My daily Baz Lurhman and

My daily Baz Lurhman and Martin Scorcese encounter: They’re both in this NYTimes article about rampant botox injections “playing havoc with facial expressions.”

One of many priceless quotes, this one about the only-temporary effects of treatment:

“You could marry a woman with a flawlessly even face,” one doctor said, “and wind up with someone who four months later looked like a Shar-Pei.”

The writer, Alex Kuczynski, formerly of the Times’ business beat and the NY Observer, which first broke the Botox story (to me) five or so years ago. She’s turning back the clock on her writing subjects, and she’s never looked better!

Update: Met with DP two

Update: Met with DP two nights in a row, discussing casting, scheduling, the script (which may go through another revision very soon), and some ideas for adding a shoot day in NYC. We’re also going to do some readings/camera tests to help finalize casting. Alice, friend of Jonah’s was along tonight; look forward to her joining. She’s got some good experience, connections, and her french is excellent. The script’s been downloaded far more than I expected (I never download pdf’s).

Other: DV audio tips search turned up another film weblog, this one from Dallas-based Bare Ruined Films.
And it turns out the master of the no-budget blockbuster, Robert “El Mariachi” Rodriquez, beat us all to it with his book, Rebel Without a Crew, which includes his daily production journal as well. There’s a webring around here somewhere, I can feel it…

YIKES. Within five minutes of

YIKES. Within five minutes of posting the script, I see the opening scene of IFC’s With the Filmmaker: Martin Scorcese by Albert Maysles, where The Man says:

The worst thing when you’re preparing a film, is the endless stream of opinions and suggestions you get; people talking and talking. You can’t concentrate and hear the one voice you need to focus on–your own.

My automatic (deadpan) reply: “Are you talkin’ to me? Are you talkin’ to ME??”

Considerations made in posting the

Considerations made in posting the script for this short, called (for the moment) Souvenir:

  • Adequately guarding intellectual property (Joe Eszterhas’ Souvenir, rated NC-17, opening May 15″)
  • Having to deal with a wave of comments and suggestions (“Loved your script. I’ve got a few notes…”)
  • Having to deal with deafening silence & lack of reaction (“monthly traffic report: 2mb/ monthly allowed: 10000mb”)
  • This script under construction (it’s currently v1.5.1, sure to change many more times within the two weeks remaining before shooting)
  • FID (the writer’s version of FUD, swapping insecurity for uncertainty)
  • Not really knowing what the impact on the viewing experience will be of disseminating the script (at least) months before the film is available.

    Anyway, here is the first complete shooting script in pdf format. [note: I fixed the link; ome people with old skool browsers reported problems. Also, I noticed that the title shows v1.4, not 1.5.1, and the footer is screwed up. OTOH, I converted this .doc to .pdf for free on Adobe’s site. Thanks, Adobe.] Do with it what you will (as long as it isn’t appropriation, unauthorized publication or use, outright mockery, or plagiarism).

    • I’ve found a DP (director

    I’ve found a DP (director of photography, or cinematographer, variously), Jonah Freeman, a brilliant artist who works in video and installation. Very excited.

    The last week has been spent rewriting and looking for a lead actor, who’ll have to carry the whole thing, basically. The actor I wanted first, Ed Norton, just started shooting a new Hannibal Lecter film two weeks ago, so he’s out. Jonah and I are meeting with some people today who he’s worked with before. Stay tuned.

    FWIW, I started a storyboard based on the latest version of the reading script. (See a brief discussion of shooting and reading scripts here,) As we start blocking out the scenes and building the shooting schedule, detail will increase. I’m using Google Images Search to approximate the composition of shots I have in mind. Never seen this done before; if you have, please let me know where.

    The last two weeks, I

    The last two weeks, I have been consumed by the task of writing a screenplay for a short film that has been percolating/eating at me/distracting me since the late fall. ( You do the math.) I’m thinking of posting either an in-process or a finished version of the script here soon; we’ll see. Shooting should take only about three days.

    The format a short film takes–as dictated by various film festival submission requirements and a group called The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences— is proving to be at once constraining and liberating, maybe like writing a sonnet or something. There’s enough structure to give ready shape to the ideas and story I’ve got in my mind.

    The movie is set in France (thus my last post about rental cars in France), and explores the lives and views of people living in the aftermath of World War I. It specifically looks at the Battle of the Somme, which was one of the most devastating, prolonged, and–in some ways–pointless acts of violence in the century.

