Cop Out Post

I’m a bit under the gun today and also have zero creative energy for a good daily post, so I’m going to do a total cop out here and list the books that make up the top portion of my standing desk at work. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll look back on this detail and be glad I wrote it down.

So, from top to bottom:

The Magus - John Fowles (have not yet read)

Papa Hemingway - A.E. Hotchner (have read, highly recommend)

Too Far - Rich Shapero (have not yet read, and probably never will - someone was giving these out on campus at UChicago my second year)

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden - Denis Johnson (have read, highly highly recommend)

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway - Ernest Hemingway (have read, at least most of them, lots of good, some bad, and some that don’t hit the nail on the head but damn they make you think about writing)

Hellboy: Masks and Monsters - Mike Mignola (have read, not the best Mignola but still a good time)

Batman: The Dark Night Strikes Again - Frank Miller (have read, not magnum opus but amazing)

The Sandman: Worlds’ End - Neil Gaiman (have read many times, love this one and love this series)

Outcast - Robert Kirkman (meh)

Seven Novels of Jules Verne - Jules Verne (really want to read these but have not gotten to them yet, in the meantime will probably vaguely act like I’ve read Jules Verne before… I took this one because it’s a real chunker and good for the standing desk)

Okay well, it ended up being a nice warm-up for the fingers at least…

Friday Black

I just started reading a new collection of short stories titled Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and man, they are intense. The first story has to do with a young black man who lives in an America that is essentially our own, in present day, but just ever so heightened in its horrid racism. Adjei-Brenyah creates this incredible tight-rope of tone wherein at first you react to the turns of the plot / setting by saying, “my god, that is absurd” but as the characters discuss these events and we hear news coverage and testimony within the story, you start to realize - it is technically more absurd but the truth of it is all the same for what’s happening in our country today. These stories are brutal and electric, to say the least. I’m looking forward to reading the rest, though it’s the sort of experience that is both invigorating, tragic, and tiring. I can’t imagine what sort of mindset he must’ve been in to immerse himself and write this collection. But at the same time, just my asking that question is, I believe, the intended effect on the white American reader. Because that mindset is the daily reality for Adjei-Brenyah and anyone like him.

NYT - Yorgos Lanthimos

Just wanted to record a very compelling segment of a deep-dive article the NYT did on one of my favorite directors Yorgos Lanthimos - can read the full thing here. I love the idea that the director creates an atmosphere of almost zen-line now-ness wherein the actors can’t connect to anything to far ahead or behind them in their character’s arc. It’s “completely instinctual.” The actors go on to talk about how they have no sense of the work they’ve just done after the production is completed.

Really exciting that Lanthimos is delving into new territory with “The Favourite” in that he’s directing someone else’s script.

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The atmosphere he creates has more in common with an experimental theater troupe than a typical multimillion-dollar movie set. Lanthimos works to bring an actor’s instincts to the surface — and he shrugs off questions about a character’s psychological motivation, back story and context as effortlessly as he does questions about himself. “If you want to [expletive] annoy him, ask him character back-story questions,” Colin Farrell told me, laughing, of his first experience working with Lanthimos on the set of “The Lobster,” where Lanthimos refused to tell him what happened in the scene before the one they were filming. “He doesn’t really feel the need, you know. For him a story is born and dies between the first and last page.” Lanthimos is “trying to give space to mystery,” Ariane Labed, his wife, told me. “Yorgos does not explain things, even to the actors really, and they’re not used to that. But then they go through this experience, and they discover that having gaps in their characters’ journeys, they actually have more room for their own imaginations, [their] own mistakes, [their] own doubts, and I think that’s why actors are amazing in Yorgos’s films. They’re on the line.”

Two Observations from Show

 First, is a comment from a writer on our show who used to be an editor (both of reality TV and scripted). He, rather hilariously, explained to us how an editor would talk to a writer when cutting back chunks of their work to get to the right run-time: “I know that’s what you thought was in the scene, but it’s not in the footage so it’s now what we’re going to work with now.” The idea that “it’s not in the footage” was interesting to me, also scary. The idea that you may have written something brilliant, or at least intended to write something brilliant, but if for whatever reason it doesn’t show up in the actual footage (bad coverage, the scene didn’t unfold the way you intended, the writing wasn’t as good as you thought, or simply that it is not urgently necessary to the story) then it will be cut out.

