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April 22, 2008

Joke Ideas

I hate it when I have an idea that starts as a joke but turns into something legitimate, like that Young Patriots idea or Rolling in It: The Movie. Both started out as jokes, but the more I thought about them, the more I liked them. It’s a sickness, I think. I have commercial instincts — really, I do! — I just choose to ignore them so I can focus on crazy shit people would probably pay me not to think about.

The latest came about simply enough. Thumbing through the Writer’s Market to find a suitable publisher of my epic masterwork, it occurred to me that very few of them dealt with a genre I’d classify as “comedy.” Many of the ones listed as “humor/satire” focused more on something political or nonfiction. Even worse, many of them pigeonhole themselves into a particular genre…and that’s where the joke idea came from. Since my current novel can’t even fit into a different, non-comedic genre (like “detective fiction” or “romance novel”), the places where I can submit it are severely limited. I told a friend of mine that I should start writing a novel that combines every conceivable genre. She thought that was hilarious, and together we concocted a basic story:

At an unspecified point in the future (sci-fi!), a private investigator (mystery!) on the Martian colonies (also sci-fi!), which have been dubbed by Earth as the “new frontier” (western!), is hired to search for the woman he once loved (romance!). When independent-minded colonists start to talk revolution (political allegory!*), war breaks out between Mars and Earth (war!). Against this colorful backdrop, the P.I. has to return to Earth undetected (thriller!) and search an unfamiliar world (adventure!) until he reunites with his love (more romance!).

So yeah, it’s about as retarded as you’d expect…

…or is it?!

It’s rough around the edges, although maybe not for an idea that was fleshed out during a 15-minute gigglefest**, but once I started to think about it, it does seem like the kind of goofy comedy I could have a lot of fun with. Once I flesh it out and iron out the story kinks, it could be entertaining…but will it be commercial?

*Also a shameless rip-off of Greg Bear’s Moving Mars. [Back]
**If it’s wrong to hang around with women and giggle like a schoolgirl, I don’t want to be right. [Back]

Posted by Stan at 4:52 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Career-Based Rambling, How Not to Write a Screenplay

April 21, 2008

Pacific Heights (1990)

(I intend to spoil the shit out of this movie, but I actually thought it was pretty good — good enough to recommend — so if you have any interest in seeing it, don’t read this.)

So here’s the thing about Pacific Heights, John Schlesinger’s bizarre 1990 thriller: it shouldn’t work. At all. The opening scenes show us a nice, Reagan-era yuppie couple (played by Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith) trying to figure out how to fudge their mortgage application so they can buy a house so comically enormous they can convert the entire thing into two apartments and live in the movie-huge attic. What I’m trying to say is, they didn’t need this house, and the fact that they paid $750,000 — in 1990 dollars — should make them much less sympathetic. The entire plot hinges on the possibility of them losing their property, so if we can’t understand why this home means so much to them or why we should care if they lose a house when they’re spending waaaaay beyond their means, the ending won’t exactly satisfy.

Wisely, Schlesinger and writer Daniel Pyne avoid potential audience backlash by not apologizing for these characters. They’re portrayed as selfish and kind of vapid, and while it’s not fully explained why they feel they need such a gigantic house in such an expensive neighborhood in the most expensive city on the planet, they seem like the kind of couple who would dive headlong into an unwise investment like this. It’s a good thing, too, because a lot of the plot also hinges on their ignorance of both tenants’ rights and home ownership.

Initially, I felt like this was going to be some kind of comment on race relations. One of the first prospective tenants is a black man (played by Carl Lumbly, who doesn’t have much of a role here but kicked all kinds of ass as Dixon on Alias), and he assumes it’s a race issue when they’re a little uncomfortable with his financial situation. The movie goes out of their way to show the characters aren’t racist, which is probably good for the sake of sympathizing with them but bad because it leads to a too-convenient scene where he slips his application under the door…the night before some other tenants move in, and it inevitably gets trampled and discarded by a mover.

I’m not sure if it would have made a better movie if they had denied Lumbly because he was black, or hell, even if they had found another legitimate reason to deny him. I guess it would have given the story a “they had it coming” vibe that they probably wanted to avoid. I’m a big fan of ironies like that, though. Nonetheless, it’s pretty amazing the movie even got mad — there’s so much potential for it to go wrong. In order for the story to work, they have to be wealthy enough to afford a huge house with some minor paperwork-fudging but also poor enough that they’d lose the house if they couldn’t rent to tenants. Obviously, the size of the house matters — if they’re poor and all they can afford is a little saltine box in the suburbs, they won’t be able to rent rooms or convert chunks of it into apartments. (The movie doesn’t go into detail on how they can afford all this.)

The plot works like this: Michael Keaton shows up as a slick businessman who impresses Modine by driving a Porsche, talking big, and flashing wads of cash. We already know he’s shady because a scene that plays over the opening credits shows him in a weird apartment that’s empty except for a mattress, where he’s sexing up Beverly D’Angelo — but we don’t know why he’s shady. Based on the way he was looking around, and his apparent fixation on the bathroom, I thought Keaton was some kind of thief who somehow knew the house was loaded with money or valuables. I don’t know if they did that on purpose, but it made even more sense when Keaton’s first act of craziness involves refusing to open the door as his drilled and sawed and did all kinds of mysterious, unseen work in the apartment. When the door finally opens, it’s not Keaton — he has a creepy assistant, again leading to the theory that he’s a low-life criminal.

Turns out, his plans are even bigger. First, he uses the noise to drive out the other tenants. All the while, he hasn’t paid Modine a dime. Neither Modine nor Griffith have a clue what’s happening, and if Modine didn’t keep losing logic to rage, he’d be able to rationalize — where’d the 911 call come from? Keaton’s apartment? Yet the guy on the phone sounded very calm? It’s easy to consider something like that a flaw, but in this case it worked for me because it was grounded in Modine’s primary character flaw — that he’d rather yell at him and get into a fistfight than figure out the right way to handle him.

The cop who interrupts their scuffle explains to Modine that the tenant has all the power here, so he needs to talk to an attorney. He does, and she’s played by Jackie from Roseanne! I’m guessing this took place while she was actually filming Roseanne, because she has a very small role and has that same long, stringy hair Jackie had during the second and third seasons. (Usually when I see Laurie Metcalf in movies from this era, she does some kind of transformation to distance herself from Jackie.) It’s around this time that we get to the real heart of the movie: tenants have a shitload of rights that they can very, very easily abuse. It’s kind of weird to see a movie that sympathizes with the landlords and not the tenants, and again, that’s why it’s so surprising that this got made.

The rest of the movie gets really weird, as we discover (thanks to Modine sneaking under the house at a convenient time) Keaton’s plan all along is to make them not only lose the house — he wants it to escalate to a point where he can sue them and win their house. This is how he makes his living. Even though he discovers this, Modine continues to get taken in by Keaton’s passive antagonization. This results in him getting a major ass-beating and a couple of bullets.

While Modine is stuck recuperating, Metcalf’s eviction finally goes through and Keaton is forced out. Griffith discovers he destroyed the whole place — both trashing it and stealing all the appliances, including the toilet. (This is where Lumbly briefly reenters the story, in a meaningless scene where we learn he’s a police lieutenant. He says, “I bet you’re wishing you’d rented to the black man.” Griffith confidently says, “You never returned an application.” Lumbly says, “Uh-huh,” all sarcastic-like. That about sums it up. Like with the 911 call, neither of them take the time to think things through: gee, maybe Griffith lost the application; gee, maybe shoving it under the door in the middle of the night wasn’t the best way to do things. I mean, this is why people have mailboxes, right?)

I have a problem with what happens next. Certain events in the movie strike me as convenient, like the way Modine just happens to slither under the house to find out what Keaton’s up to just when he and his partner start to fight about it, so he finds out everything. But that works for me, under the guise of “time compression” — it’s unlikely that the first and only time Modine attempts to eavesdrop would result in such important, useful information, but that’s how movies work. If they show him trying to eavesdrop repeatedly, not hearing anything interesting, trying again later, it would be more realistic, but it would screw up the pacing. But the big twist, which leads us into the third act, doesn’t have a speck of plausibility to it.

Well, maybe a speck — once we learn more about Keaton, we learn the importance of family. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise me that the only thing he leaves behind is a childhood photograph that just happens to have his full, real name written on the back. But, again, if family’s so important to him — why did he leave it behind? Based on the briefcase o’ backstory Griffith later finds, it becomes evident that Keaton’s been doing this trick for decades, and we soon discover he does this to support his family. That tells me two things: (1) he would have some kind of old, nostalgic picture, and (2) he’s not that sloppy.

However, without this slip-up, we’d have no third act. Once she learns his real name, Griffith does an exceptional job of tracking him down — so good, in fact, that her character might make a decent living as a private investigator. This, too, is hard to believe, but it’s also the most intriguing and satisfying part of the movie. Not only does she uncover who Keaton really is — she gets her revenge.

I don’t know what to say. Despite the convenient moments and the implausibilities (especially finding the photograph), I enjoyed it. I’d like to know how much this changed as it went through the studio wringer, though. The stuff with Lumbly feels tacked-on, but it also feels like maybe the script was rewritten and rewritten until the racial angst was downplayed to the point of meaninglessness. On the other hand, it might have come so late in the game that Pyne didn’t have time to fully explore the possibilities of this character or the racial undercurrents in the story.

I’d also like to consider a more interesting method of discovering Keaton’s true identity. I honestly don’t have a clue of how to do it in a way that would be less convenient. If he hadn’t stolen all the appliances, I would’ve suggested maybe hitting REDIAL on his phone and seeing who answered, but if he left everything but the phone that’d be just as convenient (even though phones are cheap). Maybe she could have discovered the picture, but before he left. I don’t know — that would ruin the shock of the moment we discover what he’s done to the apartment.

So you can see why they stuck with this twist — it doesn’t exactly work, but I’m hard pressed to think of something better.

Posted by Stan at 3:19 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Reviews

April 20, 2008

One of Many Stupid Conclusions I’ve Leaped To

As a lad, I would often see a Charles Bronson movie called Telefon listed in The Cable Guide (yes, this was back in that frightening time before TV Guide covered cable networks), often playing in the middle of the night on HBO. It had a little logline boiling down its complex plot into one sentence. For many years, I thought the word “telethon” was actually “telefon” and that this Bronson movie uncovered some kind of grand conspiracy funneling telethon donations to dirty Reds. In my defense, I was young and pretty stupid.

Posted by Stan at 3:01 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Random Musings

April 19, 2008

Stan vs. The Addams Family

I fucking love The Addams Family — I don’t really care much if you disagree. It’s probably the funniest “classic” sitcom of all time, and it’s pretty hard to beat Green Acres and The Dick Van Dyke Show. It only lasted two seasons, but it’s one of those shows I could watch repeatedly and not get sick of. This is either a testament to its quality or a symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder — you decide! I actually wish it had lasted longer, because if you watch the episodes in order, the writers just go batshit insane; most episodes barely have a story and are full of Monty Python-esque absurdity. As much of a story guy as I am, I love that kind of humor when it’s done well, but I also acknowledge this is probably the main reason for the show’s ratings decline and cancellation.

Although I’d never really cite it as a conscious influence, I noticed something kind of crazy. Recently, TV Land has wedged random marathons onto the schedule (usually they only air it once on Saturday and Sunday), so I had a shitload of Addams Family episodes on the TiVo this week. I watched them at the same time I went through my fake band blog to spruce up old entries, and I realized what a big impact it’s had.

The past several months featured an epic story arc in which Girth discovers he fathered an illegitimate child. It might be the family dynamic that caused me to notice the similarities…there’s nothing really outright ripped off, except the general premise of many jokes. On The Addams Family, about 80% of the jokes are based on the idea that the family has their own version of reality that is pretty much at odds with the rest of the world. That’s the foundation of many jokes on the Abysmal blog, as well. Not all of them — probably not even a majority — but enough for me to take notice and reconsider the impact this show has had on me.

This post might contain the most Addams Family-derivative joke I stumbled across:

As I reached the storeroom, the sound of her voice wafted through the semi-open door. I paused to listen to her unfiltered advice: “Slow down, chica, just think about it: you’re gonna get flabby, your tits are gonna sag, you’re gonna be looser than Jessica Martin—”

“That bitch!” the unknown girl snapped.

“You need to just terminate this pregnancy now. It’ll solve all your problems with Tommy, and you’ll keep that tight-ass body you’ve worked so hard on.”

“I’ll do it!”

I nodded with approval, even though I knew Renal couldn’t see me. She gave the exact same advice I would have—remarkably mature for a girl of her age.

(I guess I should also offer some backstory: shortly before finding out about this daughter, Girth founded a sham children’s charity to launder money he stole from some Nigerians during the band’s European tour last summer. When he started taking heat for something so flagrantly illegal, he decided to set up shop in the storeroom of an abortion clinic in Studio City, where he has his daughter and wife dispense advice to the teen girls who visit the clinic. Perhaps I should also mention that 90% of my reason for keeping the Abysmal blog has to do with letting me get all the truly weird shit out of my system, so I can write something fairly normal — at the very least, not alienating — when I do “real” writing.)

That’s a classic Addams Family structuring: part one, she gives horrible, shallow advice; part two, the recipient of said bad advice agrees*; part three, the classic reversal — rather than feeling shock and horror, Girth feels proud and believes this is a sign of his daughter’s maturity.

So there you have it: in addition to blatant theft from NewsRadio, The Simpsons, and Arrested Development (and some would argue This Is Spinal Tap and Tenacious D, though I have to disagree since I’ve consciously distanced myself from similarities to them), there’s also unconscious theft from The Addams Family. But hey, there’s some originality there, too! I don’t recall the Arrested Development episode where they have to break out of an 18th-century French jail. Although I’m pretty sure that was a MacGyver episode. Dammit!

*On The Addams Family, people usually have two reasons for going along with the Addamses: either they’re callously trying to get something out of the family, only to reach a breaking point and run away by the end of the episode, or they don’t fully understand the extent of the family’s weirdness and think they’re joking or being idiomatic or something. [Back]

Posted by Stan at 3:37 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Creative Works!

April 18, 2008

Job Shit

Update on that law firm job I wanted:

Over the course of the past month, one thing became abundantly clear: nobody at that firm was interested in hiring me, despite the fact that the HR lady told me in no uncertain terms, “It was down to you and one other person, and it was a really difficult decision.”

I called the HR lady several times, left a couple of messages, sent her e-mails, applied using the “apply online” form on their website, and when I didn’t get a response (okay, technically, one time I did get her on the phone, but it seemed like an accident and she tried as hard as she could to get me off the phone ASAP), I brought out the big guns. I don’t actually have any big guns, but what I mean by that is I e-mailed the department manager directly, since he was supposedly the one who liked me so much. He forwarded my resume back to HR, and the lady sent it back to me with a snippy e-mail saying she was already aware of my interest in the job but they were looking at candidates with legal experience first. Fair enough, although the fact that my “friend” Mark works in a library in a law firm doesn’t exactly make him Clarence Darrow, so I didn’t understand the big deal. Also, if the department manager wrote anything to her — like, for instance, “I loved this kid! Bring him in immediately!” — she deleted it when she sent the forwarded message back to me.

Meanwhile, Mark has sent me vaguely paranoid updates on his proceedings with the job. I’ve sent him responses designed to undermine his confidence under the illusion of supportiveness. Actually, after what I’d been through, I really did feel like I had no shot at the job — if even the department manager ignored my resume — so I guess I can’t be too mad at him. I was being stonewalled, and that, at least, wasn’t his fault. The HR lady definitely knew of my interest, and now the marketing manager also knew. So I figured, even though I didn’t really want Mark getting the job, I shouldn’t be a total asshole to him. At least he was honest enough to tell me…even if it was after-the-fact and only because I e-mailed him to say I saw the listing and was still interested.

Mark actually broke through to the second interview phase, and I thought, That’s it — I’m done for, he’s got the job. He e-mailed me at some point last week wondering how similar his experience was to my own. I told him it was pretty much the same, so he shouldn’t necessarily feel optimistic.

And, shock of shocks, he e-mailed me yesterday:

Subject: Does this sound familiar

Body: HR Lady: “It was down to you and one other person, and it was a really difficult decision.”

