Category: Uncategorized

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:

Deliberately chosen books and “whatever’s left within reach; can I put this table down now?”

Very thick books (4), and shims (the rest).

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:

pain-free festival submissions

local screenings for family, friends, the crew and any potential partners, backers or distributors

I can sell the overpriced, underpowered Powerbook Titanium to which I can attribute some of the output problems.

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>

“‘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).

Apropos of nothing, (or everything but what this web log is about, to be more precise), this political analysis weblog, Talking Points Memo, is fascinating and engrossing. Fulfills the promise of the web of bringing to the surface news and information that media mega-outlets try to ignore. Living in DC can be exciting, it seems.

I’m listening to Studio360 on WNYC, talking about artistic depiction of the Holocaust.

For some odd reason, this poem by Andrew Marvell came to mind. Or more specifically, the first line: “Had we but world enough, and time.” I don’t know why, but it was interesting to reread the whole thing. Not what first popped into my groggy head, but quite nice in a different way.

At times, it seems like this web account should be subtitled, “Against my better judgment.” In the application for Director’s Fortnight, there’s a place make a “statement” or “message.” Here’s what I whipped out at the Les Halles Cybercafe:

The fact that I felt compelled to make this film by
the events in my hometown last year is unsettling. I
would normally be wary of any film created under such
personal circumstances of duress; who would want to
see something like that?
Well, in New York, where it was just reported that
tens of thousands of people have exhibited signs of
depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, we must
learn to live and deal with things that once seemed so
remote, foreign, far away, long past. I made a movie
about people living next to a crater for 80 years
because *I* now live next to a crater, and I need to
learn how to do it.
If this little movie can tune the eyes and ears of
anyone (especially my fellow residents of the US)
toward the people who have some experience and
resilience in the wake of horrible violence? I will
count it a success.

New York, Old computer: a nice combo. After dropping by a North Sea-side resort in the Netherlands (love that place, but the whole country smells like cows. Seriously.) for dinner (my wife’s there for a European Space Agency conference), I came back via Brussels, probably the single lamest airport in Europe. I’m sure there are worse ones in the US, but Brussels just SUCKS. Somehow they combine assaultive commercialism with an utter lack of any useful/convenient shopping (no music, books, electronics, or travel to speak of. As if people at an airport only want liquor, cigarettes, and perfume…); and you have to go through passport control TWICE; maybe one’s Dutch and one’s French. And I thought Canada was bi-culturally ghettoized…That reminded me of a 1999 Tony Judt article in the NY Review of Books that examined why Belgium even exists. At least the euro did away with their annoying Belgian Franc.

I watched Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog for 6/8 of the flight back to NYC [check for the DVD here](mostly subtitled with the sound off, since I couldn’t find a ((&(*^*&(* pair of headphones in the airport). It’s still brilliant. And remarkably understated, given Kieslowski’s lyrical/poetic leanings. Read Kubrick on Kieslowski. Read Ebert on Decalogue.

At the confluence of the film’s title change (adding “November 2001” to the original “Souvenir” after a dialogue edit left us wrestling with how to communicate the date/setting at the beginning of the film), an admiration for Dekalog, and the increasingly frequent question, “What’s next?” I’ve decided this movie will be the first in a series of “Souvenir” films–shorts of varying lengths, according to the stories–dealing with different aspects of memories, remembering, etc. This turned up first in the press kit, but I’m quite happy/excited/engrossed in it. Stay tuned and/or Author gregPosted on April 5, 2002Categories Uncategorized

Oy vey.

Where the hell have I been? Thursday night was a hectic rush to deadline, but we got the (interim) press kit pulled together, sans publicity stills, along with a 22-minute version of the movie dropped as-is onto VHS, out to the LA Film Festival in time. Note: the office in the Kinko’s location is a godsend. Now if they’d just get rid of the Pepsi…

Dialogue retakes went alright, quickly dumping sound from the Mini-Disc to the computer did not, however. We couldn’t get ANY computer (mac or pc) to recognize the MD player when we were done. Late night beating our heads, then we gave up, logging all the tracks by hand (into Excel), and scrambling to find an audio/video transfer house who could turn 5 hours of MD audio into 5 hours of CD audio.

Jonah’s proposal for The Public Art Fund is getting announced Monday (congratulations!); since he’s crazy with finishing his images, I took back the editing suite? kit? set? for the weekend, and have re-cut and re-ordered a lot. It now stands at about 21 minutes, with the final scenes still little more than piles of “raw material” shots, but the town scenes and the third, very info-heavy conversation got a complete makeover.

It’s a fascinating view of things, to be involved at so many stages of the story’s development. What works in the script–what’s necessary in the script, in fact–may be superfluous or a drag on the screen. The goal of editing is to craft the movie experience itself, while a script is arguably for driving the acting/production experience. If all this sounds elementary, it certainly feels like a revelation to me, if only because my interest/involvement doesn’t end with delivering just the script, the crew, the production, the money, etc.

On another note, Friday night was the opening of New Directors, New Films at MoMA. The opening feature was heartfelt and very well-produced, grace a HBO Films, and it had won a big award at Sundance. A. O. Scott wrote about the Project Greenlight movie, Stolen Summer, in today’s Times. His (painful to hear) quote of Bazin: “It is as difficult to make a bad movie as it is to make a good one.” Both Elvis Mitchell’s review and Scott’s discussion of “the System” and the “fight” against it to realize director Pete Jones’ vision seem a little beside the point, though. Whatever flaws may be attributed to the production and the System don’t really come into play when the story, the director’s vision is treacle to begin with. Those guys made exactly the movie they set out to make.

With no System to blame if my movie utterly (or lamely) sucks, I know the importance of the vision all too well.