    At the time (starting in 1916), it was extremely difficult for people to adequately comprehend the scale of the killing that took place, and it was supposed that nothing could surpass it. Such views were, of course, proven wrong in WWII and since.

    While The Somme lives on in metaphor and has specifically been invoked to describe Ground Zero and the killings of September 11, I think the contemporary view is quite removed from the experiences and perspectives that prevailed “in the wake” of 1916.

    Hellfire Corner is a tremendous source of current and historical information about The Great War, which still seems to resonate in the UK far more than in the US (as far as I’ve seen, anyway). When I was visiting the UK for some friends’ art opening last October, I saw many Londoners wearing the Flanders Poppy on their lapels, a sign of remembrance for those lost in battle that seems to proliferate in the Armistice Day/Veteran’s Day season.

    It’s odd and unexpected how this writing and pre-prod process is having such a cathartic, mind-clearing effect on my other, “main” project. Like gauging and mapping out a boulder that has been blocking the (clear, I thought) path.

    Janet Cardiff at P.S. 1

    Janet Cardiff at P.S. 1 MoMA: It’s rare when a work of art has the power to transform, transport so completely. Forty-part motet is such a work. 40 speakers are arranged in an ellipse in the gallery, each playing an individually recorded member of a choir. The unaccompanied choir sings a work in Latin by Thomas Tallis, a 16th century English composer. [see this National Gallery of Canada link for a more detailed description.]

    You move among the speakers, pausing in front of one, trying to hear two or three at once, then move into the center to hear them all. The wall text describes the artist’s interest in the role of the individual, the impression of the collective, and the individual’s ability to succeed as part of a whole.

    Does this adequately explain why every person who entered the gallery became transfixed, practically held captive once they figured out how the piece worked? Or why nearly every single person there looked like their thoughts were a million miles away? Or why almost everyone was caught wiping tears away? I don’t think so.

    Cardiff’s work creates a simultaneous, visceral feeling of both presence and absence. The members of the choir are right in front of us; we hear them, sense them, move among them. But they’re not. They’re gone. And the work, by its nature, lets us know that they’re not there. In this city, at this time (the show opened on October 14), a work that aspired to one level of impact has achieved something almost unimaginably transcendent.

    How NOT to screen video

    How NOT to screen video of farmers baling hay that you shot on your first day of your first location:

    1) Watch Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, in which nearly every scene looks like a Vermeer, a Hopper, shot at “magic hour.”[note: this link’s a bit random; a blurb on magic hour from a home entertainment center dealer]
    2)Watch your own. shot on DV.
    You know, I have to say, I started writing this entry before I screened our tape, immediately after being blown away again by Malick’s daunting images. I was intimidated, and I expected the stuff we shot to be totally unwatchable by comparison. You know, it’s not the case. Our footage is certainly different, very rough in spots, and will probably not win the cinematography prize at Cannes like Nestor Almendros’ work did, but it’s not bad.
    The first third of the tape were exterior shots of the barn/shed and the fields behind my grandparents’ house; their neighbor’s corral with its tired old horse; and the lawn, huge evergreen bushes and a willow tree in the backyard. (I remember when these bushes were small enough to see through, if not quite over.) There’s no sound, though. At all. I remember that.
    The middle third is of my grandmother driving through Mapleton, discussing the town and their land and farming as we searched for hay being baled. We’d missed most of the harvest by a week or so, as it turns out, due to scheduling exigencies. She’s pretty good. Decades of teaching elementary school show themselves in her clear, descriptive manner.
    The last third was new to me. We’d found a crew loading bales of hay onto a trailer, and Jeff got out to shoot them while I went back to get our car. There’s an interesting poetry in the footage. Two teenagers with T-shirts and baseball caps and a late 30’s guy with a walrus mustache, a paunch, and those glasses that darken automatically when you go outside. It’s hot (100+) and it’s clearly hard work. Every once in a while, you can see where the guys are hamming for the camera. No way are they gonna be caught on film struggling with a bale of hay. Jeff kept the tape rolling nonstop, so myriad adjustments and setups punctuate the footage. As he jogged towards my approaching car, he said, “that loud sound is the A/C. I could use some water.”
    The mountains in the background, the cloud-streaked blue sky, the deep green field, these young guys doing essentially 100-year old work that’s not so different from that of Malick’s farmers. It’s encouraging. (and late. good night.)

    When my grandfather was still

    When my grandfather was still farming, the shed behind their house was where he parked his tractor and combine. It’s still where spare parts and empty grain bags hang at the ready and where tools fill the old kitchen cabinets.

