Whether it’s momentum, or a mindshare takeover, or a drive to push the site out of the nest and let it learn to fly, or the fact that I’ve changed 200 diapers in the last three weeks, I’ve been posting on daddytypes.com a lot more than here lately. And for that, I apologize.
Of course, if you’re interested in anything like the following, stop on by:
Category: writing
While I Was (heh) Out
The following were not reasons for my not posting for five days:
You know that guy?
At that graduate writing lecture? The one on the front row of the auditorium, with the grimy totebags stuffed with sheafs of paper? The old dude, who kept asking about, didn’t you ever notice in Shakespeare’s Titus how…? and how Nabokov subconciously cribbed then referenced some German short story in both Lolita AND Pale Fire? The one who then pulls out some sweat-curled manuscript he’s been writing in his paperback-stuffed rent stabilized apartment on 108th st, where he’s figured out his Grand Unification Theory of Literature, if only you’ll read it, you’ll see that it’s…
No, the other one, the one who keeps talking about Skull & Bones? Yeah, yeah, that’s him.
Well, he has a 10,000-word column in the New York Observer. No, seriously. Like every week.
On Adapting for Film
[via IFP] New York Women in Film and Television is sponsoring a panel titled The Art of Adaptation on Jan. 28 in New York, thank you. In fact, it’s at the Alliance Francaise/French Institute, East 60th St, so even I can stumble out of bed and wander on over by, um, the 6:30 start time.
IFP members and others get $5 off the $20 registration fee. NYWIFTies get in for a mere $10.
Related: Jason Kottke made a sweet weblog for Susan Orlean’s view of Adaptation.
This panel may be payback for the last adaptation panel I attended, a misogyny-tinged but hilarious and enlighteneing discussion sponsored by Harper’s Magazine. At the New School, a lone woman, Susan Minot, squared off against David O. Russell, David Foster Wallace, Todd Solondz and Dale Peck. Editor/moderator Lewis Lapham complained about Leonard [sic] DiCaprio, while everyone else discussed James Cameron at length.
Alas, with no known tape or transcript, this panel only lives on in our hearts. And in this funny weird/funny haha DFW-centric account from some delusional DFW groupie chick (“He’s trying so hard to be everyman, when we all know he’s uberman… poor Dave.”). Quelle surprise, it’s written in the overly footnoted style of the uberman himself.
On Scripts
Salon is not only still publishing, they’re publishing the shooting script of the Ronald Reagan TV movie that the conservative closet cases wanted to see on Showtime (the Queer as Folk Network). It’s an 8Mb pdf. Of a TV Movie. Starring James Brolin. About Ronald Reagan. You’ve been warned.
[For an invigorating Reagan text, try Joan Didion’s prescient 1997 review of DiNesh D’Souza’s Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader. It costs money, but it’s worth it.
For the definitive Reagan movie, buy or rent David O. Russell’s Flirting With Disaster, in which Reagan has two cameos: on the wall of Mel Coplin’s first adoptive “mom,” and on the tabs of acid of his real parents.]
In today’s Movie Issue of the NYT Mag, Lynn Hirschberg convenes a “roundtable” with two screenwriters, Brian Helgeland and Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, the Silver Surfer convo airdropped into the middle of Crimson Tide) “share some wisdom about the screenwriting life.”
1) We always knew Tarantino’s too much of a loudmoth to pull off the Terence Malick thing. 2) How many participants actually constitute a roundtable? I want to know who couldn’t manage to stumble over to the Regent and run up the Times‘s bar tab. 3) Reason enough to read it in print: the Favorite Screenplays Speed Round, which runs along the bottom of the piece. I may have my data entry lackeys in Madagascar transcribe it for your illicit online pleasure.
Tarantino scripts online:
Kill Bill
Jackie Brown (pdf)
Pulp Fiction
Natural Born Killers early draft
Brian Helgeland scripts online:
Blood Work draft (pdf)
LA Confidential draft
The Postman early production draft (pdf) [heads up: think Kevin Costner, not Pablo Neruda]
Assassins draft, with the Wachowskis
The script’s not online, but a A Knight’s Tale is out on DVD. [Have a hard time keeping the similarly comical anachronism of A Knight’s Tale (“An InStyle Editor in King Arthur’s Court” starring Heath Ledger) and First Knight (“Ralph Lauren Camelot Collection” starring Richard Gere) straight? No problem. Amazon’s selling them together. Supplies are supposedly limited.
