May 2004 Archives
May 31, 2004
It’s Art?
On Friday, my good friend Jive invited me to an art exhibition at DePaul, in which a few of his photographs were on grand display. I lugged my lazy ass to the campus and was immediately surprised by the crowd. Or, more accurately, I was surprised by the fact that the crowd was congregating in the hallway outside the gallery. My immediate thought was, “Wow, the art must be pretty bad,” but I soon realized it was because there was free food outside, and you couldn’t eat inside.
“Stan!” a female voice called, puzzling me beyond belief since Jive isn’t, as far as I know, a woman, and I don’t know anybody else at DePaul who would excitedly shout my name upon seeing me.
It turned out to be Jive’s mom, standing in a huddle with his brother and his brother’s girlfriend or girlfriend-like female friend. We greeted each other, and Jive’s brother introduced the girl, who wore a confusing dress made of what looked like tutu material sewn to a too-large corset that I probably made fun of.
“Jive is right inside the gallery,” Jive’s mom said. “You should check it out.”
So I went inside to check it out. I walked right past Jive’s photos, which were on the wall right by the entrance, and tried to find Jive. I got distracted by a loud, obnoxious POP-POP-POP sound. I realized I was stepping on bubble-wrap, which for some reason covered the floor of half the gallery. The entire room sounded like a giant popcorn popper.
“The hell?” I thought and immediately tried to get to a section of floor not covered by bubble-wrap. Then, Jive popped up behind me and we got some food. As we ate in the general vicinity of Jive’s mom and brother, some of Jive’s friends showed up. Then, there was the sudden announcement that the awards would be handed out.
“Guh?” I said.
Jive was as puzzled as we were; he didn’t know this was a competition. And, funnily enough, his photos won best in show for photography. Way to go, Jive!
After the awards were distributed, we decided to go in and look at some of the art.
Art, I’ve decided, puzzles me. A whole lot. Sure, I go to an art school, but to be perfectly frank, I’m no artist. You all probably know this after seeing my films and reading my screenplays. I’m not ashamed of this in any way. I am, however, periodically humiliated by my lack of savvy with art. When I don’t understand a piece of art, I either make fun of it or get very angry and shriek “HULK SMASH!” while punching it.
But what the hell? I really, sincerely don’t think much of what I saw could be defined as “art.” I liked most of the photography I saw (especially Jive’s!), and there was one clever “mixed-media” thing that, from a distance, looked like a picture of the consumption virus, but when you looked up close, it was made up of words involving capitalist consumption of goods (such as, “Look, a sale at the Gap!”). That, I thought, was clever. And art.
But, okay, the bubble-wrap on the floor? That was an art project. No, seriously. Stop laughing, it was art.
Other examples of not-art that confused me were the “sculptures.” One was a 2x4 with a little divot in it. The divot was filled in with little pieces of bamboo. Huh? Art? Wha? And, according to Jive, that won best in show for the sculptures.
It had stiff competition, of course. Another sculpture was a candy bar with what looked like dried drool on it. I’m not sure if it was supposed to be drool or not, but that was all. That’s right, if you go down to the grocery store and buy a Three Musketeers and drool on it, you have created an acceptable work of art.
But the coup de grâce of confusing art was The Performance.
We all gather round this circle in the courtyard of the DeePaul library and watched the most confusing thing I’ve seen since I first saw a Stan Brakhage film.
See, this blindfolded girl in a tan outfit laid a blanket down in the square, put a table on it, put a translucent cloth on the table, then kneeled in front of it. Meanwhile, another blindfolded girl in a tan outfit slowly entered the circle. She held a bowl of something disgusting and red in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. I thought at first the disgusting, red food-like substance was some sort of salsa, but it looked more fruity as The Performance progressed.
Here’s what they did: fed each other the red substance and gave each other sips of the wine. When they were finished, the girl with the bowl and the glass walked away, and the girl who initially set out the table and blanket removed the table and folded the blanket. The end.
