Category: Film

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Being There

Theatre director (and good neighbour) Duncan was over for a beer the other day and we talked a bit about technology making things like sets and locations and actors redundant. (I’m exaggerating.) He looked forward to the future promised by Sin City and 300. I struck back with Stars Wars Episodes I-III, and misremembered/misquoted Roger Ebert‘s essay on Werner Herzog which mentioned the rapturous truth of being on location.

Even though we were only talking about hypotheticals, the discussion camped out in a corner of my head. Surely there was more to my response than cynical pop references?

As always, the universe provides: last week, Stevo patiently guided The Boy and I through an afternoon and evening of a pool game of the FIFA U-17 Women’s Football World Cup*. At first, all I could think about was the physical discomfit of the cold plastic seats, exposure to the elements (a cold wind, passing showers), and the stench of fried food and stale beer. But somehow this was overcome by the immediacy of the game playing out right in front of me, the roar of the sizable crowd, the chanting and singing of blocs of fans supporting the teams. I got caught up in the spirit of the game. I started watching.

I’m not a sports fan to the dismay of my longtime male friends but I’ve been exposed to enough televised sport that I know when a player’s off-side, where the gully and slip are, what a zone defence entails, and the joke that is ‘non-contact’. For all that, I don’t care for it, really. When it’s on the box, I’ll just as readily watch Banzai! as world cup rugby. But take me to a live game –

– where I’m a short physical distance away from the action with little to no possibility of instant replays –

– and there’s a polite controlled mob hysteria that I’m happy to be swept up in –

– where else could I be as exhausted and aghast with each and every close call that happens on the field? Where else could I not care for the shrieking from the woman in the seats behind me?

I can’t speak for actors but the wannabe filmmaker within me believes that the let’s pretend approach can only take you so far. The environment and your senses inform what you’re doing. Whether you’re fighting frostbite at a rugby game or racing against the light on location, nothing beats being there.

*  When Bern asked, What were you guys doing at a women’s football game?, I flashed on my niece’s look of Yeah, riiight when I tried to explain to her that I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer for its brilliant and daring storytelling.

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Cut to the Chase

(I type this as a DVD plays in a corner of the screen.)

I bring this on myself, really.

EXT. SEMI-RURAL HOUSE – DAY

POLICE SUPERIOR and YOUNG COP approach the house.

POLICE SUPERIOR

Just breathe through your nose.

EXT./INT. SEMI-RURAL HOUSE – DAY

The FRONT DOOR opens to reveal DISGRACED COP.

DISGRACED COP

What the %@$# do you want?

POLICE SUPERIOR opens his mouth but --

-- DISGRACED COP looks on in disbelief as --

-- YOUNG COP urinates against DISGRACED COP’s leg.

Yes, it hurts, a voice whispers in my head. It builds character.

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Point & Click

‘S been a while since I’ve done one of these.

  • I wish I could break down my projects like this:
… The Mentalist is no different from any of its mediocre-to-lousy brethren.  You’ve got Simon Baker as the TROUBLED HERO WITH A TRAGIC PAST, who is BRILLIANT IN A DISTINCTIVE AND UNUSUAL WAY.  He has a flirty, clashing rapport with Robin Tunney, the NO-NONSENCE LAW ENFORCEMENT GAL WHO SECRETLY WANTS TO BONE HIM SENSELESS, YOU CAN TOTALLY TELL.  She works with her TEAM OF MISMATCHED SUBORDINATES, including the BIG LUG (Owain Yeoman), the UNEXPECTEDLY FUNNY GUY (Tim Kang), and the HOT, WIDE-EYED ROOKIE GIRL (Amanda Righetti).  A baffling crime is committed, to and by rich people living someplace sunny and appealingly photographed, and involving a beautiful-yet-mutilated lady-corpse and a TAUNTING SERIAL KILLER ARCHENEMY.  One hour later, after the hero has a few opportunities to DO QUIRKY THINGS, BROOD ABOUT HIS SECRET PAIN, and DEMONSTRATE HIS UNIQUE GIFTS, guns are drawn, people are shouting authoritatively, the hero is smiling, and the case is neatly wrapped up.

For the rest of the article, click on over to Teevee.org.

