the making of, by greg allen
Oh, before I forget:
Send an email if you’re interested in coming to a private evening screening of Souvenir November 2001 in NYC, to be scheduled within the next couple of weeks. If demand warrants, we’ll set one up in Washington, DC as well. I’m working on the date and location this week.
As if nothing had ever gone wrong… This morning, I managed to get the completed, subtitled, sound-level-relatively-balanced version of Souvenir outputted onto a DV master AND several VHS tapes. What this means:
A hint to Final Cut Pro users with output problems: < geekspeak> After outputting the audio to a CD-file and the video (only!) to a Final Cut Movie file, I combined these two full-length (15 min) files into an entirely new project and sequence. It doesn’t require any render files, etc, so it’s entirely self contained in 3-4 files. Because these were sitting on a firewire external drive, they were inherently limited by the transfer speed of the firewire connection. I moved them off the ext. drive and placed the entire project on the laptop hard drive. Then I replayed the project via “Print to Video.” It worked fine. Of course, because the G4 only has 10Gb, I had to delete piles of stuff first to make space. And if you have a larger project, you’ll need a commensurately larger internal drive. < /geekspeak>
First the good news: I got my keyboard replaced, and now I have my beloved Trackpoint back. Things are looking up.
Bad news: Here is the list of picks for International Critics Week at Cannes. One short, The Day I Was Born, by Japanese director Manda Kunitoshi, features a “baby born on September 11 2001,” so that may have filled the thematic slot I was targetting. There were no US shorts among the seven selected, though. In fact, there are no US films at all.
Good news: I got the no-subtitles version dubbed and submitted to the Edinburgh Film Festival, which cut me a week’s slack while I tried to get the subtitled version outputted.
Bad news: I haven’t gotten the subtitled version outputted yet. There are memory problems with Final Cut Pro, which doesn’t seem to recognize the 30+ available gigabytes on my external drive. At this rate, though, I’ll be able to sit next to everyone who watches it and translate the French parts for them.
Sure enough. Here is the list of short films selected for Cannes. Two US films, including one by Bruce Terris, who was Pete Jones’ 1st Assistant Director on Stolen Summer/Project Greenlight. Watching Terris’ constant pushing/complaining about the importance of shot lists stuck in my head and proved to be very helpful advice for shooting Souvenir, btw.
“‘We wanted to break the rule which has it that the selection of the Cannes film festival should always be tragic and solemn,’ Thierry Fremaux, the festival’s artistic director, said on Wednesday as he presented the program.”
I haven’t been able to find the list of short films selected, but it sounds like Fremaux specifically ruled out my movie. I’d better reconsider my next project: a film about coming to terms with my strict Catholic upbringing.
The list of feature films in the competition at Cannes is here, and the Un Certain Regard selection is here. Alexander Payne’s film, About Schmidt got in after all; a couple of weeks ago at MoMA, he said he thought it had been rejected. TF1 reports that there were 2,281 films submitted this year. Whether that includes the 900 or so shorts isn’t clear.
Just when I imagine that this might be the most problem-plagued, nerve-wracking production ever, Sundance Channel comes through in the pinch, with a timely screening of Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, the 1982 documentary on the making of Werner Herzog’s folly, Fitzcarraldo. It tells the ridiculous story of Herzog losing his two stars, Jason Robards and Mick Jagger, after 40% of the movie had been shot; of delays that mean shooting in the dry season, when the river is too low for his boats; of the border war that erupts, necessitating them to move the location 1,500 miles; and of course, of his hate-love-hate relationship with replacement lead Klaus Kinski. I got it easy.
Oh, by the way, they’re announcing the films selected for Cannes tomorrow (24 April).
Back from Albuquerque, ready (I think) to face a full day of non-stop debugging and (hopefully) output on the movie. Right now, though, I’m somewhat hectically getting caught up on the rest of my life, such as it is. One Albuquerque anecdote: Saturday night, after a day spent at The American Physical Society/High Energy Astrophysics Division (aka APS/HEAD) conference, we dropped on by the Break Loose 4 Breakdancing Contest and Skate Demo being held in the adjacent hall. We were the only crossovers, as far as I could tell. 200 +/- NM teens hanging out somewhat laconically, watching small crews take turns spinning on their shoulders on the unpadded concrete floor.
This confluence/juxtaposition reminded me of perhaps the best This American Life episode in my memory, partly because at the time (1994-7) I was acquainted with the guy telling the story, John Perry Barlow, partly because, listening to it, it seems that Ira Glass was actually caught off guard, unscripted, by the interview. In the Episode titled, Conventions John talks about “when worlds collide,” a fascinating story of two people at two conventions from two different worlds meeting. Here’s the Real Audio (go about 37 minutes in).
In Albuquerque for the weekend. My wife is attending an astrophysics conference here. Lots of dust and wind. And lots of murals, too, for some reason. There must be a “1% for murals” ordinance in force, because practically every building in town has an uplifting, figurative mural. Sure enough, here’s a site with a collection of Albuquerque’s murals, and here is info about the City’s Mural Program. I guess it could be painted cows, so they should be grateful.
If ONLY this moviemaking experience was as annoying as Groundhog Day… Final Cut Pro seems to be disintegrating before my eyes, and taking the project with it. EVERY time I open the master sequence, the same dozen or so clips show up as missing. The infuriating thing: it’s supposedly because the audio (not the video) file isn’t being recognized (even though they’re both clearly present), and almost all the *&#$’ed up clips don’t even use audio. They’re insert shots where we use only the video and lay another audio track over it. [While I’ve posted this plea/rant to the 2-pop.com discussion board, I haven’t gotten any responses yet.]
