their feet.
I know, I just got through with a long defense of why the federal response wasn't as awful as everyone's claiming. But at the same time, it was no model of efficiency, either. But here's what happens when you hire your pals to run important government agencies. I won't belabor what others have written about so well, but clearly Michael Brown has no business even being an employee at FEMA, let alone its director. But in George Bush's world, loyalty is valued above all else, and Michael Brown had worshipped at the Republican altar sufficiently to be rewarded. Whether or not his appointment constituted good governance was, clearly, never once considered.
But worst of all was all those years of neglect before the storm ever came. As I noted before, John McPhee wrote powerfully of New Orleans's vulnerability to a major storm in 1989, and it was old news even then. But even though the city and state--not to mention the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers--had been pleading for money to reinforce the levee system, instead President Bush cut those funds. Why? Because he had a false war to pay for--and yes, I absolutely agree that those National Guardsmen should be at home defending their communities, and not overseas spilling their blood in a war of choice.
There's a new book called The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney. I haven't read it yet because it was only released two days ago, but I'm definitely interested because there seems to be a concerted effort by this administration in particular to dismiss science when it interferes with ideology. The warmer ocean water clearly contributed to Katrina's power, but Bush still insists that global warming is an unproven theory that needs "more study" (a few decades' more, if he could have his way). His U.S. Army Corps of Engineers knew the levee system could not stand up to a Category 4 storm, but he cut their funding because he needed the money for other, ideologically-driven purposes: tax cuts in a time of war; a war on the wrong people that only increases the national vulnerability to terrorism. And that's to say nothing of the utterly absurd "debate" over evolution.
As Salon writer Joe Conason asserts in a recent article (subscription required), Bush is unfit for command. Plain and simple. And the next three years look to be very long indeed.
Friday, September 09, 2005
Things
Zen Noir recently screened during the Venice Film Festival, with our sales reps (Marc and Marla Halperin of Magic Lamp Releasing) attending and doing that magic thing they do. Some interesting people saw it, there are some interesting nibbles from distributors, and that's all very nice; the odd thing for me is the difference between this and the theatre experience. As a playwright I wasn't what you'd call screamingly successful--there were a couple of plays I wrote that got produced, but only locally in Chicago. So I never had the experience of something I wrote being produced elsewhere, that strange sensation I'm getting now, of something I helped to create that is finding its own life and journeying around the country, around the world. This thing we made over the course of a few very hot weeks in Topanga Canyon just played in Venice, and in Cannes before that. I've never been to Venice, but this movie I produced has. What an odd and delightful feeling. The closest to it I've ever felt was one year when my short play "Poised" was running at one theatre while at the same time I was performing in some Beckett one-acts at another theatre. That too was odd and delightful. I could get used to this sort of thing pretty easily.
Mr. Rosenbush is in Idaho this weekend at another festival, this one in Sun Valley, where, this being a spiritual film festival, there will be a lot of Buddhists, our key target audience. The Dalai Lama will be in town at the same time and Marc will be attending some sort of mass ceremony. The screening itself is Saturday night, during which I will be--
--at a party! Outta Sync's wrap party finally happens on Saturday night, four-plus months after we actually wrapped. The nice bit is that there is some footage edited together that everyone can see at the party; the odd bit is that we'll be celebrating the wrapping of principal photography just before some of us get involved again in reshoots and whatnot. In particular, on Tuesday the boys of the band begin rehearsing the final version of our hit single, "2 B neXt 2 U." We had a rough, recorded by Bill Robens, but now we're all going to participate. Time to find out how badly my voice has deteriorated since the last time I did any real singing, in 1989.
(Hey, wow--I went to Amazon to pull up the listing for "Fine Young Madrigals," and they're actually showing a couple copies in stock! I was given a few copies of the cassette tapes at the time but never got a CD--tried a couple months ago and Amazon couldn't find any. By gum, maybe this time it'll actually work out.)
And finally: editing in Final Cut Pro works much, much better if you begin with QuickTime movie clips. I accidentally skipped that little step recently, importing some iMovie clips (in .dv format) that we shot a couple months ago, and had endless trouble till Apple's invaluable message boards finally got me straightened out. But after spending all this time with Final Cut, and the manuals, I still feel like an absolute idiot most of the time. Very discouraging.