My continuing reaction to this is a big fat “Zuh?” I simply don’t understand it. I admire their chutzpah and admit that on the occasions when one of the girls missed the other’s mouth and almost rubbed that red shit all over her chest, I was mildly aroused. Was that supposed to be the point? I don’t think so; I firmly believe that I’m just perverted.
After The Performance, we went back into the gallery. Jive’s parents (his dad arrived before The Performance, so he, too, got to witness the miracle of confusing performance art) left with his brother and the girl to get food, and Jive and I and his friends all meandered around the gallery. I felt, as always, awkward and useless. I don’t know Jive’s friends very well, and I’m always cripplingly uncomfortable around people I hardly know. I attribute this to the fact that whenever I loosen up, I’m a complete jackass.
So I basically followed Jive around uncomfortably for awhile. I felt like an idiot when he and his friends discussed The Performance, because I still just didn’t get it. And they were talking about how it says something completely different with two females than it did at a previous Performance in which it was a male and a female.
“But what did it say?” I wanted to scream. I also didn’t want to humiliate myself, so I just said nothing. I kinda wanted to cry, but that would’ve been embarrassing, too, so I choked back the tears.
I don’t demand much from art. I just want there to be some sort of clear meaning. I don’t buy into the “well, you should draw your own meaning” from it. Sure, you can derive a meaning from something that is different from the artist’s, but I really don’t think that can work if the artist doesn’t seem to have any meaning guiding the piece. Like the bubble-wrap or the 2x4. What purpose did that serve, other than, “It’s art!” The Performance, I imagine, had some sort of meaning the artists were trying to get across, but since I can’t figure out what the hell it was, I simply have to imagine that they did without really knowing. Art is supposed to communicate to the audience, not alienate them or condescend to them (my least favorite type of art is the kind where all I can get from it is, “I’m so much smarter than you because I understand this and you don’t”). That’s why Owen will never sell a script.
Anyway…
Eventually, Jive’s friends left and he and I met up with his parents and I mooched a free dinner. Yay!
Afterward, I got really bummed out, because I realized it was the last time I’ll see Jive for at least a year. Not that we were exactly inseparable before, but he was always kinda there, hovering around the general Lincoln Park area. I knew that if I ever stopped being lazy or he ever stopped being busy, we’d be able to hang out. Now, that option isn’t there. Unlike me, he’s graduated, and unlike me, he’s going to actually have some form of career. So he’s moving to New Yawk, where he’ll play Pac-Manhattan and live in a spacious refrigerator box.
Can I afford to go to New York? No.
Will he be able to come back to Chicago? Possibly, if he sells his refrigerator box to the highest bidder and then barters all the squirrel skins and pigeon feathers for bus fare.
But either way, I don’t anticipate actually legitimately seeing him for at least a year, if not more. And that’s pretty depressing, since I’ve known him roughly forever. It’s not like most of my friends, who drift in and out of my life every six months, and we hear from each other maybe once a month through incoherent e-mails.
And of course, there’s always the magic of the Internet, which has been my primary source of communication with Jive ever since we started college. But there’s still something depressing about him being 800 miles away, as opposed to 20.
So, on the train ride back downtown, I called Lucy for some reassurement. She said, “You know what’s terrible? If you move to L.A. after college, and he stays in New York, then you’ll be three thousand miles away from him instead of just 800.”
She’s usually much more reassuring than that.
I will miss Jive, whether I see him all the time or not, but I am glad of one thing: before he left, he managed to show me the light and convince me that The Reputation is possibly the best local band in the history of the universe. I can’t thank him enough for that one.
Happy trails, Jive.
