An Idea, If Ever There Was One

Steven Johnson writes about an idea he’s had, how to do a movie about nanotechnology right. Turns out Michael Crichton had wondered the same thing, and wrote a book about it. Turns out that book, at least the good parts, are similar to ideas Johnson has been mulling over (and writing and publishing on) for a while, too.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, “how’d that be as a movie?” is a question I’m always asking myself, too. Tonight on Dublog, was this sentence which captured one idea I’ve been wrestling with lately. From Jennifer 8. Lee’s NY Times article about Google’s Live Query display:

people who shouldn’t marry
“she smoked a cigar”
mr. potatoheads in long island
pickup lines to get women
auto theft fraud how to.
Stare at Live Query long enough, and you feel that you are watching the collective consciousness of the world stream by.

You want to come up with some movie ideas, too? See how many movies you can make from this: The Weekly Standard‘s engrossing report from a Christian retailers’ convention. There’s a lot more to Church Merch than just the Prayer of Jabez brand family, after all. (You thought it was just the best-selling book of 2001? You need to repent, brother.)

The enlarge-my-territory prayer [of Jabez] also appears on wristwatches, bumper stickers, pens, candy bars, Jabez: A Novel, and much else. “It’s from the Bible, so I guess they couldn’t copyright it,” muses one CBA exhibitor. Several others tell me that editors are scouring the Bible in search of another nobody with star quality.

Guess J. Lo Was Busy, or The Adaptation of About Schmidt

Louis Begley spoke before a screening of About Schmidt last night. An extremely genteel guy, he explained why he’s quite pleased with the film, even though it differs significantly from his novel. For Begley, “write what you know” means Schmidt (“known as Schmittie to one and all”) is an Upper East Side lawyer, recently retired to Bridgehampton, something, presumably, a vast majority of the screening audience knows well, too. Consistently for Alexander Payne, “film what you know” means a studied exploration of the middle of Middle America: Schmidt is an Omaha actuary whose retirement plans involve a Winnebago.

Kathy Bates lettin' it all hang out in About Schmidt, from the official site
image: aboutschmidtmovie.com

The only disappointment Begley voiced was the elimination of his saucy Puerto Rican waitress character who (brace yourself) teaches Schmidt to love again. Or, more precisely, she “teaches Schmittie the transformative power of sex. [audience titters] You laugh. It’s true. Maybe you’re just too young to understand.” But then he gamely allowed that Payne may have been poking fun at this idea with Kathy Bates’ hand-painted clothing-shedding hot-tubber. Um, yeah.
While I’ve heard it described as a comedy, the laughs were all at things that are quite real outside the culture capitals; if you’ve been there, or are honest about being from there, your laughter is slightly embarassed and at yourself. (I’m not talking about my own proto-mullet here.) Begley sounded a little resigned when he said he couldn’t see the future holding anything good for Payne’s Schmidt. As I did in September, I have disagree and side with Payne. If taken at the most superficial level, you could argue that Schmidt’s transformative experience at the end is a pretty meager reward for all that preceded it. Why, it’s practically a, um, a money shot. What it may be is the difference between sex and love.
[12/12 update: Alexander Payne will be on Studio 360 this weekend. AND he will be given the Work In Progress award by the MoMA Department of Film and Media next February. Stay tuned.]

On Productive Passion

viewing Rothkos at The Tate Modern

In The Guardian, Jonathan Jones takes a while to get to an interesting story of Mark Rothko’s masterful series of paintings, originally commissioned for the Four Seasons restaurant. It seems Rothko painted them in contempt and withdrew them in disgust after checking out the Cafeteria of Power and deciding the moguls would be insufficiently cowed by the art. Two of Rothko’s overt influences: the “bricked up windows” of Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library vestibule, and Pompeii’s Villa of the Mysteries (“strange,” “luxurious and hellish,” a Dionysian attack on Mies/Johnson’s rational order ) [12/12 update: The Times reports Vivendi Universal is preparing to sell the Seagram collection, which would have included the Rothkos in the Four Seasons.]
On another note, Laura Winters, long the NYT‘s and Washington Post‘s go-to journalist for a new generation of independent and foreign filmmakers (and Harvard alum), gives Vogue‘s celebrity coverage an upgrade with a profile of plays-a-writer-in-Adaptation Meryl Streep. Problematically, Ms Streep and the two actresses I’d pick to play Laura in the movie–Ms. Danes and Ms Foster–all went to Yale.