That pissed him off, and it pissed me off, and what’s worse, it’s not exactly a confidence booster. If “it was down to you and one other person” is her standard line, it crystallizes all the other bullshit I’ve put up with from the HR lady. Granted, she both excels at and enjoys railroading prospective candidates, so I guess it wouldn’t have any real effect on her to know that telling this to an applicant still gives them hope. Most job interviews, if you don’t get it, you don’t hear back, and if you do hear back, they just tell you they went with somebody else. Saying “you were ridiculously close to getting this job, but [insert minor, possibly bureaucratic reason for not getting the job]” just tells you, “You should troll the company website until the job pops back up and then pounce.” Finding out she told Mark the exact same thing, phrased the exact same way (only omitting the part about an internal candidate, since he was the internal candidate), makes me assume it was never down to me and one other person, or that if it was, the chasm between myself and the other candidate was impossibly big.

Lucy has a different, more optimistic perspective. She really does seem to think that — miracle of miracles — they really did like both of us, but for various reasons went with somebody else. In my case, they went with an internal candidate; with Mark, they apparently hired an actual attorney, which became a joke in his department. “An attorney got hired for a staff job? He must really suck.” I’m not sure if this means the responsibilities and/or qualifications for the job have changed, or maybe they just got along with the guy a little bit better. Who the hell knows?

Posted by Stan at 4:07 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Job Shit

April 17, 2008

Room Service

Poring over* somebody’s screenplay, I’ve realized something: detail is a lost art.

Have you ever read an old-timey screenplay, something from the ’40s or ’50s? The screenplay for Treasure of the Sierra Madre is ridiculously vivid, jammed with visual information and nuance you don’t get in a modern screenplay. I can understand a desire to be concise for the sake of the reader. The most important rule in any kind of writing is to know your audience and cater to them, and the audience for a screenplay is generally “overworked readers who only read the dialogue” and “barely-literate producers who would rather read a two-paragraph synopsis.” However, there’s a big difference between brevity and eliminating necessary details.

For instance, this screenplay opens in an office. The slugline just says INT. OFFICE - DAY, there is a short sentence about a character — who isn’t even given a physical description — sitting at his desk, then dialogue. So what we get from this is (a) the scene takes place in an office, and (b) the character has a desk. Oh, and I mustn’t forget: it’s daytime.

Some might say, “Well, Stan, you dick, offices share a general sameness that is often a topic of stand-up comedy and David Fincher movies.” I hate to whip out my street cred here, but as a veteran of no fewer than 630,000 office jobs, I can tell you: yes, in a very, very, very general sense, offices have a great deal in common. There are still a shitload of important differences, so when you’re forming your mental picture of this office, it’s important to know things: cubicles or no cubicles, gigantic corporate building or one-story shitbox, cluttered with crap or pristine and antiseptic? If you get one idea stuck in your head because there’s no description, it’s jarring to read something later like, “Johnny steps out of his cubicle.” You’re like, “What the fuck? What cubicle?! All it says is he has a desk!”

It’s the same basic problem as the lack of physical description on the character: because there was none, based solely on his dialogue, I imagined the character as Dian Bachar from Orgazmo. So then later, the fact that he’s dumpy and huge becomes a plot point. Tell me that upfront so I’m not baffled.

I will acknowledge that part of this is my fault, because I’m obviously jumping to the wrong conclusions. With nothing to go on, what else am I supposed to do?

What’s wrong with a little bit of description? I’m not talking a Stephen King description that starts with a three-page description of the office, then veers off into a 30-page tangent about a tertiary character’s struggle with alcoholism, then six pages on a figurine somebody keeps on a shelf in the break room. It can be sparse and simple, like An enormous cubicle maze spreads out as far as the eye can see. A little hyperbole doesn’t hurt anyone. JOHNNY, early 30s and enormous, manages to wedge himself into his desk chair, which groans with disapproval. It’s possible a sloppy reader might think this is a talking chair or something, but doesn’t that paint a clear — perhaps redundant — picture of Johnny’s hugeness? If his being fat serves the plot, we need to know. Do we need to know that he’s blond and has a crew cut? No. Do we need to know that I may have unintentionally described Drew Carey? Not unless you’re a casting director.

Even if the type of office we’re in doesn’t strictly matter to the plot, it builds atmosphere. Even if Johnny’s fatness matters for one isolated joke, it’s integral to his character and our vision of him. Envisioning a fat, tall guy instead of a scrawny, tiny guy paints a different picture — while the dialogue doesn’t change, the way we read it does. So what the fuck, writers? Why are you leaving all this shit out? I know you’re told people in “the industry” don’t like to read, but they also don’t like being frustrated.

*Where “poring” means “indifferently skimming between ADD-induced trips to IMDb and YouTube.” [Back]

Posted by Stan at 6:34 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Career-Based Rambling

April 16, 2008

Marketing Insanity

I won’t deny checking out Diablo Cody’s MySpace blog, at first for more fodder in my crusade against her career, and boy does she ever disappoint. Like 90% of blogs on the Internet, it’s a haphazard assortment of embedded YouTube videos, links to shit nobody cares about (but the comment sycophants sure fake it well!), mildly interesting anecdotes, and pop-culture vomit. I lost interest shortly after she stopped making disingenuous self-effacing remarks around Oscar time, but I still keep checking it…because of Rodney.

I don’t know what to make of Rodney. I’m fascinated in a trainwreck kind of way, because I can’t seem to figure out what’s happening with his blog and MySpace page [the link’s broken, but I included it on the off-chance it returns]. Sometimes, it feels like an elaborate prank/self-promotion, not unlike what I’ve attempted (and failed at — clearly raging insanity is more entertaining than incest jokes and Skip Press parodies). Other times, it feels 100% legit.

When I first started looking at the comments on Cody’s blog, Rodney’s stood out. Not strictly because of the total insanity — just because his comments almost never had a thing to do with the actual content of Cody’s posts, or any of the other comments. It sort of reminded me of The Onion’s “Ask…” columns, where you have the standard “Dear Abby” questions with totally unrelated answers. Even then, I didn’t notice Rodney too much at first…

…until the stalking started.

If you follow the link to Rodney’s blog, the early posts detail a film allegedly based on the life of his (ex?-)girlfriend. The last post on his blog chronicles stalking/death threats/etc. against the girlfriend and himself. He pastes everything in there — text messages, e-mails, whatever — and for some reason attributes it to a psychiatrist. He left several comments on Cody’s blog flat-out stating the man lost his medical license because he sexually abused patients, but in blog posts on his MySpace page (now removed), he elaborated that the shrink lost his license for alcoholism, but because of the graphic nature of the text messages, Rodney assumes alcoholism is a smokescreen.

(On a semi-related note, after reading through all the messages, I can’t figure out how they narrowed it down to this guy — who is a real, Googleable person — when it could be any random person. The dude posts his e-mail address, websites, and phone number all over the place.)

Most people on Cody’s blog just ignored him, until last night. He received two responses — both from the same person — chiding Rodney for posting such depressing, crazy stuff in a place she visits for joy and happiness. Fair enough, but I should also mention that yesterday’s comment included a very specific reference to murdering this psychiatrist, which apparently resulted in MySpace banning his account.

Since MySpace is terrible, I have to assume Rodney’s space received specific complaints in order for this ban to take place. On MySpace, my fictional characters have made extensive references to committing murder, jailbreaks, incest, and pedophilia — and my account was only banned once. For using a bot. (Even though I state it was because of this map for street cred. Buy the t-shirt!)

Whatever happened, I still find myself puzzling over what Rodney is really up to: crazy and crying out for help, crafty and marketing himself, or maybe a little of both. I guess “a little of both” could explain why he’s marketing himself in the most alarming, misguided possible ways. This whole thing is fascinating, and I’m disappointed he’s been cut off from MySpace. Hopefully he’ll pop up again soon, or make better use of his Blogger account…

Posted by Stan at 9:30 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Random Musings

April 15, 2008

Fahrenheit 451: The Book Is Now the Movie!

I’ve loved Ray Bradbury since my misspent youth. In fact, there was a very long period where I’d never actually sit down and read a book unless it was one he wrote. Despite this, I’ve always kinda hated Fahrenheit 451. The ideas and themes, while admirable, don’t justify the plot holes and and overwrought heavy-handedness. I guess my biggest problem, from the first time I read it*, is with the timeline. We’re to believe it takes places approximately 200 years in the future, and it’s strongly implied that the switch over from firemen who put out fires to firemen who burn is in the distant past — so long ago that the idea of firemen putting out fires is little more than a rumor. So, here’s a silly question: why do these people know how to read? If all books are outlawed, why teach them to read?

I’m annoyed that I can’t remember my other complaints, and that even after watching François Truffaut’s 1966 film version, I can’t recall them. Truffaut’s film, which I’ve just seen for the first time, has some key differences from the novel — some better, some worse — but unfortunately, it shares with the book the crappy “why do these people know how to read?” plot hole.

I guess the biggest difference is the incorporation of Clarisse (Julie Christie**) into more of the story. Her actions in the novel replace other characters’, and there’s a whole creepy, added section involving a school where she’s branded as something akin to a traitor after getting fired for (one assumes) her radical ideas. I didn’t hate this change, but I didn’t like it, either. Her mysterious disappearance in the book was effectively creepy, so having her become something of a love interest felt too easy. I seem to recall the character being much younger in the book, and Montag wasn’t in love with her so much as fascinated by the questions she asked. That’s a more interesting dynamic to the relationship than the blasé “Montag thinks she’s hot so he starts reading books.”

Another huge change is the ending, which the film vastly improves. You want goofy, graceless symbolism? Try Bradbury’s novel, where the city he just fled is destroyed before his eyes and Montag starts to remember quotations from the Bible. Subtle, huh? I much preferred the film’s more poetic idea that each of the people in the little reader refugee shantytown has selected a book to commit to memory, thus becoming the books. It’s actually kind of a subtle opposite to Linda’s obsession with her “family” on the television — while Linda strives to become the TV show, these people strive to become the book. It’s a little less obvious than the “ignorant, godless people were too busy watching TV to notice there’s a war going on” ending Bradbury chose.

I know I’m crazy for feeling this way, but I find there’s nothing creepier than an old, outdated glimpse into the future. It makes me think of alternate universes and such — if the ’60s had kept on going, this is what the future would have looked like. Movies like this one, Logan’s Run, even the Mad Max movies, in many ways, wear the period of their making on their sleeves, and it terrifies me even though I enjoy the movies. Much as I hate George Lucas for not letting me own the real trilogy on DVD***, I give him credit for creating a futuristic world that isn’t overwhelmed by garish ’70s-ness. Unlike, say, the Star Wars Holiday Special. I guess maybe I should credit this more to production designer John Barry than to Lucas himself. Fuck Lucas, man! The prequels sucked. Suuuucked.

Okay, I’m getting off-topic here. One other complaint about the film is the remarkable quality and condition of the books everyone keeps reading. It’s nitpicky, I know, but it bugged me to see mostly pristine copies of books getting tossed around in a future world where nobody reads. Where are these books coming from? The book hints at pirate printing presses, which is fine, but would they really bother with hardcover binding and glossy, full-color dust-jackets? Wouldn’t you be more likely to find a bunch of pulpy sheets of paper tied together with some string? Or, if you did find a real book, wouldn’t it be in horrible condition? I had a paperback copy of All the President’s Men from 1975 whose spine split in half the last time I tried to open it; I had to go and get a new copy. So, yeah, it’s a little difficult to believe pristine books would survive into the dystopia.

In the interest of fairness, here’s another switch I like: in the novel, the Captain humiliates Montag in front of a fireman card game to explain, in great detail, about a dream he had in which Montag spouted off book nonsense, and the Captain himself responded to each with quotations from books — thus showing their meaninglessness. In the movie version of this scene, Montag and the Captain are alone, in the attic library of an old woman who looks uncomfortably like Tom Bosley, and the Captain makes similar observations without going on and on with quotations and hypothetical statements from his alleged dream version of Montag.

I’d like to close by pointing out some irony. Bradbury has said repeatedly that the book is not about censorship, fascism, or anything truly political (Truffaut must not have gotten that memo); in fact, he wrote a book about how the then-new medium of television makes people stop caring about literature and would, at some point, make us stop caring about facts altogether. I don’t disagree with the sentiment (you can’t if you’ve watched any cable news channel for more than 30 seconds), but it’s hard not to point out that he personally worked on a TV anthology series, Ray Bradbury Theater, that converted many of his short stories into 30-minute episodes. Is this the pot calling the kettle black, or did he just realize 30 years later that money is awesome?

*Yes, I’ve read it four times, hoping each time that it’d improve with age. It hasn’t, and in fact, the most recent paperback version I read has an essay by Ray Bradbury, written 50 years after the novel’s original publication, that ruins the book even more. At first, I thought, “Finally, I can get some insight from the man himself on why he’d insert all these crazy plot holes when he’s normally such a careful writer.” Instead, he quotes extensively from a stageplay version he also wrote, which opens up yet another plot hole by showing the Captain having an extensive library of books. I guess he’s going after the same idea as the computer in “I Have No Mouth, But I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison: by keeping them around, he can remember why he hates them to begin with. Still, I think he could do that with no more than a dozen. A full library, powerful image that it may be, makes no sense. [Back]

**Christie also plays Montag’s wife, known as Linda in the film (Mildred in the novel). Though it’s an exceptional dual performance, it’s kind of dunderheaded and obvious in terms of symbolism, so put that under the the column of changes I didn’t like. [Back]

***A version of the Star Wars trilogy with the original version intact was released, but it contained comically inferior, low-resolution and low-bitrate versions taken directly from old Laserdisc releases (so the prints were likely sourced from VHS). Waste of money and an embarrassing way to treat a classic movie trilogy. Even more embarrassing than digitally inserting Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen. [Back]

Posted by Stan at 5:50 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Reviews

April 14, 2008

Television Without Purpose

I don’t visit many Internet message boards anymore because, as I failed to mention the other day, message boards are just too time-consuming, especially if you participate. The few I look at, I don’t read regularly, and I participate even less frequently. But there was a time, when I was working one of my many dead-end jobs and had assloads of time to kill, where I became obsessed with a website called Television Without Pity. For those who aren’t aware (because you have better things to do with your lives than obsess over TV), it’s a site where folks write long, snarky recaps of television shows. At their best, they approximate the experience of watching a show, simulating the things that run through your mind so you can say, “Thank God I’m not the only one who didn’t think a single moment of 24’s fourth season made sense.” At their worst, they descend into rambling, pseudo-intellectual garbage overanalyzing the kind of reality shows most people half-watch as they do laundry or cook dinner.

And then there are the forums. I’ll get to that later. First, a little personal history…

I read the recaps on that site off and on from around 2001 through…well, pretty much through the recent Bravo buyout. My reading the recaps isn’t some kind of anti-corporate protest so much as a result of the shake-ups and new features really sucking up the site. The only idea worse than recapping sitcoms was the plan for “weecaps,” which aren’t defined by brevity (as you’d think, with the name) but by turnaround time. As a result, normally entertaining recappers deliver barely-coherent, joke-free summaries that are roughly as long as normal recaps.

Although I had read the recaps on the site for awhile, the forums were barely a blip on my radar until the fall of 2005. At the time, I was working at a tech company I’ve taken to calling Motorama on this blog (to make it harder to Google) that had a metric shit-ton of downtime. Even taking my now-legendary three-hour lunches, rolling in around an hour late and leaving an hour two early…I still had about four hours of downtime, because I was an efficient worker in a department notorious for inefficiency. Good times!

Also at the time, Lost launched its second season with one of the greatest mindfucks in the history of television. It was this that drew me to the TWoP forums. Well, also the fact that the color scheme of the Lost forums approximated the proprietary software we used…and also the fact that the show’s massive popularity at that time caused threads to balloon to hundreds of pages within days of an episode airing. (For a frame of reference, many other shows I watched at the time had episode threads that would rarely get to 20 pages in a full week.)

I was addicted to uncovering easter eggs and secrets, which was hard to do since ABC didn’t even carry HD feeds (or maybe it was just my cable company) at that time. As weeks passed, it became even harder because the vocal minority of Lost haters infested every thread — not just containing themselves to the show’s official bitterness thread — and this, almost as quickly as my addiction started, is what started to frustrate me about TWoP’s forums. Were all posters this obnoxious? Were they all unaware that most TVs can change channels? When they kept complaining that Lost defied its premise (and promise) by veering in a sci-fi direction, did they not noticed that the first episode featured a dinosaur-like monster that could uproot trees but was apparently invisible? Did they all hole up in threads that acted largely as echo chambers, causing their rage to increase to such a point that, by the end of season two, bitterness posters were making up their own, 100% untrue storylines, then getting mad at the writers for plot twists that…never happened.

