Free Day

It has reached the point that this is what I now describe as a "day off":

The usual run of Sunday errands in the morning. Laundry, the grocery store, exercising, that sort of thing. Then settle down at the computer for about ten pages of typing in Lightwheel's business plan, adding comments for review by the partners. A considerable amount of reading with regard to a future dream project. In the evening, a logistical problem crops up requiring a lengthy phone call to sort out how much our plans for the next film might have to change. (As we realize that the stories Marc will tell on the DVD Director's Commentary track have already begun.) And then the usual evening's-end washing of dishes, brushing of teeth, etc.

This, by comparison with every other day for the past couple months, felt like blessed luxury, and I came out of it feeling remarkably relaxed. And yet, right there in the middle, at about 3:00, I suddenly found myself with nothing in particular to do, and just kind of stood there, spinning, trying to figure out how to kill some time till the Oscars began. It was a very strange feeling, the idea that I had more time than I knew what to do with. It didn't last, but it made for a nice change of pace.

Can Van the Man Do What Van Can?

I grew disheartened before leaving for the Van Morrison concert Wednesday night. After poking around on the internet, I was reminded that Mr. Morrison has what some have called a prickly personality, probably a result of an intense shyness, that onstage can lead to unpleasant behavior. He has been known to spend most of a concert facing upstage, away from the audience; he has been known to berate an audience for perceived misconduct; and he has been known to perform for just ten minutes, get angry at something, then stalk offstage. So when I left for the concert, it was with a sense of real trepidation: would I get Good Van, or the other one? Would my expensive ticket turn out to be a complete waste of money and time?

Traffic was typically horrible, and just as I searched for the right door into the Gibson Amphitheatre I could hear from within "Please welcome to the stage...!" I found the door, found the right aisle, found the right seat, and the first number was already underway, with the band's lead guitarist handling the vocals. Immediately I could tell that the band was a good one: sharp and solid, just as you'd expect from the notoriously demanding Van Morrison. For the second number they launched into the sublime "Into the Mystic," which was handled by Van's daughter Shana. I wasn't quite impressed--she has a big voice, smoky and dark, but I also thought her voice a little harsh.

The third number, and out he came, Van the Man, stalking centerstage with his now-trademark hat covering his bald spot. He took up his place behind his microphone and rarely moved from there. Van does not dance, he does not smile, he rarely interacts with the audience more than to say "Thank you" when people applaud. But I've seen this sort of thing before: Lou Reed's performance in Chicago a few years ago was almost identical, and it came off not as arrogance but confidence. The same here: Van knows what he does, isn't at all interested in empty showmanship, and simply focuses strictly on the music.

And on Wednesday, the result was terrific. There was only a minimal lightshow, nothing like the Pink Floyd concerts I saw recently; there was no set, and in fact the band was clustered tightly in the center of the stage, leaving vast empty areas all around them, as if they were a safe musical cocoon for Van to hide inside. The Man's voice was flawless, and even though I only recognized about half the numbers he performed (geez, what a deep catalogue of tunes he's built up in 40 years!) it was all an example of the perfect mastery of songcraft. He epitomizes the performer who "makes it look easy," even though we know how torturous he finds it onstage--but since he was due to get an award the very next night, I think that overall Van was feeling pretty good about things, and it showed in his performance. There was energy, there was enthusiasm, even if he never smiled, even if he never said "You guys are great!" or anything pandering like that. It all was made manifest in the performance, in the music, in that one true place where Van Morrison has lived his entire life.

Review vs. Critique

I've always hated those "There are two kinds of people" comparisons, because they are inevitably reductionist, often to the point of absurdity. With that said, there are definitely two types of movie reviewers: those who critique a film, and those who simply review it. To me, a critique is the more stringent of the two forms, comprising a critical (from the same root, obviously) appraisal of the movie's relative merits and demerits, while a review is exactly that: a re-view, a going-over-again of the movie's contents, with a particular emphasis on the reviewer's experience of the movie rather than a more objective evaluation of the movie's content and themes. Or to put it another way, a critique is about the movie; a review is about the reviewer.

Here are a couple illustrations, pulled from the Rotten Tomatoes site's collection of critiques and reviews of a truly superior movie, Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, both from critics/reviewers who didn't like the film:

Stephanie Zacharek of Salon says that Eternal Sunshine "represents a failure of nerve," complaining that its intricate structure interferes with the aching beauty of the relationship at the heart of the movie. She writes:

It's as if young filmmakers fear that their audiences will become bored with a movie if they don't have a clever mind-boggler to wrestle with along the way (the equivalent of a magnetic bingo game on a long car trip). In grappling with these perplexing riddles, we're supposedly exercising our intellect. But isn't it also possible that we're using them as a handy diversion, a way of distancing ourselves from emotions that might be too strong for us to deal with easily? Labyrinthine plots are supposed to stimulate us. But are they really just distracting us from the work at hand -- the work of feeling?

