The Writing Week part 25

I saw three plays this weekend. Of the League, I think it’s safe to say that I’m the one most inclined to write for live theater, in addition to film. Seeing three plays made me want to write (plays), which is good, because other than rewrites, I haven’t wanted to write much recently (it wasn’t so much the desire to write a play, but rather to have people respond to my writing that stimulated me). At all. I’m reading Easy Riders, Raging Bulls right now, and there’s a passage that refers to Paul Schrader (writer, Taxi Driver), which says “He was writing like a machine, and although he didn’t know it then, he was writing himself out.”

That’s exactly what I’m worried has happened to me. I wrote at a break-neck pace for the first 4 months of this year, remember making a comment to someone about how I had so many ideas I could write forever, and then woke up one day feeling like I was all dried up. Granted, I’m quite young still and the ideas are there. I just haven’t felt that fire under me for a few months now, which is why I’ve been doing re-writes (if not a result of doing re-writes). I hope it will pass soon, but in the mean time, the going is tough. And slow.

Finally, I think it’s worth mentioning the new rule recently created regarding the Academy Awards. As I’m sure you heard, no movie will be allowed any more than two nominations for “Best Original Song” anymore. This new regulation follows triple nominations for Dreamgirls and Enchanted, neither of which landed an award in said category. Personally, I find it entertaining when a film loses a category in which it has so incredibly stacked the deck, garnering three out of the five nominations. I knew (somehow) that it was inevitable that neither of those films were going to win, and was satisfied when the awards went elsewhere. At the end of the day, though, I didn’t really care either way about the decision to limit the nominations.

However, I got to talking with someone, and they made me realize something: restricting the number of nominations penalizes a film that is truly deserving. Now, to be fair, I didn’t see either of the triple-nominated films, so the songs were out of context to me (and therefore less enjoyable than they may have been otherwise). I didn’t really like the songs, but if they were three out of five of the best original songs in their respective years, then don’t they deserve that recognition? I was trying to come up with a situation where this new regulation would affect me (should I ever receive Oscar nods), and the closest scenario I could think of for comparison would be if the Academy limited the number of, say, Best Original Screenplays a single writer could be nominated for in one year. If, by some miracle, I had three movies released in the same year, each worthy of an Oscar nomination for writing, then wouldn’t it be unfair to neglect to recognize one, simply because the other two had already received nominations?

Anyway, I’m rambling; A) this will probably never be an issue for me and B) it has next to nothing to do with what I did (or didn’t) write this week. I just wonder if it should be taken as a sign of other regulations to come, and if it is, how they’ll affect us.

George Carlin RIP

George Carlin passed away yesterday. Listening to his old routines reminds me of long road trips with his books-on-cassettes playing through the car stereo.



His infamous "seven words" routine.

Naughty joke at expense of Will Smiths's new movie...

Signmakers having fun at the London premiere of Hancock. Via The Beat.

The Writing Week part 24

All in all, a pretty good week. I got another draft of my post-Apocalyptic spec out. It's tough for me to gauge how it went. On the one hand, I think that the few, yet important changes I made have strengthened the script a lot. Act Two flows much better, the scenes are connected much more, and the characters' desires, especially the protagonist's, are much clearer. On the other hand, though I cut one scene here and reordered a few there, I really changed very little structurally. The vast majority of the scenes are still in this draft, and other than how they're linked and what's said within them, they are not incredibly different.

I don't know if this new draft works on a different level. If this was my first draft, I believe I would have received different notes than I got the first go around, but the League might have told me I had a more solid first draft. Having given up the impact of the first completely new draft already, I know that any future notes I get from people who have already read the script will be in light of what they know. It's inevitable, but the notes will be a comparison to what they've read before, and not a fresh take on a new project. Some larger problems that I'm not seeing might go under their radar, too. This is not to criticize the feedback we Leaguers give one another; I think we offer great insight and incredibly helpful suggestions. But a first draft will always, I think, have an inevitable air of "newness" to it that subsequent drafts, no matter how different, will lack. (Granted, I've written scripts that, by the fifth draft, are virtually unrecognizable as a descendant of the first draft. The people who read the pages since step one, though, still sometimes offer feedback that draws upon that first, wretched draft.)