New Script, and the Souvenir Series

Early in the editing of Souvenir November 2001, I decided to eventually expand the short film into a related series of shorts, all ultimately interconnected a la Kieslowski’s Dekalog (See the movie index for more references).
A couple of weeks ago, it became clear that the original documentary project which spawned greg.org could fit in this Souvenir series in some way. The result of this confluence: Souvenir January 2003, a short film about a man’s quiet appreciation of ironing. Look forward to your comments.

Dateline – Kauai

Doing the family thing in Hawaii for a while. greg.org implications:

  • I wrote a script on the plane, a new short tentatively titled Souvenir January 2003, which’ll be a one-day shoot when I’m at Sundance.
  • (No, that’s not an early indication of anything, but I figure it’s high time to go anyway. And besides, the snow prospects in January are already pretty good.)
  • The third act of the Animated Musical gets attention in the mornings, 5-7:00, thanks to jet lag. Made real progress on one of the characters, who makes his crucial appearance at the end. It’s very interesting, in a Hayao Miyazaki demon boar (Princess Mononoke)/bathhouse demon (Spirited Away) animation tour-de-force kind of way. Miyazaki portal, Nausicaa.net
    Tatari, Princess Mononoke, Hayao Miyazaki, nausicaa.net
    Princess Mononoke, Hayao Miyazaki, image Nausicaa.net

  • Reading Scorsese on Scorsese collected interviews published in the wake of Last Temptation of Christ, the scandal for which sets too much of the editorial tone of the book. Also in the queue: Thucydides (as soon as I finish Gravity’s Rainbow). That reading list not pretentious-sounding enough for you? Wait till I do the animated musical version of Finnegan’s Wake.
  • Gauging which north shore hike to go on, my wife said, “That’s like walking from Columbia to Times Square and back,” which amused the locals.
  • Posting will be a little spotty for a few days.

    • The legions who have suffered and are dust

    Poetry was the reportage or weblogging medium of choice for the British in WWI. “Anthem for Doomed Youth” is an exhibit of 12 WWI poets at the Imperial War Museum in London. [Alan Riding wrote about it in today’s NY Times.]
    From Siegfried Sassoon’s “Prelude: The Troops”:

    DIM, gradual thinning of the shapeless gloom
    Shudders to drizzling daybreak that reveals
    Disconsolate men who stamp their sodden boots
    And turn dulled, sunken faces to the sky
    Haggard and hopeless…

    Events: MoMA tonight, Apple Store soon, USA never

    video still, 1997, Guy Richards Smit, Team Gallery
    Video Still, 1997, Guy Richards Smit, Team Gallery

    Just got back from a screening of Guy Richards Smit‘s video works at MoMA Gramercy. Guy’s been making funny Fassbinder-esque musical-esque shorts. He also showed a trailer from his current work in progress, an imaginary Sartres sequel, Nausea 2. Very smart, entertaining stuff. Small worlds being, well, small, Nausea 2 co-stars Rebecca Chamberlain, who stars in Souvenir November 2001. (She sings, which isn’t surprising, because she’s a performer, and she’s quite good.) And I was also surprised to see Souvenir‘s DP, Jonah Freeman turned up on a boat in one of Guy’s earlier works. Hey, sailor!
    A very promising gig for those interested in the editorial and creative process: James Danziger, former 20th-century photography dealer and current editor of the cool culture zine The Mixture, is speaking December 3 at the Apple Store in Soho as part of their “Made on a Mac” series. We’re in Hawaii on the 3rd, so I hope someone will patch me in via mobile. Anyone want to burn through your Cingular minutes for me?
    And apparently never coming to a theater near you, if you live in the USA, that is: 11′ 09″01, the compilation of short films related to September 11. I wrote about the Toronto screening in September. Now in Salon, Sarah Coleman writes about a recent screening of the film at Columbia. Coleman: “By not listening to what the rest of the world has to say about [Sept. 11], Americans run the risk of isolating themselves in a cocoon of self-righteousness and arrogance.”
    A negative example of precisely one of my main motives for making Souvenir November 2001, which follows characters from a city that’s habitually open to the world at a time when it seemed like America could suddenly relate to a suddenly sympathetic world. When we could transcend a chronic exceptionalism and connect, realize that terrible things have happened before, and that we can learn from the horrors and tragedies that others have gone through. I’m sorry, but I refuse to believe that the only way to read and process and remember September 11th is as a sympathy-shaped cudgel a self-righteous US swings to clear a path for itself.

    AYUAM second draft completed. Get me rewrite!