As I started to have issues with the forums, I also noticed what I perceived as a sharp decline in the quality of recaps. (Turns out, I was just reading more of them, and the overall site quality was not nearly as good as the limited sampling I’d had before. I didn’t know this at the time.) Randomly, I popped “twop sucks” into Google just to see if anyone on the planet agreed with me. Because of the way the forum is modded, you can’t find any actual criticism of the site, or any of its posters, anywhere on their boards. You have to go to outside sources, and fortunately for me, the first hit was an anti-TWoP forum (conveniently named “TWoP Sucks”).

There, I discovered a smallish group of people who didn’t necessarily hate the site — if they did, unlike Lost viewers, they’d stop looking at — but needed to vent frustrations about unsavory posters, inconsistent moderation, and other general site weirdness. I quickly learned much more about the history of the site (in particular the forums and mods) than I ever wanted to know, but I stuck around because, although I posted infrequently, the folks there were…surprisingly normal and down-to-earth. Even their disdain for certain posters felt like typical vent-and-move-on behavior, not the rabid fandom (or anti-fandom) so often expressed on a website devoted to saying they are not a fan site.

So last year, Bravo bought TWoP for mysterious reasons. Since the site actually had some money, they hired part-time mods so the roster of recappers could do disappointing work recapping sitcoms. (Seriously, at this point M. Giant’s 24 recaps are the only things I’ll read on the site, but they should not have made him recap The Office. Much as I like him, recapping a sitcom is even worse than someone trying to retell a really good joke — it’s like someone standing next to a guy telling a really good joke, then getting flustered and trying to outdo him and failing.) With new people devoted exclusively to modding, you’d think it’d get more consistent. But no — it’s pretty much the same old shit (some would argue it’s worse). You have the mods who are fair and reasonable, the mods who strictly enforce the rules no matter what, the mods who enforce the rules inconsistently based on whether or not they agree with the offending poster, and the weird, overzealous mods who will just ban on a whim and make up an appropriate rule violation.

Which leads me, at long last to this post with a reasonable, if slightly bitter, account of getting banned from TWoP. The real fun is in the comments section. If you ignore the misguided conspiracy theories and tales of similar woe and bitterness, you’ll get to a comment that’s both sad and hilarious, in which a 61-year-old retiree was first warned, then banned for improper capitalization (ironically, she was a schoolteacher). If you keep going, you’ll find another comment in which she explains that she took the time to get the runaround from various employees of Bravo/NBC/Universal, going all the way up the chain of command to Jeff Zucker.

Because she was banned from an Internet message board. For a legitimate violation of the rules.*

Eventually, an employee of NBC (followed by a former employee) jumped on to mention that it’s both insane and hilarious to believe anybody with any kind of authority cares. This launched a bout of insanity that has resulted in, quite possibly, more traffic and comments than the poor blogger has ever received. I admit, the whole thing is hilarious, especially when it spilled over to TWoP Sucks (now known as Bitter But Brilliant) and, back on the blog, a sock puppet joined the original commenter in defense that she admitted, eventually, was being dictated to her by the original commenter. (Even funnier, I just noticed now, after pasting all these links to the comments, that the original post was written in November.)

I think the whole thing reached such a nadir of stupidity that it went from weird-yet-sad to flat-out funny, around the time somebody asked why she didn’t just re-register, and the commenter’s sock puppet answered with a paranoid (and untrue) conspiracy theory that mods obsessively check every username and e-mail address that registers to the site for superficial similarities to posters they’ve already banned.

I’m often attracted to the lurid wreckage of Internet strangeness, but I’m still just baffled by the crusade of a woman who was actually banned for the right reasons.** Her obstinate unwillingness to admit any wrongdoing kind of makes you realize that she’s exactly the type of person who would get warned once, ignore it, get warned a second time, ignore it, and then act shocked and outraged when she’s banned on the third offense. Why do so many people who gravitate to TWoP have such an utter lack of self-awareness?

More importantly: what does that say about me?***

*Say what you will about the rules and the fascist mods, their rules about spelling/grammar/capitalization make the forums much easier to read, and when you’re warned twice, why would a banning shock you? [Back]

**Although lack of capitalization is a pretty minor offense compared to the behavior of others the site hasn’t banned, it’s one of their most clearly stated rules. [Back]

***Hey, wait. That’s sort of like self-awareness. [Back]

Posted by Stan at 5:45 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Random Musings

April 13, 2008

Openings

In my quest to perfect an homage to Steven Seagal, I have to consider the importance of the opening. In his earlier, better movies, he always had something resembling a prologue to establish his character and, often, establish the story. In Hard to Kill, there’s a pre-coma sequence in 1983 showing him as (a) a bad-ass, (b) a cop/surveillance expert, (c) a loving family man, all prior to getting shot and ending up in a seven-year coma. In Out for Justice, there’s a shorter, better sequence where he asks his partner if everything’s all right (this foreshadows a plot point — seriously!), then throws a pimp through a car windshield.

I knew I’d need a similar opening, but I couldn’t figure out how to work it in. As the story stood yesterday, it started with the main character arriving in Nigeria, but he doesn’t want to announce his bad-assiness right away. He has to build up to it. At first, I thought, What if he foils a terrorist attack on the airplane? Almost immediately, I thought, Too soon! So then I started thinking that something has to happen at the U.S. airport. It reminded me of Marked for Death, which hilariously implies not only that Seagal and Keith David sneak duffel bags loaded with handguns, shotguns, and high-powered assault rifles into Jamaica…they come back to Chicago with said bags of guns plus a decapitated head.

So yeah, that’ll be it: he gets into it with a security person over the massive quantity of weapons he’s trying to carry on to the plane. That seemed lame, though. My annoying penchant for satire reminded me of the often-reported incompetent TSA workers, leading me to consider opening with a style-establishing joke — building suspense as we think he’ll get busted, but then the glazed-eyed TSA worker doesn’t even care. And he goes and kicks some ass in a Chili’s Too (fulfilling the barfight quota). I’m still mulling it over, but I think some variation on this will end up opening the script.

Posted by Stan at 1:30 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Career-Based Rambling

April 12, 2008

Prove It All Night

I mentioned a few days ago that I sometimes lurk around misc.writing.screenplays (actually, now I stick with the moderated group), just to see what’s going on. I don’t have much interest in posting, and it’s easy to check in once a month and read all the worthwhile posts in maybe half an hour. They really don’t talk much about writing except to newbies, which is fine, except when they get distracted by politics, which they do. A lot. It makes it a chore to read unless you just skip those threads. I’m all for political discourse, but I’ve been lurking and (very rarely) posting there since around 2001, and it all comes down to: same shit, different day. It’s reached a point where I can’t figure out why posters allow their buttons to be pushed, or derive pleasure in pushing the buttons of the others, because it’s always the same argument.

The trolls are the same way, and in the thread I’m about to discuss, that was even mentioned, although ironically I feel like the poster is one of the rare non-trolls. He’s just very misguided, confused, and ill-informed. Whether they’re trolls or not, the usual pattern with newbies goes like this:

1. Newbies leap onto the group, excited to learn about the wonderful world of screenwriting.
2. Veteran posters respond with encouragement, recommending resource books and websites where produced scripts can be download.
3. Newbie trades excitement for bravado, something along the lines of, “With these tools, I will write the greatest screenplay in history and everyone in Hollywood will want a piece of me. I’ll be the next [Shane Black/Charlie Kaufman/(shudder) Diablo Cody]!”
4. Regulars scale back their encouragement, deciding the newbie is now ready to learn the harsh realities of the screenwriting trade.
5. Newbie gets defensive, insists that they’re all a bunch of cynical losers (most often citing lack of screen credits or lack of screen credits on good movies) and they shouldn’t try dragging him down with them.
6. Regulars come to mild defense of themselves or each other and/or shrug things off, saying something like, “I don’t have to defend my credits to you. The fact that you think the finished product resembles my original idea shows how little you know about the business.”
7. Here is the most irregular part; most often, the newbies simply give up posting. (In my check-in six weeks ago, one of them actually had the gall to suggest that the reason they can’t get new blood on the group is because Usenet is dying. Usenet as a discussion medium is dying — but that ain’t the reason newbies don’t stick around.) Sometimes, though, the newbies get more aggressive, resorting to personal attacks, which are easy to do considering the whole group operates like LiveJournal comments, with little rhyme or reason to the discussion. It’s all personal whims, inside jokes, anecdotes, and other odds and ends that can formulate an incomplete but still attackable personality profile. Even rarer — but far more entertainingly — the newbie trolls with wild abandon, going insane and bringing in sock puppets. Amazingly, the regulars usually go for this, arguing and fighting (even as others try to point out these guys are shams). In accordance with cliché, it’s only when they ignore the troll that he goes away.

Two of my favorite troll stories: My all-time favorite was some craziness involving a guy calling himself Eric James Niemi, apparently a real guy who sold a script in 2001. The poster was clearly not the guy, but the dude went insane and just flamed everyone for several months, increasing in complexity and absurdity, almost the point where it seemed like a satire of Usenet trolling. I checked out of the group before it was resolved, so I’m not sure how it ended, but intrepid readers can check out Google Groups if they want to see some of the hilarity in action.

Another good one was more recent, with a guy (likely a bottom-rung intern, reader, or assistant) who got ahold of the screenplay for The Bucket List a few days before the sale was announced. He posted it on the group, claiming he wrote it and looking for feedback. This was actually a great example of trolling, because the guy only wrote the initial post, then stepped back and watched the chaos. While it’s true that many accused him of being a fraud, and he did begin trolling them, about 80% of the Bucket List fiasco revolved around regulars who loved the script versus regulars who hated it; the former justified their love by pointing out its high-profile sale and the attention it received from top-notch Hollywoodites, while the latter argued that all that’s meaningless because more goes into a decision than whether or not the script is brilliant.

So here comes the newest “troll,” a fellow posting under the innocuous pseudonym “studio.” He says he has a screenplay idea involving all of the following:

• A high-profile true story that will (for reasons he won’t discuss) require what sounds like Babe-esque “realistic” animation for talking animals.
• The story has already been made into an obscure movie (currently available only on VHS), but because it’s both true and because the movie concentrated on…well, I’m not sure what “studio” meant by this, but what I got out of it is that he wants to write about a character involved in this bigger, high-profile story — in my mind, something like Oliver Stone covering the Kennedy assassination by telling the (massively embellished) story of New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison.
• The true story apparently has some memorabilia/props affiliated with it that were purchased by a foreign studio, which “studio” considers interest in the project.
• He also insisted that two studios had the same story in development recently, and that the story had been written as a magazine article, but there are somehow no rights issues involved. (He also said that, while he can go ahead and write his story because he won’t have to worry about rights, if anybody else attempts the story, he will sue the crap out of them. I laughed.)
• His version of the story builds to what he referred to as an “anti-climax.” When posters asked what he meant by this, he said Bambi’s mother getting shot would be an apt comparison; when it was pointed out that Bambi’s mother’s death wasn’t the climax of Bambi, and that typically an “anti-climax” refers to an expectation that isn’t fulfilled, ultimately leading to disappointment, “studio” conceded that disappointment is the desired emotional response.

“studio” firmly believes that this story is so great, so powerful, and will be so well-told that he doesn’t have to worry about complicated things like finding an agent, getting it read at a studio, whatever. He’ll just submit it to a contest, it’ll win, a gigantic studio will buy it and pony up for the huge special effects budget he keeps talking about — everybody wins!

When regulars suggested that he choose a different medium, like writing a novel, he said no. Without elaborating, he said the “true” story would be too short to fill a book, which means he’d have to fictionalize it, which means he’d lose the integrity of the story. It has to be a screenplay. (This is when the magazine article bit came up — when it was suggested he write the true story as an article, he said, “It’s been done.”)

When regulars suggested audiences don’t like to leave the theatre disappointed, and therefore studios don’t like screenplays with disappointing endings, which means even if he does, by some miracle, get his script read, nobody will ever buy it. He didn’t really have an answer to this. Just agreed to disagree. In fact, he insisted repeatedly that he didn’t care if anybody read it or if it ever got made as a movie, but he also kept letting it slip that he really believed he could easily get it sold because any studio would want his story.

Finally, somebody made a disparaging remark about “studio“‘s personal character (a rare switch-up from the usual pattern of embittered newbies attacking regulars) after he admitted to being 48 and unemployed in New Jersey. This started “studio” on a path toward dissent. It’s actually the real irony of this guy — he’s a newbie, but he’s not a troll, and he’s actually in an age bracket where he’d probably get along with a few of the regulars. But after that personal attack, he started taking the less personal attacks (the ones telling him he’s ignorant and unrealistic about his goals) more seriously and, within a few days, disappeared. He started one other thread, asking about the street cred of the regulars, but he seemed unimpressed with the responses.

It’s pretty sad, too, because some of his questions — ignorant as they might have been — weren’t bad. It was only when people started asking for details, because of the weirder questions (like the one about whether or not a studio would be interested in memorabilia, like — I’m only guessing here — a lampshade made of human skin), that they scared him off. And then they barely even acknowledged his real screenwriting questions, which were all about directing on the page. They elected to answer by giving him the usual book recommendations and telling him to download pro scripts…

…which led to the logical question, “Why are all these screenplays filled with camera angles and what looks to me like directing on the page?” I’ve already gone into why I think it’s a bad idea for newbies to read produced scripts as a learning tool, but instead of politely explaining this*, they mostly belittled him.

I admit that this thread entertained me greatly; the weirder “studio“‘s script got, the more he hooked me. Still, I felt bad about the uselessness of the responses and the dismissal of “studio” as a troll when he was merely a confused guy and a dreamer looking for some help and insight.

*In fairness, I think one poster did answer the question, but it was still in the condescending “don’t you get it?!” tone most other posters had adopted by this point. [Back]

Edit, 4/14/08 — Going over this message again, it comes across to me like I’m disgusted/irritated/fed up with the clichés and regulars of MSWm. I don’t read it regularly and haven’t contributed to any discussion since probably 2003, but I have a lot of respect for the regulars (except for Skip Press, who’s kind of a douchebag no matter what the thread) as both people and professionals. They all seem like a cool group, and I’d probably hang there more except, like I said, I have no interest in discussing politics on the Internet, and…that’s about 80-90% of that board.

Posted by Stan at 10:09 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Random Musings

April 11, 2008

Quantum Leap

Tonight, I watched a Quantum Leap rerun that started making me think about the potential for a remake. I’ve heard rumblings of remake attempts in the past that are detailed enough to make me think they at least had one in development at one time, but obviously it’s never come to fruition. It’s one of my favorite shows of all time, but there were always a few elements to “leaping” that went unaddressed. (And yes, being that I loved the show, I fully understand that this was a show with a science-fiction premise that had very little to do with science-fiction. Probably for the best, since the attempts they made to explain things scientifically — most notably in the earlier episodes, and dropped pretty quickly before the end of the second season, then resurrected it when the “Evil Leaper” showed up and tried to ruin the show — were pretty retarded.)

For some reason, this particular episode made me start questioning the rules of Quantum Leap more than anything else. It strikes me as strange because it was really a fun throwaway episode with Sam as a beauty queen; it didn’t build on the show’s long-running mythology or have any significant impact. It wasn’t exactly filler; even an inessential episode of Quantum Leap uses the prism of the past to tackle contemporary issues. No, it was just something about Sam’s particular goals in the episode. He had two objectives that, atypically, would not have resulted in anyone’s death or cause some kind of cataclysmic event to occur. The first objective: save a fellow contestant from a sleazy photographer who takes nude pictures of her and ruins her life. The second objective: place at least third in the pageant so the woman Sam’s leaped into can get a scholarship and become the country’s first female cardiologist.

It started me thinking about some of the things the show never addressed: what happens if Sam fails in his mission? Does he start over, or does he just keep going in that life? Does whatever is leaping him through time leap him into another person, or another time, to solve the same problem in a different way? The show touched on this idea (very briefly) in “The Leap Home,” the two-parter where Sam first leaps into himself as a high schooler to make sure his school basketball team won a pivotal game, then leaps into a soldier in his brother’s Vietnam platoon. In the first part, Sam becomes obsessed with saving his family: his brother would die in a few months in ‘Nam, his sister would marry an abusive alcoholic, and his dad would die of a heart-attack. Nobody listens to him, but he has a chance to save at least one of them in Vietnam (and he does). Still, even though he got lucky, saving his brother wasn’t a primary objective (instead, he was there to save an obnoxious photographer played by Andrea Thompsons, one of my least favorite actors, whose Pulitzer-winning photos would contribute to public dissent against the war).

