"Is That All There Is? This is by far the best take (on video) of this unusual song. I think it was newer to her at this appearance, and ..."
Sunday, October 10, 2010
First Sound Press: Life's Absurd! What About Becoming a Great Singer...
First Sound Press: Life's Absurd! What About Becoming a Great Singer...:
‘The Social Network’ Holds For #1 Again; ‘Life As We Know It’ Comes Close For #2, ‘Secretariat’ Comes Up Lame #3 – Deadline.com
‘The Social Network’ Holds For #1 Again; ‘Life As We Know It’ Comes Close For #2, ‘Secretariat’ Comes Up Lame #3 – Deadline.com:
"All weekend, rival studio execs snarked to me about how the Secretariat marketing campaign was 'horrid,' in the words of one. 'The only audience interested was old females, but the print and the spots made it look like an action movie. Where was The Blind Side's spunky female empowerment, the comedy, the romance?' Criticized another, 'I think when you take the beautiful Diane Lane and turn her into a frumpy aged-up woman, you're flirting with danger. Then there's the whole horse thing, which is probably second only to boxing in moviegoing 'who cares?'. Plus, Seabiscuit opened in summer when there was a dearth of adult pictures and it really stood out. This one is awash in a sea of adult movies.'"
Portland's Mike Rich wrote this. I suspected it would bomb when I heard it was being made by Disney, which meant feel good etc, and also because the story didn't have the historical significance of Seabiscuit. So this doesn't surprise me at all.
Writing as resolution, or monkeys off my back
Sometimes writing, a particular work, has magnified meaning to its author. Thus in recent years, my novella Baumholder 1961, which got my Army experience during the Cold War off my back, and my short film Deconstructing Sally, which got the ghost of an ex-wife off my back. Each dealt with important and pivotal experience in my personal life that I had not "resolved," in the sense of understanding their meanings so I might move on. "Everything is material," I well knew, and here was some of the best material I had but I yet had shaped it dramatically into as powerful a narrative as the material deserved. And this bugged the hell out of me. What kind of writer was I if I couldn't even make use of my "best" personal material?
Sally happened by accident. I was invited to a graduate class reunion, which would return me to the scene of the crime, as it were, thrust me back among the people and the memories where the seminal experience had occurred. I went to the reunion not knowing what I would do except shoot a ton of video. Then something would occur to me, I assumed, as indeed it did, resulting in the "fictional memoir" that most observers consider my best film.
Baumholder happened a different way. I knew for decades my Army experience had been so surrealistic that it was material for a novel. I assumed a typical epic "Army Novel" in the tradition of James Jones or Norman Mailer. Only the material was more like M.A.S.H. and Catch-22. "Big novels" in any case. I made dozens and dozens of false starts through the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. Then one day, in a moment of frustration, I sat down and made a list of the essential things I wanted to communicate in my Army novel. I discovered it really wasn't all that much -- which is when it occurred to me I could do this in a shorter form, a novella, setting the entire story in one day, the day the Berlin Wall starts being built. Eureka! I'm pleased with how it turned out.
Ever since coming up with the ending of my feature The Farewell Wake I've had a sense that this project, too, might have special personal significance. But what monkey is still on my back that needs removal? This morning it occurred to me: the monkey is myself! This film might get myself off my back. Indeed, the narrator in the film is very much myself with my issues and his resolution, dropping out to become something of a private hedonist, his dog his companion, sounds very much like a remedy for my own fretting about the world. At least metaphorically. We'll find out soon enough if this notion has legs. I retain a sense that this film is special in my life in some way.
Something else I've been thinking about recently: James Otis burning his life's work. Otis is the man John Adams called "the first Patriot," the leader of the "no taxation without representation" movement, by which he meant representation not divorce. So history, the way things went, drove Otis literally mad and he was hauled out of Boston in a straitjacket, thinking the world had gone mad. After the revolution, he burned all his life's writing, which was going to be edited by his sister, Mercy Otis Warren, who is considered our first playwright. Otis became very depressed that the victorious Americans were still dancing the minuet and acting like regality, especially Hancock and friends.