    This NYTimes article by Becky Gaylord talks about mens’ sheds in Australia. There’s apparently a book, Blokes & Sheds, by Mark Thomson, who’s quoted in the article. Some ideas I liked:

    What looks like chaos to outsiders is easily deciphered by the master of the shed. A man can put down a wrench in his shed and know it will stay in the same spot until he moves it weeks, or even years, later…
    Men speak of shed coal: layers of things that build up on the floor, shelves and workbench, reflecting the depth of their lives.

    This morning on NPR, there

    This morning on NPR, there was a commentary about the Christmas Truce, a moment in the first year of WWI when British and German troops left their trenches, met in No Man’s Land, and exchanged cigarettes and jam, sang Christmas carols, and even played soccer. This ad hoc truce was unofficial and unsanctioned, and it obviously didn’t last, but it was a last vestige of a human, individual, moral approach to war that was rendered obsolete by WWI’s technological advances. Paul Fussell, a UPenn historian, called it “the last twitch of the 19th century.” Read firsthand accounts of the Christmas Truce here.

    This story reminded me of a trip I made in early 2000 with Paul, a former colleague of mine, while we were working in Paris. We set out one cold Saturday to visit WWI memorials to the Battle of the Somme. We set out to visit the British Memorial at the village of Thiepval [note: link is in pdf format], designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens. This arch is inscribed with the names of thousands of missing soldiers and was one inspiration for Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial [note: official Park Services websites are currently offline]. In November 2000, Maya Lin discussed Lutyens’ influence in an essay she wrote in 1982, right after completing the then-controversial memorial. Read it in the New York Review of Books.

    Merry Christmas.

    It’s obvious to see how

    It’s obvious to see how entertainment product has been superseded by reality since September 11; movies the country may have once flocked to are now recognized as fatuous and (potentially) consigned to oblivion (or straight-to-video, whichever’s worse). Today, I was made to wonder if the same thing should or would happen to so called “fine art.” Work of artists I both like and prefer to ignore has been pushed to the fore by recent events, and it’s a challenge to see how it holds up in the order-of-magnitude harsher glare. So many things aren’t abstracts or concepts any more; what happens to art that “addresses issues” and “explores limits” once these limits have been surpassed?
    This afternoon I walked to Christie’s to preview the upcoming contemporary art auction. En route, I found Fifth Avenue to be completely closed for several blocks. I figured it’s UN week, Vicente Fox is at Trump Tower, that kind of thing. It turned out to be the funeral service of Donald Burns, the Assistant Chief of the NY Fire Department, held at St Patrick’s Cathedral. Nearly a thousand men and women in dress uniforms were standing at attention in the middle of the street, forming a line two blocks long and three to ten officers deep. [note: here is an image from a service one day earlier.] No one made a sound, including the spectators. Stores silenced their music. Burns’ casket and procession had just passed into the cathedral. After several minutes, the officers snapped to attention and began to file into the church. Two months did not diminish the overwhelming sadness and sense of grief the scene evoked.
    BeecroftV_Intrepid_PAF2001.jpg
    Vanessa Beecroft, The Silent Service, 2001, image via publicartfund.org
    It also made me think of the work of Vanessa Beecroft, including a performance she staged in April 2001 on the Intrepid. Here is a photograph derived from the event. Especially when considered in concert with her earlier work, this seems almost as empty and wrong as a Schwarzenegger film. The emperor has no clothes, indeed.
    At Christie’s I saw several monumental photographs by Andreas Gursky, whose work “presents a stunning and inventive image of our contemporary world,” according to MoMA’s curator, Peter Galassi. From the first week after the bombings, when I was in full CNN burnout, I wanted writers’ and artists’ perspectives, not Paula Zahn’s. The scale of the debris, the nature of the target, even in wire service photographs, it called for Gursky’s perspective to make some sense of it, perhaps. As it turns out, he was grounded in Los Angeles, where he’d been traveling with (and shooting) Madonna’s concert tour. The other end of the spectrum, it seems, now.
    Irony and knowingness doesn’t work; sheer aesthetic, devoid of context or emotion doesn’t work; stunning monumentalism rings a little hollow. On the other hand, sentimentality, baring-all emotionality, sympathetic manipulation is even worse. What does it take to make meaningful art now? If it weren’t nearly 2 AM (and if I had any answers), I’d keep writing…
    gursky-madonna-0913.jpg
    [added 18 Feb 02: Here is Gursky’s photo from the 13 Sept. LA Madonna concert, which was unveiled at the Centre George Pompidou in Paris on 13 Feb. This has become one of the top five searches for my site.]

