Random Question #7

If you had to pick one: Italian food or Mexican food?

Miss South Carolina, YouTube, and You (And Me)

By now most of you have seen (or at least heard about) that infamous Miss South Carolina Teen USA clip over on YouTube. (If not, brace yourself.) Maybe you took it as further evidence that our youth today is dumbed-down and American Idol-ized, filled up with undeserved feelings of entitlement. Or maybe you saw it as a train wreck or a particularly grisly car accident you just couldn’t look away from. But you saw something in it – it has several million views.

But I’m not really interested about Miss South Carolina or about today’s youth – what I’m interested in is us, and why we watch this stuff. Because if we viewers followed the conventional wisdom of Hollywood, if we actually did what the screenwriting rules say we are supposed to do, we would change the channel as quickly as we could. But we don’t. We look. We slow down at car accidents. We watch YouTube clips like this and forward them to our friends. We don’t “change the channel” – we watch this stuff over and over and over.

Why? This goes back to a post from a while back about emotional attachment. Conventional screenwriting rules say that the viewer has to be invested in the character, has to identify emotionally with him and his struggles. This has to be clear and clean and unambiguous, and scripts in which the viewer and the character have any other kind of relationship are doomed.

Quote of the day

I don’t know which way anything will go because it’s all about the ideas that come that you fall in love with. In between things, there are no ideas — and then suddenly there’s the idea. If you fall in love with it, you know exactly what to do. Sometimes it can be surprising.

– David Lynch 2007

Random Question #6

Do you often experience stillness in your everyday life?

Random Question #5

Do you ever wonder whatever happened to that short, dark-haired, big-ace-Foster-Grants-wearing lead guitarist for the Flock of Seagulls?

Random Question #4

Do you ever have that role-reversal dream where you are tiny and roaches are 20 feet tall and you have to scamper around a giant disgusting roach house in search of food for your family while the giant roaches stomp at you with their giant roach feet and utilize every trap and chemical their roach scientists can devise to kill you and your babies?

Kind of Like “Grumpy Old Men” Meets “Kill Bill”

This is probably in very bad taste, but come on, that’s the fun of it: The world’s oldest person has died at age 114. This happens from time to time and it always makes the news. So it always reminds me…

About 3 years ago, I got this story idea. Now, it wasn’t a real story idea, it was more of a parody of a story idea. A “this idea is so bad and so tasteless that I will dismiss it but Will Farrell or the Farrelly Brothers or somebody will make a movie of it and end up making $500 million” idea.

A few years back I wrote a script called I Hate That Guy!, which is a revenge movie. A complete and total jerk guy is on a mission to take down a saccharinely sweet perfect saintly guy and utterly destroy him. The script is so dark and “South Park” scummy – pedophilia jokes, 106 uses of the F-word, a really offensive AIDS-joke climax – that I would not put my real name on it if it actually sold. Call me bitter, but I guess I like that kind of over-the-top lowbrow humor where people are out to destroy each other for ridiculously cheesy gain. The script was kind of like John Waters’ “Desperate People” with a heaping, steaming pile of the Farrelly Brothers’ “Kingpin” thrown in. When I heard on NPR a few years back that the world’s oldest person had died, I realized this might be another piece of the puzzle to throw in there: the “Grumpy Old Men” treatment.

Feedback

Writers want their scripts to get better. And for that we all need readers, and from them we all want specific and constructive feedback. But although feedback is great, it would really be a lot easier if the script was just perfect to begin with.

I bring this up because I just got the feedback from that BlueCat Screenplay Festival I mentioned a while back. I did okay in the contest – Aftershocks placed in the top 10% of all entries – but I did not advance to the semi-finals. One of the reasons I entered this particular festival (after entering several others at various points since the script was first finished) was for the “writer feedback” which was included with every entry.

Whenever I read somebody else’s stuff, I try to be constructive. This means being direct without being mean. Like one of my best screenwriting instructors used to say: no excuses. If the reader doesn’t “get” something, if it isn’t there on the page, that’s the writer’s fault, not the reader’s. After all, that is what the writer’s job is: to put it on the page. Whether I’m reading stuff for a friend, in a class, or in a writers’ group, I’ve always felt that the point of writer feedback is to point out what isn’t sufficiently on the page, what it is the reader doesn’t “get”, and hopefully try to explain why. So when I read feedback of my own stuff, I try to keep this in mind, I try to be objective and non-emotional about it, I try to forget that I wrote the thing and look at it as an outside observer who has been hired to simply make the script better.

This is hard. The head of the BlueCat contest even admits that the writer’s instinctive emotional reaction when hearing negative feedback is to usually conclude that the reader is “an idiot” who isn’t smart enough to grasp the material. Did I have this feeling about my reader? No.

