The Lost in Translation soundtracks are practically flying off the page. It’s nice that people are digging it, but I didn’t expect my Sofia Coppola material would be such a shopping catalyst.
I can see how mentioning something more obscure, like A Notebook on Cities and Clothes (Wim Wenders’ Yohji Yamamoto documentary), might tempt people to shop (or at least window shop). But the soundtrack seems like an intentional purchase; you’d just go to Amazon directly. No complaints, just many thanks.
The real surprise, though, was seeing the impact of variations in commissions for a soundtrack or DVD (usually 2.5-3.0% now) vs a classic book (up to 15%). You’re buying 20 soundtracks for every catalog of Matthew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle or every book/DVD of David Byrne: E.E.E.I. (Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information) about PowerPoint art, but those books easily rack up 10 times the commission.
It almost makes me want to become the Gizmodo of art tomes.
The Guardian tallies up the 40 best directors in the world today, complete with ratings in Zagat-style (or beauty pageant-style) categories: Substance/Look/Craft/Originality/Intelligence.
Setting aside the unavoidable grade inflation–seven critics rated them from 1-20 for each category, but the totals fall in a narrow range, from 89 (David Lynch at #1) to 73 (the Gus Van Sant “who didn’t make Good Will Hunting” at #40)– it’s a pretty safe, festival-y list. But it does have it’s share of Eurotrashing quirks (David Lynch is #1??? Michael Moore is on it at all????? ditto Samira Makhmalbaf, one of only two women).
All in all, though, I’m glad to see so many of my boys made the list Missing, though: Agnes Varda, Hirokazu Kore-eda (a stretch, maybe, but more deserving than Makhmalbaf), the Amy Heckerling who did Fast Times and Clueless, Marc Forster, oh, I don’t know.
From Bootlegs by Jon Routson, image: teamgallery.com
If camcorders are illegal, only criminals will have camcorders.
Yesterday, Sen. Diane Feinstein (D for Disney) and John Cornyn (R-Tex, an anagram for T-Rex) held a press screening for their newest starrer, which they said is set for an early 2004 release. It’s a pirate fiction fantasy directed by MPAA prexy Jack Valenti. Here’s the one-line synopsis:
They are sponsoring legislation that will make it a felony “to use or attempt to use” a video recording device to copy a film in a movie theater.
The first offense would carry up to a five-year jail sentence, with up to ten years imprisonment for the sequel. If your state has a three strikes law–like California–recording a trilogy could get you life.
As if you needed another reason to avoid Matrix Revolutions…
Related:
Baltimore-based artist Jon Routson, who uses camcordered copies of movies as his artistic medium
my Times article about video art bootlegging
still her first one-woman show, Without You I’m Nothing. It’s on Trio right now. Looks like I’ll be up for another hour to see the grand finale, her cabaret rendition of “Little Red Corvette.” (Complete with backup, it turns out, by Tori Amos)
For years it was extremely and annoyingly hard to find; it’s still not on DVD, but at least now you can buy it on VHS.
Ignore me. I’m making notes for a seminar at CCNY that Paul Myoda invited me to speak at and screen some of the films. I should probably make a Venn Diagram for this…
Production diary of my own films
Ideas behind my own films (including development of some scripts, why the hell I’m doing a musical)
Influences and inspiration, whether filmmakers, artists, writers
Subject matter, themes, background and continuing dialogue/unfolding events (death, grief, 9/11, memorials, architecture)
Art & architecture I like, because it impacts me and my worldview
Other peoples’ filmmaking news, experiences
Filmmaking trends I find relevant (DV, Machinima, Animation, DVD, documentary-style, video game-film dialogue)
Topics that develop a life of their own (shipping container architecture, powerpoint, Liza Minnelli for a frightening minute there-blame Gawker– Sforzian backgrounds and the entertainment techniques of politics, putting this war in context, religiosity, WTC Memorial Competition)
Insights and interviews with filmmakers I think are worth paying attention to/learning something from
Self-admittedly brilliant ideas I’m confident everyone in the world will benefit from reading (note: heavy overlap with other categories)
Armistice Day ceremony at Arlington, 11/11/21, image: acusd.edu
This morning I was in DC, so I thought I’d go to the WWI Memorial. [Veterans Day began in 1919 as Armistice Day. It was expanded two wars-to-end-all-wars later, in 1953.]
