This Savage Art

Check out the Julien Temple doc Joe Strummer – The Future Is Unwritten this Friday in NYC.

Popularity: 5% [?]

After much protest the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting announced the release of a newly drafted permit rule proposal.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Number four.

Popularity: 5% [?]

HK to play the schlockmeister on Broadway. Have fun with that one.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Recently I got an e-mail from screenwriter Bill True announcing a recent interview he did for Boxoffice.com. I met Bill about two years ago when his first film Runaway ran at the Tribeca Film Festival but my contact with him started just just prior to that. At that time I was using the internet to track all things screenwriting so I could raise the bar on my writing skills and put something on paper that I could put out into the world. I was trolling community writing sites like the Francis Ford Coppola branded American Zoetrope. There I found Bill’s screenplay [at that time it was called Michael's Letters] which placed high on the site’s Screenplays Section Hall of Fame. I decided to contact him.

I don’t know if it was the pure audacity of my e-mail or his need to expound some sort of writer’s wisdom but he responded and we corresponded about all things film industry, writing with confidence and never being afraid to approach people that can advance your career. It was very motivating and it pushed me in a direction to complete a screenplay I hadn’t touched in a long time. Since then he has become a working screenwriter and I have a short film and a couple of feature screenplays under my belt.

Here is the interview I spoke of. It’s enlightening and a good illustration that no two careers are alike.

Popularity: 80% [?]

The New Yorker profiles The Wire creator David Simon. [ Hat tip Ted Z.]

Popularity: 5% [?]

Let’s make it three.

Popularity: 5% [?]

[Entry in the Close-Up Blog-a-thon, hosted by The House Next Door, running Oct. 12 through Oct. 21. Close-up image from Once Upon a Time In America.]

DeNiro’s poppy induced smile is such a far removed sentiment from the whole of Sergio Leone’s Lower East Side spaghetti crime epic. A man at peace with himself, maybe the only time, only through flashback and only through the use of narcotics, David ‘Noodles’ Aaronson slips away to dream. Of what? We can only image. Wherever he is it is far from the life of a petty criminal filled, upon reflection, with much regret and loss.

The close-up is preceded by Noodles as an older man unknowingly attending the party of a dear friend from days long gone. Aged, listless and drained of any real joy Noodles looks on at the gate where his friend Maximilian ‘Max’ Bercovicz stands in front of his massive Gatsby-esque estate. A garbage truck passes in front of Max as Noodles gazes on. The truck grinds. Max disappears – another ghost from Noodles’ past gone as the truck’s lights fade into the darkness and magically [really, a great visual match dissolve] transform into a Prohibition era car’s headlights full of young men and women celebrating the New Year. Noodles wistfully watches his youth drive off.

Ennio Morricone’s heart-swelling tinny score leads us to the next scene that takes place in the past where we find Noodles, a young man looking to fix what is ailing him. The close-up rides us out – it being the last image we see in this melancholic journey through New York’s immigrant gangster origins to this final destination, a Chinatown opium den.

Noodles tokes up, leans back on a prepared bed and lets his mind wander to blissfully find his gauzy happiness. He does. He is free.

Popularity: 11% [?]

At the Ziegfeld. That’s all I’m saying.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Part deux in which our hero starts seeing filmmakers all over Columbus Circle.

Popularity: 5% [?]