  •  Over at The Rouge Wave, Julie Gray wrote up a list of writerly traits, amongst them:
    • Many writers, regardless of age, have not seen the classics
    • No new writer is realistic about breaking into the business
    • Action scripts are almost always written by men of any age

    Guilty as charged. Let’s see how you fare. (Fedora-tip: Jill Golick.)

  •  Speak of the devil – Ms Golick recently wondered aloud about a world where you only got nice notes.
  • In these uncertain post-West Wing times, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd writes how got Aaron Sorkin to script some face-time between Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and former president Jed Bartlet might go. (Fedora-tip: Dan Slevin.)
  • And over at What I Write, Sean Molloy provides some pretty detailed insights into one of his script projects (in five parts, with addenda).
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Quis Custodiet

Saw the trailer for the Watchmen film the other day.

It got me pretty excited. I suspect the faithfulness of the visuals to the source material is a big factor, though the voice-overs sounded a bit undercooked.

Although Terry Gilliam, and then Paul Greengrass, had been attached to direct this monstrous adaptation in the last couple of decades, it’s taken Zack Snyder to bring it this far. I haven’t seen Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead; not really my cuppa. I kinda/sorta/maybe was going to see 300 when it first came out but was quite disappointed by the graphic novel I borrowed from my friendly local in preparation for my viewing. Maybe, one very rainy day/week/month, I will might try either/both.

Anyhoo – wait a minute: I’ve got scripts of Watchmen – a 2003 Hayter draft and an undated Tse draft.

INT. CAVE – NIGHT – A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER

Some… measured anticipation has replaced the excitement.

I had, in my post-trailer, pre-blog-post-drafting excitement, already typed –

 

I can’t freaking wait

– but I was a bit hasty. It’s a big ask to condense a complex twelve-issue limited series into a two-hour adventure. (C’mon: it’s got superheroes – whether we like it or not, if it’s going to be a superhero movie, it has to be a kind of adventure.) And now, thanks to Mr Slevin, I can’t get this out of my head:

It’s eight-nine months away. Let’s see how I feel then, eh?

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Grrgrll farggle raar – Debrief

After threatening to, I followed through.

INT. IMAX THEATRE – DAY

DAVE and STEVO, their necks unnaturally craned at a certain angle in order to see as much of the HONKING GREAT IMAX SCREEN without inducing whiplash, watch what they hope are the final minutes of “The Dark Knight”.

ON SCREEN where GARY OLDMAN holds his SON tight and intones:

GARY OLDMAN

Because... he’s the hero Gotham deserves – but not the one it needs right now....

ON DAVE as he tries to move his head without it, like, hurting.

DAVE

(thought balloon)

Some chiropractor’s going to buy their next speedboat with this neck.

ON SCREEN as Batman’s BAT-POD streaks through GOTHAM’S UNDERGROUND STREETS.

GARY OLDMAN

... because he’s not our hero – he’s a silent guardian...

ON DAVE as he glances slideways at STEVO – and realises that he is asleep.

GARY OLDMAN

(on honking great imax screen)

... a watchful protector...

DAVE sits up, a lightning bolt of spinal pain lost in an eureka moment --

DAVE

(thought balloon)

I know what he’s going to say!

-- and DAVE’s lips move in sync with --

GARY OLDMAN

(on honking great imax screen)

... a dark knight.

Ah, Mr Hilton. I really should’ve taken the hint when you wrote:

CHRISTIAN BALE IN A RUBBER SUIT flips HEATH?S TRUCK using his BAT-PHYSICS-VIOLATOR, then rides up a wall in order to turn around like a BADASS. FANBOYS in the AUDIENCE cheer wildly for this, even though it looks RETARDED.

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Kev and Me

I have fond twentieth century memories of an above-average cop show where Ken Wahl and his eyebrow went undercover to fight crime, befriended the bad guys, and becoming increasingly conflicted about his work with each season. It was called Wiseguy. This (and the long-lamented Unsub) plumbed moral ambiguities and twisted the TV-cop-show genre before the likes of X-Files and then CSI made ‘dark’ and ‘gritty’ cool.

