the making of, by greg allen
I got back this morning, with a broken toe and a completed script for an ultra-short, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Here are the things I posted in my head while on vacation:
On the road: On the sea, actually. I guess it’s reassuring to get complaints about this site, at least when they’re about the recent paucity of postings. We’re in Hawaii, a conference/vacation at an insane resort. Like Ben Stiller’s Mel in Flirting With Disaster, we’re not not “B&B people.” Somewhat unsurprisingly, we’re not “Take-a-monorail-to-swim-with-the-dolphins-before-the-authentic-luau-Resort people,” either. [Here is a live webcam. I can attest that it looks just like that right now.] While we’re actually sleeping at a slightly lower-key part of the complex, the conference (and the wireless networks) are all at the veritable Ka’aba of leisure.
Anyway, there’s much writing to be done, but screen technology being what it is, that’d mean staying indoors most of the time, so we’ll see. So if you’re upset at the infrequency of my posts, this week may be a good time to browse the archives, explore the projects, look up some references to films or artists, or to get away from the computer altogether and kill a little time outside. Mahalo
Souvenirs from Utah: (NOTE: These are some finds from a weekend in Utah. Not related to any current film project, they’re bonuses, the equivalent of a tub of CoolWhip for the bowl of fruit salad that is the rest of the site.)
Souvenir updates from the road: Spoke with some folks in Austin, and submitted Souvenir (November 2001) to the festival. As you can discover by surfing through the Souvenir-related links at left, the film is a sytnhesis of scripted narrative and documentary language; Austin is very adamant about it’s “NO DOCUMENTARIES” requirement, which I can respect, but which I think has to be considered in a contemporary context. After talking to a couple of people in the short film selection office, they sounded persuaded; their requirements would not exclude the film. So, off it went.
I also signed up as a betatester for Withoutabox’s electronic press kit application. So far, it’s not bad, but I can’t yet feel/see the benefits. If I were a festival programmer with piles of Priority Mail packs all around me, I could see some advantage, though. We’ll see.
In the mean time, I’ve had some good breakthroughs in group (Oh, wait, that was Scott Evil.), in writing the script for Souvenir, the feature-length ensemble into which Souvenir (November 2001) will be interwoven. We’re going away soon for a solid week offline, and I expect to finish a draft then. Ideally, I’ll post it then.
One memory-related anecdote: After five years away, I visited a storage space I keep in Philadelphia. It was like running into a college-era friend, in a way; he’s changed, but you still recognize him, and (fortunately for you both) you’re not embarassed by him. Contents of this inadvertent time capsule include:
A pair of COMMANDERS-IN-CHIEF are having problems with their PowerPoint presentations, berating an INTERN. They proceed and address the troops.
A lot of weblog-related stuff. I’ve been working on a website project for a Museum friend of mine, which feels good and potentially very interesting. With some new projects emerging (total=5, for those playing at home), the armchair IA in me thinks greg.org’s a bit unwieldy these days. Look for a redesign soon. Also, I’ve been exploring Movable Type (Can I write that on my Blogger Pro server?), which I set up on another server, gregallen.com.
[There’s nothing there that isn’t here; far less, in fact. Though it was originally the main way for people to find me, greg.org has long since taken over the vanity Google searches. As a result, gregallen.com is now like some increasingly invisible sculpture in Central Park, which makes greg.org the web equivalent of the Balto statue: frequently visited, and sporting an explanatory plaque and–most importantly– a movie tie-in.]
Serendipitous mis-click: From Evhead, I accidentally clicked on Heath Row’s weblog, and I’m glad I did. It’s called Media Diet, but Heath’s clearly eating for two. At least. One delicacy: Andy McCaskey, Sr.’s weblog, Topic. Mr. McCaskey’s 86 years old, and writes what he knows. His seems to be the case of a lived life, well worth examining. (Heath compares him to Paul Harvey or Garrison Keillor; I wouldn’t. Harvey’s authentic but annoyingly glib. Keillor’s phony and just annoying. McCaskey’s both authentic and thoughtful.)
Returning from the bathroom where he brushed his teeth using his new toothpaste, Arm & Hammer P.M. (“Fights Nighttime Mouth!”), a MAN leans over to kiss his WIFE goodnight.
Even though a friend at Vanity Fair is so sick of hearing about him she puts her hands over her ears and starts screaming “la la la la la la” when I mention his name, I’ve been listening to Robert Evans read his book, The Kid Stays in the Picture. It’s a grating riot. And I will see the movie, which I think will be overkill, but I’ve seen clips where they have done some interesting-concept animation of still photos. That’s something I’ve been kicking around with for a few years. Never mind. You can listen to a brief excerpt of the audiobook here. Buy it if you wish. (But if you’re on Wes Anderson’s Christmas list, you already got it; it briefly replaced muffin baskets and surfwax as the Hollywood Christmas Gift of Choice in 2000.)