Posted by Stan on May 31, 2004 1:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Random Musings
May 19, 2004
The Dungeonmaster
Special thanks to Rummy for this find:
First shot in 1983 but not released until 1985, this low-budget, amateur fantasy is about Paul Bradford (Jeffrey Byron), a computer whiz who takes on the forces of evil in the guise of Heavy Metal (Blackie Lawless), the leader of an eponymous L.A. band, and Mestema (Richard Moll) the black magician who forces Paul into seven separate confrontations with powerful enemies, much in the manner of Hercules and his challenges (each confrontation directed by a different individual). The nasty Mestema is holding Paul’s girlfriend Gwen (Leslie Wing) hostage, giving him all the more reason to meet these challenges, armed with his computer and nothing more. And all this happens in a mere 73 minutes of running time — counting the long credits — or about 10 minutes a challenge.After hearing this clip, I decided The Dungeonmaster is a film I need to own. Unfortunately, it’s out of print. However, Amazon zShops always come through in a pinch — I bought a copy for $3.99 total, which hopefully will get here before I abandon Chicago for the summer.
— Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
Posted by Stan on May 19, 2004 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Random Musings
May 16, 2004
Dissed
This is my favorite backfired “I am Spartacus” moment ever, I think.
I’ve talked about step-outlines before, but in case you forgot, here’s a slight refresher of the very obvious meat of the step-outline: it’s the story told through steps. Zing. Basically, you number (or bullet-point) the various “steps” you require to get the story from its start to its conclusion, with as few frills as possible. Note that a “step” is not necessarily a scene; two or three scenes may accomplish one step of the story, or one scene could accomplish two or three steps. It sounds weird, but it makes sense when somebody who isn’t retarded explains it.
I like step-outlining because it’s basically a map, for me. Every step has a story-related purpose. When I try to free-write, I have a tendency to meander, and while I used to like the whole idea of just writing and working the story out that way, then going back and focusing it, I decided less time is wasted by just step-outlining the beats of the story and getting right to it. Or, even if I have a vague notion of what the story will be, when I get down to writing it, I tend to forget things and leave them out. When I step-outline, I’m free to insert and remove things even as I write the script. It’s a lot easier to add or remove a step than to add or remove a scene or two. For me, anyway.
This is different from a treatment. I feel like treatments, like pitches, should be created after the screenplay is finished, because it’s basically a summary of the story. It’s not an outline; it tells you what you need to know about the story in the simplest terms possible, and it’s normally not used in aid of writing the story (although some people, for reasons I personally don’t understand, use it for that) but as a tool to sell the story.
So, for this conspiracy class I’m taking, we were assigned to write both a step-outline and a brief treatment of our stories. I guess the treatment I wrote worked quite well, which surprised me, because I thought it was pretty incoherent. The feedback I got was pretty positive, particularly from the professor, who insisted there was “a lot of good writing” in the treatment. Apparently I have a knack for summarizing complicated characters in less than a sentence, which I know is good in treatments.
Owen, however, was not overly fond of my treatment. He decided it was “too conversational and too literary, and therefore not a treatment.” I actually agree with the first clause of Owen’s assessment: I write treatments like a story, sans dialogue and overly flowery language. For example, I will write something like, “They hide out in a fleabag motel” rather than “A cracked and ancient sign over the filthy glass doors read ‘Duncan’s Motor Lodge.’ The door creaked slightly as Alfred opened it and entered a high-ceilinged lobby that smelled of stale cigarettes and a prostitution ring…” and so on, which would go on forever.
The first example tells you everything you need to know: They (Alfred and his lover, Bartleby) hide out (hide out) in a fleabag (unpleasant) motel (cheap). The second, in addition to being a terrible description, goes into waaaaaaay too much detail for something that’s all about brevity. Nobody who reads a treatment gives a shit about the look of the sign or the filthiness of the glass doors or the name of the motel or the creakiness of the doors or the smell of the lobby. Hell, you can’t even smell things in movies (although really good cinematographers and production designers can sometimes do a hell of a job making you think you’d know what the place would smell like, if you could).
Which brings me to my problem with Owen’s treatment, if you’ll allow me to digress even further away from the original point of this entry. And I am ready and willing to school his enormous, probably hairy ass as soon as we read his treatment aloud in class. Owen’s treatment is currently, according to his first readers, 17 pages long. The maximum page-count is supposed to be five.