Each season of Wiseguy concentrated on one big-cheese villain that had to be taken down. Of all the mobsters and politicians and teamsters who would go into Mr Wahl’s little black book, two villains stood out for me: Tim Curry‘s rogueish music exec who was a hoot to watch; and Kevin Spacey‘s enigmatic and downright creepy criminal mastermind (and his too-intimate-for-comfort relationship with his sister played by Joan Severance).

Now that I think of it, maybe it was the actors’ approaches that were so memorable. At one end of the spectrum was Curry’s big-toothed scene-chewing, and at the other was Spacey with his looks, glances and loaded pauses. I think it was Spacey – and the writing of course – that forced me to think things like what did he mean by that? and I just missed a major clue, didn’t I?

Did Wiseguy really introduce me to my screenwriting friend, Subtext? I don’t know. But something happened when Spacey started running his lines in that show. It’s where an actor elevates the script without drawing attention. People thought that Spacey was the bee’s knees when they saw him in either The Usual Suspects or American Beauty.

I knew that already from his tour of duty on Wiseguy.

(And here’s an entertaining few minutes of Spacey and his imaginary friends. Fedora-tip: Eyes Wired Open.)

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Box Watch – “Mad Men”

When watching movies, I know I’ve found a new personal favourite when I’m grinning from ear to ear as the credits roll. It’s a recognition of the craft – the art – that went into what I’ve just witnessed. It’s the realisation of how slickly I’ve been played as an audience member. And the jaw-stretching grin is all the more sweeter if my expectations were pretty high beforehand.

In the last five years, that credit-roll grin has been hurting my face after just an hour – sometimes only half that – of television drama. From the oh-my-gods-I’m-exhausted elation/relief of The Shield and Bodies, to the what-the-heck-happens-next-gods-dammit addiction of The Wire and Sports Night – and let’s not forget the hot-damn!-that-was-good enjoyment from The Closer, The West Wing and the occasional Burn Notice episode.

So what is it about Mad Men that makes me griiin and whine cry out Finished already? each week?

Nothing happens. It’s about relationships – between a bunch of distinctly unlikeable rogues bastards in an era where women were little more than chattels, blacks were invisible, and every damned one of the characters smokes.

It’s those very things that I savour about Mad Men.

Nothing much may happen in an ep but we’re learning more and more about Don and Peggy and company – and what we learn not so much answers questions about them but deepens what we know about their characters. Where most other television dramas would portray the dick-swinging camaraderie with a post-Top Gun homoeroticism or symbolic gunfights and car-chases, the male relationships in Mad Men are so finely detailed that even The Goddess is forced to ask me What was that all about? And as for the show’s portrayal of the time and place: I salute creator Matthew Weiner‘s unflinching lack of gloss or veneer – ‘S how it was, baby.

In portraying a period of history as unflatteringly as one might cover current events, Weiner’s genius is in showing us that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Where the choice on the box is usually between procedural (or procedural with a twist) and soap (or soap with a twist), it’s great to have a drama that – just like its characters toil at in advertising – gives more of the same, but different.

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Jason Rules

Single name creatives usually make me suspicious. Except Prince, of course, because he’s freakin’ Prince, so shut the hell up. It’s the others I worry about. Like McG. Or Pitof. I’d include Fabio but I’m still working through whether it’s jealousy about his hair and/or pecs or just plain suspicion.

And then there’s Jason. The name itself might conjure Halloween-type movie images, rightly or wrongly, but he’s a Paris-based cartoonist who insists on doing graphic novels with no description and less dialogue than a thirty second television commercial.

There’s only one way I can describe his work, full of absurdity, surrealism and hilarity and yet still telling a story – from the blurb for Meow, Baby!:

STARRING: One mummy, one god, one angel, one devil, one plasic surgeon, one Dracula, one Van Helsing, two ambulatory skeletons, one ice cream girl, two policemen, one space alien, one rocket ship, one Egyptian explorer, one werewolf, one family of cavemen, one Frankenstein monster, one pizza delivery guy, one Godzilla, one family of zombies, one Terminator, one set of potential in-laws, one mob of angry villagers, one naked girl in a shower, one Rubik’s cube, one hitchhiker, one opthalmologist, one Darth Vader, one Frenchman, one time clockone pterodactyl, one Jules, one Vincent, one teacher, and one Elvis.

And pick up Living and the Dead – where “horror, humour and romance commingle” – while you’re at it.

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