Mr. Rosenbush is in Idaho this weekend at another festival, this one in Sun Valley, where, this being a spiritual film festival, there will be a lot of Buddhists, our key target audience. The Dalai Lama will be in town at the same time and Marc will be attending some sort of mass ceremony. The screening itself is Saturday night, during which I will be--
--at a party! Outta Sync's wrap party finally happens on Saturday night, four-plus months after we actually wrapped. The nice bit is that there is some footage edited together that everyone can see at the party; the odd bit is that we'll be celebrating the wrapping of principal photography just before some of us get involved again in reshoots and whatnot. In particular, on Tuesday the boys of the band begin rehearsing the final version of our hit single, "2 B neXt 2 U." We had a rough, recorded by Bill Robens, but now we're all going to participate. Time to find out how badly my voice has deteriorated since the last time I did any real singing, in 1989.
(Hey, wow--I went to Amazon to pull up the listing for "Fine Young Madrigals," and they're actually showing a couple copies in stock! I was given a few copies of the cassette tapes at the time but never got a CD--tried a couple months ago and Amazon couldn't find any. By gum, maybe this time it'll actually work out.)
And finally: editing in Final Cut Pro works much, much better if you begin with QuickTime movie clips. I accidentally skipped that little step recently, importing some iMovie clips (in .dv format) that we shot a couple months ago, and had endless trouble till Apple's invaluable message boards finally got me straightened out. But after spending all this time with Final Cut, and the manuals, I still feel like an absolute idiot most of the time. Very discouraging.
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Eyes
If eyes are the window to the soul, what does it mean when my eyes must look out through bifocals?
So I'm having lunch today and a friend of mine needs a pain reliever out of the little first-aid box. "Which kind?" she wonders, and takes out a little packet which she holds under the light, directly over a table. Being the snarky fellow I am, I ask "What, you can only read over tables?" She laughs and tells the tale of how she discovered she needed glasses: how in her early twenties she always wondered why movies were never focused properly, and why anyone bought digital clocks when the numbers were unreadable, until a bit of night driving when she finally realized that she needed glasses.
For me, it was younger, but much the same. I was driving somewhere with Mom, who asked me what a sign on the right side of the road said (she was looking at something else). My answer was "How would I know? No one can read those things." Mom, whose eyesight stayed good into her forties, suddenly realized: at the age of 13, I already needed glasses.
Yeah, 13 was a fun age. I moved to a new neighborhood, started a new school, and got glasses and truly nasty acne, pretty much all at once. Puberty was a freight train straight to hell. Curiously, at exactly the same time I discovered theatre--so even though in my real life I was wearing neutral-colored, nondescript clothes, trying desperately to just blend in and not be noticed, I was also discovering that I was an actor, that I could stand in front of people and be noticed and even admired. That was the lifeline, the one thing that enabled me to survive.
The eyes, as they do, continued to slide, slowly. Each time I went to the doctor, the prescription was just slightly stronger. I tried variations on the eyeglasses, like those horrid indoor/outdoor glasses that would darken when you stepped into the sunlight; that only meant that they were a little too grey indoors, and not grey enough outdoors, neither one thing or another; and since they were made of glass rather than plastic, they were heavier and more uncomfortable and eventually started digging holes in the flesh of my face where they rested.
During college, I got contact lenses. True bliss, except for one thing: I couldn't get them in. When the doctor put them in, fine; removing them was a chore, but I could do it. But I just could not put the damn things in on my own. I sat there at the doctor's office in front of a mirror, trying and trying and failing and failing. In the meantime, this young girl waltzed in, sat at another mirror, popped in her lenses and waltzed back out. "Stupid girl," I murmured, and kept trying. The nurse was ready to declare that I couldn't do it and take my contacts back; I asked her to let me take them home overnight.
Much more time at the mirror, sitting at the kitchen table. Finally, Mom watched me for a couple minutes, then had an idea: with the left hand, two fingers hold the eye open while the right hand gets the contact on the eye; then use the left hand to grab the eyelid, lift it over the lens, and close the eye. The pressure of the closed eyelid would squeeze out the air bubble, and the lifting prevented the lens from getting caught and dislodged when I blinked. Pure parental brilliance, and now I could wear contacts.