I think he thinks his exorbitant page count is really impressive to the peons who could only come up with five measly pages. Except I am much more impressed by the people whose treatments started out at 17 pages, which they then chopped down to five. Again, brevity is the key for a treatment, so the fact that they initially believed the minimum page count to fully tell their story was 17, and then they managed to cut it all the way down to five and still tell a coherent (probably tighter and more interesting) story, that’s impressive. I had to chop my treatment from 12 pages down to five, and I still went a half-page over and felt like a jackass (until I found out that almost everybody else did, too).
I respect Mike (who plays a prominent role in my last entry) more and more every day. First, he gave me really kick-ass suggestions to improve two of the scripts I’ve pitched. But he’s also the only guy in class who has managed to cut his story down to the required page length and still have it be coherent and tight. His two-page treatment was spectacular, and his five-page one just filled in a few gaps. He’s an impressive writer.
Anyway, to the point of this digression: the problem with Owen’s treatment is that it’s overlong, but it’s not even remotely concise. The treatment I read, which was 11 pages long, spent way too much time being, you know, literary. (It was not at all conversational, because he has all the style and wit of a Joan of Arcadia erotic fan-fiction author.)
He writes paragraphs like these: “The Preacher walks up the dusty driveway, gravel crunching beneath his feet. An old gray Volvo is the lone car in the parking lot. The Preacher approaches the entrance to a store called JOE’S VIDEO DEPOT. Inside, many people talk, discussing the new movies that are on display in the video store. The Preacher speaks to no one. He walks past a door labeled “ADULT VIDEOS” and passes a bin filled with various genres of pornography: STRAIGHT, GAY, SHEMALE, LESBIAN, ASIAN, and so on. The Preacher goes through the bins and finds his selection: THE AMAZING ANAL CANAL PART 6, starring Kristy McNichol and Michael Clarke Duncan.”
Which is a little too much. I mean, sure, parts of it would probably be acceptable in the script itself (especially if the excessive details, like the Volvo and the stars of the porno, are important later, or if they hit on a joke of some kind — like, haha, the washed-up ’80s starlet will do anal with that huge guy from The Green Mile), but that is not a treatment. Here is a treatment: “The Preacher goes to a video store and rents a porno.”
It’s not the best writing in the world, but that’s how a treatment is written. It’s supposed to be a drab and styleless description of the story, but the trick is to engage the reader with your complete lack of style in describing the meat and potatoes of your plot. I can’t figure out this trick, which is why my treatments are always so “literary” and “conversational.” The “literary” is so the reader can see the film in their head — I put in enough visual information so that they can hit on their own image of it, so they understand what I’m going for. Everybody has an idea of what a fleabag motel looks like — it starts to get confusing when you go into details about what the lobby looks like, because what does that have to do with the story?
Every single sentence has to pertain to what happens in the story. You can write about a gray Volvo being the only car in the parking lot if it becomes important later, and if you do write about a gray Volvo and it doesn’t pay off later, the person reading it is gonna get pissed off, because if you wrote it in your treatment, it’s gotta be important to the story at some point.
Okay, sorry about getting so ranty, but this actually does pertain to the story I planned to tell (plus, I wanted to document what a hypocritical asshat Owen is). Owen went off on my treatment being too literary and conversational, and I got pissed and was about to defend my work when something completely amazing happened: everybody else, including the professor, defended it for me. Everybody liked my treatment. They thought, as I said before, that it was tight and conveyed everything I intended to convey without getting bogged down in details.