A fair point, in which Ms. Zacharek brings her concerns from the specific to the general, asking whether modern moviemakers are afraid to just Go There. Now, by contrast, the reviewer who calls himself "The Cranky Critic" also grouses about the movie's stylistic conceits, but in a manner that never rises above itself:

...Kaufman has now moved into the realm of rubbing the viewer's nose in how clever he is. It's a very strange feeling to walk out of a screening thinking little of the actors or the story or its gimmick; the only thought wafting through our deteriorating gray matter was "gee, that was clever writing." Good writing is only the starting point for good film making. We should not be thinking about the writing, and only the writing, when all is said and done. That was the case with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a film so dead on target with the mind set taught in film school that it will have cinerati dancing in the aisles. Everyone else gets some chuckles and a whole mess'a clever visual effects to drive the story along.

Which begs the question: why does this guy take the time to set himself up as a movie critic when he doesn't seem to like movies? Or rather, when his view of what movies can or ought to be is so rudimentary, so narrow? There is all over his review that rampant anti-intellectualism that disguises itself as a reverence for "authenticity," but betrays itself over and over again as what it is: a fear of intellect, of challenge, of being asked to participate in the artistic experience at hand.

Consider this, from Cranky's "about me" page: "There is no applause for intellectual musings over entertainment value in Cranky's world, 'cuz Cranky doesn't live in the stratified world of private screenings and lavish PR parties." It is, of course, a false comparison: plenty of people don't get invited to private screenings or PR parties, but they're perfectly happy to engage a film on its own merits, however challenging (or not) those merits might be. It's a potent reverse snobbery in which a reviewer represents himself as an Ordinary Guy, claiming that in a democracy, the Ordinary Guy is king. Anything else is elitism, oligarchy, and that smacks of, you know, Socialism or even Commie-dom.

Then, of course, there is the fact that on the internet, anybody can start a website and call himself a critic. For these people, the art of the review deteriorates completely: "This movie was boring and it sucked" becomes the be-all and end-all of criticism: I didn't like it, therefore it sucks. No appreciation for other points of view, and any point of view that does differ from the reviewer's is automatically pretentious and elitist.

Zacharek's concerns, however, are exactly the opposite: "...there are moments in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" that bring us as close as anyone should ever come to staring at the sun. The movie's warmth is irresistible; the risk of getting burned should have been left to us." This is (a) better writing in and of itself; and (b) an urgent plea for this artful movie to be both simpler and more complex, all at the same time--simpler in its artifice but more complex in its emotional search. Zacharek is frustrated because the movie isn't artful enough, her frustrations with complexity a result of a sense that they interfered with (and obscured) the beautiful story at the center of it all.

Now me, I loved the movie almost unreservedly, and didn't find myself distracted by the things that distracted Ms. Zacharek, so I don't happen to agree with her criticism--but I respect it, and it makes me take an even harder look at a film I love, to see if maybe there's something I should have been paying better attention to. That's good criticism; Cranky, he does nothing to elevate my experience of the movie, he just makes me awfully glad that I'm not him.

Lightwheel Entertainment

We have begun a new company--arising from and yet unrelated to Zenmovie, LLC. The new entity will, in future, serve as the umbrella for everything we do, and it is for this company that we recruited Monica Kim to serve as our third partner. After several days of running through every name we could possibly imagine (I'm still annoyed that Mythos was taken), we finally settled on Lightwheel Entertainment, Inc.

What does it mean? Well, we were initially thinking about spinning wheels, turning straw into film, and saw the wheel itself as a reel of film, a wheel of light. But then I discovered this--a phenomenon known as a marine lightwheel, one of those unexplained wonders that is probably just bioluminescent algae or plankton, organized into colonies, set into motion in the sea. But I loved the image, and found that it suited our mission very well, that a broad description of one phenomenon matched with the kind of movies we want to make: something mysterious, just below the surface.

And so we are named. Filed the papers last week, got our employer ID number, all that. We all have murderous to-do lists already, we have registered several versions of the domain name, we don't yet have a website but we will when the time is right. Lightwheel will be a production company above all else, probably working on co-productions with other production companies, and we have already begun the process of getting our first project off the ground--maybe even our first two projects.

Can't wait for the day when we first see our logo, a wheel of light turning beneath the surface of the sea, flickering across a movie screen. The start of something, right here.