    Logging tapes after slacking

    Still too distracted in the aftermath? Project in turnaround? The terrorist subplot deemed inappropriate for our new entertainment environment? No, no, and no. Just the rest of life–including work-related stuff, shuttling between NYC and DC, planning to build one house and to find another in the mean time, on and on–constantly impinging on my time and mind.
    Also, recent travel has kept me somewhat out of touch with people who regularly ask, “how’s the movie coming? I haven’t seen an update on the web.” Cue the friends in NYC last week, including one blog coach and sounding board who cracked the whip and told me what I needed to hear: block out the time for working on the movie, to the exclusion of other things.
    Somewhat unexpectedly, this weblog is functioning as a catalyst to keep this project moving forward. Not even cart/horse, really; practically harness/cart/horse. [as it turns out, he had his own motivations, too; his thought-provoking entry that mentions this site was in danger of getting stale if I didn’t update more frequently. Win-win, Chad. Thanks!]
    Screening and logging: another reason it’s been easy not to work on the movie is that right now (since the first location in July/August, actually) I’m screening the footage we shot, logging the contents, taking notes, taking stock. This process–time-consuming under standard practice shooting– is even more consuming because of 1) DV profligacy and low cost (“just shoot ’em all and let the director sort ’em out.”), and 2) the Maysles-inspired fly-on-the-wall, unscripted approach.
    During the two hours I blocked out yesterday, I screened “Utah 7: LW Follow,” a tape shot at my grandmother’s house.
    Activity: chatting around the table; searching for recipes; starting to make biscuits shucking corn; continuing to make biscuits; negotiating with my young CT cousins for the day’s schedule; reading the paper; getting food for one, then another, cousin. It’s extremely mundane activity, but my grandmother–who was a schoolteacher for many years–has an unconscious habit of gently narrating almost everything and punctuating her narration with aphorisms, observations, recommendations. “Sometimes it’s better to listen silently across the room than to be the one asking all the questions.” (a paraphrase).
    [note: it’s 10:30 AM as I write this, and someone is smoking a fatty right outside my slightly open window. Uptown. Off Park Avenue. They’re hanging around, too, not just walking by. It’s like it’s 1994 or something.]
    Image: It’s generally pretty static, cleanly framed shots. Enclosed setting is a factor. Not a lot of movement by the subject, really. Also, the almost-impulsive decision to buy-not-borrow a tripod made it a favorite of the crew.
    The crew being just me and Jeff, who did most of the shooting, also factored in. Ideally, it’d be more flexible with one more person to focus on sound, mikes, lighting, etc. I remember trying to corral my almost-16 year old cousin into being the boom mike guy, but he successfully evaded us for most of the time.
    Technical: The sound sucks regularly. Our new XLR adaptor had a short in it, and there are long stretches where the popping and scratching are so bad, I almost had to mute the monitor. It would’ve been nice to test everything before getting out of reach of B&H. [note: the replacement’s fine, though.]
    Light is great. A southfacing kitchen window is all we used. Nice contrast. Some unhappy moments with the wideangle lens. And the graduated filter (for reining in the contrast between sunlight and interior, for example) had a smudge on it. Only for a few minutes, though.
    Equipment: This so clearly falls into the, “but it’s for the movie project” school of rationalization I shouldn’t mention it. Actually, if I’d posted about it two weeks ago, it’d give a too-clear portrayal of how I was avoiding screening tapes. I bought a bag for the tripod at Jack Spade, a store near my old office. Cool store, nice folks. The pitch for the bag was, “it’s for carrying blueprints. Or maybe a yoga mat.” They can safely add “or a video tripod” to their rap. Here’s a review.
    Here’s a puff piece about the premiere of Jack Spade Films’ “Paperboys,” directed by Mike Mills. Mike makes Moby videos, too.
    There’s an authenticity of the actual people and the store and the movie that I greatly admire, which is rendered cringingly fatuous in store reviews and movie premiers co-starring Tina Brown. How susceptible am I, is this project, to being “jaded Manhattanites [getting] a little nostalgic for suburbia?” I’d better make my grandmother executive producer. Back to work.
    Actually, I’m leaving for a crazy two-day trip to see some friends whose work is in a show in London.

    My video equipment’s out on

    My video equipment’s out on loan for a music video, and I’ve been location scouting in DC for the last few days and haven’t been able to work on the movie at all. For cheap thrills, I’m flying out of National Airport this afternoon (good old Delta Shuttle), and will report any happenings of note.