This Savage Art

I found this, forgot about it, then found it again by way of Scott Meyers’ Go Into The Story. Do it!

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That’s me.

When I started this whole weblog thing back in May 2005 I was an film blogging animal. Three, sometimes four posts a day but here I am posting a measly one or two a month if I’m lucky. What can I say? The dynamics of my life have changed. You never realize how little time you have until you cut what you had in half. Now literally every moment of my life is more or less planned out. Everything from meals to writing to everything.

I used to read a lot of weblogs too. Post on them voraciously. That dropped off well before my son though. Now I find myself just lurking. Not posting. Just lurking. It’s not that there aren’t great sites out there. The problem is there are too many and I know I’m not the only one. The film writing is so astute it’s intimidating and inspiring at the same time. Take for instance this one post from Glenn Kenny’s site. Now, I like his site very much and have opinions about the new Raging Bull Blu-ray disc. Many opinions. It was a film that informed so much of what I do creatively and yet I can’t opinionate. I would love to give a well thought out breakdown of why this film is important for so many reasons. The key there is well thought out. That is time consuming and brain power is in demand. I feel like I’m just getting my brain back after close to one year after my son was born, a rough move from Manhattan to Brooklyn and an assault of all sorts of stresses that I won’t bore anyone with. You know, life and shit. So now it’s down to business. I have my creative time in the afternoons so it’s balls to the wall plotting, planning and writing. I still get my daily dose of film news and info on the interweb but now it’s different. Now the window is smaller and I mean that in every way. This week I get reacquainted with many past projects enough to make a decision about what I want to work on. Hopefully next week I can dive in. So wish me luck. I’m back to zero again.

And don’t think I missed the irony that I’m taking all this time writing this post when I could be commenting on the Raging Bull post.

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A book of quotes about building characters from the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and David Mamet. MM has some samples.

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I’ve been meme double-tagged by pachego and Edward Copeland to offer up 8 facts/habits about myself you don’t know. Hopefully one entry will suffice.

The Rules

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

[...]

1. I cannot function without my prerequisite two cups of coffee in the morning.
2. I’m a mediocre guitar player.
3. I didn’t buy an iPhone but…
4. After years of fighting the urge for fear that my productivity would be lost, I did get an XBOX 360 for my 40th birthday. So far I’ve kept myself in check.
5. My first movie going experience was The Towering Inferno.
6. I feel naked without a watch.
7. I probably say the word fuck (or some variation like mother fucker, fuckstick, dickfuck) way too much in my daily life. It’s been a problem since I was a child, well, if you consider it a problem.
8. I’m currently reading Don DeLillo.

I’ll cross the great divide and include filmmakers, editors, film journalists and the like. I’ve chosen the following to cough up 8 facts/habits about themselves:

Steven at Big Media Vandalism

J.J. at j.j. murphy on independent cinema

J. at Making The Movie

Christopher at Deep Structure

Erich at Acidemic-Film

Chris at The Rec Show

Paul at Paul Hackett

Noel at Critic After Dark

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Trying to gain footing on some projects since I’ve been back from the trip to South Carolina. I was hyper-focused before I left and actually producing pages as you can see from the status bar . Since I’ve been back I got caught up in the Tribeca Film Festival and personal stuff. Now it’s just a matter of getting back on track. I’m feeling good about the projects. Many projects. Maybe too many projects. I’m getting distracted by all of them which only means one thing, I’m avoiding the actual work. This is what I’m talking about. Some good advice if you feel like your being pulled by a handful of different ideas.

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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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Last night I had the first 16 pages of Dyre Avenue read in my writing workshop. I wasn’t fearful, I wasn’t nervous. Well, maybe a little. I was more curious to see the reaction and overall it was pretty good. There were comments that I should let the scenes linger a little to get the full drama out of them. One comment that bothered me because of my own struggle with it was about a scene I pulled at the last minute. It’s a drug bust scene. My feeling was that we’ve seen it so many times before, why do we need to see another one? Wrong. It’s like saying a three chord progression has been used in so many songs why do we need to hear it. Well, maybe because it just works. Okay, bad analogy but you get the point. The scene does belong there and it feels like an abrupt break because it’s not. I was struggling with it for a long time, wanting to make it original and not derivative. My solution was just rip it out. So the lesson here is tough it out. Every scene, every word. Even if you have to come back to it weeks later. Give yourself a little distance. Make it great.

