This Savage Art

I don’t post about the incremental changes of the much hyped, eagerly anticipated release of the RED camera because there are so many other sites that cover it in greater detail (HD4NDs) but this is pretty significant news. Bonus link: a post on high end HD cameras from Mike.

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I just noticed this link to my site so I thought I would raise some awareness for this very cool blog. Gray Hamilton has taken on the challenge of reading one screenplay a week to get to the bottom of this whole writing business.

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I did it. I put my screenplay Dyre Avenue on InkTip, an online service that brings writers together with producers, agents and managers. Out of curiousity or desperation I’m not sure which but it is there. I would equate it to Match.com but for the biz. I can see the companies that are checking out the screenplay. They can look at my background and read the first 15 pages. It’s like a game. I get the company name then I go over to IMDb and check their credits. Then I go into best-case-scenerio fantasy mode.

I’m not sure how a story like mine will fare on a site like this but there is only one way to find out, right? $50. Six months. It’s an investment.

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Griffin Mill has returned in Michael Tolkin’s follow up novel, The Return of the Player. Get Altman on the horn! Also [via Man Bytes Hollywod] UCLA professor Howard Suber has put out what looks like a very powerful book entitled The Power of Film.

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I just completed watching your four part documentary When The Levees Broke: A Requiem In Four Acts and I have to say as a big supporter of you work in the past, I am angry. Before you became a household name I was watching She’s Gotta Have It and School Daze in multiple viewings to the point where I was reciting Mars Blackmon ad nauseam. To the point where I was making the same gestures when I greeted friends. I met you at a book signing at Barnes and Noble on Sixth Avenue in the Village. I’ve seen you walking around Brooklyn. So with all this personal history and investment with you and your films I repeat, after watching this documentary I was angry. Not with you though.

I think you respectfully unhinged the casket that the media and government has been trying so desperately to lock and bury like so many other corpses. The event of Katrina itself proved to be a revealing point in U.S. history, one of a series. It hammered the point home that if you don’t fall into a certain tax bracket you are done and left for dead in the land of plenty, literally. No matter what how much insurance coverage you took out. No matter how much time your local government had to secure your safety. You are done!

You’ve always been controversial. You’ve always agitated the “sweep it under the rug” view of race relations in this country and the timing couldn’t be more perfect. This documentary aired as New Orleans gets ready to engage itself in another hurricane battle. A year later and those levees are still not secure. Five years later and we “can’t get a hole in the ground fixed” as an angry New Orleans Ray Nagin told us. So this is just a thanks for putting the truth out there in the words of the people who suffered the most, the residents and ex-residents of New Orleans. It is an eye-opener.

When the Levees Broke Acts 1-4 airs again on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina: Tuesday, August 29 at 8pm on HBO.

Read the New York Magazine article here.

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The House Next Door poses the question, what single movie image or moment do you think of more often than any other?

Hands down the image that haunts me to this day is Scorsese’s choice to let the camera sit facing an empty hallway after a slow and deliberate dolly shot right as Travis Bickle tries to explain his true but misguided intentions of his botched date to Betsy in Taxi Driver.

That is confidence. That is balls. To let the audience sit and stare into the void for almost 20 seconds while a trembling voice desperately pleads for forgiveness. Travis doesn’t get forgiveness. We know what happens next. “A strange cinematic choice” is what I thought when I screened the film many, many years ago. What do I think now? Pure genius.

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Time Magazine asks Francis Ford Coppola about the past and future of his career. Sidenote: if you are an Apocalypse Now! freak this has just been released – just be aware that it doesn’t include Hearts of Darkness – big mistake.

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The MOMA is screening 75 years of the Huston family’s cinematic history. Of course they’re showing Chinatown.

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