Think you can do better? Well, get Final Draft and start writing, script monkey.
[links via Daily Script and Screenplays For You]
Things I want to write about, given world enough (or time)
On Writing A Screenplay About A Writer
In the Guardian, British docu maker John Brownlow tells about the tricky business of writing a screenplay about Sylvia Plath, one of the most fought-over writers of the modern era. With duelling critics, conflicting biographies, testy literary estates controlling the rights to Plath’s and Ted Hughes’ poetry, and an ending even Hollywood can’t spin, it sounds like an impossible task. Oh, and “there had to be humor.” Humor and a head in the oven.
Brownlow ended up completely re-researching Plath’s and Hughes’ stories to find a bearable story, and, after realizing the couple didn’t “speak in verse” with each other, he says, “[I] cut dialogue and if I couldn’t cut it I made it as banal as I could, while ensuring the situations were dramatic.”
His writing war story is long, maybe not really of general interest, but if you write, you won’t want to miss it. Two good lessons: 1) Brownlow is a huge fan of treatments and outlines and the discipline they impose on the writer’s story, and 2) he wants to direct.
Interestingly, I just rewatched Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris on DVD, and in his commentary (with the deeply shallow James Cameron), he talks about cutting and cutting dialogue, too, in order to reveal the characters’ emotional subtexts. From what he says, I think he greatly improved the movie (which I liked better the second time, btw). Soderbergh tells people if they don’t like the pacing of the first ten minutes, they should leave, “because it’s not getting any better.”
Ugh. It should be called “American Publishers Yawn at Foreign Fiction”
In the NYT, Stephen Kinzer easily pulls some horrible quotes from major publishers about how Americans don’t want to read books translated into English. From a marketing hack at Harcourt: “We [Americans] are into accessible information. We often look for the story, rather than the story within the story. We’d rather read lines than read between the lines.” And from a hack at Hyperion: “The hard fact is that given the reality of the world, we [Americans] simply don’t have to be concerned about Laos, but people there might well want to be or have to be concerned about America.”
Granted, it’s not literature, but if a webful of kids can translate Harry Potter in German in two weeks [read Kottke comments here], why can’t the world of people who don’t work for ridiculous publishers start bubbling these things to the top and translating them collaboratively? Just to see what sticks.
If I were Jeff Jarvis, I’d say this was a project for webloggers.
On Taste Tribes
via Boingboing: On Mindjack, Joshua Ellis writes at length about what he calls Taste Tribes, friendship by cultural affinity–liking people who like the same stuff. Blogs are the engines for the smarter artist/chiefs of their own taste tribes.
I cooked something up along those lines in 1999 at Shagpad, which was based on the Austin Powerish, Abercrombie & Fitchy theory that people bought stuff in direct relation to its ability to get them laid. Or as the VC-Powerpoint presentation-ready slogan goes, “Shagpad.com leverages web and e-commerce technology to monetize aspirational lifestyle portfolios that facilitate getting mad play.” The idea came out of some client work which became, in part, Pop.com (They chose the wrong part, I thought.) At Shagpad are a couple of essays that are not quite embarassing enough to take offline (and besides, the buy-this-lifestyle Amazon links usually pay the hosting).
[Update: It should be noted that I peeled off my friend Jeff’s last name; he’s a sculptor in Red Hook, and the Google searches were beginning to cramp his style. Now that Wallpaper* has declared Red Hook trendy, I’ll probably have to change that, too. Aaron, you have my sympathy.]
I Like Sites We Like
Useless Screenwriting Tip #1: Write When Ronin‘s On
According to the little-known Osmosis Theory of Writing, while trying to write a tight, sharp, crime thriller, you should watch a tight, sharp crime thriller, like, say, Ronin (directed by John Frankenheimer, screenplay by David Mamet on JD Zeik‘s story). It helps if it’s got insane chase scenes over roads you used to travel regularly (Paris, Nice, La Turbie). If you do this, the doors will fly open, and your screenwriting muse will spray you with inspiration, like so much shrapnel in a waterfront ambush.
That’s the theory, anyway.
Your screenwriting kit should include: Ronin (with the Frankenheimer’s commentary) and his 1962 classic, The Manchurian Candidate, on DVD, and Frankenheimer interviews at The Onion AV Club and Movie Express.