Owen maintained that my treatment was not “visual enough,” but he’s missing the point of the context of “visual” as it pertains to a treatment. A treatment is not merely visual, in the sense of overlong descriptions of stuff nobody cares about; a treatment is observable behavior. That’s what makes it visual. So while parts of my treatment got bogged down in dialogue-heavy scenes (which are mostly written like “She tells Alfred that he’s an asshole. Alfred tells her Bartleby never loved her.”), it’s there because without descriptions of the dialogue in those scenes, the story makes no sense. I’m not going to get all flowery-symbolic to explain dialogue in my treatment, because you know what it is in the screenplay? Dialogue. Not symbolic action. Not visual poetry. Just people standing around talking. Which is boring as hell in a treatment, but it can week exceedingly well in a screenplay, especially when you’re ripping off the scene in Marathon Man where Janeway explains to Babe every single thing that’s going on, and then double-crosses him.
So, with everybody defending my work and wanting to make out with my treatment, I felt slightly vindicated. But not vindicated enough, which is why what happened next totally kicked ass.
A little while later, Owen started bitching about step-outlines. I don’t remember what, if anything, prompted it, but basically he said something along the lines of, “Doing a step-outline was a complete waste of time. It doesn’t help at all.”
Our professor said, “A lot of students have told me they’ve been very helpful.”
Owen was wearing dark sunglasses, but I totally have the feeling he rolled his eyes at her. He looked to the students, his peeps, from behind those dark glasses and said, “Raise your hand if you found the step-outlines at all helpful.”
The professor started to defend herself, saying, “I don’t really think that’s —” but then yet another amazing thing happened: every single person in the class, except for Owen, raised his or her hand.
Owen stared at us, his jaw slowly dropping. He really, honestly believed we would all rally on his side. “I, uh, I…” he stammered. “I guess I’m in the minority here.”
“I guess so,” the professor said as the rest of us snickered in amusement.
Like I said, I find the step-outlines very useful. I know lots of others do, as well. I don’t think everybody in the class did, but I think those that didn’t raised their hands anyway, just because nobody wants to agree with anything Owen says at any point in time.
I was so glad for that, since we didn’t have time to read his treatment, Owen at least got some sort of comeuppance.
Posted by Stan on May 16, 2004 1:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | School Rants
May 14, 2004
The Threesome
This is strictly on the gossip-mill, but whatever. So was The Theory, but my rabid fan is clamoring for a new entry, since it’s been nearly three weeks since my last post. In lieu of anything credible or interesting, I’m willing to write up some gossipy libel since it’s the latest buzz in the screenwriting department.
But first, some backstory.
Almost immediately after posting about The Theory, I started to doubt my conclusion that Owen was a deeply closeted homosexual just waiting to leap out and pounce on any number of terrified men out there. I had a couple of reasons for doubting myself:
- Immediately after re-reading the entry, I decided that, while the gossip is amusing, I came off like an obsessive homophobe myself. It seemed a tad hypocritcal. I figure that if I’m not gay (key word “if”) and I’m doing the same thing he is, it’s possible he’s not, either.
- My insatiable quest for knowledge (for mocking him) led me to find a site he has on deviantART, which has a lot of his short stories and what barely passes as a blog. Everything there, posted in his natural habitat and designed for people he knows, negates The Theory.
- It’s been getting warmer lately. The ladies, as they often do, have been dressing in next to nothing, which is awesome. However, Owen pays way too much attention to these women. One in particular, a friend of mine, he will stare at unabashedly, slack-jawed and unable to say anything. It would really be funny if I didn’t want to kick his teeth in all the time.
Of course, none of this is any more conclusive than my initial supposed conclusions, so take it all with a grain of salt. Fellow likes to say that someone as deeply closeted (and disturbed) as Owen wouldn’t really leave a trail of any kind leading us to any legitimate conclusions. We’re mostly just working on weird observations and Fellow’s finely tuned gaydar.
So, doubting The Theory as I was, I sort of gave up on Owen providing any interesting observations. Instead of reinvigorating the blog, he got sort of boring. I mean, same old shit every week. More pretentious sci-fi talk, more comic book obsessing, more awkward silences. I got tired of memorizing and cataloguing everything he says and does online. But this is just too good.