All I had to do was remember to clean the contacts. Because that time when I didn't, it got bad. Ignored the whole enzyme cleaning process for weeks, then one night I was ushering for a show and noticed that each time the lights changed my eyes would feel a short sharp stab of pain. "Huh," I said. "Guess I should clean the contacts." I went home, cleaned the contacts, and went to bed. When I awoke the next morning I opened my eyes and shrieked with pain. The dirty lenses had actually scraped my corneas. I was in the dorms then, and had to get an R.A. to lead me like a blind man to a doctor's office, with big sunglasses on and my hands over my eyes.
But the eyes, they heal remarkably well. Remind me to tell you someday the story about the time I got a lit cigarette in my eye.
Now I wear "progressive" eyeglasses--the fancy-pants version of bifocals. With lenses getting smaller and smaller each time I buy them because that's the fashion, now I have these lenses where one region is for close, one region is for normal, one region is for distance, and the regions on the sides seem to just be for blurriness because that's all they ever really seem to do. It mostly means that I turn my head a lot, in order to look at something through the appropriate part of the lens; and sometimes when I drive and really need my peripheral vision, it's like I'm not wearing glasses at all.
I remember wondering when I was a kid: knowing that people's vision tends to get worse with age, maybe there would come a point when my original near-sightedness would meet up with my developing far-sightedness and I would have perfect vision again.
Yeah, it sounds stupid now, mostly because it is. I claim the folly of youth, and quite subtly the head cranes forward just a little so that I can look at the screen and see, really see, whether I'm spelling everything correctly. Does the screen need to be closer, or am I already discovering that new glasses will be required?
So I'm having lunch today and a friend of mine needs a pain reliever out of the little first-aid box. "Which kind?" she wonders, and takes out a little packet which she holds under the light, directly over a table. Being the snarky fellow I am, I ask "What, you can only read over tables?" She laughs and tells the tale of how she discovered she needed glasses: how in her early twenties she always wondered why movies were never focused properly, and why anyone bought digital clocks when the numbers were unreadable, until a bit of night driving when she finally realized that she needed glasses.
For me, it was younger, but much the same. I was driving somewhere with Mom, who asked me what a sign on the right side of the road said (she was looking at something else). My answer was "How would I know? No one can read those things." Mom, whose eyesight stayed good into her forties, suddenly realized: at the age of 13, I already needed glasses.
Yeah, 13 was a fun age. I moved to a new neighborhood, started a new school, and got glasses and truly nasty acne, pretty much all at once. Puberty was a freight train straight to hell. Curiously, at exactly the same time I discovered theatre--so even though in my real life I was wearing neutral-colored, nondescript clothes, trying desperately to just blend in and not be noticed, I was also discovering that I was an actor, that I could stand in front of people and be noticed and even admired. That was the lifeline, the one thing that enabled me to survive.
The eyes, as they do, continued to slide, slowly. Each time I went to the doctor, the prescription was just slightly stronger. I tried variations on the eyeglasses, like those horrid indoor/outdoor glasses that would darken when you stepped into the sunlight; that only meant that they were a little too grey indoors, and not grey enough outdoors, neither one thing or another; and since they were made of glass rather than plastic, they were heavier and more uncomfortable and eventually started digging holes in the flesh of my face where they rested.
During college, I got contact lenses. True bliss, except for one thing: I couldn't get them in. When the doctor put them in, fine; removing them was a chore, but I could do it. But I just could not put the damn things in on my own. I sat there at the doctor's office in front of a mirror, trying and trying and failing and failing. In the meantime, this young girl waltzed in, sat at another mirror, popped in her lenses and waltzed back out. "Stupid girl," I murmured, and kept trying. The nurse was ready to declare that I couldn't do it and take my contacts back; I asked her to let me take them home overnight.
Much more time at the mirror, sitting at the kitchen table. Finally, Mom watched me for a couple minutes, then had an idea: with the left hand, two fingers hold the eye open while the right hand gets the contact on the eye; then use the left hand to grab the eyelid, lift it over the lens, and close the eye. The pressure of the closed eyelid would squeeze out the air bubble, and the lifting prevented the lens from getting caught and dislodged when I blinked. Pure parental brilliance, and now I could wear contacts.
