You, Me and the Mythos

Here’s one advantage of keeping two blogs: linked entries. I’ll talk about the documentary I just watched here, but I’ll discuss one of the ideas it raises over on the Damn Lies blog. Collect the full set!

Over at Internet Marketing for Filmmakers, our current clients include Steven and Whitney Boe, two charming and clever folks who have created a film called Mythic Journeys. And though we’ve worked on some fine films, this one happens to come closest to my own sensibilities, so I want to rave about it a little, not to try and goose its sales (though its sales deserve to be spectacular), but simply because I like it a lot and feel like raving a little.

Okay, I always feel like raving a little. But here it’ll be specific raving.



It’s an odd duck of a film, part talking-heads interviews, and part narrative. With puppets. The backbone of the film is a retelling of a famous Indian story translated as “The Bone Orchard,” in which a king must rescue a corpse dangling from a tree and bring it back to a powerful magician—but the corpse keeps telling stories with complex moral questions, and every time the king’s answer is insufficient, the corpse reappears at the end of its rope, dangling from the same tree. So what you get is a very interesting documentary, punctuated by a really good stop-animation film using puppets by Brian and Wendy Froud, with voice work by Mark Hamill, Tim Curry and Lance Henriksen. (And each of the stories told by the corpse is done in yet another animation style.) It had the potential to be a mess, but it totally works.

It’s also one of the very few films where I ever sat there with a notepad out, scribbling things down. It’s obviously about myth, but the tag line is “Every life is a story, and a story can change the world,” which is exactly in line with my wacky novel. So I’ve thought about this stuff a lot, and am always eager to hear more—which is why the density of the material in this film has such great appeal for me. It gave me ideas, it sparked my imagination, and I will happily watch it more than once, then set it on my DVD shelf next to the Bill Moyers/Joseph Campbell set, with which it clearly belongs.

I won’t say any more. But it’s available through their site, through Amazon, all kinds of places. Check out a copy: it’s got the Bob Toombs Seal of Approval, so you know it’s top-notch.

Metallic Randiacs Write Themselves

Now that that’s out of my system, time to change the subject. A lot. And frequently.

Slow Hand

Haven’t mentioned the guitar in a while, but there’s been progress. On the acoustic, I’m starting to manage picking songs like Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bookends,” I’m even slowly writing a song that is called, so far, “Variations in C” because it mostly depends on my not having to move my hand from the basic C-chord position. But I’m also starting to hit barre chords with some consistency, which feels like a major hurdle. And on the bass, I’m doing a reasonable job on songs like Elvis Costello’s “Pump it Up,” which is fast and moves a lot. And I have to say that of all songs, who’d have thought I would find Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made For Walking” to be so much damn fun?

Last night, though, it’s like it all went away. Both hands felt like lead. The left just seemed to lag as I tried the run at the beginning of the Nancy Sinatra song, I was just kinda staring at it and thinking “What the hell’s wrong with you?” And the right hand was similarly clumsy--the fingernails, which are not all that long, kept hitting the strings when I didn’t want them to, imparting a heavy metallic clanging sound that was just plain ugly.

Two explanations present themselves: (1) it was just one of those nights, it happens; and (2) in fact I’ve always been that bad, or worse, but at last I’ve developed my awareness enough to realize it.

I leave it to you to speculate which of those is true.

Ou est le Randiacs?

Come on, people! In previous blog entries where I barely mentioned Ayn Rand, her supporters would pop up almost instantly, telling me how intellectually jejeune I was, how I didn’t know what I was talking about and really should just shut up please. So okay, I took that as a welcome challenge and responded. Worked hard, wrote an essay I’m proud of, and with the exception of a comment from a friend of mine who already agreed with me, there’s been no response--particularly, none from the Objectivist crowd.

Can it be? Have I so completely proven my point that they’ve all just given up and given in? Fabulous! I expect to see a plunge in sales of Atlas Shrugged any day now...