Nice plan, except that there is no national WWI Memorial. On 11 November 1921, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was dedicated in a ceremony which was relayed by telephone to New York and San Francisco.
[“In the open air the President’s voice swept over the crowd in Madison Square,” enthused The Times‘ man on the scene. “The Voice seemed to come from the chest of a giant…Carried by wire from Washington, [it] was heard more clearly that that of Colonel Theodore Roosevelt and Martin Littleton, whose voices were amplified as they spoke from the platform in the Garden.” God Bless America(n Telephone & Telegraph).]
Presidents laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns became an Armistice Day tradition. But eventually, the soldier disinterred from Belleau Wood was joined by representatives from later wars, expanding he Tomb’s purview. As a result, specific remembrance of the horrors and sacrifices of WWI were conflated into the larger struggles of the century.
The traffic at Arlington was a mess; after sitting in misdirected lines for nearly an hour, I left without even a glimpse of the parking lot, much less the Tomb. Many in the crowd were veterans, though, families in tow. I went on to my second destination, across the Memorial Bridge, to the south edge of the Mall.
DC War Memorial, cropped from someone online, who I can’t remember….damn…
The DC World War Memorial is located in a grove of trees midway between the new Korean War Memorial and the massive, so-new-it’s-not-done-yet WWII Memorial. President Hoover dedicated the little temple pavilion in 1931 to the memories of Washingtonians who died in The War. Technically, then, it’s a local memorial, created by the locals, who also happened to be the leaders of the country.
I was the only visitor during the half hour I was there. Three Park Service rangers–two in WWI-era uniforms–were breaking WWI-era camp in the little temple. For three years now, they have taken it upon themselves to create a little interpretive history opportunity for any visitors. Last year, when detours for the WWII Memorial construction closed off many other pathways, the rangers had quite a turnout. This year was much quieter. The two rangers in period uniform participate in WWI re-enactments with the Great War Association. Unlike Civil War re-enactments, however, there is no audience; there are practically no spectators, only participants.
Memorial to the Missing, image. bc.edu
Britain created the Cenotaph as a Memorial to the Great War, and it has woven taught WWI into the national identity. They built The Memorial to the Missing–the subject of my first film, and an inspiration for Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial design just across the Reflecting Pond from the DC War Memorial–in France, an outpost for British memory. The names of just The Missing from just The Somme exceeded 75,000.
DNA testing helped identify the Unknown Soldier from Vietnam, and his remains were reburied in 1998. Until September 11th, it was assumed there would be no more Unknowns or Missing, but that turns out not to be the case. The World Trade Center Memorial will hold the presently unidentifiable remains of those killed, in hopes that technology will someday match them up to the 1,271 individual names. The New Missing, on the other hand, are frequently those who have been wounded or killed in Iraq. Witness to the fresh horrors of war, it seems, must come from the unlikeliest of sources: Cher calling into C-SPAN with stories of brave 19 year-olds who’ve lost arms and legs, just a few of the 2,100+ GWII casualties who are shunned and obscured by the Administration.
In Sunday’s Washington Post, the playwright Norman Allen–an old man, I take it–lamented the fading of Armistice Day:
I first heard tales of the war’s devastation from my grandfather, who was 19 when he was wounded not far from Chateau Thierry, an hour’s drive from Paris. In middle age, he spoke in generic terms of his heroic comrades, Iowa boys like himself. In early senility, he spoke in detail of struggling across a field under heavy fire. Glancing to the left, he saw a friend’s head blown away. He told me, “Never go to war. No matter what.” My generation is the last to hear these things firsthand.
“I’d tell him make a short first, and finance it himself,” [an unnamed] producer said. “He’s got to have a reel. No financier is going to risk $30 million on someone who’s never made a film.”
And, I would add, get a weblog, get your name out there, meet a few people. This unsolicited advice is meant for one Tom Ford, who is considering a new career in film.