    The last couple of days have been pretty productive, and I’ve managed to get out the second complete draft of the As-Yet Unannounced Animated Musical (AYUAM or AM for short) script. It’s probably even less fun to read about an unannounced than it is to write cagily about it. Sorry. Here on the weblog, I’ve been trying to come up with thematically consistent and entertaining links and clues over the last few weeks, creating a scattershot mosaic of references that, if pieced together, should amply prepare you/pump you up for the actual story. In fact, though, I count on the short attention span-weblog format to keep the dots unconnected. (For better or worse, I don’t have an army of decoding gamer/readers, a la that secret A.I. promotion a couple of years ago).
    Where it stands: The story, plot and action are all in place and pretty tight. The present/future/flashback narrative structure makes sense, too. At least as much as it’s gonna. In addition to our (anti-)hero (it’s based in part on a true-crime story, remember), there are 3-4 other major characters, depending on how you count. Of these, I’m still only fully satisfied with the characterization of two of them. The other three are close, but not done. It’s a combination of action/reaction, dialogue, and how they change/reveal themselves over the course of the story.
    Global issues:

  • Dialogue overall needs some attention, but that’ll be the case until we finish shooting, I imagine. There are still some artifacts from when everything that happened got explained. There is still some dialogue that I can tell will be acted away, too (i.e., made unnecessary by the actor’s performance).
  • Pacing I feel like I need to take a pass through the whole thing, finetuning the pacing, and imagining how the music will fit in. This will be the the last step to get it in good enough shape to take it to the songwriters. And I expect the whole thing will change/improve once the songs come in.
    [For an example of how a script can change by bringin’ in the big musical guns, check out this draft of South Park, which predates some of Marc Shaiman’s contributions.]
    “Mormon cinema on a mission for profits”, an article that causes me a crisis of faith, frankly. Like to know more? Check out LDSfilms.com, a good old-fashioned portal, with Mormons I knew/knew about (Aaron Eckhart, Neil LaBute, Walter Kirn) and Mormons I didn’t know about (Tom Hanks, Matthew Modine). No obligation, and no one will visit your home.

    • The Reel Truth: Getting Behind Behind-the-Scenes

    Commercial production house Zooma Zooma is hosting The Reel Truth [Quicktime], a hi-larious, sodium pentathol-laced short film, set on the set of a commercial. My favorite scene is the one with the MBA client in it:
    INT – SOUNDSTAGE
    Accompanied by the ass-kissing PRODUCER, the suit-wearing BRAND MANAGER visits the set to consult with the DIRECTOR.

    BRAND MANAGER
    Can I look through the camera?
    DIRECTOR
    Of course, of course.
    It’s a little known fact that some of the world’s best cinematography is the result of input from arrogant, pinheaded business school grads like yourself.
    BRAND MANAGER
    Oh, Naturally. (pause)
    I think we should go tighter. I don’t really know why, or even what I’m talking about, but this is my sole creative act this year, aside from choosing the color of my minivan.

    This just confirms the genius of my original idea: What if we make the business school grad the director? My brilliance dazzles even me sometimes… [via BoingBoing and this Jim Griffin]
    Followup: According to AdAge, director Tim Hamilton made the short as a sequel to Truth in Advertising, for an awards show. And if you have to ask his nationality, well…

    Places Where It Feels Odd To Be Reading Gravity’s Rainbow

    My cheap-ass copy of Gravity's Rainbow It’s not quite like whipping out your copy of Lolita at the playground, but it sometimes feels weird to read Gravity’s Rainbow “in public.” Can’t say if it’s the book itself, which is rather unsettling and is shot through with Strangelove-ian absurdity; my used paperback copy (which I sought out for instant authenticity, as if I pulled it off that cinderblock bookcase I apparently had in apparent grad school); the conspicuous tape job (I was clearly the first person to crack the spine. Documenta packing tape ROCKS, by the way.); or general marginalization anxiety (Anthony Lane, quoting and reviewing Mason & Dixon: “‘What we were doing out in that Country was brave, scientifick beyond my understanding, and ultimately meaningless.’ He sounds like a reader of Thomas Pynchon.”).
    1. In the middle of a crowded contemporary art auction at Christie’s. (Just during the lulls, the Bleckners and the Basquiats).
    2. At Singin’ In The Rain, which I found to be kind of corny. Or is it just me? Wendy Wasserstein loves it and claims it’s not “cloying or campy.” In some moments, the saturated colors and weightlessness prefigure Jacques Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which I like much more (and which turns out to be anything but weightless).
    The Comden & Green “Moses Supposes” song is pretty good, though, possibly because it tries even a little to fit into the story. And I came away really admiring the long, near-stationary takes during the musical/dance numbers, the “master-master”, if you will. It’s the diametric opposite of Moulin Rouge (110+ edits/min in songs). I’d like to reference/adapt this in the Animated Musical, and I think it can work well, as more than just historical homage.
    Long choreographed shots of musical scenes live on in the auteur-y crane/steadicam shots directors show off with (cf., The Shining, Touch of Evil, The Player, Goodfellas, Boogie Nights, Bonfire of the Vanities even).