The other thing is a more logistical process note to myself. And that is: if there’s going to be a break during the show (in our case, Thanksgiving) it REALLY is helpful to have intricate and detailed notes laid out before the break — notes that track exactly what

Always have really intricate and detailed notes laid out before a break because it is really hard to return to that when you’re back and remember the trains of thought that led you down certain rabbit holes of character arcs and subplots. And mentally, it just feels like eons ago when you return — the more big notes you have to jump-start those thought processes again is really helpful.

Quotes from Nowhere

I’m not sure who would say this or why, but I have a feeling it’s a metaphor for social media:

“You ever listen to the sound of a single frog. It’s beautiful, but it’s also lonely. The pauses between croaks are the sound of loneliness – and perhaps that adds to the beauty. How about a chorus of frogs? It’s also quite glorious, there’s no loneliness there but a strength there instead – a calm confident power of nature.

But you can reach unnatural numbers too. A plague of frogs? They’re more than a chorus, they’re mechanical cacophony. You can’t tell them apart, you can’t hear a song – there are so many that it becomes one solid noise, a blare. And you don’t know what they’re saying anymore, they’re not strong or lonely – they’re just deaf. It makes you miss the sound of a single lonely frog.”

Patriot S2

This was a really interesting one for me. I’m profoundly obsessed with Patriot season 1 - I think it’s a self-contained masterpiece. It’s like Waiting for Godot meets Dr. Strangelove or Jon Le Carre hit his head, thought he was a satirist, and wrote a comedy of errors when he should’ve been in the hospital. I loved it so much I wrote a spec of it for the fellowships. I basically set it at the start of what would be season 2 - and was pleasantly surprised when I guessed a few things right for the real S2: the return of an old character thought to be dead, a specific sort of scene between an secondary father and son duo, a train trip to a foreign city, little pieces like that. But it’s impossible to see where this season ends up and that’s part of why I loved it.

The interesting thing is that I was pretty bored with the first half. At times, it even verged on feeling like these new, early episodes were hollow repeats of the first season — the same shaggy-dog story machinations of a spy plot gone wrong and slowly going wronger, except without the profound, tragic humanistic statements on existence in the background. Maybe there were, but they didn’t feel like new statements. Don’t get me wrong, still beautifully shot and filled with some choice moments. Then all of a sudden, halfway through the 8 episode season, the entire rhythm changed. Without giving too much away, John Tavner and his crew finally take a break from the mission and have an all day part of sorts. That episode (“Fuck John Wayne”) is totally and utterly brilliant: laugh out loud hilarious, tragic, surprising, and ultimately revolves back into a core aspect of the overarching plot. I wish I could’ve been in that writers’ room for that one! And the remaining 2 episodes (so I guess it’s even past the halfway point that things ramp up) carry you through on a gripping, deliberately paced ascent towards a crazy finale. I think it’s because they found a way to turn the major catastrophe of the season into an event that is totally grounded in character (in the relationship between John and his wife) and as a result we see John transform in a wholly unique way. It’s a show about elision, eliding vital and at times absurdly upsetting details of reality in order to get the mission done. At the same time, it’s a show about people who wear their hearts on their sleeves and are incredibly compassionate even as they commit terrible acts - or witness those they love commit them. And beneath the style (I didn’t even get into all the directorial moments that hearken back to French New Wave and so much else), and the odd character direction, and the ridiculous shaggy dog story - there is a tragic heart to all these characters.

Now the real question is whether we’ll get a season 3…

Reflections on Widows

The problem with hype is that you don’t even know what your expectations are going into a film. Unfortunately, I definitely had hype going into see Widows and it may have set things off-kilter for me. I was extremely excited for it from the get-go, Steve McQueen is one of my favorite directors and each of his previous films have shook me to my core. So on some level I imagined he’d transfer those visceral abilities into the heist genre. Then, lots of trusted friends highly highly recommended it - saying it was their favorite film of the year! Not to mention, god help me, the reviews I ended up letting myself read. I guess I was expecting at least a slight reinvention of the drama and something powerful and new otherwise - with such an insanely fantastic cast. But at the end of the day, I must’ve had more amorphous expectations than that because I found myself steadily disappointed as the movie rolled on. Yet, I’m pretty sure it was a good movie? Perhaps this is less movie review, more self review.

