Always hard to know how it goes but it absolutely was a great learning experience.
Signing off until the new year, due to travel and writing deadlines. Happy holidays all, may we enter the new year like conquering heroes!
Writing the Genius
Just sharing a great article by screenwriter Graham Moore here: https://medium.com/@MrGrahamMoore/how-to-write-about-characters-who-are-smarter-than-you-c7c956944847#.mv23v897n
The Smoky Mountain Killer - Origins
Spring break of my senior year of college, my friend and I took a road trip in his sister's car from North Carolina through the Smokies and Tennessee ending in New Orleans, before driving through Nashville back to Chicago.
One of the absolute highlights of the trip, and my life for that matter, was trekking in the Smoky Mountains. Specifically, the day we tried (and failed) to tackle Thunderhead Mountain.
I'll save that story for another day, but it ultimately inspired my pilot (currently posted under TV samples). My friend got around to developing some of the photos we took during that trip, and during that day specifically. They're absolutely beautiful and I'll post them here. I hope you can enjoy them, if not for using them as an imagination-backdrop when reading Smoky Mountain Killer, then simply as a portal into the surreal, natural world of the Blue Ridges.
That's me. Spring, 2013.
Junun
I have the good fortune to be working with someone who helped create the film Junun. Album trailer here. Review of the music itself here.
I recommend the movie for many reasons. First, it showcases Paul Thomas Anderson in the complete opposite light of his narrative films. While those are starkly controlled, beautifully photographed, and surreal - Junun is fluid, playful, improvised, and yet equally surreal. Not to mention the music is uplifting and beautifully composed. At its peak moments, Junun helps you both feel and understand how true music collaboration works.
I'm also lucky to have been introduced to this film because of its connection to Mubi. A very cool new streaming service that allows you to watch 30 films at any given time, with a new film added each day. The twist: each new film replaces an old one. It's a constant cycle of shedding and regrowth, circulating the best of international and cult cinema. Not to mention they've got a pretty cool aesthetic.
So if you have the time, go enjoy Junun and Mubi and double your worldly-ness!
Screenwriting is like solving a very difficult puzzle. But first you have to design and cut the puzzle pieces yourself. Beyond that, you have to pick the materials (setting), the shapes (characters), and the way they're cut up (plot). The real trick is forgetting how you cut them so that by the time it's done being put together, you're still satisfied with the finished result.
Douglas Sirk
I recently watched a Douglas Sirk film for the first time, MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION. Although completely unrelated to why I originally watched it, that movie has become instrumental in how I think about romance films and melodrama.
One of the current screenplay gigs I'm on now is very much a broad commercial romance/comedy. Now, OBSESSION is not a comedy - but it is larger than life, which is something every good comedy needs to have built into it's tone. Especially the one I'm into right now.
I'm still digesting why a film so absurd, so vague (in regards to story), and so melodramatic is still completely effective at what it intends. Obviously the fantastic direction and crazy German lighting makes it visually awesome. But I think part of is that the characters are utterly sincere all the time, never once self aware or cynical or manipulative. It's sort of mesmerizing to experience a near-utopian world like that.... Anyways, if you haven't seen it I highly recommend!
Fun side note: Rock Hudson is eight years Jane Wyman's junior. Compare that, in 1954, to today's consistently heinous older male to younger female age discrepancies!
The Glories of Karson Redfist
Here is an excerpt from a novella I've been writing on and off for the past few months, mostly as a restorative exercise to do in between screen/TV writing projects.
Hit the Spirit Plate
A man should only be concerned about his drunkenness if it gives him a sense of peace. Karson smiled at the thought as he slipped on his burnished brass knuckles, felt their comfort around his fattened fingers. Snow drifted in through the broken windows like piss trickling on the walls. Two men left. A third was on the floor, certainly unconscious if not already freefalling towards hell. A fourth lay on the ground outside with a choked out throat. He was dead. His name was Flagg; he’d crumpled to the ground and Karson imagined a fine layer of the white gathering atop him.
The two left were almost young men by his standards, sixteen perhaps, though he had to admit his lens for discerning age always dissolved after ten or eleven shots. At fourteen, the current count, wrinkles and baby cheeks sloughed off in equal measure. With that much alcohol in his gut, the whole of boys and men mixed into one vat of loathsome anger then. Karson believed that any man who stood straight and knew how to hold a fist deserved to die if he invited death to his front door. These boys were men now and the group had called him over with hell’s trumpet when they broke into his home, stole his basement liquor, bashed his lamps, and punched up the face of his landlord’s daughter, Mercy, during their haphazard getaway.
