Author: greg

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…

Details, details.

Paris, lqnd of screzed up typezriters qnd keyboqrds% zell, qfter eight missed/rescheduled flights (including three yesterday, Tuesday), I got here with the < fingers making quote marks>finished< no more quote marks> version of the film, now officially titled, Souvenir November 2001. Dropped the screening copies off at Cannes Festival offices and the Director’s Fortnight. Tomorrow morning I’ll take the third copy to the Critic’s Week competition; Qs you may know, the Cannes Festival is paralleled by two other events/series, Festival de Cannes being the most easily recognized. For a sense of the odds/competition, there are about 900 films in the pool for Cannes, most of which also submit to the other two competitions. (The others have about the same, I guess, but with some longer films as well; “short film” = <15 min. for Cannes, <60 min for the others. Academy Award category is cut off at 40 min.)

There’s a whole story in the final final editing and outputting to video crisis, which will probably only interest someone who gets stuck with the same technical glitches we faced and is trying to overcome them. That tutorial can wait until I get back to a regular keyboard. Suffice it to say, Jonah the editor/DP rocked. rocks. we’ve still got some audio/music issues to iron out, but those can wait a few days. The last week has been like Groundhog Day, excruciating repetition of the exact same activities until we got it right. And the movie? I think it may not be half bad; there certainly are some really good moments, visually, aurally, or idea/emotionally. Someone else will have to say if it actually succeeds, though. Maybe if there was a big gathering of film experts somewhere, they could tell me…

I plan on falling asleep somewhere in the 3-hour screening of Atanarjuat, the first Inuit-language film, which is an epic masterpiece, apparently (and which was awarded the Camera d’Or for best first feature at last year’s Cannes). I’d downloaded their press kit a couple of weeks ago to use as a model for ours. It doesn’t open in the US for another three months, and i (obviously) missed it at last weeks’ New Directors/New Films in NYC.

Editing, Last Day 3: Well, we go on, editing through the Friday 9PM shipping deadline. (There go my 80K miles. And because of the Easter holiday, I have to fly through London to deliver the tape by Tuesday.)
Thursday night, we called a few friends over to screen the cut with fresh eyes, to see if it made sense, had any unintentionally unclear/unexplained parts. Good thing we did. A couple of key moments didn’t come across as I’d hoped. People wanted to see more at the memorial itself, for one thing. While in one sense, the “shortchanging” of experience at the memorial was an intentional contrast with the preceding experience at the crater, it was apparently overdone, an unconscious underestimation of the audience’s ability to identify the differences.

On that note, there were moments and ideas caught by new eyes that I hadn’t consciously considered. Dennis liked a physical contrast between the comparably scaled crater and the towering arch (positive/negative, raw/manicured, random/precise). Of course, Dennis is a sculptor, well attuned to such things. Patrick caught the naivete of the character’s quest, the “not knowing what he’ll find but needing to look anyway”. And the emotional ambiguity of the end, being left to feel what you will, not just what you’re made to feel. Andrew was the sharpest on spotting continuity & narrative flow issues, even spotting a sequence I’d put in of cutting back and forth from driving in the rain and searching online. “I want to see more rain. I know she’s still searching; she just said it.” And he was right. All in all, it was an extremely nervewracking but valuable session; if it’s this tough to show something to someone I know, what’s it going to be like to show something to the world? Or to the world that stumbles into the VFW hall where it screens on a Saturday afternoon?

Editing, Last Day: Synched the sound, mostly. Almost halfway through cleaning up stray dialogue and sound (voices in the backseat of the car, feeding lines to the person onscreen, etc.), and always trimming down where it’s obviously needed. The movie stands at 17.5 minutes, and we still hope that half of the cuts to come from general tightening, but aesthetic- and story-affecting cuts are getting tougher (and more necessary) to make.

One phenomenon that came up yesterday: what people notice/latch onto in a movie. Jonah and I were tweaking the crater scene (2nd to last, an emotional money shot), and he wanted to cut away to a wide landscape shot for a bit during the caretaker’s explanation of the crater. Doing so would’ve cut these gestures the caretaker was making that I really liked. After I pointed them out, Jonah said he’d never seen them, even after watching the footage a hundred times. (Needless to say, we kept the gestures, laying in the landscape at a different spot of the conversation.)

Later in the day, we were laying music down on the airport scenes where the New Yorker calls home. He’s riding a conveyor belt, and I made the comment that the people on the opposite conveyor are so perfectly spaced and cast they look like extras. Jonah said, “yeah, but almost every one of them looked at the camera.” And it was true. I’d seen that shot “a hundred times,” and I’d never noticed. Yet in the gas station scene, when the attendant glances at the camera for a split second, I caught it right away. How is it that people notice, remember, and give significance to things so differently? What tiny things do people remember from movies, and when (if ever) did the director decide to put it in?

Editing, Day ??: I’ve lost count. Is it as tedious to read about editing day-to-day as it is to experience editing day-to-day? Since it consumes every one of my 20 waking hours/day, I’m left with little else to write about, though…

Jonah locked almost all the CD (formerly Mini-Disc) audio tracks to the clips used in the rough cut. This, after a long night and early mornings searching for an automatic way to synch up the video and CD audio. Basically, I think it comes down to this: If you have a lot of media, synch AFTER you make a rough cut, and then just synch the clips you use in the cut. If you have a lot of edits in that rough cut, though (and with the kids and the MTV, who doesn’t have a lot of quickfire edits these days?), take a pass through your raw material, whittle it down to a small-medium sized batch that you’re likely to use, and SYNCH IT BEFORE YOU EDIT.

Some metrics for you schedule-building filmmakers out there:

Editing: Finished the (second?) rough cut, re-editing the middle scenes and editing the final ones (the crater and the memorial), which had previously been only barely sketched out. Learned how to do dissolves. Picked up the Mini-Disc audio, now transferred to CD, which Jonah’s going to start laying down tonight. As soon as I generate a list of all the CD tracks he needs to load onto the hard drive. To do this, we created what’s called an Edit Decision List, or EDL, which contains all the clips–and their corresponding information, like in and out frames– and effects in the project/sequence. Check it out. If one is doing final editing on a different editing system, this code-like information would direct the editor (or the system) precisely how to do each shot and cut. It’s sort of like the source code of the movie. Huh. I’d better write that down somewhere…

Other: The production company under which this movie will live is now called First Sally, and I just created a placeholder page for it. The name comes from Cervantes, ostentatiously enough. Don Quixote’s journeys were chronicled as “The First Sally,” “The Second Sally,” etc. At least, they were in the edition I read. (I got it online at Project Gutenberg.) And by naming my company after a famously deluded misfit, I’ll be a step ahead in the “manage expectations” department. Much like Philip Johnson calling himself a whore before anyone else got the chance.

The illustration is the earliest known depiction of Quixote, from an edition printed in Paris in 1618, a choice made for 1) aesthetic and 2) copyright reasons (I wanted something more linear and spare than illustrative, something more logo-like. An early 20th century edition of Don Quixote was one (as yet unfound) possibility, and then Picasso’s dorm poster doodle version is good, but see reason #2 above…

A casual browse, a refreshing visit through the Cannes website yielded some helpful information: the deadline for submissions is BEFORE April 1, not BY April 1. Good to know. That shaves two days off our calendar, and I rebooked my ticket to deliver the tape Thursday night instead of Monday. Also, the other two Cannes competitions, Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Circle have their own registrations. Also good to know. Moral: Scroll down to the bottom of the page. Scroll early and often.