This particular episode could have tackled the same stories in a number of different ways. Say Sam had a harder time getting the photos back. According to Ziggy*, the nude photos of the contestant didn’t appear publicly (on an erotic calendar “seen in your better muffler shops”) for a month. That gives him ample time to solve the problem in a variety of different ways — going after the photographer, as he does in the episode, or if it’s too late he could dive into the seamy underbelly of Deep South porn peddlers circa 1958. Like Hardcore, only better because he’d be in drag all the time while lecherous men hit on him.

Or let’s say he solved the photo problem but, as a result, blew the pageant. He was already struggling because he’s a man, not a beauty queen, and he has no clue how to do any of that pageant crap. It was hard enough to believe that, with minimal rehearsal time, he’d get up to #4 before blowing everyone away with his impromptu Jerry Lee Lewis impression. So, at the end of the hour, he’s failed one of his missions.

It could go one of three ways: they could have a “Bobby in the shower” ending where Sam leaps right back into the same point in time, making the next episode Groundhog Day-esque variations on the previous leap; they could have him leap into a different person involved in the pageant and, again, show us a different take on the same plot; or, the least repetitive option, they could have Sam “stuck” in 1958, forced to find alternate methods of getting college money.

They could delve into other questions like the consequences of Sam “dying,” and whether or not he can age. Notice that these are all still very ingrained in both the show’s formula, either extending the show’s usual standalone-episode format for occasional multi-episode arcs or answering questions that don’t need elaborate, science-fiction answers.

The only potential downside to a new Quantum Leap series: obvious generalizations aside, the past three decades just aren’t quite the same as tackling the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. One of the struggles facing Journeyman, a recent rehash that I actually enjoyed (it had superficial similarities but enough differences to make it worthwhile; too bad nobody but me watched it), was a way to make the ’80s and ’90s and distinctive as earlier decades. They never quite accomplished it, although they didn’t have the “travel within his lifetime” conceit, so he traveled to earlier time periods. The “within his own lifetime” bit is essential to the idea, even though they bent that rule once in awhile; otherwise, you could go crazy with leaping antics and the time-travel would overshadow the character drama. The only way to fix it is to set the series earlier than 2008…or make the leaper really, really old.

Even so, given the chance, I’d remake Quantum Leap. You know, assuming nobody is interested in that awesome Young Patriots series.

*For non-Quantum Leap fans, that’s the gargantuan computer built for the QL Project that Al accesses via a goofy, tricorder-like PDA precursor. [Back]

Posted by Stan at 10:31 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Career-Based Rambling

April 10, 2008

Blown Wad

I felt pretty confident when I sent Dying Proof to the Big-Shot Producer. Not just because I thought I finally had a solid draft and, because he confessed to never “getting around” to reading what I sent him in June, I dodged the bullet of ruining my chances with that imperfect draft (which I knew had major flaws when I sent it to him; I just didn’t have the time to fix them, hoping instead that he’d saw the raw potential). That was part of the reason, but the main reason was: with semi-frequent harassment, it takes him about six months to read something. From me, anyway. He’s busy with other projects, and at the end of the day I’m nobody. I knew I could send it to him and have a huge window to continue work on new projects, so when I got the inevitable “What else you got?” question, I’d…actually have something.

That’s not to say I don’t have anything, but he’s read two of the six screenplays I have in “ready for reading” condition; he has a third in his possession as we speak. The first two he said, without elaborating, that he felt were too “bleak” and “over-the-top.” That’s pretty much my sense of humor. I don’t want to get too high and mighty, but I was just arguing with a friend in L.A. about my sense of humor, which some consider uncommercial. They sit there, they laugh their balls off, and they say, “There’s no way anyone will pay money to see that.” Because there’s this perception that in order to appeal to “flyover” states, comedy has to be sanitized and formulaic. (Evidence to the contrary: the Apatow machine, which has found success in features it never did on television, in part because TV network publicity people are morons.) They’re kinda missing the part where I was born and raised in the heart of “flyover” country. I understand the humor of the Midwest, and around here, the more depraved you are, the harder people laugh. Maybe it won’t play in Denver or Mobile, but the Midwest is pretty big, and everybody here is fucked up, possibly because everybody calls us “flyover” states like we don’t actually matter.

That rant out of the way, it became clear that maybe I’d be safe sending him another comedy; I’m not sure if he asked for something different because he was genuinely put off by jokes about the lighter side of meth abuse and gang rapes, or if he wanted to see if I have anything close to range as a writer. I’m not sure if this would be the case or not, since most producers and agents I’ve encountered love to pigeonhole you. If you send them a comedy, you’re a comedy writer, so if they ask for something else and you pitch them a humorless thriller, it will confuse them. That’s stupid, but it’s the way things are. I don’t know if the Big-Shot is progressive in his awareness that some writers aren’t so easy to define, or if he really just doesn’t think I’m funny.

Either way, I sent him the thriller, but I have nothing else except more comedies. I have some non-comedy projects in planning stages, but nothing I could send him…unless you take into account that six-month window between me sending it and him reading it. (And if I need to stall for more time, I can easily just stop harassing him for a month or two.)

Unfortunately, things are different this time. When I wrote to him about this new draft, he told me this was pretty good timing on my part — he just made a partnership with some people looking to make a thriller. Kind of odd, considering he doesn’t specialize in anything close to thrillers, but hey, that could go back to that whole “progressive” thing. And besides — why should I care? He’s saying, “Yes, good timing. Send it!” So I’ll send it…

…and he tells me because of these partners, the turnaround won’t be the usual slowdown. These guys will have an answer in two weeks.

Oh fuck.

The clock started ticking the second I sent the script, and while I don’t fully believe the two-week promise, I at least feel safe assuming it won’t take six months or more. So if they start beating down my door for something new — especially if it’s a thriller — I have nothing.

Nothing but pitches, and to use yet another awful pun, pitches ain’t shit. There was a miracle time in the mid-’90s when “bought on a pitch” became a mantra — people were selling great concepts for $1 million during the course of a single elevator ride, then delivering shitty scripts and laughing all the way to the bank. Somehow, it occurred to Hollywood executives that this business model didn’t work. It gave writers — gasp! — shitloads of money for very little work. That’s a job reserved for executive producers, dammit!

So while I have the option of pitching these concepts out of desperation and hoping it’ll buy enough goodwill and time for me to finish something…the clock is ticking. Once I’ve done the preliminary work — figuring out the characters, beating out the story, etc. — I could probably crank out a serviceable draft in a week. But the preliminary stuff, for me, takes anywhere between one month and six, depending on how much trouble I have figuring out the actual story. Besides which, only one of my first drafts has been really good and solid right out of the gate — it’s a rare thing, but it came from an idea that had been germinating for two years before I sat down and crapped it out on paper.

At times like these, I think of scripts like that zombie script, with a story and characters that are all right there, and I say to myself, “Just run with it.” If you want to know the circumstances for plagiarizing fiction, they’re all right here.

I won’t do that, though. I have better, marketable ideas — I just don’t have them on paper.

Which leaves me with one last, awful idea: the Nigeria script. Enough potential for goofy comedy to keep me interested, but if I play it straight enough — fully deadpan satire that’s only over-the-top in its action — I could just beat this thing. It’s the kind of script where the characters are already fleshed out. They’re all archetypes (or stereotypes, depending on how cynical you are) of the genre, the story’s all laid out, and it technically qualifies as a thriller.

This just might work…

Posted by Stan at 3:11 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Career-Based Rambling, How Not to Write a Screenplay

April 9, 2008

A Mild Defense of On Deadly Ground

I promise I won’t go in-depth on any other Seagal movies. Ever. They’re fun, better than I ever imagined, but I think all the in-depth analysis needed has been covered in the Seagalogy book I’m reviewing.

As I mentioned, I’ve watched more Seagal movies than any sane man should, in chronological order from his screen debut in Above the Law through his directorial debut, On Deadly Ground. I plan to continue with more, but I’m pausing to catch my breath and remark on what’s regarded as Seagal’s most laughable movie.

First, a clarification for folks who don’t know much about Seagal (I didn’t know any of this until I started watching these movies a few days ago). He looks like another meathead action star, and in many ways he is, but he also elected to take the Stallone approach, demanding creative control early and often. Except, unlike Stallone, he doesn’t steal other people’s screenplays and credited himself with writing them. Seagal has done largely uncredited writing work on every movie he’s starred in, giving the writers credit for forming his strange but awesome ideological beliefs into a story that’s often coherent. He also has producing credits on every movie he’s starred in. Not executive producer, associate producer, or co-producer — the elusive produced by credit, meaning he actually had more authority over the movies than your average star.

With the surprise success of Under Siege, Seagal took it up a notch, holding Warner Brothers’ sequel hostage like so many ex-CIA terrorists…unless they gave him the opportunity to direct. The product was On Deadly Ground, a savagely anti-oil, anti-big-business, anti-government, pro-environment, pro-Native American rights, pro-animal movie that combines the strangest quirks of Seagal’s personality with huge explosions. Vern, Ain’t It Cool News reviewer and the author of Seagalogy, calls On Deadly Ground “the essence of Seagalogy,” and he’s absolutely right.

Calling it “good” would damage what little credibility I have as a critic, but I look at it like a guy who has a lot of good-intentioned things to say, but he picks the absolute wrong way to say them. Because he’s Steven Seagal, action star, and he knows what his audience expects: action, and lots of it. Would they mind if he incorporated a bit of his political philosophy into it? Probably not, because his five previous movies were loaded with dark subplots about political and police corruption. But he went way over the top this time.

The story goes like this: Forrest Taft (Steven Seagal) is a well-known and well-respected…oil guy. Somehow, he makes $350,000 per year, shares Thai hookers with his boss (played awesomely by Michael Caine), and has made his way into the upper echelon of the Aegis Oil Company because he’s real good at putting out fires. Seriously, the introduction to his character involves him blowing the shit out of an oil rig (featuring an excellent shot of flames engulfing the entire frame as Seagal and Caine stand there looking like bad-asses), and that appears to be his entire job. In an unusual use of crowd looping, Seagal-the-director tosses in clear feedback from workers on the rig, all of whom applaud Taft’s arrival on the scene: he’ll take care of this fire. What else does he do to earn all that money?

At the very least, we get a nice implication of Taft’s history in the oil business — he’s more at home with the blue-collar workers in the field than he is with stuffed-shirts like Caine, John C. McGinley, and Shari Shattuck. Everyone likes him, even though he essentially sold them out to make more money and become some kind of oil mercenary, I guess. Literally the second scene in the movie is a long barfight that manages to combine kick-ass action, character development, and several plot points — surprisingly well-written and well-choreographed. The barfight also includes film’s strangest ending to a barfight ass-kicking scene: Seagal challenges “Big Mike” (Mike Starr — you’d know him if you saw him) to a game of Slaps (known in some quarters as Bitchslap). For those who haven’t played it, it goes like this: one person holds his hands out, palms up. The other puts his hands on top of them, and the first guy tries to maneuver his hands around to slap the opponent before he can pull away. If you get slapped, the slapper gets to punch you. In a Seagal movie, he gets to break your nose and punch you so hard in the chest you vomit.

So Big Mike, broken and bloodied, vomit drying on his lips, loses the game in spectacular fashion. Seagal asks him, “What does it take to change the essence of a man?” Big Mike, breaking down in tears, says, “I need time to change.” Seagal nods, suddenly looking depressed, and says, “I do, too. I do, too.” Then he gently puts a hand on Big Mike’s shoulder before leaving the bar. And…scene.

And…what the fuck was that? Call it stupid if you will, but I’ve never seen a more bizarre or interesting barfight scene ever, and I’ve watched a shitload of westerns. At first I thought they were implying he was half-Indian, just like Billy Jack, but then a tribal chief confuses him with a bear and he doesn’t have any knowledge of the Inuit language or culture, so it seems pretty unlikely. Either way, I do think that scene was supposed to tell us that he’ll use violence as a…well, basically a first resort, but after he wins, he will Dr. Phil them into submission. Big Mike won’t be messing with anybody ever again.

The actual plot progresses from here: Aegis Oil is using inferior…things (blowout valves, I think they were) because a shipment was delayed. If they don’t get their mythical Aegis-One station online before a certain deadline, mineral rights revert back to the damn Injuns. Michael Caine won’t let that happen, even if it means blowing up Aegis-One. It really is a short-sighted plan: he knows the things won’t work, he knows the result will be a catastrophic explosion that will destroy the entire site (which consequently means they will miss they’re drilling deadline…right?!), but he doesn’t care about the safety of the workers or — more importantly — the land and Natives living there. He’s Michael Caine, the guy who screams at innocent makeup ladies for complimenting him. (Granted, I’d yell at them, too, if I got a look at the ridiculous dye job they gave him for this movie.)

So Seagal’s left with no choice: he runs away. More accurately, in the process of running away he gets caught in a bizarre trap, leaving him injured. An Inuit tribe nurses him back to health, and he goes on a vision quest. Really, this is a strange subplot for an action movie. It takes up a great deal of time. For at least 40 minutes, there’s a back-and-forth between Michael Caine cutting corners and Seagal hallucinating about naked chicks and fighting bears. No real action (the bear fight is impressive because Seagal really tackles Bart the Bear, but the “fight” is very, very short, possibly because bears don’t like being tackled), just sweaty vision questing.

Eventually, the vision quest leads Seagal to go back and fight for what’s right — with environmental terrorism. Yes, the overall message of this movie is that if you care about the environment and don’t want Big Oil crushing everything in its path, you need to commit acts of environmental terrorism. That’s not something you usually see in this kind of movie.

The end of the movie contains a fairly long, detailed monologue intercut with stock footage of animals, environmental protests, and tribal dances. Here’s where I really want to rush to the defense of the movie. Because right or wrong, misguided or not, he’s impassioned. He doesn’t have a lot of range as an actor — mostly veering between intense concentration and gadabout sarcasm — but in these final scenes he really sells the speech. Because he isn’t acting — he believes every word he’s saying. Here’s a transcription of the speech, which originally ran for 11 minutes (test audiences found it dull and preachy):

I’d like to start out by saying, thank you to all the brothers and sisters that have come here today representing this cause. I have been asked by Mr. Itok and the tribal council to speak to you and the members of the Press about the injustice that has been brought against us by some Government Officials and Big Business. How many of you out there have heard of alternative engines? Engines that can run on anything from alcohol to garbage or water. Or carburetors that can get hundreds of miles to the gallon. Or electric or magnetic engines, that can practically run forever. You don’t know about them because if they were to come into use, they’d put the oil companies out of business. The concept of the internal combustion engine has been obsolete for over 50 years, but because of the oil cartels and corrupt government regulation, we and the rest of the world have been forced to use gasoline for over a hundred years. Big Business is primarily responsible for destroying the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the food we eat. They have no care for the world they destroy — only for the money they make in the process. How many oil spills can we endure? Millions and millions of gallons of oil are now destroying the ocean and the many forms of life it supports. Among these is plankton, which supplies 60-90% of the Earth’s oxygen. This supports the entire marine ecosystem, which forms the basis of our planet’s food supply. But the plankton is dying. I thought, well, let’s go to remote state or country — anywhere on Earth. But in doing a little research, I realized that these people broker toxic waste all over the world. They basically control the legislation, and, in fact, they control the law. The law says, “No company can be fined over $25,000 a day.” For companies making $10,000,000 dollars a day by dumping lethal toxic wastes into the ocean, it’s only good business to continue doing this. They influence the media so that they can control our minds. They have made it a crime to speak out for ourselves, and if we do so, we’re called “conspiracy nuts” and we’re laughed at. We’re angry, because we’re all being chemically and genetically damaged, and we don’t even realize it. Unfortunately, this will affect our children. We go to work each day, and right under our noses, we see our car and the car in front of us spewing noxious, poisonous gasses that are all accumulative poisons. These poisons kill us slowly, even when we see no effect. How many of us would have believed, if we were told 20 years ago, that on a certain day we wouldn’t be able to see 50 feet in front of us. That we wouldn’t be able to take a deep breath because the air would be a mass of poisonous gas. That we wouldn’t be able to drink out of our faucets, that we’d have to buy water out of bottles. Our most common and God-given rights have been taken away from us. Unfortunately, the reality of our lives is so grim that nobody wants to hear it. Now, I’ve been asked, “What we can do?” I think we need a responsible body of people that can actually represent us, rather than Big Business. This body of people must not allow the introduction of anything into our environment that is not absolutely biodegradable or able to be chemically neutralized upon production. And finally, as long as there is profit to be made from polluting the Earth, companies and individuals will continue to do what they want. We have to force these companies to operate safely and responsibly, and with all our best interests in mind. So that when they don’t, we can take back our resources and our hearts and our minds and do what’s right.