Writing the Boards Again

The other day I was describing myself to someone, somewhere, and for the umpteenth time said I was “a person of the theatre.” It takes umpteen times for me to notice things, but I finally stopped and said “You know, that’s really kinda true.” A couple days later, I took a project I’ve been planning to write as a movie, and instead began writing a new play. First time I’ve done any playwriting in just about ten years.

It feels amazingly good. So much fun to stretch that particular set of writing muscles again, and to remind myself of how a stage play works, and why.

And so far? This thing is writing itself. The first thirty pages have been just about effortless, and I’m loving what has emerged to date. Even had that loveliest of moments, early on, when I put two characters on stage together, thinking I was going to write the scene one way--but as soon as they were together, they took over and the scene became a whole different thing that instantly deepened and enriched the play.

As with Thereby, I feel like I’m not the captain, I’m just a passenger on this ride. That makes me one seriously happy writer.

Wallowing in Nostalgia

My junior year of high school, some friends of mine were in a one-act called "Did You Ever Go to P.S. 43?" by Michael Schulman. In it, a woman sits on a park bench, minding her own business, when a man comes up and asks her whether she went to the school listed in the title. We soon learn that he was once a star athlete at that school who had one fantastic game, one perfect night, early on in his life--and that nothing was ever so good again. So he roams the city, asking random strangers whether maybe they were there, whether they can validate his life by remembering that one perfect night with him.

A group of people I went to high school with has slowly gathered on Facebook, over the past couple of months, and I have found myself nearly obsessed with the group. I started scanning old photos, even old programs, and of course started to actively seek out people I hadn't seen in something like a quarter of a century. A formal group got created on Facebook just for the performers at that school in certain years, which had the effect of creating an ongoing high-school reunion where only the people you liked showed up. (As opposed to the one actual reunion I attended, my tenth, where I ended up disappointed because most of the performers weren't there.)

No question, it's been great reconnecting with some people I hadn't seen in all that time; there are even a couple folks I really hadn't known that well back then, but who are now becoming actual friends, not just of the Facebook kind. The old artificial distinctions of age drop away (who cares now whether someone was a year ahead or behind?), and we can all just be people with a certain specific connection, sharing the old stories--indulging ourselves, as much as we want, in a bit of harmless nostalgia.

And as I wallow, my memory of those days has become golden. All the pictures in my head look something like this...

That's me looking goofy on the right, but smiling and cheerful, with old friends, some of whom are now members of that Facebook group. (And one of whom, Rudy Prieto, in the red shirt with his back to the camera, passed away years ago, alas.) But why shouldn't I be smiling? By my senior year, I was completely in command. I had leads in both the major shows, completely knocking it out of the park as Fagin in Oliver! The school created a closed-circuit TV system that year, so my best friend David Hernandez and I did the morning announcements as a pair of oddball TV anchors, playing as many pranks as we could possibly dream up--and since I was on TV every morning, absolutely everyone in school knew me, and said hi, and kinda sucked up in the way that only happens when you're on TV, even closed-circuit TV that never leaves that one building. Every morning I would get to school half an hour early, just so I could hang out near the Drama classroom with my friends before classes started. I was in Advanced Placement classes, got good grades, and didn't have to take math. What more could a fella want?

But here's the thing. A few days ago I wanted to look up some specific information that required pulling out the journals I started keeping my first year of high school. And there, in horrifically bad writing, was the truth of how I felt back then. Which is to say, miserable.

Every stupid little insult. Every moment at a party when I felt snubbed. Every unrequited crush. Every moment that didn't meet some unattainable standard of perfection, I dwelled on all of it, and refused to enjoy all the moments that were, in fact, pretty damn great. It was as if I were that guy in Schulman's play, who has in fact found people who remember his big game--but who has now discovered that even when he was having his great moment, he was completely unable to enjoy a second of it. Best moment of his life and all he did at the time was gripe.

(By the way--I am not that guy. Plenty of great moments since high school, thank you very much. Most recently, watching my name scroll across a movie screen for the first time, in a crowded theater, that was just plain fantastic. Plenty more of those moments to come, too--I feel like I'm only just beginning to peak, right now. So there.)