Right now, I’m recapturing the offending clips in video only, hopefully avoiding the missing audio syndrome. Considering I currently have no movie to submit to any festivals, I can’t even say what festivals I’m missing (except for the ones like the IFP Market in NYC where I already applied but haven’t sent in the tape (obviously).
Editing: Final tweaks over the weekend to get a distortion-free output version has now deteriorated into a major structural problem with Final Cut Pro. If I didn’t have so much other stuff to occupy my mind, I’d be worried sick. The program shows that a dozen+ audio files are missing AND that they’re required to play the finished sequence, even though they’re not in the sequence. IDGI. Anyway, I’ve started going through every file, recapturing those that are in the movie, and deleting those that aren’t. It’s going to be a long week. And the submissions clocks are still ticking.
Submissions: Got a dear auteur fax from Quinzaine Realisateurs. Maybe I don’t want people who don’t know me to see it after all…
As I’m sitting here working, Rushmore is just ending on Comedy Central. Freakin’ amazing. What IS that movie? I’m glad I didn’t see it right before meeting Wes Anderson last week; id’ve been a blubbering idiot fan. As it is, I’m no more likely to EVER make a movie like that (at one end of the spectrum) than I am to make Weekend at Bernie’s II (at the other). No prob.
Issue of 2002-04-22 and 2002-04-29
Posted 2002-04-15
COMMENT/ TWO STATES/ Nicholas Lemann looks at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of post (US)-Civil War reconstruction.
STRING SECTION/ SLAVA AT SEVENTY-FIVE/ Charles Michener basks in the effusive presence of Maestro Mstislav Rostropovich.
INK/ THE TIMES, V.O./ Adam Gopnik lets us know that, even though Le Monde began publishing an English-language insert from the NYT, he buys it for the French articles.
THE BOARDS/ MAN IN TIGHTS/ Eric Konigsberg previews right-wing muscle daddy/blogger Andrew Sullivan’s Shakespeare debut.
THE FINANCIAL PAGE/ TAX CHEAT, INC./ James Surowiecki explains why offshore tax dodging is illegal for you, but fine for Ingersoll-Rand.
I ended up making screening tapes from the DV master, since I have been having the same problems with output that we had before (ie., skipping, frozen frames). The movie may have found the maximum processing capacity of the G4 we’re working with. Moral: don’t go halfway on the memory or processing power. You’ll use it all, so make sure it’s enough.
Jean and I drove from DC to NC for the weekend, and talked through the rest of the Souvenir series. I’ll post some of those notes after I get them typed up. Some general ideas around which stories may develop: remembering and returning to specific places, the differences between peoples’ memories of the same event (more Chuck and Buck than Rashomon, though), remembering as talking vs. remembering as “experiencing,” and a few more. Abstract enough for you? After hearing a 1992 interview with John Cage on WNYC yesterday, I’m pretty sure he’ll have a role in the movie somehow. (besides the music in Souvenir November 2001, that is) Anyway, everyone goes to bed early in NC, so I’m outta here.
Making screening tapes: Groundhog Day all over again (which may be redundant, I know). I’ve been working to swap out the shot that annoyed Jonah and me (shooting into the sun=super-blown out exposure), finding one that (except for some coke can/coke bottle discontinuity) is way way better. Now, though, the same popping and frame snagging problem that nearly derailed us last week is back, even worse.
MoMA Benefit: what a laff riot. Spent hours in the afternoon rehearsing with David O. Russell, Lily Tomlin, and a posse of movie and museum people. It was a blast. My co-chair, Muffy, didn’t want to do any of the jokes I’d written for us (we were the fifth in a chain of intros and thank yous, and we introduced David and Lily, who interviewed him). Instead of Ben Stiller opening the evening, it was a clip from Flirting with Disaster, the one where Mary Tyler Moore lifts her shirt and shows off her aging-yet-still-firm breasts (let’s see what search engines do with THAT description). So after four refined, diplomatic, but slightly uptight intros by other museum dignitaries, my joke about Russell making movies for a TV generation that grew up wanting Mary Tyler Moore to take her shirt off went over fine. As did the line about thanking my lawyers and my manager who got me this job (people were just about thanked out). Ben Stiller’s appearance later, via “live” satellite hookup, was hilarious; he acted like he was accepting the award, then got confused and hurt when he was told it wasn’t for him. Finally, Will Farrell showed up, as James Lipton, and pulled all the actors onstage to fawn over them strangely. I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me. Then we all ran upstairs for dinner (and, for the LA crowd, an American Spirit) and the party.
Here is a list of my new Hollywood friends (in Hollywood, if you hang out for a night, mentioning your respective projects, you can claim friendship.): Spike and Sofia (very nice. sat next to them.); the Leguizamos, Wes Anderson (very popular with the ladies, btw), Alexander Payne, and Glenn Fitzgerald. The agents were thick as thieves (in a good way), but, true to form, they don’t have entries in IMDB, so no linking. Anyway, my friends’ll understand if I have to get back to work. Let’s get together for breakfast.
Been working on my schtick for tonight, where I am introducing David O. Russell and Lily Tomlin at a MoMA film benefit. MoMA is acquiring Russell’s films for its permanent collection, and the fundraising group I co-chair is hosting the program/party. Given the crowd and the committee (almost all of whom are going to be there), I’m (Spike) Jonzin’ to work the movie into the intro, no matter how tenuous the connection. Can’t see it happening, though. And with Ben Stiller opening for me and the crowd of comedians in the program, I think the best I’ll be able to do is not be a complete idiot. Paul Thomas Anderson‘ll be there, as well as Wes Anderson [a Wes Anderson blog, yet not by Wes Anderson.]; hopefully, we’re seated somewhat alphabetically…