In June, I wrote about an extraordinary instance of reporting the morning the Worldcom fraud story broke. CNBC’s Mike Huckman ambushed Salomon analyst Jack Grubman (until then “The Most Powerful Man In The Telecom Industry”) outside his townhouse. Grubman was shaken and disoriented; you could see him struggling to respond to something other than a softball question.
But you could also see then and there Grubman’s realization that the world he imagined to be well within his control would soon start falling down, and there was nothing he could do about it. You couldn’t write this stuff. (Well, I couldn’t. Tennessee Williams, maybe…)
If Grubman’s tragedy follows the ancient structure, (and so far it does), this week features the amoibaion or lyric dialogue, what we now call “e-mail.” Slate condenses all the salient lines from this episode, where Grubman asks Sanford Weill (his boss’s boss’s boss’s boss) for help getting the Grubman twins into pre-school in exchange for, well, aye, there’s the rub. In his e-mail, Grubman gloats: “[AT&T Chairman Michael] Armstrong never knew that we both (Sandy and I) played him like a fiddle.” (Note to Jack: Your Rome’s burning, dude.)
If there are too many allusions in this posting, it’s because I can’t figure out if this is a biblical, Greek, Roman, Shakespearean or fable-like drama. But maybe it doesn’t matter; the end is likely the same. I do know how the second verse of the nursery rhyme goes: Take the keys and lock ’em up.
Author: greg
On the Distribution Challenges of Independent Film, Again
Listen to director Harry Shearer (he’s the voices in your head, you know) and another independent filmmaker talk about getting people interested in their films and getting their films into theaters [10.5 min.]. From WNYC’s On The Media (via Romenesko’s MediaNews).
There’s a Movie Here Somewhere… Glitter II: Brazilian Boogaloo?
In a NY Times article by Tony Smith: Harley-riding “hackers” clear Sao Paulo’s roads for motorcades, score photos with the VIP’s they escort. These police escorts are officially called “outriders,” but they call themselves batadores, (hackers, after the Brazilian pioneers who cut roads through the jungle), and they apparently leave their royal, diplomatic, and rock star charges in awe. The Empress of Japan insisted on taking a picture with them; Elton John sent an emissary to one batadore’s funeral
The Pitch: It’s The Bodyguard meets Black Orpheus. International and Conveniently-Multiracial Pop Star on tour in Brazil falls in love with a swaggering bike cop in her motorcade. Get Hazelden on the phone; I need to talk to Mariah Carey…
Directorspotting and Fansite Trends
Ewan, up close. Image: Eccentricity-online.com
The Guardian has an interesting interview with Ewan McGregor who talks about singing, about directing his first short, and about working with directors. There’s audio as well, in case you’re into the accent.
Ewanspotting, an awe-inducing McGregor fansite confirms a trend: names derived from the first/big movie. Ex. Being Charlie Kaufman and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Cigarettes & Coffee (named after his first short).
Surely, Hordes of Showgirls-Googling Architects Can’t Be Wrong?
Queries attempted to answer in this edition:
Q: “Herbert Muschamp” +Showgirls
Welcome to Special Edition of greg.org answers, where I provide information you thought you’d find on my weblog but didn’t. Until now:
Q “Herbert Muschamp” +Showgirls
AHonestly this had me stumped for most of the day. Then, at the bottom of this NY Post Page Six column (I was reading about my friend’s new publishing job, I swear.), I found a short article about “Just as I Expected, These Plans Suck,” a parody of the NY Times architecture critic’s writings on the WTC.
The opening line: “Striding down the row of design proposals for the WTC site, balefully eyeing each inert mien and artificially enhanced plan, I was reminded of the scene in Showgirls where the choreographer grimly surveys his topless charges.” The original press mention was in the LA Times; also, check out Michael Sorkin’s wickedly telling tabulation of recurring themes and pet architects in Muschamp’s columns. I’m working to get a copy of the actual parody. When I do, I’ll let you know, so stay tuned.
[Frankly, I’ve always seen Muschamp’s looong Times articles as a Fountainhead-size-novel-in-progress, which (if Sorkin’s analysis holds true) is about the madcap theoretical adventures of three architects–Rem, Diller, and Scofidio–as they turn Manhattan into a giant museum/store.]