"All Access"

There's this quark-like organization called the Sherwood Oaks Experimental College, which simultaneously does and does not exist. It has no physical presence except in the body of its founder, Gary Shusett. This virtual school exists to serve the creative community in Los Angeles, chiefly by creating the usual sorts of seminars, but with built-in opportunities to meet the participants and/or pitch to them. (The all-important "pitch" is where you briefly describe your project, hopefully in such a way as to make the pitchee decide that it sounds like the greatest movie idea since Gunga Din and should be filmed immediately. Which, of course, almost never actually happens.) This past weekend, partly in conjunction with the Writers Guild Awards, Gary staged what was called the "Screenwriters All Access" weekend.

The basic idea was simple: he would invite Hollywood players of all stripes to participate in panel discussions, and afterward, we participants would mob the front of the room in an unholy mass and try to get some face time with whichever panelist we thought might best Make Our Dreams Come True. But sometimes this basic model was improved upon: a lunch wherein a panelist would sit at your table and you could have a conversation at length; or breakout sessions in which the mob would break into smaller groups that could sit down with an individual panelist for a while. There were also traditional pitching sessions, and sometimes these elements could combine: thus, on Saturday Marc and I pitched City of Truth to Bridget Tyler from Red Wagon, then half an hour later Bridget ended up at our lunch table.

There was a kind of Socratic dialectic happening when all the panels were considered together. On the one hand there were the agents and the executives, who were all about numbers and trends; on the other hand were the writers and the directors, the people talking about art. If you were able to reconcile these very different discussions, you might begin to construct a synthesis, a framework for navigating your way through this town where both sides of the equation are inescapable.

Just one example of the numbers-and-trends people: a production company executive who flat-out told all we young screenwriters, "Don't write what you're passionate about." This guy was only interested in the surefire thing, the movie that did not resemble some past hit but was a carbon copy of some past hit. In other words, he doesn't give a fig for the artistic side of the equation and only wants to look at properties that will make his company, and him, more money. What was worse, he was proud of his position, and clearly considered himself quite daring and bold for having the guts to Speak Truth unto us.

He is, of course, a moron. A smart moron but still a moron. When introducing himself, he made an exaggerated claim about some software he helped design that is now quite famous, and said that now that he had all that money he could turn his attentions to whatever he wanted; and this is what he's choosing to do with his time on earth. All that money, all those possibilities, everything he could be doing with wealth and power, and he chooses to make cookie-cutter movies that say nothing, and then to go sit on panels, crush the dreams of dreamers, and act all proud of himself as some kind of innovator. He is the worst that Hollywood has to offer, and I was glad when Bridget-from-Red Wagon (a company with some real movies to its credit, and good ones, like Gladiator, Jarhead and Memoirs of a Geisha) told me that this guy will almost certainly be out of the industry within three years. It's a damn shame that someone just like him will certainly move in to take his place.

But by happy chance, after this panel finally concluded (I eventually exercised my critic's prerogative, and fell asleep on them), another came up comprised of the directors Nicholas Meyer, Richard Benjamin, Pen Densham and Henry Jaglom. They proved to be an unexpectedly great combination, with some serious credits to their name: Meyer is a terrific writer/director whose work includes Star Trek II (the best of them all), The Day After and Time After Time; Benjamin, the well-known comic actor, also directed the utterly wonderful My Favorite Year, with Peter O'Toole gallavanting gloriously; Densham is probably best known as the screenwriter of Kevin Costner's Robin Hood movie (the end result was not his fault, he didn't direct it); and Jaglom is a longtime indie stalwart who is probably best known for directing Orson Welles in his last screen role. They were all very bright, with well-considered opinions about directing, about film, about art.

But it was Nick Meyer who said the most valuable thing I heard the whole weekend. It was, simply, this: "There is no formula." As he said it, I realized that every seminar of this sort is crammed full of people who are trying to find The Formula, the to-do list that will, once completed, make them into Hollywood players. They believe that this formula is a closely-guarded secret, kept in a vault somewhere in the Valley, but that every once in a rare while someone might just decide to spill the beans and reveal the formula, if only you can schmooze them well enough at an event like this one. But Meyer said it plainly and inescapably: "There is no formula." There is no single path through the Hollywood jungle, everyone's experience will be unique to him/herself, and there's really nothing he can tell anyone about how to make films or how to succeed in the film industry.

I talked to him afterward and he only reinforced the point. He came up in the biz back in 1971, and it's all so different now that his story would be meaningless to anyone today. It's exactly for this reason that he avoids ever telling personal anecdotes at events like this one (and anecdotes are the life's blood of pretty much everyone in town when he gets up in front of a crowd): because he doesn't want people to think for a second that if they just do what he did in a given circumstance, then they too will succeed like he did. But it's not true.