Driving around DC this morning: When we bought our car, (a 1985 Mercedes 300CD coupe, like people’s moms used to drive to the club), it was a tossup between that one and the Volvo 240 wagon (also from the late 80’s). Dodged the bullet on that one. What do I mean? Listening to NPR while driving a Volvo and listening to NPR while driving a Volvo ironically look pretty much the same from here.
Writing and music rights: Agnes Varda’s Gleaners and I is on Sundance again. [It’s been released on DVD now, too.] While I’ve mentioned the, video-to-film transfer pleasure aspect of seeing it on TV, it’s weird to see how similar some of shots in Souvenir November 2001 are to her movie. I’d been influenced even more than I knew.
Attribute some similarity to shooting in roughly the same places: overcast and rainy French autoroutes, rural side roads, fallow fields, smalltown streets. Her success in “gleaning” people (on the street, in a field) became our solution when we lost all the actors we’d lined up; we started meeting and interviewing people wherever we could find them. And I no doubt took on one of her themes as well, if unconsciously: like The Gleaners, Souvenir is a road movie, a search, but one whose target isn’t clear at first. The New Yorker in Souvenir only begins to recognize what he’s actually looking for after he’s engrossed in the search. And as Varda makes poignantly clear, the search is what’s important. Unlike Varda, however, I do not write and perform my own rap voiceover. Of course, if it costs too much to clear our music clips, I may have to…
This weekend, after seeing Full Frontal, we discussed the dialogue at length. My (grew-up-on-the-stage) wife spotted a lot of weak improv, or weakly directed improv–actors left to figure it out for themselves and, more often than not, not pulling it off. Besotted Soderbergher that I am (nothing like three DVD commentaries in the last two weeks to make you feel like you know the director.), I’d argued that surely Soderbergh knew what’s up; he’s shooting a script that’s written to sound like this. It’s all artificial, after all. Get it?
Rather than address the fact that I was just wrong [Fine. I’ll address it. Nerve.com has an excerpt of the script which differs notably from the scene in the movie. The actors seem to have recreated and expanded on the type of conversation written in the script. A FoxNews interview with Blair Underwood settles on “workshop” as the best way to describe the film.], I’d rather deflect the whole issue toward something “serious.” Here’s Joel Klein in a New Yorker column about Hilary Clinton’s strong showing at that Democratic meeting in NYC last week:
But political deftness and ease of delivery were not the most impressive things about the Senator’s turn: Clinton was the only speaker who didn’t make an advance text available to the press. Apparently, she winged it. A day later, in response to a call to the Senator’s office requesting a copy of the speech, a press aide said, “Sorry, but it’s still being transcribed.”
Don’t contrast this with the seemingly adlibbed (and immediate Moment of Zen) George Bush comment I mentioned yesterday. Contrast it with the most distracting thing about listening to Bush read his speeches, the way he always pauses at what seem to be linebreaks on his index cards. It’s almost like listening to Christopher Reeves on a respirator or to a lighthouse keeper who’s conditioned to pause every five seconds, whether the foghorn’s on or not. I mentioned this several months ago to a friend with very close ties to the Bush speechwriters, but I haven’t been detained yet. All the same, I couldn’t find any articles online talking about this Cageian Bushism. Am I the only one who hears this bomb’s tic?
Did a few walkthroughs this weekend on the story & structure of this project. It’s a crime story (whether it’s a “based on a true story” story or “any similarity to real persons is entirely coincidental” story depends on how we proceed with the rights. I’ll discuss this subject in some detail later, as I did with Lolita: The foreword Nabokov appended to his novel nominally sets Humbert Humbert up as an unreliable (and hence, seemingly unsympathetic) narrator. here is an article about various similarities between Nabokov’s and Alfred Hitchcock’s use of unreliable narrators and other devices attributed to the influence of 19th century literature.
John must have his comment settings at +5 or something, because his mass emails are rare-yet-always-awesome. Since he works for the media giant that made both LOTR II and Austin Powers, he was vague/suspicious of Leonard Nimoy’s Hobbit “music video”. I dug around online (well, I just Googled “‘leonard nimoy’ and hobbit”, really). The first result is “Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” on this site. [note: site appears to be in Elvish.]
On the plane this week, I made myself laugh (and my wife nervous) by coming up with the pitch way too quickly and unabashedly for a half-rewritten script I’m…rewriting: It’s like Monster’s Ball meets Memento. It pales in comparison to “Ghost meets The Manchurian Candidate” and “Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman,” though. (Too many of these log lines, and I’ll screw my movie/director index up.)
Reading this article (from Ftrain, like everything else today, I guess) is like watching Errol Morris’ First Person, wherein an interviewee is established as utterly normal/a genius in the first half of the show, and then is allowed to show how that utter normality is belied/that genius is applied in fantastic, frightening, or wildly misguided ways in the second half.