Pentagon Memorial Response — Update
Proposed Pentagon Memorial Ramp, Greg Allen
Thanks to a very talented friend–no stranger to the question of memorials–who can sketch in 3-D modelling programs the way I can…crank out a Powerpoint deck or a term sheet, I guess, I have some new depictions of the Pentagon Memorial design I created as a response to the finalists chosen by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Competition Jury. See all the greg.org entries about memorials here. It’s a subject that interests me so much, I made a movie about it.
Oh, Canada!
Working on the Animated Musical, which is humming right along, thanks. There’s a whole Canada thing in the script, which keeps me on edge a bit. Some puppet-wielding treehuggers may blame South Park for depleting Canada’s natural comedy resources, but I’m sorry. When I stare into the deep comedic wells of the whole Canada Concept, I get as giddy as a moose-stepping Republican in the Arctic. Bumperstickers flash before my eyes: Faster, Fat Cat! Drill! Drill! and Fill up my SUV–with cheap laughs!. Ahem.
Twas ever thus, at least as far back as Steve Martin’s 1974 debut TV special, “The Funnier Side of Eastern Canada”:
Some guy John’s Canada parody of Apple’s “Switch” Ad? Funny.
The Molson “I AM Canadian” ad it dovetails so well with? Funny.
CBC’s Larry Sanders-like series, The Newsroom? Not just funny, but Canada Funny (think “Minnesota Nice”).
Suck’s early-and-often Canada-bashing? Very Funny.
South Park? Dude.
Writing Proceeds Apace; In the Mean Time, Follow These Links
“I can do things the traditional Hollywood route. I don’t have to try the new, unproven Internet.”
– Screenwriter Pamela Kay, leaving the new crop of screenwriting communities behind in Matthew Mirapaul’s NY Times article, “Aspiring Screenwriters Turn to Web for Encouragement”
What I hate to see/hear in historical documentaries: the expert interviewee’s super-affected use of the third person present tense. Listen to a twee example (about 2 minutes in) from NPR’s story of the song, Dixie. Obviously, I enjoyed soaking in the smug displeasure 2blowhards‘ lengthy rant about tedious PBS documentaries.
Movie Reviewers I’m Reading (for wildly different reasons): Flick Filosopher offers engaging, pretension-free, reviews and recommendations for movies and dvds. Just the ticket when you’re looking for film-as-unabashed-entertainment. (She didn’t like Thin Red Line, but her putting Buckaroo Banzai at #1 more than makes up for such a lapse.)
When anguish in a world of insufferable fools is your game, though, check out the voluminous and uncomfortably revealing user comments of one Mr Noel Bailey on IMDb. It’s lonely at the top of Mr Bailey’s bleak world, as he points out (Again! You people!) in a comment on the ur-sequel, 2010: “2001: A Space Odyssey as I suggested some time back is able to be understood and appreciated by marginally less than 5% of the world’s population. The chances are therefore, that you didn’t make it..accept that!”
Lonely and tough, even when he saw Zabriskie Point in theaters as an impressionable 24-year old: “[ZP] may be shy of ‘masterpiece’ status (mind you, who amongst is solely qualified to make THAT call?) but it is probably now, THE defining film of 70’s culture. A time when acid trips, communal living, even just plain old fashioned ‘love’ were not that easy a choice to live with!”
What with all my easy-to-live-with acid trips, my film’s “lonely solo piano” background music, and my “new, unproven Internet,” I guess I should find me a place well-nigh the bottom of that 95%.
Reading::Writing Drinking::Driving?
In the Casino resaurant, not the slightest impedance at all to getting in, no drop in temperature perceptible to his skin, Slothrop sits down at a table where somebody has left last Tuesday’s London Times. Hmmm. Hasn’t seen one of them in a while….Leafing through, dum, dum de-doo, yeah, the War’s still on, Allies closing in east and west on Berlin, powdered eggs still going one and three a dozen, “Fallen Officers,” MacGregory, Mucker-Maffick, Whitestreet, Personal Tributes…Meet Me in St Louis showing at the Empire Cinema (recalls doing the penis-in- the-popcorn-box routine there with one Madelyn, who was less than– ) —
Tantivy. Oh shit no, no wait–
“True charm…humblemindedness…strength of character…fundamental Christian cleanness and goodness…We all loved Oliver…his courage, kindness of heart and unfailing good humour were an inspiration to all of us…died bravely in battle leading a gallant attempt to rescue members of his unit, who were pinned down by German artillery…” And signed by his most devoted comrade in arms, Theodore Bloat. Major Theodore Bloat now–
Staring out the window, staring at nothing, gripping a table knife so hard maybe some bones of his hand will break. It happens sometimes to lepers. Failure of feedback to the brain–no way to know how fiercely they may be making a fist. You know these lepers. Well–
Ten minutes later, back up in his room, he’s lying face-down on the bed, feeling empty. Can’t cry. Can’t do anything.