    The Search, 2002, by Noam Sher, via machinima.com

    Video games have turned this symbol of technological virtuosity, literally, into child’s play: first-person shooters are long, unedited takes by definition. Machinima takes advantage of the game “camera” to turn a programmable/alterable game engine into a virtual movie studio. Somewhere in between Scorcese, Anderson Lara Croft is my story, Singin’ in the Rain meets Quake III.

    And I Felt A Little Paranoid Before Learning Pynchon Wrote A Musical

    “Mistral Island Manuscript acquired by Univ. of Texas”
    According to this report from last week, Pynchon collaborated with Kirkpatrick Sale in 1958 to create a musical set decades in the future, where IBM controls the world. Sale gave “Luddite” its contemporary meaning and “wrote extensively on the political, economic, sociological, and environmental impacts of technology.”
    I’m backing quietly out of the room…
    Pynchon and animation: “Except maybe for Brainy Smurf, it’s hard to imagine anybody these days wanting to be called a literary intellectual, though it doesn’t sound so bad if you broaden the labeling to, say, ‘people who read and think.'” (from “Is it OK to be a Luddite? in the NYTimes.)
    And Pynchon and comic books: Charles Bock’s loong, engaging ArtKrush rumination on Tolstoy, Great Art, and growing from the X-Men to, yes, Gravity’s Rainbow.)
    And some (non-Pynchonian) animation links: Toon Shader, a software tool for bringing hand-drawn cel animation and computer animation together, created by Michael Arias, a CG Guru who works with Hayao Miyazaki, called the greatest animation artist ever (people at the Mouse think so, too, you know).
    A Village Voice article by Anthony Kaufman about cinematographer Ellen Kuras’ ability to make beautiful DV.

    On Illegal Art


    Superstar still, 1987, Todd Haynes
    Superstar, 1987, Todd Haynes

    Last night we (finally) saw Todd Haynes’ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story last night. After years of being snubbed by the clerks at Kim’s Video when I’d ask for it, and half-hearted attempts to get a bootleg copy from someone or other, we just walked over to Anthology and there it was, showing as part of Illegal Art!.
    (The first time I went to Kim’s, a Suit workin’ for the Mouse but livin’ in Chinatown and yearning for street cred, I cannily asked if Bladerunner wasn’t in the Ridley Scott section. The scornful reply: “Noo, the Douglas Trumbull section.”)
    Anyway, Superstar turned out to be both better and worse than I imagined. Definitely worthy of its reputation, it’s a canny film; it’s a little eerie how well the Barbie doll concept works. The bootleg copy they showed, though, sucked. If only there were a medium you could copy without generational degradation… [If you don’t have connections to the video underground either, you can watch Superstar in even lower-res online.]
    Giant Steps, 2001, Michal Levy
    Giant Steps, stills, 2001, Michal Levy

    Other films screened with Superstar, all using unauthorized/illegal footage or music in some way. For my money, the best ones were not about appropriation per se; Michal Levy’s Giant Steps, for example, is a fun, beautiful CG interpretation of John Coltrane’s canonical (and surely impossible to clear) recording.
    A slightly unrelated note: Apparently, my new haircut is something of a proto-mullet, not unlike Todd Haynes’.

    Aspen: The Magazine in a Box (on the Web)

    Image from Aspen 5+6, 1967, Sol Lewitt
    Serial Project #1, 1966, Sol Lewitt, from Aspen 5+6

    Unbelieveable. The entire collection of Aspen: The Magazine in a Box, is now online. It’s the magazine equivalent of Kieslowski’s Dekalog: almost completely unknown, yet highly respected and influential within its narrow audience.
    In a fit of John Cage admiration, I tracked down and bought Aspen 5+6 several years ago. In addition to some floppy little records with Cage and Morton Feldman on it, there’s a reel of 8mm film with works by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Robert Rauschenberg, and others; documents of Sol Lewitt’s seminal 1966 1967 exhibit at the Dwan Gallery in LA, Serial Project #1, and a little Tony Smith sculpture you can make yourself.
    Not owning a record player or an 8mm projector, my edition of Aspen has been more a glassined, bubblewrapped holy relic than anything else. Until now. The Moholy-Nagy film is full of glare, shadows and light reflecting off of machinery, as if Jeremy Blake and Paul Thomas Anderson were the same person. Check it out. Thanks, UBU (and thanks, Fimoculous for the link.)