Some of you might scoff and laugh, but you’re playing right into Big Oil’s hands. He says so, right there: “They have made it a crime to speak out for ourselves, and if we do so, we’re called “conspiracy nuts” and we’re laughed at.” Shockingly, that’s what everyone did when On Deadly Ground came out. But it wasn’t a bad movie — as ridiculous and over-the-top as any post-Under Siege Seagal movie would be? Definitely. Does that make him any less sincere or passionate about the environment? No.

Really, the worst thing you can accuse him of is thinking he can change the world with an action movie. Even if On Deadly Ground had had a less ridiculous screenplay, nothing would have changed. Nobody going to see On Deadly Ground would leave the theatre saying, “That’s it — I’m joining Greenpeace!” It was the wrong medium and the wrong audience for his attempted message.

I feel bad. I really do. He has so much passion, desperation, and sadness — it makes me wish he had done something effective, rather than just marking the starting point of Seagal’s slow, sad decline into direct-to-video irrelevance.

Edit: Here’s the fight scene, which showcases the unusual use of background looping Seagal uses throughout the movie (“My balls!”):

Second Edit, 4/27/08: Because I’m an asshole whose mind is cluttered with bizarre trivia but couldn’t remember a chapter of a book I read four days prior to writing this, I mistakenly wrote that Seagalogy author Vern “trashed” On Deadly Ground. After he politely commented to point out my baffling stupidity (see below), I’ve edited this post to reflect the fact that he did not, in any way, trash the movie. In fact, we pretty much agree on this movie. I normally don’t like forging a weird revisionist-history version of reality on this blog, preferring instead to just forge along in ignorance. In this case, I feel really bad and I don’t want people stumbling on this blog, thinking this is some kind of real website and my opinions matter (seriously, it happens), and then not reading through to the comments to see Vern clear his own name.

Posted by Stan at 5:23 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (2)  | Reviews

April 8, 2008

Based on the True Story of Steven Seagal

A few years back, I worked for a well-known tech company that I’ve taken, in writing, to calling Motorama. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist figure out the actual company, but it may take a rocket scientist to think of Googling “Motorama” in search of embittered ex-employees giving fake names to everyone and everything around them. I worked in their super-secret contracts department and, in fact, had to sign a non-disclosure agreement stating I would not discuss any of their state or federal contracts. Consequently, it’s difficult to discuss the screenplay idea it gave me.

I’ll only say this: thanks to loopholes in the contract provisions, I discovered an easy method of embezzling from the company. Well, not easy, but easy enough. With so little oversight, all you really had to do was falsify some invoices, and Motorama would pay out. Because you know what they did with invoices, for accountability purposes? Threw them away. I hope that doesn’t violate the agreement. There’s a more complicated part of the scheme that I won’t discuss, but needless to say it gave me a screenplay idea that never got off the ground. Why? Because there’s no story.

Actually, there is a story, but it was, like, half Normal Life (an exceptional and underrated movie if you haven’t seen it) and half Bananas: with the help of a custodian (who gets a cut), a disillusioned office worker starts embezzling to keep his wife happy; somebody discovers the scheme and has to be taken care of, and when too many people start asking questions about that, he ends up gunning down the whole office and fleeing the country with the help of a drug cartel the janitor’s brother runs. Yes, it’s a comedy full of embezzlement, murder, and drug cartels. Party! Anyway, he flees the U.S. and inadvertently becomes a propped-up dictator in a small Central American country and prevent a plot against his own life. (The idea came from something I read where a drug cartel in a small Mexican city staged a mayoral election, had him win on a landslide with a campaign promising benevolent leadership, then had him be the most incompetent, useless mayor in history — and so, when the cartel had him killed, citizens cheered and gladly elected one of the top lieutenants to run the town. It’s been so long, I honestly can’t remember if that came from a short story or a factual account. So I guess that means I would have been ripping off three things.)

Eventually, the idea changed to an Nigerian custodian and village. There is no global problem that’s funnier to me than Nigerian 419 scams. Both the instigators and the victims make me laugh endlessly; I even recorded an awful novelty song about them. As even more time passed, I dropped the office worker angle and thought it would be more fun to satirize the recent spate of “African issues” movies like Hotel Rwanda, The Constant Gardener, Blood Diamond, and The Last King of Scotland.

Before people get accusatory, this couldn’t have less to do with race. Every time I hear stories coming out of Africa, I feel a little bit ill — and feel blinding lily-white guilt over the fact that European whites fucked up that continent to begin with. Fuck you, David Livingstone and Otto von Bismarck! This has more to do with my hatred of the inept Hollywood belief that making a movie, even a well-made one, will solve anything. Usually, the just reduce complex struggles to the simplest cause-and-effect patterns imaginable, leaving audiences wondering why it’s so difficult to solve the problems. If they made more movies about disenfranchised whites inflicted with the horrors of genocide, I’d gladly mock them. In fact, I’ve read a half-dozen scripts attempting to deal with the problems in Chechnya — if this becomes a genre of political film, it’s next on my list. To sum up: I just like to mock and offend; I don’t care about the target.

Also, wait until you see the revised character! As before, he’s the kind of guy who would willfully shoot up a largely innocent bunch of people to save his own ass. He comes to Nigeria after getting screwed over by a 419 scam — he’s after the man who stole his money and has no interest in anything else. He gets swept up in the social struggles and politics, but the entire time he’s mostly whining because he doesn’t have his money. I didn’t really have much more of a plot than that…

…until now.

As I mentioned yesterday, I binge-watched the following Seagal movies over the past couple of days: Above the Law, Hard to Kill, Marked for Death, Out for Justice, Under Siege, and On Deadly Ground. I have a half-dozen other Seagal movies lined up, and if you’re wondering what the fuck, I’ll let you know I have to review a book on Seagal coming out on May 20th, and it occurred to me that I haven’t seen any of his movies since they stopped being played every other day on HBO. On top of that, the only Seagal movie I’ve seen more than once is the first Under Siege. Since a great deal of the book involves first plot summary and then in-depth analysis, it occurred to me that I should refresh my memory so I can assess whether or not the half-assed Ain’t It Cool News writer who authored the book does them justice.

I was originally just going to watch a smattering of Seagal, but something amazing happened as I watched Hard to Kill: I started to love Steven Seagal. Back in the olden days, I didn’t think much of him as either an actor or an action hero, but time has passed, I’ve seen a shitload more action movies, and it’s pretty amazing how…different his movies are. What could be rote, indifferently made martial-arts schlock actually has artistic aims and a political conscience. Obviously, it’s problematic when Seagal’s characters solve every political problem by beating the shit out of people and, more often than not, murdering them with weapons they tried to kill him with. It’s an effective short-term solution, but not much more.

I can’t say enough about the surprise and enjoyment derived from these movies. He’s a better fighter than Van Damme, he has Stallone’s take-charge (uncredited) writer-producer-star attitude and a much more cynical political outlook, he wasn’t a comical ‘roid rage case like Stallone/Schwarzenegger (in fact, his pudginess gives him a surprising “everyman” quality, even though he took potshots for it both then and now), he has the charm and wit of Bruce Willis, and — dare I say it? — by the time he hit Out for Justice…he could actually sorta act, which puts him above most of his action-movie contemporaries. I’m not saying he’s Oscar material (then again, maybe he is), but what impressed me is the evolution of his chops over the course of these movies, as well as surprising but rewarding choices (like his anguished delivery of the line “I’m taking you to the bank…the blood bank…” in Hard to Kill).

Seagal’s fixation on the Mafia, Catholicism, CIA corruption, and the late-’80s/early-’90s urban drug culture (and later, the environment) fills his movie with such vivid characters and labyrinthine plots, they barely qualify as action movies. Of course, the plots get thinner and the action gets more emphasis as the movies go on, but it’s very clear from the outset that Seagal — operating as a producer and a mostly uncredited writer — has a peculiar worldview that he’s expressing with these movies. I admire him for that.

You might be wondering why I’ve slipped into Seagal worshipping. The answer’s pretty simple: I found both the plot and the padding for this movie — the untapped goldmine of social-relevance action movies, combined with the “African issues” movies, made a storyline crystallize. I won’t divulge it, but let’s just say it won’t be terribly difficult to piece together if you watch a couple of classic Seagal movies and notice the similarities in story and theme.

The ultimate goal, when I finally start work on it, is to have something that operates both as satire and as a straight action movie — in true Seagal fashion, forcing the audience to contemplate the deep corruption in African politics and the desperation that leads to the exploitation of greedy Americans (who, elderly or not, kinda deserve what they get). To sum up, it’ll basically be the scene in The Gods Must Be Crazy where the militants chase the anthropologist in fast-motion, stretched out over two hours.

Posted by Stan at 10:30 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Career-Based Rambling

April 7, 2008

Perfect Plot

I had trouble sleeping last night for a really dumb reason. It’s been a week since I sent Dying Proof to the Big-Shot Producer, and somehow reading through other peoples’ work made me realize something:

Dying Proof had a serious plot hole, and now it was out of my hands, ready to be scrutinized by people who may notice it and not care, notice it and toss it aside, or (if I’m really lucky) not notice it at all. The hole is a basic logic flaw that affects many thrillers and action movies: why do villains go to such elaborate ruses when it’s way easier just to shoot somebody?

In the script, the protagonist discovers a lone newspaper article — the only known evidence of a massacre that he witnessed, which is the main reason he’s now in hiding. He’s trying to uncover not just who was responsible for the attack, but proof of their culpability. So the newspaper article makes him hunt for the reporter listed in the byline, and when he finds her, he makes an appointment under false pretenses. And, of course, it turns out that everything about this — the newspaper article, the reporter, the office where they’re meeting — is an elaborate ruse, a trap he just walked into and may not walk out of…

Except why’d they go to all that trouble? This is the question that puzzled me as I tried to sleep last night. Eventually I drifted off, and when I woke up this morning, I realized:

Dying Proof had no plot hole. Yes, it features a typical nonsensical “convoluted trap” set-piece, but…it actually does make sense. They have to formulate this ruse because they have a ballpark idea of what city he’s in, but (a) they don’t know specifically where he is and need to flush him out, and (b) they need to lure him to a private place that he thinks is public — an open office. Nothing bad could possibly happen there, right?

Still, while it’s not an out-and-out hole, it did force me to ask two questions that go unanswered:

1. How do they know he’s looking for information in newspaper archives and that he’d stumble across that particular article (technically two questions)?
2. Why not lure him to the office, pull up in a van, grab him, and take him to an abandoned warehouse where they can kill him without any difficulty? It’s much cheaper than renting one entire floor of an office building to kill one guy.

I have answers to those questions, but they aren’t in the screenplay. Well, they are now — I added them in — but they aren’t in the draft that was sent out. I don’t think either question makes or breaks the story. I’m not a huge fan of scripts that spell out every little detail, treating the audience like idiots. However, I’m trying to anticipate possible questions — complaints and perceived flaws — because even though I have an explanation, those reading it may not think of one.

This is the problem with creative media. How can you truly tell when something’s “finished” when it’s always evolving? I’m not going to pretend like I’m an artist or anything, but there is a part of me that strives for perfection in whatever I’m attempting. A week ago, I thought I’d sussed out all the potential plot holes and logic problems. Beyond the solid feedback I received, I noticed a few issues of my own — and was somewhat gratified that they weren’t noticed by the people who read it. In fact, one of my usual readers said of the previous draft: “It’s amazing how quickly this moves. I didn’t realize any of the problems until I thought about it a few days later.”

Writing something that’s deliberately fast-paced to gloss over its many flaws…is not exactly a goal. It’s a means to an end in some cases, and in that case I’d jabbed myself with a coffee IV drip and written the entire thing in 36 hours because Big-Shot told me on Friday that he wanted to see something ASAP, so I gave myself until Monday — along with the laughable excuse that I went fishing up in Wisconsin for the weekend.

The next draft took more time, but I tried to keep as much of the caffeine-induced rapid pacing as possible. I’ve been walking around saying, “This is as good as this draft will get, but talk to me in a month.” That’s my way around the evolution process. My own opinion will change — it’s not just the influence of others that produces new drafts — and I will continue striving for unattainable perfection.

I’ve been writing long enough to know it’ll never happen, though. There’s always going to be something I’d do differently. It has less to do with intangible qualities like “perfection” and more to do with my ever-changing opinions. I binge-watched six Steven Seagal movies, and while it didn’t change my opinion about Dying Proof, it changed the way I’d write an action movie in the future. Maybe in a month or two, after the ponytailed spectacle sinks in, I’ll go back to it and decide what it really needs is a disillusioned cop with a shady CIA past trying to unravel a conspiracy involving cocaine. Or possibly decapitating a Jamaican druglord’s twin.

Point being, you have to strive for perfection and accept “as good as I can make it.” That’s not to say you need to settle for “good enough,” which usually isn’t good at all, but if you know in your heart, at this moment in time, you can’t make the story better, and you can objectively say that’s it’s pretty fucking good (or have others say it for you) — it’s time to send it out or set it aside. It’ll always be there when you want to come back to it..

Posted by Stan at 4:12 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Career-Based Rambling, How Not to Write a Screenplay

April 6, 2008

Charlton Heston (1923-2008)

Doesn’t matter what you thought of his politics. He starred in the greatest unofficial trilogy of sci-fi classics in history: Planet of the Apes (1968), The Omega Man (1971) and Soylent Green (1973).

Rest in peace, Mr. Heston. You passed with the knowledge that you won’t be turned into a delicious and popular foodstuff.

Posted by Stan at 5:05 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Reviews

April 5, 2008

Nothing Ever Happens

So the second script I read had one unfortunate side effect: very little in the way of plot. It gave me an early Richard Linklater vibe because of the setting and the writer’s penchant for meandering scenes of characters just hanging out. Although he defies many conventions, Linklater’s a master of subtext and conflict. For instance, Dazed and Confused has a very loose plot — seniors want to beat up next year’s freshman class — that sets up the characters and their minor goals over the course of the night (e.g., “beat up a freshman”/”don’t get beaten up”). It has the traditional obstacles and changing goals, but it’s mostly a movie about hanging out. Yet, from the conversations these characters share, everything they say tells us a little something about them. Their attitudes on superficial things like music, acid-induced dreams, fashion — what a person discusses and the way others react to it all tell us things about who they are.

The script I was given had the loose plot and the deliberate (some might say “plodding”) pace of a Linklater film, but it didn’t have much else in common. When the characters talked about buying a keg, all they were talking about…was buying a keg. That’s a problem. Similarly, the characters desires and goals are shielded until, quite literally, just before each goal is altered. (In one case, we don’t know a character wants a scholarship until page 100, and he gets the scholarship on page 102 — ooh, the suspense. In another, the character reveals he’s unwilling to take the scholarship because he knocked up his girlfriend and needs to take care of her. Beyond logic problems I won’t go into, this is another conflict that’s brought up way too late and then resolved almost immediately. In literally the same scene that he mentions it to the love interest, she’s hit by a drunk driver and killed, leaving him to take the scholarship.)

I don’t want to go on and on ranting about this particular script, but I do want to bring up some fundamental tools of drama that this script should have employed but didn’t.

The Unbreakable Bond

The Unbreakable Bond, illustrated by Lajos Egri in The Art of Creative Writing, is the most effective dramatic tool I’ve ever read about. In fact, much of what I write features unbreakable bonds even when I don’t intend them to (not that that’s a bad thing). It works pretty much the way it sounds: characters who are polar opposites in nature and goals are thrust together for one reason or another, unwilling to cave to each others’ wills. At least, not until the climax.

The wonderful thing about unbreakable bonds are, it works on more than just a protagonist-antagonist/hero-villain level. For instance, in this script, two best friends are vying for the same scholarship. There’s no conflict about this whatsoever — in fact, we don’t learn until far too late how important the scholarship is to either character. But the foundations of an unbreakable bond are there — bound by friendship, a team, and direct competition for this scholarship. The opposites are there, too: one’s a spoiled, carefree rich kid who doesn’t seem to need the scholarship, while his best friend is poor and desperate. Every scene should crackle with conflict, but mostly they just hang out until the rich friend has a temper tantrum after the poor friend already has the scholarship.