(And, of course, all of the above could also be summed up thusly: I was a teenager, and that's what we do. C'est la vie.)

Still, I can't escape the conclusion that the only reason I was miserable was because I wanted to be. And that if I'd been able to simply make the other decision, the Buddhist decision to simply be where I was and experience life as it was rather than as I desired it to be, I'd have had a hell of a lot more fun back then.

Of course it's all a vicious cycle: if I'd been able to enjoy myself a little more, doubtless there wouldn't have been quite so many stupid little insults, awkward moments at parties, or unrequited crushes. When I wrote Thereby, I discovered the one theme that has come to dominate all my work: that our lives are like stories, and we're the tellers of those stories. Whether they go well or badly is entirely up to us.

Now I learn that lesson again, through my own awful high-school journal entries. A perfectly lovely time made miserable by nothing more than my decision to be miserable. A story that could have gone so much better, if only I had allowed myself to tell it that way.

I've Been Ayn Randed and Billy Graham'ded, I'm Communist 'Cause I'm Left-Handed

I recently watched the movie version of The Fountainhead. And I think I can now say, with perfect confidence, that Ayn Rand can bite me.

Prior to this, I knew effectively nothing about Ms. Rand. I had never read any of her work, had never had any conversations about her that went beyond "You should read such-and-such." Never looked her up in an encyclopedia, never read any articles about her, never watched Biography Channel programs about her, never ran across anything about Objectivism in any works on philosophy. I had a vague sense that her work was controversial, and that was absolutely it.

So I really truly did come to The Fountainhead with an open mind. Ten minutes later...

Apparently, the history of the movie is this: the novel was very popular, so Ms. Rand was hired to write the script, and she demanded that there be no interference whatsoever with what she wrote. (Exactly the sorts of demands Howard Roark makes repeatedly.) When the director, King Vidor, trying his level best to make a movie, tried to tighten up that nearly six-minute speech she'd written for the end, Rand threw a fit, went to the head of the studio, demanded that Vidor film only and exactly what she had written, word for word, and got her way.

The result is awful. It's a bad, bad, bad movie, entirely because of the script. (I will submit that Gary Cooper's particularly wooden performance had a lot to do with his dislike of the script.) Leaving aside for the moment the philosophy espoused in the film, my initial adverse reaction was purely as a writer responding to the writing. And bear in mind, I'm not complaining because the film is preachy and didactic--I'm a huge fan of Bernard Shaw, and no one can ever say that Shaw wasn't preachy and didactic (the plot of Man and Superman is interrupted for about an hour by a speechfest called "Don Juan in Hell"). But Shaw had a sense of humor, and Rand doesn't at all. This makes a huge difference. Shaw was also a much better writer of dialogue, which is partly a function of his sense of humor, but it goes deeper than that--writing dialogue is a specialized skill, and clearly, Shaw had mastered it and Rand hadn't.

To be fair, I've still never read any of Rand's prose, and it may be that she was a good novelist but a bad screenwriter. I'm completely happy to accept, for the moment, that this is true, and to move on.

But here's the thing: the whole philosophy espoused by the movie is that the individual artist must never be interfered with in any way, that only the pure, untrampled creations of such artists can ever advance art and society. And this movie? It's a bad movie. By being left alone to create exactly what she wanted, without interference, Ayn Rand wrote a bad movie. The work itself completely undermines the very idea it seeks to advance.

Probably the reason why my dad has from time to time suggested I read Ms. Rand's work is because I seem to share her affinity for the supremacy of the artist. I am, after all, the writer of Thereby Hangs a Tale, which is a challenging novel written very much according to its own dictates, and resolutely not a casual beach-read. But at the same time, I'm also a former actor, and one thing I learned very clearly in my days on the stage is that the work isn't for the performer, it's for the audience. A bad actor is one who is only interested in exploring his own psyche onstage, which is that peculiar form of Narcissism that insists that the rest of the world watch the actor love himself.