This current project has gotten me thinking about something, which is probably deserving of its own post, but I'll throw it in here anyway. I've been thinking a lot about perfection versus production. By that, I mean: if an agent or a producer read my comic book script and asked for something else, I would be inclined to give him/her the post-Apocalyptic spec. But what if that script wasn't ready? Not quite. Do I go for production - I'm a young writer; if someone wants to give my $500K (I'm also optimistic) for a script that might not be as good as it could be - who am I to say no? Or, do I go for perfection - I'd be thrilled to have that opportunity present itself, yet I know, deep down, that my script doesn't quite do the justice to my idea that it could, and that if I had more time, not only could I write a movie, but I could write a great movie?

Perfection. Or Production. As a young writer, it seems ridiculous to think of turning down any opportunity. But where should I place the value of my work? I don't want to turn around one day and know I could have written a better movie, but I don't want to risk not having one produced.

More Giant Robots!

Looks like Transformers may be getting some competition in the awesome giant robot market. According to hollywoodreporter.com, Lawrence Kasdan is set to adapt Robotech, the epic sci-fi animated series from the 1980s.

For those of you not too familiar with the Robotech series, you and I are pretty much in the same boat. I got my giant robot fix from the Transformers. Although I’m not a Robotech historian, I do have some fond memories of the series over the course of a month back in 2007 when I was crashing on my brother’s couch.

My brother’s roommate recently got the complete Robotech series as a birthday gift. I use to believe there was nothing he could consistently watch more than The Simpsons, but I was wrong. From what I got from the few dozen or so episodes I watched is that humans have this beef with aliens involving a power source called protoculture. Hot shot pilot Rich Hunter is far better at blowing bad guys up than he is with recognizing and dealing with the affections of his commanding officer Lisa Hayes. Is that about it?

Like I said, I’m not the Robotech expert. I’ll let Zombie chime in to fairly represent the series. All I know is that sometime down the line we’ll be getting some super sleek, mach 10, giant robot action. I’ll watch it, not for the giant robots, but because it’s the only way I know how to thank Lawrence Kasdan for Wyatt Earp.

You can read the original Hollywood Reporter article at http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3ia3b683089f36e7ebb3a620eb11dacda3

It's here!!!

For all you who lives in New York, or near New York, it's almost time for

The 7th New York Asian Film Festival!!!

June 20-July 6
Presented by Subway Cinema
http://www.subwaycinema.com/

I'm not hired by these guys. I've actually been waiting for this for months, and am very excited.

A good amount of them are big-budget hit movies in Asia, rather than the usual art house movies played in festivals. And probably because they are big-budget, star-casted movies, I will admit that I've been disappointed before, the same way Hollywood movies can disappoint. I've also walked away from films thinking 'wow, they've poured more money than God in this movie, and it's worth every fucking cent.' Some of these movies really left me in a floaty daze, and wonder why I left Asia in the first place.

Another reason to see these movies is that if you decided in the last minute, 'meh, I'll just stay at home, it's not a movie kind of night', you probably won't be able to find a lot of them on DVD in the states. So unless you own a region 2 or 3 or 6 DVD player (or just have the player "fixed"), you won't be able to actually watch a lot of them if you miss it. And even then some don't have english subtitles.

Also, pre-order tickets. I've been turned away from sold-out shows with tears too many times.

You know you're a film nerd when...

... you're playing Grand Theft Auto IV and you spend a good chunk of time re-enacting scenes from There Will Be Blood in Liberty City's bowling alley...

Actually, that probably says more about me than "film nerd"...

Sigh.