They did it it. Took his friend out to some deathtrap, probably let him fake an “honourable” death…and then just closed up his file…
It will occur to him later that maybe the whole story was a lie. They could’ve planted it easy enough in that London Times, couldn’t they? Left the paper for Slothrop to find? But by the time he figures that one out, there’ll be no turning around.
– Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow p. 293
So I’m reading Gravity’s Rainbow, small, resonant details of which, I freely acknowledge, find their way into the animated musical screenplay. But when I mention Anthony Lane’s writing about Cannes one day and read this bit of Pynchon (set in Nice. !) the next, please understand –please, just don’t sneer– if Lewis’s post the next day about Cannes and the grisly fate of first-time filmmakers weirds me out just a little.
Not that I’ve been expecting a full-blown review for Souvenir in the New Yorker…but, maybe a smart little bit in Talk of the Town…
Post-script: A reader pointed out that using the mass media to send messages to the troubled protagonist is a plot point in The Bourne Identity as well. So what are you saying? That stealing ideas from Pynchon, the best I can hope for is to be Robert Ludlum? Or that I’m (un)consciously campaigning to have Matt Damon play me in the movie?
Sites not waiting around for me to anoint them
In case that doesn’t narrow it down enough:
Dublog, which has, among many other interesting things, this link about astronauts’ photographs or earth. Bears out what Thoreau said, which I wrote about a few weeks ago.
Purse Lip Square Jaw, a lot of interesting IA, A (architecture, that is), and culture. (thanks for the heads up, Peter)
Movie Poop Shoot, Kevin Smith’s worthy vehicle for online empire.
Actually, If You’re An Astrophysicist, The Rocket Scientists Work For You
The travails of the writer, indeed. While I type away in semi-obscurity on a screenplay for a musical cartoon, and while Anthony Lane (not Lewis, as a few readers pointed out. They just look so much alike, though…) puts aside his Mont Blanc to wrestle with publicists for Harry Potter tickets, there are people who not only write and publish, they contribute significantly to the expansion of human knowledge and our understanding of the universe.
One example from today’s issue of Nature: “Gravitationally redshifted absorption lines in the X-ray burst spectra of a neutron star,” by Drs Jean Cottam, Fritz Paerels, and Mariano Mendez. (The NASA News page is a little more colloquial: “Exotic Innards of a Neutron Star Revealed in a Series of Explosions”. See the final draft of the paper on astro-ph, the Napster of Astrophysics.)
Don’t ask me to explain it to you. When one’s wife is a high-energy astrophysicist, gravitationally redshifted absorption lines are just one more of the mysteries of women you hope to understand, some day. I do know, however, that she is made of rather exotic matter.
Beyond +went+to+high+school+with+Ben+Affleck
Queries answered in this edition:
Q: “Why is Agnes Varda called ‘The Grandmother of the Nouvelle Vague‘?”
Q: “Matthew Barney Cremaster screening in Washington”
Q: “Greg’s Western Wear Online”
Q: “How much do producers spend making movies?”
Q: “In which films are the clocks stuck at 4.20?”
Q: “All Quiet on the Western Front symbols”
For a price, the small army of researchers and Jeopardy contestant manque‘s at Google Answers will answer your questions, things you just can’t find with Google the search engine.
In my site logs, I see your queries that bring you here. When what you’re searching for doesn’t immediately appear, sometimes it’s the search engine. but sometime it’s you. I’d certainly hope it’s not me. Along with fresh breath, customer satisfaction is a priority in my life. So I’m introducing greg.org answers, the information you thought you’d find on my weblog but didn’t. Until now. Let’s begin:
Q “Why is Agnes Varda called ‘The Grandmother of the Nouvelle Vague‘?”
A Because she tells you to, and you should generally do what great filmmakers tell you to do. From an Indiewire interview: “…because my first feature I made in ’54, five years before the New Wave, and I already had the freedom and the principles that they had. I hadn’t met with the Cahiers du Cinema. I never had any training. I wasn’t a cinebuff like they were. I wasn’t a film critic. So, they called me the Grandmother, because I started it, almost.”