Here’s a more famous unbreakable bond: Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese in The Terminator. You have a militant from the future and a frilly, young waitress. They’re thrust together (in more ways than one) by a combination of time travel and desperation. Sarah Connor has seen the terminator — she knows she’ll die without Reese. This creates tension between the characters even though the central conflict is between the two of them and the machine. You could argue that in the vastly superior Terminator 2, the bond between herself and the terminator is even more unbreakable than between her and Reese in the first one. I could see it — after all, there’s nothing more “opposite” than allying with your former worst enemy — but one of the great ironies of T2 is that Sarah Connor is no longer all that dissimilar from the terminator. He may be a machine and, in her mind, an enemy, but they share the exact same goal: an obsession with keeping John Connor alive and safe from the T-1000. There’s still plenty of conflict there, but it’s not unbreakable bond conflict.

(On a related note, the underrated and hopefully soon-to-be-renewed TV series The Sarah Connor Chronicles elaborates on this dynamic and creates an unbreakable bond. Unlike the mindless, militant characterization of Sarah Connor in T2, on the TV series she’s softer and less willing to kill indiscriminately. Thrust together with an unwanted terminator companion, the main source of conflict is trying to achieve the same goals through opposite ways. Rather than killing the dorky cell phone salesman who will have direct involvement in Judgment Day, Sarah opts to burn down his advanced homebrew chess-playing computer.)

In the latest draft of Dying Proof, I counted a total of three unbreakable bonds, only one of which was intentional:

1. The heroes are siblings on the run from the law (long story). As such, even though they don’t get along, they’re forced to hide out together. The brother has a single-minded obsession with clearing their names, while the sister is dealing with the problem by trying to pretend it never happened.
2. The two villains, corrupt federal agents, have opposite methods of handling situations. One’s an older agent with duplicitous Cold War ethics, more interested in building elaborate fronts to lure people into traps than just killing them. His partner is a rank-climbing sociopath who will do anything to make his bosses happy. They’re forced together to find the siblings.
3. The brother and the older agent, who has secret reasons for keeping the siblings alive, are forced to help each other in order to bust the younger agent.

The Love Story Ploy

The problem with the screenplay I read is that it was, indeed, a love story, but it didn’t use its romance to give us any kind of reflection of the characters involved. This problem is compounded by the stoic nature of the protagonist; we don’t get a window into his emotions until the last 20 pages, which makes him exceedingly dull to spend the preceding 100 pages reading about. Plenty of movies have had taciturn protagonists, many of them with romantic subplots that allow us to get a glimpse into the true nature of these characters.

In Hard to Kill, bad-ass cop Mason Storm awakens from a seven-year coma (comas are a typical side effect of getting shot in the chest, twice, at close range, with a shotgun) to discover he still has reason to be on the run. He enlists the aid of sexy English nurse Andy Stewart, who, trust me, is a chick. Once he gets her to believe him…okay, more accurately, two dead bodies in the hospital within 15 minutes of him waking up make a more compelling case than Mason Storm. Anyway, she takes him away to a hidden cabin, where he can rehabilitate and fall in love.

Storm is not an emotional guy. He’s sarcastic and fearless, but all we get from him is that block-of-wood Seagal face intercut with Vaseline-lensed flashbacks to his family life before his wife was brutally murdered. The only way to get him to open up, and to understand what he’s really thinking and feeling, is for him to sex up Andy Stewart and then tell her what life was like pre-coma. There’s plenty of story and conflict prior to that, but this subplot gives both Storm and Andy a deeper emotional complexity. Did you ever think you’d hear the phrase “emotional complexity” applied to Hard to Kill? It’s there, and it’s a better movie than you might think.

So the love story in this script could have been used to let us know how he feels about the protagonist’s troubled family life, his desperation to leave town, etc. Instead, what do they talk about? Baseball. And, as I mentioned above, when they’re talking about baseball, all they’re talking about is baseball. No subtext. There are only two instances where we know what he’s feeling. The first occurs just before he gets the scholarship; the second occurs just before he tells her he’ll give up the scholarship to raise the baby. We don’t even get an emotional cue when she dies. In fact, quite alarmingly, he spends his last week of school all smiles. So is the point of the story that she didn’t mean anything to him and now he doesn’t have to shoulder the burden? It’s anybody’s guess, because unlike Mason Storm, he doesn’t let the love interest — or the audience — know anything.

I have to say, even though the first script was better than expected, I am having major concerns about the members of this hippie co-op. In fact, I’m back to thinking it’s just a classy-seeming way to get someone to do coverage.

Posted by Stan at 12:36 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Career-Based Rambling, How Not to Write a Screenplay

April 4, 2008

Guilt by Association

In early 2005, Stan Has Issues™ attempted a noble but failed experiment: a dual blog, Stan and Anne Have Issues™, which would temper my frustrations and cynicism with…slightly less frustration and cynicism. Don’t bother going back into the archives to find the posts from this almost-mythical era; they’re all gone now. You can take a wild guess as to why the dual blog fell apart, but I don’t have much interest in delving into it.

I’m more interested in this fun fact: Google “stan and anne have issues” (without quotes). Go ahead, do it. I’ll wait. Come on, you lazy asshole. Click this. Too silly for you? How about “stan and anne” (with quotes)? Two random names, one of which has not appeared on this blog in nearly three years and has been almost entirely stripped from the archives, and yet it still tops Google. Even without the quotes, stan and anne only sinks to #3. And even just stan anne only sinks it to #9 — still on the front page. It’s weird.

I don’t claim to know or understand how Google compiles and filters its results. I know that, thanks to Google bombs and other attempts to manipulate search results, things have gotten more complicated than the circa-1999 philosophy of “if it gets the most clicks, it gets the top spot.” Still, it seems awfully fishy that this blog would still be the #1 for these key phrases, so long after one half of this blog became little more than a memory.

(Also, if you’re wondering why I was starting searches like these in the first place: I discovered, while narcissistically Googling this blog, that several blog search engines still list this place as Stan and Anne Have Issues™, complete with a tacky tagline I wrote. I started searching for “stan and anne have issues” so I could try to update all of these search engines. I wonder if that accounts for the Google craziness…)

Edit 4/5/08 — I neglected to mention the irony that posting about Stan and Anne Have Issues™ is less likely to remove the Google association with that name. You no longer need to point it out.

Posted by Stan at 5:56 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Stories of Hilarity and Humiliation

April 3, 2008

The Bead™

Sometimes I read a script that I just can’t figure out. I know it has problems, I can even put my finger on what they are, but I can’t offer up solutions; granted, some people don’t like solutions, but offering solutions while I point out problems has never failed me, and one of the unfortunate side effects of covering so many scripts is that I am, at this point, a better reader than I am a writer. The only way to solve this kind of problem is to figure out what’s causing it, but what happens when I can’t even do that? I know the characters are thin, but why? I walk myself through the story, reminding myself of surprising moments of nuance and subtlety that give the characters depth. Why is it that, at the end, I felt like they were paper-thin? Something went awry.

I can’t pretend to understand how it happens, but when I actually talk out these problems, I figure them out. It’s all in how you’re telling the story. Here’s the story, and here are its flaws. But what if the writer did this, that, or the other? The solutions present themselves, and if you do it right, you can solve every single problem in one fell swoop — and if you’re really good, you can do it without insulting the writer.

You’ve found The Bead™.

That’s right, I make up my own screenwriting jargon. Fuck off, motherfuckers. The Bead is mine. From the old marksman term “get a bead on,” corrupting the meaning slightly to apply to targeting the screenplay’s problems and obliterating them*, I’ve found myself defining “The Bead™” as an all-encompassing solution — one shot fixes everything, just like The Manchurian Candidate. Oh wait.

I was worried as hell last night because that script the Big-Shot Producer sent me had major problems, many of which stemmed from what I felt was a clash between writer and producer(s), and I had no solutions. Talking it out this morning, I figured that shit out. In fact, the solution is so simple, I’m both annoyed and disappointed that I agonized over it for so long to begin with.

Here’s the story:

Protag is a neurotic, passive office worker who’s in love with Love Interest, portrayed (in the writer’s exaggerated humor style) as the perfect woman. He has a friend, Antag, who has all kinds of luck with women, an endless parade of one-night stands. Through a wacky set of circumstances, Protag witnesses Antag faking a dangerous situation, filling the woman with raw animal lust. Protag wants to know how this is done, so Antag introduces him to an entire team of guys…who devote time, money, and a lot of effort to get Antag laid. None of them get laid — they just assist Antag. (Careful readers will note that’s a flaw.)

Protag sets his sights on Love Interest, but Antag has to talk him down — first Protag has to learn the basics, so Act Two is filled almost exclusively with slapstick set-pieces as Protag attempts to play the hero for women (with the help of The Team) but manages only to humiliate himself. Much of this is repetitive and while the set-pieces are funny in theory, in practice they come across as labored. The writer is operating on a domino principle: he spends all his time setting up the way it’s supposed to go, so we understand just how wacky things are when they go wrong. Again, it gets repetitive.

The big third act shift occurs when Protag humiliates himself in front of Love Interest (causing her to get angry, because she actually did like him). He quits The Team, realizing all it’ll get him are one-night stands when what he wants is true love. Antag agrees in a sleazy way — he decides Love Interest is the perfect foil for all his plans, and if he can win her, he can retire from his shenanigans and settle down. He asks her on a date, and she agrees far too easily. He acts overtly sleazy, even while taking her on a perfect date told to him by Protag earlier, but Love Interest has turned stupid and falls for his smarmy charm.

Meanwhile, Protag decides to fight for her honor, but first, he has to get past The Team. More slapstick. In the restaurant, Antag is accosted by a steroid case claiming to be Love Interest’s ex-husband (she admits he is, but she has a restraining order). He starts pummeling Antag, until finally Protag gets to the restaurant. Love Interest, appropriately charmed by Protag’s effort, calls off the ‘roid rager. Turns out, he’s not her husband; he’s her brother, and he’s just pretending. She knew about Antag all along and set up this dinner to humiliate him, which would somehow clear Protag’s name. This doesn’t make as much sense as it could if you keep in mind that if she believed Protag had somehow been set up, she could have just said something. Besides which, there was no guarantee Protag would leap in at the eleventh hour, or that Antag would ask her out…so what was the point? Also, while the twist ultimately redeems Love Interest’s intelligence, we still spend about 30 screen minutes thinking she took stupid pills, which is frustrating enough that the twist doesn’t make up for it.

Here are the three main problems:

1. Labored, repetitive slapstick gags occupying most of the story time
2. With few exceptions, thin characters
3. The whole third act

What we want to do is take these problems and find one way that both retains the obvious plot mechanics — emphasis on slapstick, surprise “twist” ending — while improving the weaknesses. I came up with a detailed outline of what I’d do differently, but the goal of coverage isn’t to rewrite somebody’s work; my main goal is to nudge the writer in the right direction.

Here’s the right direction: you have your klutzy, inarticulate Protag, and you have Antag letting him in on the secret of The Team. As he explains it, what if Protag unintentionally pointed out that The Team does all this work…for another guy. None of them get laid — they don’t rotate, some of them are married, one’s a kid, etc. — and as the script is now, we’re left wondering about that. In fact, the last-minute development that two of them are married (and one’s divorced, but still, there would be teams when he was married but still on this team), so you either have a bunch of cheaters or you have a bunch of guys getting someone else laid for no apparent reason.

(Why this Team exists is less important than what Protag does to it, although I did come up with open-and-shut backstory: the team did rotate originally, but it reached a point where Antag was just so damn good at closing the deal, while the others were hit-or-miss, each member of The Team found themselves rooting for Antag, wanting him to succeed, until it reached the point where now they’re just doing it out of habit, not even realizing they no longer get anything out of it, not even vicarious thrills.)

So The Team’s up in arms, which will add some development to those characters. Maybe one of the married guys wants his uninterested wife to get jealous (or hell, maybe he just wants to get some). Maybe the divorced guy wants to prove to his exes that he isn’t a loser. Maybe the kid wants to prove he’s a Real Man. Giving them each clear goals, along with new scenes and characters to illustrate their lives away from The Team (in place of clunky setups for slapstick gags), makes the more interesting and more sympathetic.

On top of the development, it’ll also fix the repetitive slapstick problems. There’s only one way you can go with “an individual klutz ruins a well-oiled machine” gag. We’ve destroyed the well-oiled machine; The Team is still operating, but they aren’t operating together. Each has his own agenda, and they’re all jockeying for the girl. It adds more dramatic conflict, for one thing, but it also adds more slapstick variety — and it doesn’t make Protag the endless punchline. The scenarios could end up any number of ways, depending on who does what wrong and for what reason, and perhaps Protag has assumed an unintentional leadership position because he opened their eyes. This gives him the confidence to create his own danger scenarios, which he’s as inept at as anything else.

Finally, it fixes the third act. First, you have to change any indication that Antag is a bad guy — in fact, it’s probably safest if it’s rewritten so Love Interest barely knows Antag exists. His Team has turned into a disaster. Antag wants things back to normal — he wants Protag off the team and wants to be able to manipulate his friends into serving his interests. This is a more logical motivation for asking Love Interest on a date. He just needs to act less sleazy so we’d believe she’d go out with him, at least once.

Rather than having Love Interest stupidly fall for Antag’s distinct lack of charm, perhaps she’s willing to “drown her sorrows,” so to speak, with a guy she doesn’t particularly care for, just so she can get over the guy she did care for. (Keep in mind, she liked Protag.) Meanwhile, Protag finds out about the date (as he does in the current draft) and goes on the war path. Maybe, instead of fighting the team, he enlists their help — but their own personal chickens come home to roost, with wives and ex-wives and girlfriends and junior-high kids and maybe even former one-night stand victims chasing them down.

They finally get the restaurant, and Protag is forced to finally stand up for both himself and for Love Interest’s honor, which impresses her (exactly as it does in the script, even though in both cases it’s a fairly cheesy reversal — but it’s necessary for the generic happy ending). They declare their love for one another —

— and then we’re hit with the surprise ending that this was Antag’s plan all along. He knew the only way to get him off the team was to get Protag and Love Interest together, and the only way Protag would finally pass her “tests” would be to grow a pair and stand up for himself, so it’s yet another scenario he engineered. It gives us the exact same ending: they’re in love, and Antag hasn’t learned a thing.

I really hate the kinds of romantic comedies that beat rote formulas into the ground. I’m surprised I came up with something that still fits the formula but is, at least to me, about 10 times more interesting than what I read.

I just hope they listen.

*Note: May result in death by sniper fire. [Back]

Posted by Stan at 1:33 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Career-Based Rambling

April 2, 2008

The Co-Op

Things have officially gotten weird with the Big-Shot Producer. I fired off the fourth draft of my confusing conspiracy thiller, Dying Proof on Monday. I expected the usual month (or two…or three…) of silence, followed by an unenthusiastic “What else you got?” followed by me scrambling to turn one of my demented scripts into something reasonably mainstream. Instead, I received a lengthy response urging me to join some sort of bizarre co-op.

Here’s a succinct explanation that omits the weird sales-pitch aspects and new-age feel-goodery: a group of professionals — among them studio readers, agents, executives, writers, and producers — exchange material on a semi-weekly basis. The group is large enough that you’ll keep getting things to read every week or two, even if you aren’t submitting anything for a few months. Somehow I qualify by having a tenuous business relationship with Big-Shot, and that makes me wonder if it’s like 80% unemployable losers, 20% legitimate people. I don’t know, because it’s anonymous.

“Anonymous?” you ask, as it gets the Hmm, this whole thing sounds like bullshit gears a-grinding. I’m not saying it’s not bullshit — I’m just telling you what I know: this guy is legitimate. His creepy co-op may not be, but I’m far more interested in keeping in his good graces, and if turns out to be beneficial, good. If it’s a waste of time…well, that’s less good, but at the moment I have time to spare.

The anonymity factor, as he explained it to me when I asked for my details, comes from the fact that the readers and executives (and maybe even agents) will add your script and title to their coverage databases if it’s a piece of shit. With no names and fake titles, they can’t shut you out like that, which is good because the whole point of the co-op is to foster development in the writing. You can’t do that if you’re going to get blackballed for submitting a shaky first draft.