Ms. Rand's architect, Howard Roark, continually insists that his buildings be constructed as designed, and he refuses to ever consider any other points of view about what's in his designs. (The movie stacks the argument ridiculously: opposing points of view are never balanced or thoughtful, they are only deadly literal recitations like this one: "You can't hope to survive unless you learn how to compromise. Now, watch me! In just a few short years I'll shoot to the top of the architectural profession because I'm going to give the public what it wants.") Since his opponents are all manifest idiots, there's never any real Socratic dialogue, never any attempt to play one idea against another in order to arrive at a new truth--art here is an excuse for a predetermined ideological position, which is exactly why it fails as art--and, again, undermines Rand's own purpose. Roark is that bad actor, just as Rand is--they're not actually interested in the art for its own sake, they're only interested in their own self-aggrandizing freedom of expression at all costs.

To be Buddhist about it, the thing that is most missing from Rand's work is any sense of humility. A humble artist can still insist on the importance of following his own muse without allowing it to be watered down, but the key to that is to let the work itself lead where it must, without imposing preconditions on it--without insisting that the art support your philosophy of Objectivism, for example.

Again, we come to Shaw. You might well ask, isn't that exactly what Shaw's plays did? Weren't they often just excuses for him to espouse Socialism, or some other pet theory he had? In rebuttal, I will only offer Saint Joan. The reason why it's his best play, I've often thought, is because Joan surprised Shaw--that he originally wanted to write the play for didactic reasons, but as he went along the work started to take him to different places, places that surprised him. The character came alive, and he was a great enough artist to let that happen, to let the work lead him where it would, and didn't try to wrest control of it back to his ideological purpose. That is what makes great art--being humble enough to let the universe speak to you, to accept that you are not superman, that you don't know everything, and that sometimes the work is best when you just get the hell out of its way.

Plus, there's nothing at all wrong with finding some smart people whose opinions you respect and asking them what they think of the work you've made. Thereby is definitely a better work because I sought, and respected, and incorporated, the opinions of some very smart people.

There's more. I've now read up on Ms. Rand, and Objectivism. I can certainly see why someone who was a child in St. Petersburg during the 1917 revolution would come to hate any form of collectivism, and I certainly feel some empathy for how she came to reach that conclusion. But I can also see that she swung so far in the other direction that Objectivism became one short step away from Fascism, and it now comes as no surprise to discover that proponents of laissez-faire capitalism (Alan Greenspan, Dick Cheney, etc.) are huge fans of Ayn Rand. Her work often appeals to just the sort of person who has no humility, who believes himself to be a superman who must never be interfered with, who feels no need to "cater to the stinking masses." Her work becomes, in essence, one of the excuses they use to convince themselves that their own personal Fascism is perfectly okay, that they best serve society by ignoring society. And that's just plain wrong. There's a balance to be struck, and it's a difficult balance to be sure--but without the essential thing, without a little humility, listening to Ayn Rand will only lead you way down a dark, dark road.

Or, to say it again: Ayn Rand can bite me.

Perks!

Lest you doubted that doing a thing purely for the love of it leads to the greatest rewards, a few notes:

Our Michael Palin for President video, now viewed 660,000+ times on YouTube alone, has also been embedded in hundreds of other people's blogs, and was picked up by other sites like Will Ferrell's funnyordie.com. News reports popped up a few Sundays ago in all the major London papers talking about the video, even reporting that unnamed Republicans were complaining that the video was clearly the work of Democratic operatives running a smear campaign on Sarah Palin.

We were even contacted by an enterprising CNN reporter, although she did warn us that the producers at CNN are notoriously lacking in a sense of humor. Having seen the "Picture of the Day" spot that runs on AC360, I believe her. Nothing about our video ever appeared on CNN.

But the people who were watching the video, and visiting the website, started contacting us. They demanded buttons and bumper stickers, so we uploaded some designs to CafePress and started selling buttons and bumper stickers. (Plus thongs, because you just have to.) It's not the sort of thing that'll make any of us rich, but it'll certainly pay for the domain name registrations and the website hosting for the next several months. (Although I'm still waiting for the moment when I see someone with a Palin bumper sticker out in the wild....)