Q “Matthew Barney Cremaster screening in Washington”
A It was Oct.31 and Nov. 1 at the Hirshhorn. You missed it, dude. Try London until Nov. 14, Paris, alongside the exhibit until Jan. 5. [I saw it, though, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt]
Q “Greg’s Western Wear Online”
A Greg’s Western Wear is a Central Florida western wear empire dedicated to “making wester wear shopping fun.”
Q “How much do producers spend making movies?”
A John Lee’s The Producer’s Business Handbook is a very useful reference for new or aspiring producers.
A The guys at Cyan Pictures clearly know how to spend money smartly, and it looks like they spent $42.5K on their nearly completed short film. I’ve spent a little more than half that on my short, Souvenir.
A How much you got?
Q “In which films are the clocks stuck at 4.20?” [from Yahoo UK, winner of the 2002 most proper search engine grammar prize]
A Huh. Uncharacteristically for an obscure topic related to smoking pot, there’s a looooong, excruciatingly detailed discursis about 420 on Phish’s site.
The rumor that the clocks in Pulp Fiction are all set to 4:20 is easily refuted. Only one is, apparently. (According to disinfo, Tarantino took his revenge on these baked rumormongers by killing each of the potsmokers in his next movie, Jackie Brown, at 4:20.
Anyway, disinfo also mentions a 4:20 clock appearance in Ingmar Bergman’s The Magician.
Q All Quiet on the Western Front symbols
A I’ll answer your questions, but I won’t do your homework for you. Watch the movie yourself. I hear there’s a book, too.
Hey! They shot that scene in the church on my corner
The Opposite of Sex and The City, by FTrain’s Paul Ford.
I See Harrison Ford As The Daring Writer…
Film critic Anthony Lane is writing the diary at Slate. So far, it’s been torrid accounts of the perils of writing. It’s pretty suspenseful stuff, journaling as a pitch/plea for giving Lane the Charlie Kaufman Treatment. (Kaufman wrote the screenplay adaptation of Susan Orlean’s book, The Orchid Thief, which became Adaptation, starring Ms Meryl Streep as Ms Orlean.) Vivid imagery, action movie material, even. Tuesday, rewrite day, for instance:
“If this [my Tuesday as a New Yorker writer] were an Indiana Jones movie, I would merely have proceeded to the next plank in the creaking, swaying rope bridge over a ravine. Below me, the crocodiles gape. One more pace, twice as fraught, will bring me to the fact-checking department, into whose miasmic maw writers far stronger than I have disappeared, their cries fading into the dark. Pray God that I come out alive.
(There’s much more of this in the book, Nobody’s Perfect: Selected Writings from the New Yorker. We should have breakfast about it. London? Fine. Tea.) I enjoy Lane’s writing. A favorite is his 1997 report from Cannes [Yeah, I got the book, hardcover. When you’ve been throwing out the paperback version every week, what can you do? Just buy it!]:
…at Cannes, unlike anywhere else, the act of waiting justifies what you are waiting for, and deepens your need to get there. I wandered around town for two full days in a tuxedo, feeling like the world’s most underused gigolo, for no other reason than to smooth my path into screenings of films from which I would normally run a mile.
Hmmm. Get me Richard Gere on the phone…
Director’s Cut? That, My Friend, is TMI
On the set of Starship Troopers: DP Jost Vocano,
director Paul Verhoeven, star Casper Van Dien, writer Ed Neumeier
Yesterday’s NY Times Magazine is a veritable toolbox (and I use that word deliberately) for film, all you want to know, and more. First, what you want to know: There’s the Cinderella-story of indie director Joe Carnahan’s tremendous success on the Bel-Air Circuit, where Narc, his ignored-at-Sundance cop flick became the favorite film of (among others) Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford.
And the more: The “How to…” section provides expert opinion on potentially tricky subjects, all in a neat little package. Here’s a quote from Paul Verhoeven’s How to Shoot a Nude Scene:
When I did Starship Troopers, the cast was balking about going through with a group shower scene. So I took off all my clothes. And my director of photography did also. It worked, because everybody started laughing, and then they got naked. And we didn’t hear anymore complaints.
You can read reviews of Verhoeven’s piece at CNdb, the Celebrity Nudity Database.