Of course, I have a solid fourth draft that I’m unashamed to have this man read, because I know him. When it comes to anonymous people commenting anonymously, I am uneasy. In my experience browsing Internet message boards, I know that anonymity breeds cruelty and contempt more than healthy discussion and debate. Then again, I’ve gotten notes before. I can tell the difference between good, constructive notes and awful, half-assed notes. I’m fine with negative notes when they’re constructive. I’m even when when they aren’t constructive, because then I know I can just ignore them. Still, it’s difficult to read somebody trashing something you spent a lot of time on, especially if they’re off-base.

Trying to look on the bright side: this is a group of people taking time out of theoretically busy schedules to volunteer to read shit they don’t have to read. The thing that lures some people in is the idea that they might find something really great; for others, it’s the idea that their really great thing might be found. With the shroud of anonymity, if it’s universally panned, nobody will know you wrote it. Big-Shot added that if it gets a majority of good feedback, and/or reaches a point where some anonymous person is legitimately interested in it, the shroud is lifted. That’s a good thing for me, assuming it’s not just a hook to get me to do free coverage.

But free coverage I’ll do, because hey, at the very least it’ll keep my skills sharp. At the slightly-above-very least, Big-Shot — the only person who knows our secret identities — may consider throwing me some paid reader work. I wouldn’t complain about that.

After waiting for the details and then thinking about it for a few hours, I agreed to take part. Tuesday night, he sent me two scripts. One was anonymous; the other was not.

In fact, it was so non-anonymous that I Googled the writer, and he has a feature in the works that I’ve actually heard of (full disclosure: I’ve only heard of it because a super-hot actress I have a crush on is in it). So non-anonymous that he’s repped by a legitimate agent from a huge company. So non-anonymous that Big-Shot listed himself as the producer.

Suddenly I found myself in the same ethical quandary as I did with The Manager, only worse because the Big-Shot Producer isn’t a useless tool. Back then, I felt uncomfortable because when The Manager sent me a script he himself wrote, it felt like a conflict of interest. Did he really expect to get honest feedback? Was it an absurd test, and if so, did I pass by lobbing him softballs or by giving him brutal honesty?

Things got worse here; granted, it’s not a conflict to have people outside of your specific offices look at a script you’ve got your name on, even if it’s not as the writer. But when you’re sending it to somebody who wants something out of you, and you aren’t keeping it anonymous, do you really expect to get brutally honest feedback? He says they’re a tough crowd, but are they tough on him?

I read the script, and while it’s a passable romantic comedy (certainly better than the bulk of what The Manager sent me, albeit still kind of bland and formulaic), I have some big issues with it. Worst of all, the issues I have focus on writing problems that, I sense, are caused by a writer trying to please a producer — meaning, the writer’s inept incorporation of Big-Shot’s ideas have sunk the entire thing.

I’m not sure what to say, but I doubt it’ll be honest.

Posted by Stan at 10:53 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Career-Based Rambling

April 1, 2008

Shitty Transfers

My sister bought me the Criterion Life of Brian DVD, the most appropriate Christmas gift ever. I didn’t get a chance to watch it until this weekend, and it left me feeling a little disappointed. Not the movie itself — the bad film transfer.

Now, look, I know Life of Brian didn’t exactly have a huge budget, so the fact that its aesthetics resemble the 1970s European “erotica” I’ve reviewed doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is that, in this age of digital wonderment, Criterion couldn’t (or didn’t) clean up the film or audio as well as they could have. It would be one thing if this were the older (now out-of-print) cheapie DVD — this is the Criterion DVD, the one that retails at $40. Most of its extras came from the old Laserdisc release, and the new ones don’t justify such a lofty pricetag, so are we really just paying for the Criterion name?

We live in a world where you can buy copies of movies made in the early ’40s that look like they were made yesterday. Why can’t ’60s and ’70s classics get the same treatment? Life of Brian is an irritating example, but other ’70s classics like The Verdict and The Conversation suffer from the same problems, while others made in the same era (like The Parallax View and The Deer Hunter) don’t. (Admittedly, some of the more popular ones, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the Godfather movies, get elaborate restorations.)

I know it depends partly on the quality of the print and the companies releasing the DVDs. They decide whether or not to devote the time and cost to restore them, which will drive up the final price of the disc, so they have to know whether or not potential buyers would pay the extra money for it. This Life of Brian thing is ridiculous, though. I’m fine with the pleasant surprise of a $10 copy of The Parallax View’s quality; I’m not fine with my sister spending $30-40 on a copy of a movie that barely looks better and, in fact, sounds worse than my VHS copy.

Posted by Stan at 5:13 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Reviews

April 30, 2008

Getting Burned Out on a Character

In mentioning the notecard theory the other day, I started rambling about a novel I’m in the process of revising and editing. It’s in pretty good shape in a general sense — nothing huge to rewrite — but it had enough flaws that I needed to get organized on it.

I neglected to mention that, until a day or two before that post, the novel had been sitting, lifeless, while I distracted myself with easier (and potentially more lucrative) screenplays about people beating up Nigerian 419 scammers. I spent much of last summer revising it, then I decided, “I need to get on that novel again” and put it up in the little status sidebar, thinking if I let all my shame hang out, I might do something about it.

Well, I am doing something about it, but not because of its shameful flaccidity as it flaps in the wind. I just got burned out on this particular set of characters.

These particular characters have been with me since around 2001. I don’t want this to sound like a pretentious artist thing, like these characters have invaded my soul and I love them like I would my own children, because it’s really not. The progression of the characters is very practical: first, I invented them to exist in a feature film I planned to shoot with a tiny, tiny crew and my friends as actors. When that failed, I…took the route of lying my ass off.

I took a 100-level screenwriting class that was divided into three related parts: documentary, narrative, and experimental. The syllabus was set up as a domino effect: you get a subject for your documentary, you write a narrative film based on the documentary, then you write an experimental film based on the narrative. Tasked with interviewing somebody both real and interesting, and being both unable and unwilling to complete that task, I elected to “interview” somebody interesting…but not real.

This is actually when I knew he had potential. I made up a person. He does not exist. He never has, he never will. Yet, when I pitched this “person” as the documentary subject — people were amused by this eccentric rocker they’d never heard of. They were amused when I brought in an interview that read like an episode of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast. And they laughed out loud when I brought in a 15-page script about this fictional character and his friends.

After dabbling with an unsuccessful attempt at a website (what I know refer to as a “dry run”) dealing with the characters and their band, I let it rest for a few years…

…until I went to L.A. and was forced, as part of the class I took out there, to bring in three fully formed ideas. I figured, since I had a clear idea of the characters and a short-script draft, it couldn’t hurt to scrawl down that idea as one of the three, even though I had a ringer that I thought would wow the prof so much that he’d support and encourage that one.

He didn’t. In fact, his reasoning was that my eyes supposedly “lit up” when talking about the washed-up rocker idea. Huh. Maybe it is a pretentious artist thing.

A few months after writing this script, I decided maybe it was time to attempt to take my career seriously. Maybe I could latch on to the viral marketing bandwagon and make a second attempt at a website. The hope was to get it to a point of “Internet sensation” — cult popularity that would give me enough traction to tell production companies, “Hey, look, this script has potential!”

Despite the 10,000 friends the fake band has on MySpace (nearly 50 of which aren’t spambots), it’s not something I’d call an “Internet sensation.” Half of the people who have paid attention seem to think it’s legitimate, and the other half don’t quite seem to understand the joke. Mostly, though, people don’t pay attention. I’ve accepted that, in the hopes that maybe someday some person who’s just as warped as me will stumble across the sites* and get hooked. It costs me nothing but time, and for awhile it was an amusing diversion…

…until, like I said, I got burned out. I planned an entire story arc on the blog, but I wrote one or two entries before I just, simply, got too bored to continue. Not because I hated the story or the characters. I’d just written so much about these people, it started to feel repetitive. How many times can he get conned out of his money? How many times is his wife going to leave him? How many times will the band quit? What started as running jokes stopped being funny.

What do you do when this happens? How do you get the mojo back, especially when you have to do something major like, um, finish rewriting a novel? I could have always just ditched the blog for awhile — nobody but me reads it, anyway — and pick up again. In fact, that’s pretty much what I did. I’m in the process of catching up, which is why my blogging here has been a little erratic lately. (If you look on the band’s blog, all the posts from the past six weeks — around 25 — have been written by me over the past couple of days.)

First, I tried to pick it up again with a new character — one who has yet to be introduced, but she will parody my arch-nemesis Diablo Cody and become incorporated in the next major story arc, which parodies this guy. The operative word here is “parody.” That helped a little bit, but it didn’t give me the desired level of enthusiasm.

In my earlier post, I write, “I picked up on one moment in a related story that made me rethink the characters’ backstory.” This sentence pretty much inspired today’s entire post, and what I refer to very vaguely there is the exact thing that inspired me to continue working on these characters.

I went back through some old stuff and stumbled across possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever written, a structural and stylistic parody of O.J. Simpson’s classic “fictional” tell-all If I Did It… The concept fits perfectly with the established backstory, but because I went through O.J.’s book sentence by sentence and grafted Girth’s life onto it, I had to create some strange backstory surprises. re-reading it, I discovered one of the surprises, and it gave me a whole different outlook on his career. In fact, reading one small paragraph of this goofy thing fixed every problem with the “flashback chapter” in my novel, and the alteration of the backstory made him more interesting to me.

The advice you can draw from this is — well, if you’re anything like me, you’ll end up forgetting small but vital chunks of what you’ve written if it’s more than a year old. No matter how bored you are with a character or a story, go back over the material until you find something new and surprising. It doesn’t have to be literally on the page, as it was in this case; I’ve had similar moments of clarity just by looking at individual scenes with fresh eyes. You’ll see something new and different that will invigorate the writing. It’s how Dying Proof went from a love story to a story about sibling rivals (Freud would love it!).

*Yes, plural — part of the fun of viral marketing is trying to assert your artificial reality on the real world. So far, this has caused me to accumulate over 20 MySpace accounts and create five different websites. [Back]

Posted by Stan at 4:24 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Career-Based Rambling

April 29, 2008

Fuck Free Shit

Remember how I was going to score a free copy of a certain highly anticipated video game that comes out tomorrow? Yeah, I never heard back. I don’t know if the PR lady didn’t like my bullshit excuse for an article, or if she (rightly) flagged us as a fly-by-night operation desperate to get our hands on free shit, but the game’s out tomorrow. Or maybe she’s just not too worried about me running the article on launch day. It seems like most “early reviews” have exclusivity/fawning rights, while everyone else will have to make do with scraps later on.

My Amazon preorder shipped. I just hope, if the PR lady does decide to send a copy, it doesn’t have NOT FOR RESALE stamped all over it like most freebies, so I can return it to Amazon.

Posted by Stan at 3:28 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Random Musings

April 27, 2008

Dumbass

Man, did I feel like an asshole last night. Readers of this blog know that I have a tendency to just say shit, unchecked. The problem with the blogosphere is that anyone, including someone who has no idea what he’s talking about, can start a blog, and somehow people will take that person seriously, quoting from him or her as if an opinion-based blog — even one that occasionally reports fact — is a legitimate source.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a little puff piece of On Deadly Ground, Steven Seagal’s underrated 1994 directorial debut. In that post, I got all defensive because I felt like Vern, the author of Seagalogy (the book that inspired me to watch Seagal’s first dozen or so movies back to back), had unfairly trashed On Deadly Ground. Like I said, I’ll just say shit. There’s no filter here, so even though I’m constantly wrong, I don’t expect to get called out.

Well, Vern called me out. In a very reasonable, polite way that had me instantly feeling guilty. Last night, he left a comment on my post:

Good post. But as the author of SEAGALOGY I have to disagree that I trashed ON DEADLY GROUND. I love this movie and in my book I defend it on many of the same grounds that you did. I praise the complex construction of the bar scene, say that the movie is “daring in so many ways it’s ridiculous,” that “as a director I honestly think Seagal did a good job,” and list in detail all of the Seagal trademarks and themes that this movie has the ultimate example of. I’m not sure how you could interpret that chapter as a trashing, but it’s disappointing to find that out.

Anyway, good to see someone else enjoying the movie and even having some respect for what Seagal was trying to do.

So I went back and re-read his chapter on the movie, and I realized — not only was he absolutely write about not trashing him, my post on the subject makes similar points. I’d like to chalk my mistake up to the sampling of negative reviews I’ve read, or maybe the fact that I read Seagalogy faster than I needed to and, let’s face it, his movies share enough similarities (that’s one of the points — recurring motifs and themes that cross the movies) that I might have had it confused with a lesser effort by the time I wrote about On Deadly Ground.

I still felt like shit. I wrote a polite response, and he didn’t seem to mind enormously. He seemed happier that someone else found enjoyment in On Deadly Ground than that I unfairly attacked him even though we liked the same movie for many of the same reasons.

I went back and edited the post (there’s an explanatory note as to why at the bottom), but man…it’s really embarrassing to be so thoroughly wrong.

Posted by Stan at 3:25 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Stories of Hilarity and Humiliation

April 26, 2008

Notecard Theory

So for all you non-writers, there’s this theory floating around — mainly but not exclusively in screenwriting circles — that notecards will magically help to improve structure. There are about 90,000 different methods of doing this, but the most useful one I’ve heard works like this: for every given scene, you write down a general description of what happens in the scene, followed by (a) how it fits into the overall story, (b) the characters involved in the scene, (d) their conflicts within the scene, (e) how these conflicts are resolved, and (f) how this scene reenforces the theme. In theory, you should have all the answers and a fully-loaded 3x5 notecard, or you should cut the scene. (Or rewrite it until you can provide all the notecard information.)

Most of the time when I hear the notecard theory, it doesn’t work like that. It’s a much more useless structural idea: you map out the scenes with notecards so that you can shuffle them around. I’ve read lengthy, possibly apocryphal stories (all of them coming from unsold spec writers) explaining how notecards saved their script. One part of the story doesn’t work, so they shuffle one scene from the first act to the third act, and — boom! Citizen Kane 2: Razing Kane. Am I an anomaly for never really having problems with an overarching structure or misplaced scenes?

To paraphrase William Goldman, once you find the spine of the story, you can fuck up just about everything else and still have people thinking there’s something in the screenplay worth saving. This is what I’ll politely call The Mountains of Indiana Syndrome — one of the many reasons I find that writer so frustrating is that his stories are structurally sound; it’s everything else that’s the problem. I have a pretty harsh reason for not buying into the validity of these “repositioning one scene saved my script” legends: if you put an act-three scene in act one, chances are you have bigger problems — problems that a notecard can’t solve. That is the “tough-love” approach from a guy who believes, more than anything else, that story is structure.

Of course, the “story is structure” mantra applies more to dramatic writing than, say, a novel. Novels have quite a bit of structural freedom, and you can throw pretty much anything at it and still come out a winner. Or, at least, you can if you can write well. Probably the best recent example I can think of here is Stephen King. Why are so many Stephen King movies terrible, when you feel like his books are ready-made for film adaptations? Critics might tell you it’s because he’s just plain not as good as everyone wants to believe, but if you’ve ever actually read one of his novels, you might notice that they’re very loose and rambling. He describes everything in vivid but plainspoken detail, making you feel like you can see everything. He often does this without resorting to hoity-toity poetic imagery that turns a lot of “mainstream” readers off of “literature,” but…he also has a tendency to go way over-the-top with descriptions. A description of an ashtray will start off with a paragraph about the ashtray, then deviate into a 30-page meditation on one character’s lifelong love of smoking, its effects on his wife and children, and the grim specter of his cancer-killed father looming over every cigarette he smokes. (Also, he repeats details all the time: in any given book, there’s about a 99% chance a smoker will strike matches on a thumb hardened and yellowed by nicotine staining.) He basically writes fictional versions of this blog.

That’s a problem: how the fuck do you adapt that? Unless the novel is called John Q. Smoker Gets Ironic Lung Cancer, there’s a high probability that it will be adapted as follows: JOHN Q. SMOKING-ISN’T-CENTRAL-TO-THE-PLOT, skinny mid-30s, takes one last drag on a used-up cigarette, then stubs it out. Maybe there’ll be later references to the character smoking, but we don’t need the case history.