On Wednesday night, we had a rare absence from Owen. Nobody was disappointed, least of all a guy in my class named Mark. He told me the following story about an incident that occurred the week before:
Last week, we discussed our treatments. We got into a large circle of chairs (rather than our typical conference tables) to do a hippie rap session in which we either pitched or read our treatments and then gave each other feedback. Typically, Owen spent several decades listing each and every complaint he had about others’ stories. I really appreciate the fact that he can be so attentive while listening to people read (as interested as I may be, I often find myself zoning out), but he gives everything that smarmy, man-am-I-smarter-than-you way that makes me want to kick his teeth in more than usual.
Regarding Mark’s story, Owen commented that there were “plausibility” issues regarding the general plot, which involves a radio shock-jock who falls in love with his psychiatrist, who is hired to help him when the shock-jock has a breakdown on the air. No matter how we tried to explain it, Owen couldn’t wrap his head around the idea that a radio station would keep their highest rated personality on the air and pay for him to get therapy instead of just firing him.
Mark got pissed. Really pissed. (Which is why I think it’s possible this entire story is made up.)
During the break, Mark and a friend of his (her name is unimportant, but the fact that she’s a woman is, so keep that in mind) approached Owen to confront him about his bull-headedness. Before they could say anything relevant, Owen asked the following question:
“If I gave you both $50, would you participate in a threesome?”
Mark and his friend responded thusly:
“…”
As did I, upon hearing this story. “He must’ve been joking,” I said when I regained my ability to speak.
Mark looked me in the eyes and shook his head.
“We didn’t say anything,” he told me. “How do you even respond to something like that, from anyone, not just Owen?”
So then Owen suddenly started laughing. He has this creepy laugh that’s a mixture of Tom Hulce’s Mozart laugh and Robert Carradine’s nerd laugh. He said, “Come on, you guys, I was just kidding.” He said it very awkwardly, like a football player who thinks the only way to recover a fumble is to jump on top of the ball and weep like a woman while the other team piles on top of him.
It was clear to Mark that Owen was not in any way joking, despite his awkward “ha ha funny joke!” attempt to recover. The fact is, he seriously propositioned two classmates. And the thing that makes it creepiest to me is that the two he propositioned aren’t even going out. In fact, they’re not even flirtatious. They’re just…them. Friends. They don’t even make sexually charged jokes to one another in class.
Needless to say, this rumor exploded the following week, when Owen happened to not show up. In fact — and this just popped into my head — perhaps he didn’t show up because of the unusual proposition. It appeared that he hadn’t planned to show up at our Thursday class (Mark’s also in that — yay for screenwriting students!). Our professor made fun of him for sending an e-mail saying he wouldn’t be there when he ended up going.
And, in fact, he was wearing dark sunglasses the whole time. Perhaps because he was hungover, perhaps so he could avoid direct eye contact with anybody.
With a normal person, this type of behavior wouldn’t surprise me. With Owen, it sort of does. Owen has shown himself to have very little humility. He’s better than we are, so why should he be embarrassed by a horribly inappropriate sexual advance on two people at the same time? Once again, it’s possible that he’s shown himself to be an actual human being. Of course, he managed to crawl up from the unfortunate muck called “humanity” and regain control of his pedestal, high above us all, in time for our Thursday class. I gather that his desperation to prove how much smarter he is than the rest of us thwarted any embarrassment his conscience attempt to inflict upon him.
When I started writing this entry, I thought it was just a silly little rumor of an untruth, but now I sort of wonder. Owen is most certainly not the kind of guy who would cut class to go out a-drinkin’, especially if it would cause him to miss not one but two classes, so I really doubt the “hungover” theory applies. What other explanation is there for the dark, eye-contact-preventing sunglasses?
So there you have it. Maybe Owen’s not gay. At least he’s a sexual deviant (or an attempted sexual deviant). Perhaps next week he’ll show up to class in his crotchless Spike Spiegel costume, wondering who’s going to the anime convention at the Star Plaza in Merrillville this weekend.
For the sake of this blog, we can only hope.
Posted by Stan on May 14, 2004 9:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | School Rants
