Author: greg

So I finally got at least one production still off the Mac and onto the web. Here is the first of about 20 or so images from Souvenir November 2001, the one which accompanys all the press kits and festival applications (so far).

It’s a scene of the New Yorker and the caretaker of Lochnagar Crater, a site that the film’s protagonist stumbles across while searching for the Thiepval Memorial. (None of this makes the remotest sense to you? Welcome to my weblog. Check out the background links, script, and storyboard at the top of the lefthand column.) In this scene, the caretaker and his colleague explain the crater’s origin and history. Read about the crater at the Friends of Lochnagar site. And read an account of the 1998 discovery of Private George Nugent’s remains at the crater, an incident the caretaker discusses in the movie.

It was moving day, or moving around day, anyway. Traded weeks of keyboard-based work for overhauling the art in our little NYC house. Out with Roe Ethridge’s landscapes (his great show just opened at Andrew Kreps Gallery, so we’ll ALL be seeing more of his work for a while.), Anne Chu’s watercolor landscapes, and Stephen Hendee’s ink/gouache futuristic landscapes (see a theme here?) In with Vern Dawson and Olafur Eliasson (now that winter’s over, it’s safe to put up pictures of Iceland). And the kicker: a Wade Guyton sculpture that has a table-like object as its base. Looks so much like a table, I’m typing at it right now, in fact, until Wade comes to help set up the mirrored plexiglass column element that sits on top.

Since it’s only table-LIKE, I stacked some books and magazines under the leg-LIKE elements to bring it to table height. Here’s the list:

Godel, Escher, Bach; The Invisible Man; the last two issues of Vogue; Air Guitar by Dave Hickey; First They Killed My Father : A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers; Bret Easton Ellis’ Glamorama; Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell (french version, which is hilarious, btw); Collected Fictions: Jorge Luis Borges; Projects for Prada Part 1 by Rem Koolhaas’ publishing elves; an old Wallpaper*, a new Artforum, a Vanity Fair, Departures, an old art/text, and a beat-up New Yorker.

Then I looked at the finished piles, and I was reminded of the stylists at “shelter magazines” who artfully arrange erudite-seeming/trend-driven book spines for photoshoots (Remember that summer when everyone seemed to have Infinite Jest on his/her coffee table?). I couldn’t find any articles about it, meaning 1) such magazine machinations may be an urban myth (unlikely), 2) I’m not hip to the right stylist-related search terms, or 3)people in the shelter magazine world don’t use the internet for self-critique, just for hookin’ up. I did find this excerpt from Marjorie Garber’s Sex and Real Estate, which talks about the business of “propping” a for-sale house (using wood fires, apple pies, aromatherapy, flowers, etc.) to hit the prospective buyer’s “romantic soft spot.”

So what can we glean from our collection of titles? Is it the display window of my soul? I see two breakdowns:

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:

“‘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).