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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