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Screenwriter Paul Schrader starts creating a screenplay by beginning with his most personal, pressing problem today.

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I’ve been slammed with work lately which is a good thing. Gotta eat. The downside is the rewiring of my brain. Dealing with all things technical and editorial makes my left brain the more dominant of the two hemispheres. I must analyze, I need to figure out the best way to accomplish what the client wants in a smooth video workflow. This can entail many options and many solutions considering technology changes every…uh! It just changed. Not to mention what goes into setting up my next gig.

This wreaks havoc on my right brain, the creative hemisphere. Of course there is a creative element to editing but my writing suffers. It gets put on the back burner for days like this where I actually have a break waiting for client approval on the most soulless of work, the corporate video. Hey, it’s work am I very grateful for it. It keeps my editing suite up and running. The juggle is a challenge but it gives me the freedom I need to do what I need to do, write screenplays and make films.

Mega Millions, where are you?

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My friend and Assistant Director on The Face of the Earth Jeremiah Kipp and I talked about having an open dialogue regarding the making of the short film. The following is an excerpt from that conversation. This conversation makes reference to scenes in the film so if you haven’t seen it you can download it on the sidebar in a large or small Quicktime file format. I will break up the discussion and post it as a reference point for anyone who wants an inside look on how this film was made from the people who made it. Because we did this via instant messenger I took the liberty of cleaning up the text and editing for clarity.

JK: We never talked about where you got the idea for this. I know at the time you were a livery cab driver. Dave and I always assumed this had happened to you or something, but never wanted to ask.

WS: You guys could have, it was no big deal…I drove for a car service outside the Bronx in lower Westchester for about 12 years. I was driving when I made the film…I had a lot of experiences with that job and I would make note of them but this was different. Two guys in my car where just talking to each other. They came out of a bar and they were just going back and forth. I started piecing a life, background and scenes in my head and it was heartbreaking.

What intrigued me about your script was it dealt with characters from the underbelly of New York. It had grit and authenticity and it felt personal. How did you know this was something you wanted to make into a film? Meaning, you were gonna invest your time, money, heart and soul into turning this idea into a reality.

Yeah, the funny thing is everyone thinks New York is all nice and squeaky clean now but I didn’t feel that way.

The locations we were shooting in were definitely not cleaned up. Did you know what parts of the Bronx you wanted to shoot in when you were writing the script?

That was simple.

Those locations felt like crime.

I wanted to capture this boozy, fringe world in that borough.

What came first: assembling cast or assembling crew? Or was it at the same time?

At the time I was just trying to put it all together myself to streamline the entire process, really feel I was making the most of my resources. If I can remember, I think it was crew first.

Did you know how much money you had to make the movie?
Or did that number just keep going up?

I had an idea, I did make a budget but you know how it is, you plan and plan and something happens.

When did you interview me at Starbucks?

You were one of the early interviews. I was really just trying to get a grip on who was going to be my core. You sounded like you had your shit together.

I remember it was a pretty quick interview. I said I was intrigued by the script, which felt real and authentic to me. I got the sense you wanted to tell this story. I felt like I’d be able to help. And, of course, I love a technical challenge. Your movie’s technical challenge was unique: Half of the script took place within the confines of a moving vehicle, with two passengers in the back seat and one in the front.

You really turned out to be my right arm on that shoot. It made the difference because you really committed to the project.

God damned right.

I was recently interviewed for an article about a film I worked on in 1999, and had to call up the filmmaker to remind me of some choice anecdotes. All I remembered from that gig was working back-to-back 18-hour days, and the director of photography speaking in tongues by the end of the shoot. However, The Face of the Earth remains vivid to me.

Yeah, vivid like getting assaulted and thrown in a dumpster…

to be continued….

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