Eventually the "all access" part of the weekend just kinda disappears: by Sunday evening, as the Writers Guild Awards were gearing up one floor down, Gary Shusett started rounding up the Big Names and herding them in to talk to us for a few minutes. But by then there was no chance of actually talking to any of these folks: David Milch, J.J. Abrams, Oscar nominees Michael Arndt and Guillermo Arriaga, Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry, Jon Cassar from 24 and B.J. Novak from The Office, even CAA chairman Rick Nicita, they came in for a few or for several minutes, said whatever was on their minds, maybe answered a question or two, and then they were gone with the next celebrity on his/her way in. It was fun, but I had already learned everything I needed to learn two days before.

Eventually, Marc ended up as a panelist himself. As a writer/producer who actually had gotten his movie into theaters, he was one step ahead of most of the other attendees, so Gary put him on an early-Sunday directors' panel. We worked out a joke before he went up: "Yesterday I was one of you guys, sitting out there, which is an example of how fast the industry can turn." (Laugh number one.) "And in about an hour I'll be sitting with you guys again, which is also an example of how fast the industry can turn." (Laugh number two.) Funny how people were treating him just that little bit differently after he'd been one of the panelists....

Really, the most valuable part of such a weekend is networking. We met some tremendous people, such as Autumn McAlpin, a terrific columnist from the Orange County Register whose work I've been enjoying today, and Maurice Daniel Oulay, an African-born filmmaker currently working on a documentary about poverty in Africa that I'm looking forward to seeing. (To name only two of the many.) It's impossible to know which of these new contacts might prove invaluable someday; a few years ago, Marc was at a Film Independent event and happened to be seated next to someone who is now our new business partner, Monica Kim. Any chance encounter at such an event could prove to be the crucial turning point in a career; and since we now know that there is no formula, these contacts are really the best--perhaps the only--reason to go.

The Wheels of Justice

The court appearance was down by the airport, and as it happens, I've got a friend who lives close by: Monica Kim, the production designer on Zen Noir and, as it happens, our new business partner. (Say wha? Yeah, I'll get to that in a couple days--not much time to write today, for reasons that I will also talk about in a couple other days.) And since Monica has a three year old (the delightful Alexander), she's always up pretty early. So I was able to beat the worst of the morning traffic, visit with nice people, have a gooey cinnamon bun, and then went off to the courthouse to do my part in making a Bad Guy go away.

Or not.

See, a while back I picked a face out of a photo line-up, but only with about 60% confidence that he was actually the right person (turns out that when there's a knife involved, the only thing you really pay attention to is the knife). The person that face belongs to was arrested for a home-invasion robbery. But since my ID wasn't conclusive, he was never charged with my robbery--therefore there was no reason for my being there. Or, as the young and harried Assistant D.A. said to me, "Geez, I have no idea how you ended up on the subpoena list. I'm very sorry."

And so I nodded, assured them I am happy to help in any way I possibly can with any other aspect of, you know, my case, got back in my car and drove away in what was now height-of-rush-hour traffic.

Never even got to see the accused. Maybe the sight of a real person, rather than a photo, might have triggered my memory more effectively, but I'll never know. The wheels of justice, they are made of stone. Grinding slowly along a stone road. And they're square.

J'accuse!

There was that first twinge of worry when I came home last week and found an envelope from the L.A. Police Department wedged into the doorjamb, because that's just one of those things that will always make you nervous, like your phone ringing at three in the morning. But inside the envelope, I was delighted to find a witness subpoena from the detective in charge of my robbery case. (This link should bring you to a page with all my previous posts on this subject.)

Someone has been arrested and arraigned, and the preliminary hearing is tomorrow. Curiously, his name isn't Hispanic at all, which might just mean that the person arraigned is the ringleader, which would suit me just fine. (I will hold off on actually recording his name in a public place until he's a little further along the road toward establishing his massive, overwhelming guilt.)

(I am so tempted to pull a Python here [from "The Mouse Problem" in episode two]--"A typical case, whom we shall refer to as Mr A, although his real name is Arthur Jackson, 32A Milton Avenue, Hounslow, Middlesex." But I won't.)

At the prelim, they are (according to the court's website) chiefly interested in determining whether there is sufficient evidence to bind the accused over for trial, and I hear from the detective that there is one other victim who will be testifying. So this is just the beginning of a long process, and there are a thousand ways it could all fritter away into nothing. But here's hoping that tomorrow I get to do my part, my tiny part, to make it that much less likely that someone else out for a nice walk doesn't have to deal with thugs with knives.