Some very well-meaning folks simply missed the joke. A very nice, very earnest woman in Atlanta wrote to Michael Palin care of us, begging Michael not to run for President because he might split off too many votes from Barack Obama. Which does raise the startling possibility that there might actually be a few people, here and there, who actually do write in Michael's name. I seriously doubt there would be as many as a thousand, spread across the country, but you never know. Someday, Marc and I might be reviled in the same way Ralph Nader is.

And just today, I was handed a copy of The Complete Monty Python Collectors Edition Megaset, a massive DVD box set containing the entire TV series, the live performances, the "Personal Best" discs, and two new documentaries I'd never seen. It's currently deeply discounted on Amazon at just over a hundred bucks, but the merchandising company that created the set found our site and, for promotional purposes, offered us three free sets to give to our newsletter subscribers. (They even handled the shipping, all we had to do was pick three people, get addresses, and forward them on.) Then they sent over a couple extra sets so that we too could enjoy them, thus leading to a happy Saturday afternoon as I watched both documentaries.

We made the video because it amused us. We had no expectation of anything, we just did it to have some fun and geek out a little. And from it, all this has come. Pure intentions, without expectation, has indeed yielded these great rewards.

I say all this because Thereby is done. I've excerpted it before, and I've always known it was massively uncommercial, the sort of thing I did for the love of doing it, largely to amuse myself. But watching the documentary about how the Pythons conquered America, none of them ever believed that the show would have any impact in America; it took Cleese years to believe it really had caught on. I have now written and rewritten my mad little novel to the point that I'm ready to start sending it out to real publishing people. (Actually, a friend of mine from high school knows a publisher, so I've already started there.)

A novel of pure intention, written without expectation. Is it hubris to think that maybe there's a place for it in the world after all?

Travelating

The idea is, make a trailer that looks like the next movie we want to make, and it becomes easier to make investors say "Hey, I want to see that movie!" so that we can, in fact, shoot the real thing. Film being, after all, a visual medium. Would you rather see a business plan or three minutes of footage?

That's why we're flying to Vermont tonight. A bunch of actors, some minimal crew, and an astonishing amount of checked baggage. We'll shoot for just a few days, be back by Friday, and then I get some real mileage out of Final Cut Pro.

And what have I been up to in the meantime? Well, getting ready for this, obviously, but also: finishing a treatment for a new screenplay, revising the City of Truth screenplay with Marc (incorporating a wealth of great feedback from several sources), defining the mission statement and purpose of Lightwheel Entertainment, and, happiest of all, rediscovering Thereby.

I posted an excerpt from Thereby Hangs a Tale a long while back, but hadn't actually read it in a time much longer than that. (The book itself has been basically finished for years--long enough that there is stuff in there about two towers being destroyed, collapsing with people in them, that most definitely predates Sept. 11th, and consequently becomes a bit of a problem--do you change the novel because it is, accidentally, too close to something real in a way that would be distracting? Unfortunately, the fall of my towers is so deeply integrated into the story itself that that would be pretty much impossible, so all I can do is have one of my characters, from the "real" world rather than the unnamed someplace where most of the novel happens, comment on the freakish coincidence.)

But since my friend Buffie was visiting, I happened to mention the novel to her one day, and realized I'd never actually shown it to her. So I pulled up the file, started reading, and had that happiest of discoveries: after a great deal of time, not only do I still like the book, I absolutely love it. So I zoomed through a touch-ups rewrite, happy to find that it was already in very good shape, and after getting some comments from people I will start working on finding exactly the right agent--someone who'll love it as much as I do.

Being in L.A. had kinda convinced me that Thereby was just too weird to ever sell, that's exactly why it sat for so long, unseen and unloved. But as soon as I started reading it again I realized, Hell no, it's not that weird at all, all it needs is the right agent and the right editor and the right marketing campaign, and I think people will go a little crazy over it.

But enough for now. Now, I have to pick up a fish-eye lens and then finish packing before a red-eye to Vermont. If there's an internet connection (we already know our cellphones will be just about useless) I'll try to check in from the road.

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?