Or maybe, it just came down to the writing. Lots of characters had completely open endings, their arcs barely touched upon - and in fact left with far bigger questions than we started them with… one of them murders a man, another we just have no idea what her new life looks like… and the biggest loose end of them all (SPOILERS): the crime syndicate that was putting all the pressure on the Widows in the first place? Are they just gone now? Did they pay them off? There’s a lot of vital context we’re never given in the last 20 minutes of the film.

Okay here’s the whiny fanboy reason I didn’t love it - the heist itself. I mean, we spend literally 2 hours building to a heist and it absolutely under-delivered. It was a very very simple house/safe robbery that ended in about 2 minutes with minimal trickery, action, twists… If this film were truly a drama, that cared about its characters on a level so as to steep us in their POV — hell, I wouldn’t care about the heist. But unfortunately the film’s balance was off, and though there was some juicy character stuff, it really did make us focus on the heist for a long time. For example, I’d say the film spent 25-40 minutes focused entirely on the heist: where they get the info, casing the place, getting guns, etc. Yes, there are some entertaining character moments here but the point of these scenes comes off as: they are getting closer. Not, they are totally transforming.

So, it left me with this sense that the film wanted to be cross-genre, maybe wanted to be the thing I wildly hoped it would be — but it wasn’t. Things I did absolutely love, lest I be considered a total sourpuss: Daniel Kaluuya - brilliant, psychopathic gang leader. Robert Duvall - any chance to see him back in full action is fucking awesome. Viola Davis and Cynthia Erivo - they could hold the whole film down just the two of ‘em. The themes of the film were rich, though not always totally fleshed out — questions of how one can fight the racist tides of America / change a neighborhood, whether through any means necessary or a new path. They’re good questions, but sometimes the weight of forcing the audience to ask these questions isn’t backed up by the work done in the film itself. I don’t know… merits a re-watch to be sure. Maybe the hype killed it for me on the first round…. But, I came here to test out my criticisms here in writing them out and they feel valid under scrutiny. Kill the hype next time!

Breaking a New Episode

It’s interesting, we’re going into EP107 now and even with everything that’s behind us it feels like each episode is broken in a completely different way. It makes sense, sometimes there are just different priorities to an episode (the crossing of a threshold for a character, or a big plot movement, or making sure a new rule in introduced to the mechanics of the world). Whatever the necessary impetus, there still needs to be a wholly realized world around that episode’s milestone. So, depending on what you start with as your discussion point - whatever you’re coming out of the previous episode with, usually - that influences how you must weave the rest of the good TV components around it. It keeps things interesting, but also sort of terrifying because on some level every new episode-break you’re reinventing the wheel and relying only on what you know as an experienced writer to be true, and what you’ve established the in episodes previous.

New Movies I'm Excited About (short post)

Short post today since I’m way behind on my podcast editing to-do… I'm really thrilled to see two movies this weekend: Widows - directed by Steve McQueen, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs - the new western anthology film by the Coen Brothers. It’s been a long time, it feels like, that I’ve been earnestly pumped up to see some films just because I know the filmmakers are so good and unique. No reviews necessary, no word of mouth. Just knowing they exist is enough to get me excited. Shortly down the line, Roma by Alfonso Cuaron will fit in the same category. Sometimes I feel this way about TV shows but in this stratified, crystallizing movie-verse there’s a lot less diversity readily accessible within the film medium. So, I’ll take it where I can get it!

Writing Schedule

Made my first writing calendar for the show today (or was it yesterday?? hard to track honestly) — really blocking out and tracking exactly when the room is breaking or reviewing which episode, when an episode outline should be assigned and how long they have to review it — as well as when it should be submitted to first the production company and then the network. Really interesting and equally terrifying to understand on a granular level how easy it is to fall behind while making a show and how essential it is that you don’t. Well anyways, a new skill to add to the resume!