All I had to do was remember to clean the contacts. Because that time when I didn't, it got bad. Ignored the whole enzyme cleaning process for weeks, then one night I was ushering for a show and noticed that each time the lights changed my eyes would feel a short sharp stab of pain. "Huh," I said. "Guess I should clean the contacts." I went home, cleaned the contacts, and went to bed. When I awoke the next morning I opened my eyes and shrieked with pain. The dirty lenses had actually scraped my corneas. I was in the dorms then, and had to get an R.A. to lead me like a blind man to a doctor's office, with big sunglasses on and my hands over my eyes.
But the eyes, they heal remarkably well. Remind me to tell you someday the story about the time I got a lit cigarette in my eye.
Now I wear "progressive" eyeglasses--the fancy-pants version of bifocals. With lenses getting smaller and smaller each time I buy them because that's the fashion, now I have these lenses where one region is for close, one region is for normal, one region is for distance, and the regions on the sides seem to just be for blurriness because that's all they ever really seem to do. It mostly means that I turn my head a lot, in order to look at something through the appropriate part of the lens; and sometimes when I drive and really need my peripheral vision, it's like I'm not wearing glasses at all.
I remember wondering when I was a kid: knowing that people's vision tends to get worse with age, maybe there would come a point when my original near-sightedness would meet up with my developing far-sightedness and I would have perfect vision again.
Yeah, it sounds stupid now, mostly because it is. I claim the folly of youth, and quite subtly the head cranes forward just a little so that I can look at the screen and see, really see, whether I'm spelling everything correctly. Does the screen need to be closer, or am I already discovering that new glasses will be required?
Saturday, September 03, 2005
How to Fix The Brothers Grimm
In which yr. humble author suggests how a big Hollywood flop went wrong, and how it might, at enormous expense, be repaired.
First off: I love Terry Gilliam. I've already written about the pivotal role the Python boys played in my life, and of them, by far the best filmmaker is Gilliam. Brazil in particular is a movie whose influence on me has been enormous--in fact one of the biggest challenges Marc and I have in adapting City of Truth is keeping it away from Brazil territory. So everything I'm going to say about the movie comes from the position of a true fan, someone who wishes that Gilliam had a Spielberg-sized following so that Gilliam could always find the financing and support to do whatever on earth he feels like.
Marc and I went to see the movie last night, at the gorgeous Mann Village theater in Westwood, a true movie palace and one of the great perks about living in L.A. I was dismayed to walk in, on a Friday night of only the second weekend for this movie, and find the theater was nearly empty. The crowd, once the movie started, was probably no more than thirty people, maybe closer to twenty. Which means that the second-weekend falloff, to which Hollywood people pay close attention, is going to be dreadful, and the powers-that-pay will say "See? That Gilliam bastard is nothing but trouble, and he keeps losing money." (Never mind that his movies sell consistently on DVD, and I'm sure that in the long run he has always ended up making money for his backers.) But the reviews were middling, and on this particular weekend--when the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is far more absorbing, and terrifying, than any Hollywood movie, this kind of attendance was probably inevitable.
So what to do about the middling reviews? First off, as Marc noted after the movie, a filmmaker has to be allowed to strike out from time to time, particularly one who keeps reaching like Gilliam does. Gilliam films have never been modest: they always stretch out as far as they can, they're always audacious and original, and when they work they are spectacular (think Brazil, 12 Monkeys or The Fisher King). When they don't work (think The Adventures of Baron Munchausen), they're still interesting as hell, and on the whole I'd rather see a failure like Munchausen than a "success" like Armageddon. (Okay, that was an unfair comparison.) Here, I think, is how the movie could have been fixed (and yes, there are spoilers, so if you think you may rent this someday, you might want to stop right about now).