Baltimore Is Burning
Iraqi troops aren’t puttin’ up a good enough fight for you? Your teams didn’t make it into the Final Four? Your need to engage, even vicariously, in tales of the life-consuming urge to win is going unmet? Read Anna Ditkoff’s under-the-skirts, behind-the-scenes look at the Miss Gay Maryland pageant. [via Romenesko’s Obscure Store]
[Doing sultry, smoky ballads instead of the more common, flashy, diva dance numbers] is a risky gamble, and in the four times that Jenkins has gone to Miss Maryland he has never placed higher than fourth. “In a contest, it’s about the crown, it’s about the name, it’s about the recognition, it’s about all these things that some of these insecure girls really, really have to have. And they’re willing to do anything for it,” Jenkins says. “For me, if I win, I win. If I don’t, I don’t, but you’ll remember me. You will remember my name.”
Drag competitions, drill team championships, Westminster, rhythmic gymnastics, ice skating, track, cricket, baseball– I better stop there for now. Jennie Livingston‘s amazing 1990 documentary about Harlem drag balls, Paris is Burning, is currently only available on VHS.
When Do You Cry Reading The Home Section?
Hardly ever, frankly. But William Hamilton’s wonderful story of the Kellams, a couple who lived alone, together, on an island off Mount Desert Island, really got me for some reason. Hamilton mentions David Graham’s book about the couple, Alone Together, published by Ponds Press
“What did he read to you,” Mrs. Kellam was asked…
“It was always the right thing,” she answered…
Kippy Stroud, a summer resident who runs an arts camp on Mount Desert Island, said, “We just admired them so much.” Ms. Stroud introduced Mr. Graham, William Wegman and other artists to Placentia to see the Kellams’ world as it faded, like a patch of light in a forest.
The story has the best ending I’ve ever read.
Bill & Nada’s Cafe
Bill & Nada’s Cafe was where I had my first script idea. It’s not that the Salt Lake dance clubs were cooler than the ones in Provo, there were no dance clubs in Provo. (Don’t talk to me about The Palace; that was like a church dance in Orange County). So we’d drive to Salt Lake to go out. Finding a designated driver was never a problem (think about it). Then after the clubs closed, we’d go to Bill & Nada’s. Much cooler than Denny’s. And full of characters, whether at 3AM or 8AM or lunchtime. Clubbies trying to be bad, punks, mothers with home-dyed hair, Willy Lomans, and always a few grizzled friends of Bill at the counter, truckers, probably. Or prospectors.
It was the time warp kind of diner that hadn’t changed since the early sixties. Ancient country music on the jukeboxes (one on each table. There’d always be some jerk who’d order up Patsy Cline’s Crazy ten times, just as he was getting his check. Damn college kids.) The most famous dish was eggs & brains, but I’d always get pancakes (“Breakfast served all day”), which were orange (fertilized eggs, they’d say) and tapioca pudding. Or a patty melt. Every hour, the head waitress’d saunter over and spin the wheel. If your seat number hit, your order was free (there are little stick-on numbers at each spot, it turns out). There’s a vintage Field & Stream-like mural of a mountain lake on one wall, and a portrait of Bill, in full metal jacket and chaps, on his show horse. Just like in the Pioneer Day parade, every July.
There were stories, told on the way home, about why the pictures of Bill & Nada are so old, too. “Go ask where she is,” some smart ass’d say, but no one ever did. Uncovering the urban legend we were sure lurked behind Bill & Nada’s was to be my first documentary, I decided; So many characters! And so quirky! (I was running the International Cinema program at BYU my senior year.) Half-assed research and writing efforts in the following years yielded one problematic result: there was no mystery, nothing lurking behind anything at Bill & Nada’s. What do you do when the reality turns out to be far less sensational than what you’d built it up to be in your mind? In my case, you go to business school, I guess.
I found this meal ticket from Bill & Nada’s today while sorting through some tax receipts. I bought it for the clean design. Despite the slogan, Bill & Nada’s closed at the end of 1999. On their last night in business, I took my DV camera down there and roamed around for a couple of hours, capturing the atmosphere, shooting detail shots, so I could recreate it on a set, when the time came. Looks like longtime patron Bert Singleton did the same thing before they tore the place down last January.
LIVE@WTC DESIGN PRESS CON. PIX …
LIVE@WTC DESIGN PRESS CON. PIX ETC 2 FOLLOW