Knowing what to cut is one of the general struggles of adapting, but it’s even worse with somebody like King, where everything feels cinematic but only about 10% of what he writes has anything to do with the dramatic “movie story” he’s telling. So people either complain that an adaptation sucked because they cut out all the good parts, or they complain because they tried to cram in everything and very little of it made sense. Or, like my complaint with Kubrick’s The Shining: completely missing the point. This is a book about a man dealing with alcoholism. The only way King could make this point less subtle is if he’d titled it Jack Torrance Is a Drunk, and It’s Not as Fun as It Sounds. I don’t know what the fuck Kubrick was going for, other than a shoddy horror movie or some kind of meditation on insanity. (For the Kubrick defenders: use, I know Torrance is portrayed as a drunk in the movie, but it’s downplayed to such a degree that it’s irrelevant. Also, you can’t defend against the fact that Jack Nicholson — who’s usually great — plays Torrance as insane from the first second he appears on screen. Where’s the gradual descent into madness?) For my money, the best book-to-screen adaptations must retain the spirit and theme of the source material. It’d be nice if they kept the characters and the overall storyline, but they can hack it to pieces as long as it has the same underlying purpose.

What I’m getting at, at long last, is this: my novel, Cedar Point, is about as good as it’s going to get, with a few exceptions:

• One of the later chapters deals exclusively with two minor characters. Although these characters are central to the plot, this chapter is not. It’s universally reviled by everyone who’s read it — not so much because of what happens, but because of when it happens. I admit, I tried something a little different. At the end of the day, this is a straightforward story I could have just as easily written as a screenplay, but I threw in a few novelistic flourishes every now and again. The one in the next bulletpoint, which worried me much more, got a warm reception, but I guess that’s the difference between giving readers a cliffhanger at the beginning instead of the end. When you’re on page 300, leaving them hanging, then spending 30 pages with different characters before getting back to the main story, does not make them happy. Good to know.

  On the plus side, nobody hated the chapter — the suggestion from every single person was to merely take the events condensed in this chapter and sprinkle them throughout.

• It’s a whole different ballgame when you’re on page 50 and you take a 100-page diversion from the main story. This surprised me, because it’s 100% backstory — taking the three main characters on a journey from 1991 until 2005 (“present day” for the story) to show not only how they’ve changed — which they already know from the first 50 pages — but why they’ve changed. Everyone loved this little trip along the scenic route, but that didn’t mean they had no criticism. I got two main points from everybody’s feedback: first, I have to incorporate a fourth character into the backstory chapter; second, certain backstory elements didn’t work for them. More to the point, it’s implied that the story might take a totally different direction (not my intention, but this is what the readers picked up on), and when it doesn’t, it got a little confusing.
• This is related to the flashback chapter: while some parts of the backstory need work to clarify the actual story, the main complaint from me is that much of the backstory isn’t funny enough or interesting enough to sustain readers’ attention. This was actually backed up by one reader, who suggested I established certain characters and situations and didn’t take full advantage of them. I’m trying not to be too coy, but I’m also trying not to give everything away. Sorry if this all sounds really bland and stupid.

  The bottom line is, I picked up on one moment in a related story that made me rethink the characters’ backstory. Fortunately, these new thoughts only affect the main story in the sense that they make it even more tragic. I won’t have to take a backhoe to the whole thing just to change out one little tiny piece.

If you were paying attention during that little list, something might have occurred to you. If it didn’t, I’ll bluntly state it now: I am going to start using notecards. OH I WENT THERE.

My feeling is, notecards aren’t really as effective for something structure-dependent like a play of any kind. Maybe they help some people, and that’s fine. I’ve never felt the need to use them and have never had any complaints about structure.

A novel is different. It’s a bit more unwieldy: more scenes, for one thing, and in those scenes many things can happen that don’t happen in a screenplay — internal thoughts, repeated descriptions (in a screenplay, you usually describe a person when they’re introduced but otherwise, nope; in a novel, you have to give yourself a clear picture of the person because you’ll be describing them multiple times), flashbacks or little bits of anecdotal backstory…hell, in my particular novel, there’s even a lot of weird history of the town that would never get into a screenplay.

Because most of the changes above have to do with inserting and removing scenes, notecards are optimal for this type of thing. In the first bulletpoint, I’m trying to find similar scenes that I can use to combine events from that late chapter with earlier events. In the second and third, it’s the simpler matter of pulling certain scenes out and replacing them with something new. The notecards will help me keep this all straight.

Is it ironic that the first time I’m using notecards in a non-classroom environment is for one of my few non-screenwriting projects? It seems like notecards should be more common for novelists, but I don’t hear much about that as a viable method to help keep things straight. Maybe I’m just not cut out for it.

Posted by Stan at 1:50 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Career-Based Rambling

April 25, 2008

Scoring Free Shit

I spent part of today trying to score a free copy of a certain upcoming video game that I am looking forward to more than any person should. Apparently a PR firm contacted a website I’m working on, even though we’re a film review site, to let us know we can contact them for hi-res graphics to promote the launch. The publisher forwarded it to me, telling me he’d help me score a free copy if possible. I said, “Awesome,” because even though I preordered it, I don’t technically have the money (whoo credit!). So I got a polite e-mail from somebody at the PR place asking me about the nature of my story, so she can help to better accommodate me.

Uh-oh.

Some quick thinking led me to the realization that a good, film-related article could be culled from the very notion that video games are becoming increasingly cinematic; beyond this, the series has been known for movie references and parodies. I could write a decent comparative article about the games, their influences, and whether or not a video game can capture the same emotional depth as a film. (P.S.: They can.)

No word yet on whether or not that’s good, but considering the impromptu nature of this B.S., I am feeling pretty good about my skills. I’m ready for grad school!

Posted by Stan at 3:38 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Random Musings

April 24, 2008

What It Takes to Make CSI Not Suck

In the vast realm of popular culture, there’s very little I hate more than the CSI juggernaut*, but recently I’ve found myself obsessed with the Miami flavor. I can’t tolerate anything other than this one because it always seems to me that the cast goes wildly over-the-top because the performances are secretly tongue-in-cheek. They always have these little grins on their faces, which may or may not be the excessive botox and facelifts the regular cast members have obviously undergone, that makes me think they’re going to crack up as soon as they cut. I have to believe this is the case to keep my sanity.

The other series, which I’ve sampled on occasionally out of curiosity, don’t hold up nearly as well because there’s a different kind of attitude to the cast — a smugness, as if they really feel they’re a part of something important. I guess you could argue that it’s important to bring joy to tens of millions of Americans who like the kind of TV you can watch while doing the laundry and making dinner, but I like something a little more substantive. Even the Seagal movies I’ve raved about lately, while ridiculous and implausible, are at least attempting to get at something resembling a higher truth — exposing rampant police and government corruption, oil companies fucking over both Native Americans and the environment, and so on — while the CSI shows are content to play out the same basic ideas over and over again (to be fair, the Law & Order shows on NBC are equally guilty of this, and more than anything else so is American Idol). Making crimes ridiculously over-the-top is not a substitute for quality, especially since it always turns out to be the first person they interview, played by an actor so cartoonishly evil any good detective would hold them in interrogation until they break them.

Well, recently I decided to take a look at the two-part fifth-season finale. Quentin Tarantino directed both episodes, and while I enjoy his movies I should say upfront that I’m not really an obsessive, Tarantino-defending fanboy. I downloaded these particular episodes for what the Internet has declared CSI: Original Recipe’s crowning moment: Gil Grissom’s eleventh-hour antgasm. It was as funny as I expected, but it also disappointed me…

…because the episodes themselves were actually kinda good.

I can think of two simple reasons for the surprising quality. First, each episode had almost nothing to do with lab work. The thing that sinks most CSI episodes is the cartoonishly over-the-top crimes. Yes, the crimes have to get sort of wild in order for them to be solved using most likely inaccurate science!!!, but these shows take it to extremes that make Agatha Christie’s weirdest shit sound reasonable. It doesn’t help that the lab tests these people perform on whims cost tens of thousands of dollars, and no police department on the planet would justify the amount of goofy tech and tests they use. (That’s not even getting into the fact that most forensic investigators rarely have anything to do with interviewing suspects, arresting people, etc. To its credit, CSI actually got this detail right at the start, but soon enough it got ridiculous.)

For those thinking I’m ripping on this shit for being implausible because that’s the best I can do, and I should just relax and enjoy the show, here’s the thing: there are junky procedurals I like. I like House, I like Bones, I like Monk…all three are ridiculous in almost every possible way, but they’re also populated with interesting characters. I can check out and stop caring about real-world impracticalities if I’m interested in the characters and conflicts happening in each scene. When I don’t have that, and on CSI I never do**, I bitch. I bitch when the plot doesn’t make sense, or when something doesn’t seem like it could really happen, because nothing else of interest is happening.

The second major difference in this episode of CSI is that, for the first time, we’re given that conflict, especially in the form of George Eads’s Nick Stokes. Much more of this has to do with Quentin Tarantino’s ability to work with actors than the actual writing — these people gave more than I’ve ever seen them give before, including in the movies, so I have to assume Tarantino is responsible for that. Television is not known as a director’s medium, but it just goes to show what a good director can bring — he rushes past the plot holes and builds the suspense and drama from the helplessness of the usually unstoppable lab team.

The plot basically goes like this: a CSI is lured to an odd crime scene. Turns out, someone manufactured the scene so they could nab a CSI, lock him in a plexiglas coffin, and bury him alive. Whoever perpetrated the crime knows his shit — they get their lab work out of the way pretty quickly, and there’s nothing. No leads. Eventually they get a package that leads them to a webcam broadcasting Stokes’s struggle to survive. Boo-hoo. Oh, also, the guy wants $1 million in 12 hours, or Stokes dies.

Once they’ve exhausted their attempts at “science,” all we’re left with is a team who has to deal with the terror of a fellow lab worker trapped in an unknown location. When they finally get the money and deliver it, the man (played by the awesome John Saxon) is shocked — that was never part of the plan. He pretty much intended just to blow himself up. That’s how part one ends. In part two, they find an intact thumb, figure out the man’s motive (shoddy lab work got his daughter convicted of murder), and use actual investigative skills to figure out what happened to Stokes.

It’s not without its flaws. I know they need to find him, but the thumb thing just struck me as way too easy, especially when they contrive false drama from Sara’s inability to find any fingerprints, and then in, like, the next scene another lab tech is like, “Oh, I ran it through another database and found something.” Then, of course, there’s the breathing tube protruding very obviously from the middle of a path. It’s a place of business — nobody would notice that?!

I also have an issue with the frustrating, moronic “time” element toward the end of part two. It sort of reminded of the movie Soultaker, featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000, where initially it’s a big part of the plot that they have to get back to their bodies by midnight or their parents will pull the plug — but even after they’ve changed their mind, the director keeps showing shots of the clock as they frantically rush to the hospital rooms. Same deal here: Warrick estimates Stokes has 90 minutes before the fan circulating the air will die (it’s on a battery). All this means is that when the watch stops, that gives him the two and a half hours Grissom estimated he’d have based on the size of the coffin. Nonetheless, when the timer goes off, Warrick looks like he’s about to give up — what the fuck?!

It had some frustrating moments of stupidity, but I was actually disappointed about how little comedy fodder this episode had. In fact, for the first time in my life, I actually enjoyed CSI in a non-ironic way. Again, I’m going to go ahead and credit Tarantino with this, because if CSI’s producers were capable of this kind of work all the time, the show would be halfway decent. (Also, even though Tarantino only receives a STORY BY credit, his severed-thumbprints are all over this episode’s writing, from the distinctive dialogue style to the weird — some might say annoying — ’70s pop-culture fixation.)

*Note that I also qualify the other Bruckheimer-produced procedurals (Cold Case, Without a Trace, and Close to Home, a surprise failure) as part of the juggernaut, because (a) they’re on the same network, (b) they’re made by the same production company, and (c) face it: they’re the same show. One deals with cold cases, one deals with kidnappings, one dealt with “suburban”/small-town crime, but they conform to the exact same formula. [Back]
**Yes, each show has defined characters, but in the worst possible way. Each has a distinctive trait, maybe two, that we’re supposed to latch onto. [Back]

Posted by Stan at 3:29 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Reviews

April 23, 2008

Banning People from the Internet

Remember this lady? Here’s the disconnect, for me: first, on the Lee Stranahan blog, she refuses to post a link to her own blog. After first accusing commenters of being ridiculous by destroying his bandwidth and leaving trolling comments, fair points both of them, some folks asked for a link to her own blog, so we could take it over there, but she said no. It’s a private blog, invitation-only (Blogger’s stupidest feature, if you ask me; if you aren’t going to let it all hang out for the Internet masses, why blog at all?).

So, with a baffling two-day roll-out, she decided yes, she’d make a public blog — specifically designed for readers both of Stranahan and Bitter But Brilliant. She started by posting about 20 things in less than two days. Many of the early entries were clearly copied and pasted from another place (ostensibly her private blog); later, she took it upon herself to troll BBB posters (including yours truly) using the blog, since they banned her from the forum.

After checking out that trainwreck several times last weekend, it suddenly prompted me to sign in so I could view the private blog. That’s right: she privatized another blog. Which begs the question: what’s the point? You have two blogs, one public and one private. Ill-advised though it was, I suppose the point of the public blog was so that we could get to know her in order to stop mocking her. I don’t claim to know that for sure, but it did seem like the sampling of entries were selected to ingratiate her. It didn’t work, so why not just delete the blog? Do you really need two private blogs? After that, do you need to roll out yet another public blog, this one with comments disabled? You couldn’t have just disabled comments on the other one? Maybe she’s just not Internet savvy, but it seems like excess.

It started to make me wonder: should the Internet have some kind of Logan’s Run-esque rule where anyone over a certain age isn’t allowed to go online? Since it seems she’s devoted her life to trolling message boards and creating unnecessary blogs, that’s a tax on bandwidth that nobody really needs. I suppose this rule should also apply to younger people, as well. What I’m saying is, only people between the ages of 22 and 35 are allowed on the Internet. Sorry, pervs, find another outlet.

Posted by Stan at 3:24 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Random Musings

April 27, 2008

A Touch of Frost: Season 13 (2008)

Note: From late 2006 through the start of 2009, I volunteered to write content for and redesign a film-review website run by a former college professor. The arrangement didn’t end well, and as a result I removed my association from the site and decided to publish the reviews on my blog instead. Read about my misadventures with the site here.

With 13 seasons and 37 feature-length episodes, A Touch of Frost is bound to have an off episode or two in its run. The real downside about MPI’s A Touch of Frost – Season 13 collection is that it’s not a collection at all. The show only ran one episode in that “season,” and as such the DVD only contains one, “Endangered Species.” Instead of waiting for possible Season 14 episodes to bundle this lackluster episode with, MPI went ahead and released it solo. At the risk of sounding too harsh, it’s really an episode for fans/completists only. I urge casual viewers or non-viewers to check out MPI’s releases of earlier seasons. After I was assigned to review the Season 11 & 12 collection, I spent time catching up with what I’d missed. It’s a great show, but “Endangered Species” left a lot to be desired.

I couldn’t explain the decision-making process, but for the first time in the show’s history, it’s gone to a Law & Order-esque “ripped-from-the-headlines” approach for its stories. I don’t know; maybe it was like that all along, and I am just too ignorant of big British news stories over the past 15 years. Either way, the two crime stories featured in this episode—one about exotic animal smugglers, the other about a teacher-student sexual relationship—felt a bit overdone. And when Frost faces off with both a crocodile and a tiger (in two separate scenes), somebody should realize they’re heading dangerously close to sitcom territory and either play it for laughs or just pack it in and go home.

A Touch of Frost’s writing has always been characterized by an empathy for the criminals. Not sympathy, mind you—this show does not let them off the hook, but it does show, firsthand, their rationale. With “Endangered Species,” the mysteries were interesting enough, but they didn’t spend nearly enough time with the criminals. I don’t want to give spoilers, even if I’m not recommending this, but each case offered razor-thin motives for both the innocent and the guilty. Frost is usually better than this.

Since the mystery aspects disappointed, I had some hope that the usual “Frost’s failed personal life” subplot would hold my interest. It’s a continuation of the relationship Jack started with the woman at the gym in Season 11. It wasn’t bad, but for anybody who’s watched A Touch of Frost, you pretty much know how and why the story will end for the couple. It’s a bit disappointing, as the show continues to age (and may reach a point where it doesn’t return) that Frost can’t grow a bit, realize his commitment problems, and either stop making himself miserable by entering disastrous relationships or ease off on his job obsession. I guess this isn’t necessarily a criticism of the show, and the fact that I’ve gotten so worked up about it offers some evidence of its emotional impact.

Nonetheless, I’d tell anyone but a die-hard fan to skip this season’s DVD. Here’s hoping Season 14 (scheduled to air in Britain sometime this year) will show a return to form.

Posted by Stan at 12:00 AM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Reviews