Perhaps the most glaring error is the lack of simplicity. I'm fascinated by the old folk tales too, and from time to time I've tried to write one. They are fearsomely difficult, because they are compact like a poem, they are plain-spoken even when their content is florid, and while their metaphorical content is often quite deep, on the surface they are all plot. A character is introduced (very quickly), finds him/herself in a situation (very quickly), there is a turn or two, and then some sort of resolution happens (very quickly). In Brothers Grimm, nothing happens quickly, none of it is clean and compact, and the style is even more florid than the content. The first half meanders badly: the brothers go into the forest, they come out of the forest, they go back in, they come back out, they go back in, etc. All this endless back-and-forthing before the story ever really starts to happen. The first bit of the movie is fine, and I like the idea of the brothers as shysters who find themselves in a real situation; their introduction to the accursed village of Marbaden works fine, for the most part; but once they go into the forest with Angelika, they should have just stayed there and had their adventure.
Granted, this means the movie is an hour long and no studio would ever back it. That's one of the problems with a fairy tale-based project like this one. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine faced a similar problem with the somewhat similar Into the Woods, and their brilliant solution was to have the characters' adventures take up the first act; then the second act is devoted to the "ever after" period when ever after turns out to be not so great as the characters had hoped. So there are solutions to be found, but Gilliam (and screenwriter Ehren Kruger) didn't find one. Padding the first half is simply a recipe for disaster.
There are also tone problems, particularly in the performances. There isn't much characterization going on here: the brothers are never more than lightly sketched in, which is in keeping with the fairy-tale nature of the stories (and I don't know that the "magic beans" backstory really adds all that much), so Heath Ledger substitutes a kind of frenzied hyperactivity for characterization, with awful results. His performance is just like Brad Pitt's in 12 Monkeys, all flurry without foundation. In the hands of a really good character actor, all that frenzy might have been grounded in something, but in Ledger's hands it just felt arbitrary and annoying and distracting--the most aggravating performance of the year. Where you do have real character actors, like Jonathan Pryce and Peter Stormare, there is just as much cartoonish clowning, but it's easier to buy into. Even with these two, though, there is a problem: the cartoonishness keeps you from taking them seriously, thus seriously undercutting their effectiveness as villains. (And I never bought into Stormare's conversion into a good guy toward the end.)
Fortunately, I know how to fix that: when Cavaldi and Delatombe first interrogate the brothers, the brothers' two dim-witted assistants are threatened with death in order to goad the brothers into confessing that they are frauds. Much later in the film, the dim-witted assistants are killed by Delatombe; but if they were killed during that first interrogation, then Delatombe has real credibility as a villain. We know what he's capable of, and all the clowning suddenly has some credibility--he's now a dangerous clown. This would also add some tension to the later moment when Delatombe is threatening Angelika--but since the dim-wits got through it okay, we never worry about Angelika's fate.
So there you are: how to fix The Brothers Grimm. Streamline the first half and get the characters into their adventure much faster; make the villains more credible by having them do something actually villainous right at the top; and forget all the fussiness and let the brothers be real people surrounded by the supernatural and the outrageous (note that Lena Headey's Angelika feels completely real throughout, and is the one character we ever feel anything for). Make these changes, while keeping the spectacular visual style and the high-stakes adventure that makes the second half work so well, and I think you could have a pretty damn good movie here.
And hell, the reshoots should only cost five or six million. A pittance!
First off: I love Terry Gilliam. I've already written about the pivotal role the Python boys played in my life, and of them, by far the best filmmaker is Gilliam. Brazil in particular is a movie whose influence on me has been enormous--in fact one of the biggest challenges Marc and I have in adapting City of Truth is keeping it away from Brazil territory. So everything I'm going to say about the movie comes from the position of a true fan, someone who wishes that Gilliam had a Spielberg-sized following so that Gilliam could always find the financing and support to do whatever on earth he feels like.
Marc and I went to see the movie last night, at the gorgeous Mann Village theater in Westwood, a true movie palace and one of the great perks about living in L.A. I was dismayed to walk in, on a Friday night of only the second weekend for this movie, and find the theater was nearly empty. The crowd, once the movie started, was probably no more than thirty people, maybe closer to twenty. Which means that the second-weekend falloff, to which Hollywood people pay close attention, is going to be dreadful, and the powers-that-pay will say "See? That Gilliam bastard is nothing but trouble, and he keeps losing money." (Never mind that his movies sell consistently on DVD, and I'm sure that in the long run he has always ended up making money for his backers.) But the reviews were middling, and on this particular weekend--when the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is far more absorbing, and terrifying, than any Hollywood movie, this kind of attendance was probably inevitable.