But…

Fun With Apple’s New iPhoto

In addition to being a music fanatic, a film school graduate, and a photography nut, I’m also a Mac guy. So whenever Apple rolls out their newest version of their iLife suite (consisting of iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, Garage Band, and iWeb), I go out and buy it all over again. So when at work yesterday I suddenly realized that Michelle, Jay, and Sandy had taken the kids to The Grove, I text messaged everyone to make a stop at the Apple Store for me. With over 700 Italy photos, I was ready for all the cool new bells and whistles the new update to iPhoto promised.

Like this.

Now the above link is only a test run, something slapped together pretty quickly, but man it is fun. There was some kind of error in the upload so not everything works yet, but the idea is that in addition to being able to view the photos in various formats, people can also download the full-size images. Pretty cool, especially for far away family members.

Play around with the options there – I sent you to Mosaic mode, but there’s also Carousel mode (which is neat) plus others. Fun stuff. Just wait until I go through the hundreds of others and make a proper gallery.

Why Don’t I Like Steely Dan?

Stay with me here:

 

Music is my life. Always has been. In high school, I was the guy with over 200 tapes. By college, I was always having to buy more blank cassettes, walking down the dorm hallways copying everything I could get my hands on. Today I can’t leave the house without 3,441 of my favorite songs on my iPod. I fall in love with new (or “new to me”) songs on a regular basis, and I’m always desperately looking for songs to fall in love with, artists to collect, catalogs to complete.

 

So why don’t I like Steely Dan? If you looked at my music collection, you’d expect to see them. They have much of what I like: impeccable musicianship, sophisticated and complicated (but not too complicated) songs and structures, a more intellectual bent than standard 70s rock fare. I definitely should like them, but… I don’t. I respect them, I completely understand that the quality of their stuff is first-rate, but… well…. I’m not sure if they leave me cold, or if I find them pretentious (imagine that), or what, but I don’t care for them. I’ll even say it: they suck.

And I don’t enjoy saying that. It makes me suspect that I am the one missing the boat. Their stuff is so high-brow, so universally lauded, that something must be wrong with me. Right? And yet, there it is: they suck.

This kind of bugs me. I give them every opportunity. Last night I finished – after three attempts – watching a Tivo’d episode of “Classic Albums” on their landmark “Aja” record from 1977. I wanted to finally find the last piece of the puzzle, find that missing “something” that I had been overlooking all those years. I wasn’t “getting” them, that must be it, so I’d let the “experts” take me by the hand and lead me through the process and explain to me why Steely Dan was as great as everybody has always said they are.

Looking up from the new Harry Potter book, Michelle didn’t know how to respond to this. “Steely Dan? I thought you hated them?” she said. “I don’t hate them,” I replied. “Yes, you do,” she said, “you say they suck.” “Well, yeah, I mean I do hate them,” I replied, “but, you know, they’re great.”

She went back to her book and I kept watching. And waiting. And guess what? There was no “missing piece.” Nothing I had overlooked. I did “get them,” but I still don’t like them. They still suck.

But not really. I mean, they’re good but I don’t like them. More precisely, I don’t love them, and that’s what I think I’m getting at here. There is plenty for me to respect and admire in Steely Dan, plenty for me to like, but, try as I have all these years, I never find anything there to love. I have never found anything to emotionally connect to with in Steely Dan. And, until recently, that has never been a requirement for me. But somehow, somewhere in there, it became one. A big one. Somewhere in there my tastes, my reason for listening to music or seeing movies or looking at art, went from an intellectual interest to learn about stuff to a need to emotionally engage with something, to fall in love. It is fine to respect and admire something, but that is not enough anymore. My response to Random Question #3 notwithstanding, it appears that I may have changed. Possibly.

Why am I thinking about this? After having this realization I looked back on the stuff I have written as well as the stuff I am writing now. I can clearly see some stuff that is fine and interesting and maybe even respectable, but which gives us nothing to fall in love with. And when I think of the stuff I am most proud of and ask myself WHY it is I am proud of it, and I can’t really explain, I think that is what it comes to: I am in love with it, and more importantly other people have fallen in love with it too. There is an emotional attachment there.

But how do you get that thing in there, how do you make that thing that people will fall in love with and put it in your work? How do I make Dead Guy a more engaging and satisfying experience than Steely Dan? Now there is much more at stake than “getting the story to work.” Suddenly the only thing that matters is that emotional attachment.

But emotional attachment… to what? The easy answer is “the characters” but that’s not really it. It’s part of it, yes, but not the whole thing. There are movies I love, but not because the characters are sympathetic or easy for me to identify with, or any of those things you find in screenwriting bibles. The story and the theme are important too, but again, not the whole answer. It’s like falling in love with a person – appearance, yes, intelligence, yes, personality, definitely – but you don’t fall in love with everyone you meet that has all three. We’ve all had people that were “perfect” for us, that friends and family couldn’t believe we weren’t crazy about, that we just weren’t that interested in. Like Steely Dan.

So… what exactly do I do with these new revelations? Beats me. But the one thing I cannot do is forget them.