Finding them so easily was a relief. Two hours after Karson had returned home and witnessed the destruction, he learned which abandoned ware house the boys snuck off to. It was an old dog-fighting house turned dock’s pub turned rust-beamed shithole. Karson’s fury started with Mercy’s poor punched up face, but it really set alight when he realized – in order to get good and drunk and strong enough to dole out justice – he would have to buy a new bottle of Whiskey with the little money he had on hand. So, he bought some white mash bullshit from Halloran and sat outside the boy’s hideout in the cold. The drunk came quick and he kept with it till he finished the bottle. Sometime soon after was the strangling. Flagg, whose name he heard shouted after him as he exited the building, had just come out for a quick piss but ended up letting it out in his pants along with everything else once Karson finished the job. Then he headed inside the shithole. Well the well, that brings the tale up to speed.
Boy, did those brass knuckles feel nice – he thought maybe he could smell their metal bite just a little. Then he realized it was just that simple sensation which came from the blood treading down from his own nose. The two young men, though not quite ready to die, decided they had to stand their ground. Certainly running was no option. Maybe Cotton will get in front of him and then I’ll stab the big bastard in the back meanwhile, that’s what one young man thought. The other, who was Cotton, started thinking about his grandpa’s old joke about outrunning bears… you know how it goes. They were both just thinking, and that was their fault. Maybe chalk it up to their inexperience, but Karson didn’t give a fuck, did he? That’s when he rushed them.
They instinctively both tried to meet his charge. Karson focused on Cotton and sent him into the air with a blow so devastating it must have turned the boy’s right cheekbone into a texture as soft as his sobriquet. Cotton landed on some old glass mugs and they pâté’d his backside up nicely. Some final wheezes let Karson know he’d been effective with that one. Meanwhile the other shitdoodle had sliced down Karson’s flank, but the bourbon made sure it wasn’t any sort of distraction. One hook to the ribcage, one hook to the neck, a few sucker stomps to the face and it was over. Karson was feeling mighty fine.
Some sort of alchemy happened then. The bourbon, the easy mix of rage and joy Karson felt at his own damnation, the thinned life blood seeping from his side, and the young deaths evaporating in the air like angels’ share in a whiskey distillery. What happened was Jesus Christ came down to the rust-beamed shithole and made it like the sun. In that moment, he looked into Karson’s eyes and emptied all his eternal, celestial frustration with mankind into Karson. As he did, Jesus plunged his hands into Karson’s wound and fixed him. But before Karson could feel life’s salvation, Jesus broke each of the big man’s fingers against his own tight brass knuckles. Jesus Christ spoke in a whisper, “You will be the holy reservoir of Jesus Christ. You will accept the frustration caused by those who have failed their deliverance, which is all. You will be Karson Redfist, and Christ’s fury will sustain you.” And like a bobcat in a lightning storm, Jesus disappeared and the whole building came down atop Karson Redfist just as the snow came down atop dead Flagg Millward lying in the mud outside.
On Editing
Editing is the ugliest stage of writing. I imagine it feels similar to the resetting of a bone...
Rivers of Fundament (a creative vaccine)
If you find yourself in need of an overwhelming jolt to the system in order to keep at your creative endeavors, I recommend exploring Matthew Barney's "Rivers of Fundament." Enter at your own risk here.
I recently saw the sculpture installations at MOCA. Though there's a six hour video opera (the script is available to read on his website) that I have yet to subject myself to.
What I saw, though, was amazing. Pieces of incredible size and built of remarkable industrial materials - sulfur, salt, copper, gold, etc. Lest I fall into the abyss of analysis that could accompany a discussion of Matthew Barney's work - I'll just stop myself here and say that it's shocking and original. Original in the sense that it's truly visceral and evocative. It's not in any simple conversations with its related source materials.
If you need a reminder of an individual's ability to imagine an entire world and bring it into being with only their two hands and a distorted mind, look no further. It certainly made me feel powerful, just thinking that one person was capable of filling a warehouse with metallic abberations (that are supposed to inhabit the dreamscape of Norman Mailer).
Enjoy?
Pluto
Apologies, it's been a while since my last post. Been deep in the world of The Undertaking of Lily Chen - a graphic novel I'm adapting for FilmNation Entertainment. A little more context on that here
But as far as images in keeping with my aesthethic, and generally cool news - I wanted to quickly post this amazing image of Pluto. For more recently developed Hi-Res photos, you can browse here.