So what to do about the middling reviews? First off, as Marc noted after the movie, a filmmaker has to be allowed to strike out from time to time, particularly one who keeps reaching like Gilliam does. Gilliam films have never been modest: they always stretch out as far as they can, they're always audacious and original, and when they work they are spectacular (think Brazil, 12 Monkeys or The Fisher King). When they don't work (think The Adventures of Baron Munchausen), they're still interesting as hell, and on the whole I'd rather see a failure like Munchausen than a "success" like Armageddon. (Okay, that was an unfair comparison.) Here, I think, is how the movie could have been fixed (and yes, there are spoilers, so if you think you may rent this someday, you might want to stop right about now).
Perhaps the most glaring error is the lack of simplicity. I'm fascinated by the old folk tales too, and from time to time I've tried to write one. They are fearsomely difficult, because they are compact like a poem, they are plain-spoken even when their content is florid, and while their metaphorical content is often quite deep, on the surface they are all plot. A character is introduced (very quickly), finds him/herself in a situation (very quickly), there is a turn or two, and then some sort of resolution happens (very quickly). In Brothers Grimm, nothing happens quickly, none of it is clean and compact, and the style is even more florid than the content. The first half meanders badly: the brothers go into the forest, they come out of the forest, they go back in, they come back out, they go back in, etc. All this endless back-and-forthing before the story ever really starts to happen. The first bit of the movie is fine, and I like the idea of the brothers as shysters who find themselves in a real situation; their introduction to the accursed village of Marbaden works fine, for the most part; but once they go into the forest with Angelika, they should have just stayed there and had their adventure.
Granted, this means the movie is an hour long and no studio would ever back it. That's one of the problems with a fairy tale-based project like this one. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine faced a similar problem with the somewhat similar Into the Woods, and their brilliant solution was to have the characters' adventures take up the first act; then the second act is devoted to the "ever after" period when ever after turns out to be not so great as the characters had hoped. So there are solutions to be found, but Gilliam (and screenwriter Ehren Kruger) didn't find one. Padding the first half is simply a recipe for disaster.
There are also tone problems, particularly in the performances. There isn't much characterization going on here: the brothers are never more than lightly sketched in, which is in keeping with the fairy-tale nature of the stories (and I don't know that the "magic beans" backstory really adds all that much), so Heath Ledger substitutes a kind of frenzied hyperactivity for characterization, with awful results. His performance is just like Brad Pitt's in 12 Monkeys, all flurry without foundation. In the hands of a really good character actor, all that frenzy might have been grounded in something, but in Ledger's hands it just felt arbitrary and annoying and distracting--the most aggravating performance of the year. Where you do have real character actors, like Jonathan Pryce and Peter Stormare, there is just as much cartoonish clowning, but it's easier to buy into. Even with these two, though, there is a problem: the cartoonishness keeps you from taking them seriously, thus seriously undercutting their effectiveness as villains. (And I never bought into Stormare's conversion into a good guy toward the end.)
Fortunately, I know how to fix that: when Cavaldi and Delatombe first interrogate the brothers, the brothers' two dim-witted assistants are threatened with death in order to goad the brothers into confessing that they are frauds. Much later in the film, the dim-witted assistants are killed by Delatombe; but if they were killed during that first interrogation, then Delatombe has real credibility as a villain. We know what he's capable of, and all the clowning suddenly has some credibility--he's now a dangerous clown. This would also add some tension to the later moment when Delatombe is threatening Angelika--but since the dim-wits got through it okay, we never worry about Angelika's fate.
So there you are: how to fix The Brothers Grimm. Streamline the first half and get the characters into their adventure much faster; make the villains more credible by having them do something actually villainous right at the top; and forget all the fussiness and let the brothers be real people surrounded by the supernatural and the outrageous (note that Lena Headey's Angelika feels completely real throughout, and is the one character we ever feel anything for). Make these changes, while keeping the spectacular visual style and the high-stakes adventure that makes the second half work so well, and I think you could have a pretty damn good movie here.
And hell, the reshoots should only cost five or six million. A pittance!
