film

Randomness for 1/28

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1) I’m not sure what to call this video clip: GUN FU HUSTLE (Bollywood version)? Whatever you call it, it’s delightfully absurd and inventive.

2) Cherie Priest: high priestess of steampunk.

3) Dear News Media: When reporting on polls, please keep in mind…

4) Louis CK — Being White. God, how I laughed.

5) UK government bans export of fake bomb detectors.

6) Ted Haggard’s wife Gayle stands by her husband/writes book. Ms. Haggard says that her husband confessed to a sexual encounter with another man early in their marriage. He asked for and received her forgiveness, sought counseling, and they moved on. Or that’s what she thought–later she discovered (along with everyone else) that he had been seeing men in secret. However, now he’s asked for and received her forgiveness, sought counseling and they’ve moved on. So that’s totally different from the previous time. (Actually, there is a difference: Ms. Haggard has a book with an Amazon.com sales ranking in three digits. I hope she’s squirreling that money away.)

7) Try to conceal your unbearable surprise, but the CIA agent who claimed in December of 2007 that waterboarding got worthwhile intelligence out of hard-core terrorists, disrupting dozens of attacks? Well, it turns out that he was lying. So much for the “It works. Period.” crowd.

Randomness for 1/21

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1) Yet another reason I’m glad I’ve given up screenwriting. As bad as the credit situation is for writers now, it’s better than it was before the WGA negotiated the right to determine the credit. In the old days, a producer could leave the writers’ names off entirely and give the credit to a girlfriend, if they wanted.

2) A modern-day Jesse James? If Jesse James had 15,000+ Facebook fans, I guess.

3) Upcoming Nicolas Cage projects! aka, some guys with Photoshop put Nic Cage’s face on Davros, Wayne (of Wayne and Garth), and everyone else.

4) I am shocked shocked to discover FBI agents misused the power to conduct warrantless searches! Apparently, the agency has described this lawbreaking as “technical.”

5) Myths of online dating photos: The folks at OKCupid run statistics on their online dating services. What photos get the most interest? What photos turn people away? There are more posts on other topics in the sidebar, including matching people by religion and race.

6) Ta-Nehisi Coates on Jews and basketball.

7) From 10 Strangest Books on Amazon.com: How to Good-bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way? I should mention, this book also has a better sales ranking than mine, but how can I top a quote like “Besides shooting out a big blank from your buttock, you can feel as if your root chakra leaked sweet hot mucus.”

Remember AFTER LAST SEASON?

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Remember when I posted the trailer for AFTER LAST SEASON, which is probably the worst movie to get a theatrical release in 2009?

Well, here’s a review from a guy who tracked down a copy. It sounds even worse than the trailer made it seem, if that’s possible.

Enjoy!

Free DVD offer still ongoing!

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There are still 30 copies of BATTLE FOR TERRA waiting to be given to anyone who donates at least $25 bucks to The Red Cross for their relief efforts in Haiti. The film’s producer says they’ve raised $2700 so far. See details for how to collect on his web site.

Send an extraction team!

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My son just put the ALVIN & THE CHIPMUNKS dvd in. Get me out of here!

Not a rant

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In the “This is freaking annoying” category, the increasingly out of touch Wall Street Journal tries to cover The Death of the Slush Pile. Never mind that the author trots out the same old chestnuts about bestsellers being rejected and Pultizer-winners being plucked from the slush, she adds a dose of “Wasn’t the internet supposed to fix this?” and “Connections still matter!” then goes straight to confusing book publishing slush with film/TV script slush. Grrr.

Here’s an instructive experiment: try sending an unsolicited filmscript query to a Hollywood film agency. One that represents writers.

It’s a waste of time and trees. If you want to be in movies or TV, you ought to be making connections. You ought to be making friends who are trying to break in, too. Help them with their projects. They help you with yours. Meet people. Don’t be crazy. Get an entry-level job or gig.

Publishing isn’t like that. You can write a letter from anywhere and mail it in. A certain percentage of agents will reject you, and the same is true of publishers. Probably, it’ll be a large percentage. That’s not something to worry about; you just need to find the right person to put your book in front of readers.

But this is an article that wraps up by calculating the odds of selling a story to a magazine by comparing the number of stories published with the number of stories submitted, so it’s pretty clear this is a ignorant mish-mash.

Living inside a movie

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Tor.com guest blogger Don T. Careallthatmuch writes a ridiculous post suggesting that Pandora, the fictional planet that serves as a setting for the movie AVATAR is where people were meant to live.

Fun quote: “Isn’t this how we were meant to live, and might live again? Hunting the forest, leaping through the canopy, killing beasts, taming others, enacting meaningful rituals? It’s the same dream offered by Tolkien’s Middle-earth—to be peaceful, nature-bonded hobbits, quietly growing crops, smoking pipes, drinking ale and laughing. An alluring fantasy life to be sure. And one perhaps worth fighting for.”