Fred Bernstein’s Twin Piers Memorial, Feb 2002, image: slate.com
[via Archinect] Fred Bernstein’s proposal for a World Trade Center Memorial has been online for a while. (I first saw–and posted about— it when Timothy Noah featured it on Slate way back in Feb. 2002.) . Back then, it was an unexpectedly restrained, welcome alternative to the maudlin or ludicrous ideas that were being floated at the time. (Remember that Max Protetch show in January? I’m sure most of the participants now hope you don’t.)
Now it turns out Bernstein’s Twin Piers was the ninth finalist in the official WTC memorial competition. It was disqualified because, although it was submitted under a friend’s name, it was readily identified as his idea, and he’d already submitted another entry. Interestingly, according to the NYPost, it was the “no two entries” rule, not the “publicly identified” rule that led to its exclusion.
For a poignant flashback and a realization of all the possibilities that have since been foreclosed for the WTC site, the city, the country and the world, read Bernstein’s November 2001 NY Newsday article, “United Nations should move to World Trade Center Site.” Those were the days.
Forget the Matrix-colored glasses; now it’s time to look at films in terms of good old-fashioned medieval religion. Apparently, The Passion of Christ was prophesied as far back as Mad Max 3. In the Voice, Jessica Winters follows a trail of little mustard seeds through twenty years of Mel Gibson’s films, which leads to the actor/director/producer’s longtime-coming Messiah Complex. It makes for sinfully entertaining reading. If Gibson didn’t already think I’m damned to hell for being Mormon, I’d be quaking in my spiritual boots for daring to question his piety.
[While I’m on the subject, when, exactly, did shooting wrap on The Passion? Sometime before the screenings Frank Rich didn’t get invited to, right? And when, exactly, did James Caviezel get struck by lightning on the set? Then why, exactly, is this getting reported now? Is Gibson actually God-baiting as well as Jew-baiting in the name of publicity?]
Salon is not only still publishing, they’re publishing the shooting script of the Ronald Reagan TV movie that the conservative closet cases wanted to see on Showtime (the Queer as Folk Network). It’s an 8Mb pdf. Of a TV Movie. Starring James Brolin. About Ronald Reagan. You’ve been warned.
[For an invigorating Reagan text, try Joan Didion’s prescient 1997 review of DiNesh D’Souza’s Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader. It costs money, but it’s worth it.
For the definitive Reagan movie, buy or rent David O. Russell’s Flirting With Disaster, in which Reagan has two cameos: on the wall of Mel Coplin’s first adoptive “mom,” and on the tabs of acid of his real parents.]
In today’s Movie Issue of the NYT Mag, Lynn Hirschberg convenes a “roundtable” with two screenwriters, Brian Helgeland and Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, the Silver Surfer convo airdropped into the middle of Crimson Tide) “share some wisdom about the screenwriting life.”
1) We always knew Tarantino’s too much of a loudmoth to pull off the Terence Malick thing. 2) How many participants actually constitute a roundtable? I want to know who couldn’t manage to stumble over to the Regent and run up the Times‘s bar tab. 3) Reason enough to read it in print: the Favorite Screenplays Speed Round, which runs along the bottom of the piece. I may have my data entry lackeys in Madagascar transcribe it for your illicit online pleasure.
Tarantino scripts online: Kill Bill Jackie Brown (pdf) Pulp Fiction Natural Born Killers early draft
Brian Helgeland scripts online: Blood Work draft (pdf) LA Confidential draft The Postman early production draft (pdf) [heads up: think Kevin Costner, not Pablo Neruda] Assassins draft, with the Wachowskis
The script’s not online, but a A Knight’s Tale is out on DVD. [Have a hard time keeping the similarly comical anachronism of A Knight’s Tale (“An InStyle Editor in King Arthur’s Court” starring Heath Ledger) and First Knight (“Ralph Lauren Camelot Collection” starring Richard Gere) straight? No problem. Amazon’s selling them together. Supplies are supposedly limited.
Think you can do better? Well, get Final Draft and start writing, script monkey.
[links via Daily Script and Screenplays For You]
As you’ll never see it again… As B.Logman’s photos and news reports indicate, The Tate Modern has a massive-crowd-pleasing phenomenon on their hands. Now suddenly this photo I took at the preview seems worth posting, if only because who knows if it’ll ever happen again.