Friday, September 02, 2005
An Excerpt
I think that from time to time I'll run little excerpts from things I'm working on. There probably won't be much from scripts, because the formatting just doesn't feel like it would fit here; but prose pieces should be dandy. So to start, here are the opening paragraphs from a novel I've been working on for forever, titled Thereby Hangs a Tale. Bear in mind that "Thereby" here is the name of a character, and that it rhymes with the word "therapy."
Thereby thereby sailed the open sea, sailed said sea on his broad flat feet, spray and spume to windward and yon. An honest fellow Thereby, a royal he yet common too, hair a maze of ratnest, feet the scope of schooners, lungs that bellowed in out in two three four. He carried nestled in his mouth thirty-one teeth and one acorn, lodged in a neatly nesting right-side space where once had been a thirty-second tooth.
Flying fish flew into his mouth, happy salmon jumped and spawned and died, eggs rectumed back into the roeing sea, Thereby a fertile fecund fellow of twelvehand high. Locomotion was a puzzle. Thereby galloped across the mist-coated nymphish sea, legs long and loggish, bones of anthracite, lips marbled and eyes lashed to the ever-distant horizon.
Thereby was undeniably in motion, for otherwise would surely sink the ship of foot; yet progress was problematic, as the horizon always remained a horizon. It was always ahead, a thin strip of land always visible; but after all this time, it never had grown the least bit closer. Forward he had sailed for a time past memory; but he was no closer than at the beginning of his improbable journey. Had he only ever traveled round and round, or was there another explanation not yet found?
And then, in the very next chapter, you have this about a guy in Chicago at the Oak Street Beach:
And in this public place, both surrounded and ignored, Honest Ave walked parallel to the shoreline for a time, right through the remaining bathers, stepped on some beach towels, knocked over a small sandcastle, blithely walked through a volleyball game, broke someone’s sunglasses, and reached the farthest end of the beach where none were any longer. Without losing stride, Avery O’Neill pressed forward, felt the water gush quickly into his shoes, pants and underwear, felt his shirt bellying with air, and eagerly sucked in the water once it reached his mouth. By then he could not walk but had to swim a little, his shoes falling off and away, till he reached a good depth and then pushed himself below.
Staying under was a tremendous effort, and he realized why his predecessors put stones in their pockets.
What's that you say? These sound like they're chapters from entirely different stories, you say? Huh. How very interesting. Wonder why that would be?
Thereby thereby sailed the open sea, sailed said sea on his broad flat feet, spray and spume to windward and yon. An honest fellow Thereby, a royal he yet common too, hair a maze of ratnest, feet the scope of schooners, lungs that bellowed in out in two three four. He carried nestled in his mouth thirty-one teeth and one acorn, lodged in a neatly nesting right-side space where once had been a thirty-second tooth.
Flying fish flew into his mouth, happy salmon jumped and spawned and died, eggs rectumed back into the roeing sea, Thereby a fertile fecund fellow of twelvehand high. Locomotion was a puzzle. Thereby galloped across the mist-coated nymphish sea, legs long and loggish, bones of anthracite, lips marbled and eyes lashed to the ever-distant horizon.
Thereby was undeniably in motion, for otherwise would surely sink the ship of foot; yet progress was problematic, as the horizon always remained a horizon. It was always ahead, a thin strip of land always visible; but after all this time, it never had grown the least bit closer. Forward he had sailed for a time past memory; but he was no closer than at the beginning of his improbable journey. Had he only ever traveled round and round, or was there another explanation not yet found?
And then, in the very next chapter, you have this about a guy in Chicago at the Oak Street Beach:
And in this public place, both surrounded and ignored, Honest Ave walked parallel to the shoreline for a time, right through the remaining bathers, stepped on some beach towels, knocked over a small sandcastle, blithely walked through a volleyball game, broke someone’s sunglasses, and reached the farthest end of the beach where none were any longer. Without losing stride, Avery O’Neill pressed forward, felt the water gush quickly into his shoes, pants and underwear, felt his shirt bellying with air, and eagerly sucked in the water once it reached his mouth. By then he could not walk but had to swim a little, his shoes falling off and away, till he reached a good depth and then pushed himself below.
Staying under was a tremendous effort, and he realized why his predecessors put stones in their pockets.
What's that you say? These sound like they're chapters from entirely different stories, you say? Huh. How very interesting. Wonder why that would be?
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