Don left out “crapping in holes” but whatever. This reminds me of something I heard Spider Robinson say at the late, lamented NW Bookfest some years ago (I paraphrase from memory, of course). He said that he reads science fiction because he wants to read about societies of the future, advanced societies where he can imagine living. Fantasy readers, he assumed, were doing the same thing–which made them fools. The typical human in a pre-industrial Europe worked incredibly hard and was incredibly uncomfortable; he’d tried to live a self-sustaining farmer’s life, and it was a nightmare. Fantasy readers, he concluded, were idiots.

Never mind that many, many people do not read books because they’re daydreaming about living in the setting. Sure, I might imagine how cool it would be to fight like Aragorn, kicking monster ass and getting to be king at the end, but that doesn’t mean I’d walk through a portal marked “Middle Earth: Entrance Only.”

I think something that throws people about this is that these action movies are taking place in a wacky setting. If I read a crime novel, does that mean I want to have a knife fight with a junkie in an alley? Hell no. Do I want to drive an souped-up car across a post-apocalyptic Australian wasteland? No and no again.

I enjoy the hell out of those sorts of stories, though. I may imagine myself standing alone on a bridge as the goblin warriors rush at me, or piloting a spaceship through a firefight, or confronting a vampire in it’s lair, but that’s part of enjoying an adventure story.

But to actually go there and do that? For real? Pass. And I think most sane people would agree.

At this point, let me tell you about a very good, very old friend of mine. At one point, he told me he was going to join the FBI. This was something of a surprise, because this was a guy who’d given up the chance to run his own martial arts school to pursue acting. He’d owned a bicycle repair business, repaired rental hardware for Lowe’s, produced documentaries and DVD extras, built movie sets, etc. But wear a suit and investigate people for the federal government? Where did that come from.

“The X-Files,” he said. Now, he knew it was a little ridiculous as he said it. He knew he couldn’t join the FBI to hunt aliens, but he’d enjoyed that show so damn much that he wanted to jump into it. (He cancelled his application midway through because he knew it was laughable, but still). There are scientists who were inspired by Star Trek, martial arts students who studied wu shu because of Jackie Chan, fencing students inspired by The Three Musketeers, kendo students inspired by Toshiro Mifune.

Yeah, there are people who love a story enough to try to make it part of their lives. But to give up everything and rush off to neverland? I look forward to Don’s future posts from the jungles of the Amazon. As for me, I’d consider it if it was an honest-to-god utopia and I could bring my wife and son. But probably not. I don’t hate my life that much, and I don’t want to crap in a hole.

Randomness for 1/6

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1) A cult I might join, and a manifesto that would do me good.

2) This is an article I’ve been waiting a few days for: What if the Christmas bomb had exploded? Did the Nigerian terrorist have enough explosive to bring down the plane? The answer seems to be “Maybe, but probably not.”

3) Lunch Lady Paper Dolls! Not your average lunch lady, either–it’s the crime fighting lunch lady from the popular comics.

4) Pride and Prejudice, told through emoticons. This is awesome.

5) The Venn Diagram of Cookie Status.

6) The difficult, difficult work of plotting AVATAR.

7) Screenwriters are trained to fail the Bechdel Test. “Ego and laziness – the intrepid supervillain team!” via Jim Hines.

Quote of the day

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This is a long one, from an interview with Terry Rossio, one of the highest-paid screenwriters working today, and the man who runs the Wordplay site, which is full of writerly advice. I learned a lot on the Wordplay message boards, and in the columns, and I learned a lot from this interview (even though I’m supposed to be MAN BITES WORLD.

Anyway, this is about screenwriting, naturally, not writing books, but I think it’s pertinent:

JRM (interviewer): How did you break in, and how did you come to be where you are now?

Terry Rossio: I’m going to try to not give the usual boilerplate answers in this interview, and that means not going along with false presumptions, no matter how seemingly benign. The question about breaking in seems perfectly legit, but really it’s not. A writer must create compelling work, and then try to sell it. Once sold, the writer has to do the same thing again. It’s really not true that the writer ‘breaks in’—that’s an artifact of the belief that the person is being judged, not the work, and also of the belief that there is an inside and an outside, which I don’t think exists. There are too many screenwriters out there with only a single credit for there to be an inside, and too many writers on the outside making sales, to too many markets which are either new, changing, or undefined.

In truth buyers are just not that organized, your buyer is not my buyer, or in some cases, you can become your own buyer. Courtney Hunt was nominated for an Academy Award this year for best screenplay for Frozen River, and she’s never sold a screenplay. Is she on the inside or the outside? In truth, anyone, at any time, can come up with South Park or Superman or Sandman, and that’s all that matters.

And I can’t resist adding this one:

Screenwriters are the Charlie Browns of Hollywood, and everyone else holds the football.

I recommend reading the whole interview. Yeah, it’s a little long, but the stuff on constructing a story is wonderful

Remembering 2009 as it should be remembered

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By the worst movie of the year!

It played in four theaters, and I’m told the distributor asked the theater owners to burn the prints so they wouldn’t have to pay to have them shipped back.

Here’s the trailer, which I imagine was supposed to interest viewers instead of drive them, laughing, to other theaters.

“They’ve got, uh, printers in the basement you can use.”

Public Access TV would be a step up for these guys.