At any rate, I can see why a man would get so depressed at how the world has changed that he'd destroy his life's work, assuming it meant nothing any more. I've had similar thoughts myself, and I'm sure I'm far from alone. More than once I've come close to deleting this entire blog, for example. But I babble on.
Sally happened by accident. I was invited to a graduate class reunion, which would return me to the scene of the crime, as it were, thrust me back among the people and the memories where the seminal experience had occurred. I went to the reunion not knowing what I would do except shoot a ton of video. Then something would occur to me, I assumed, as indeed it did, resulting in the "fictional memoir" that most observers consider my best film.
Baumholder happened a different way. I knew for decades my Army experience had been so surrealistic that it was material for a novel. I assumed a typical epic "Army Novel" in the tradition of James Jones or Norman Mailer. Only the material was more like M.A.S.H. and Catch-22. "Big novels" in any case. I made dozens and dozens of false starts through the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. Then one day, in a moment of frustration, I sat down and made a list of the essential things I wanted to communicate in my Army novel. I discovered it really wasn't all that much -- which is when it occurred to me I could do this in a shorter form, a novella, setting the entire story in one day, the day the Berlin Wall starts being built. Eureka! I'm pleased with how it turned out.
Ever since coming up with the ending of my feature The Farewell Wake I've had a sense that this project, too, might have special personal significance. But what monkey is still on my back that needs removal? This morning it occurred to me: the monkey is myself! This film might get myself off my back. Indeed, the narrator in the film is very much myself with my issues and his resolution, dropping out to become something of a private hedonist, his dog his companion, sounds very much like a remedy for my own fretting about the world. At least metaphorically. We'll find out soon enough if this notion has legs. I retain a sense that this film is special in my life in some way.
Something else I've been thinking about recently: James Otis burning his life's work. Otis is the man John Adams called "the first Patriot," the leader of the "no taxation without representation" movement, by which he meant representation not divorce. So history, the way things went, drove Otis literally mad and he was hauled out of Boston in a straitjacket, thinking the world had gone mad. After the revolution, he burned all his life's writing, which was going to be edited by his sister, Mercy Otis Warren, who is considered our first playwright. Otis became very depressed that the victorious Americans were still dancing the minuet and acting like regality, especially Hancock and friends.
At any rate, I can see why a man would get so depressed at how the world has changed that he'd destroy his life's work, assuming it meant nothing any more. I've had similar thoughts myself, and I'm sure I'm far from alone. More than once I've come close to deleting this entire blog, for example. But I babble on.
Saturday, October 09, 2010
Community
I say this because today, still in Portland, I have no sense of belonging to community whatever. Indeed, no one in the theater community, where my past activity had been strongest, who has been here less than twenty years has any evidence that I exist. This is not all a consequence of my "retirement" as a playwright. After a theater dedicated a season to my work in the late 80s, "Charles Deemer's Oregon," I became dead as a playwright here. The retrospective was, in fact, a funeral. Only one play was done here in the 90s, a play that bombed despite being a finalist for a prestigious award in Ireland after its premiere there (the play was "Who Forgives?"). My divorce from the local theater community was aided by my sudden obsession with hyperdrama and by the departure of my three supporters: Smith retired, O'Brien left town to care for his father in Ohio, and Fornara died much too young. Had I been single I would have left Portland in the early or mid 90s, I suspect. I didn't like any of the changes in the city. Still don't. Been my wife loves Portland, and here we are. Portland State University asked me to start a screenwriting program, which I did and where I still love teaching, the best thing about the city for me now.
Although my career is dead here, my stage actually widened as I became active on the net. Plays got done in Ireland, Chile, Mexico; students in Sweden and Denmark studied my hyperdramas; I was invited to submit papers to academic meetings, the latest a submission of a series of videos to a 2008 hypertext conference in Pittsburgh (I had attended the first ever hypertext conference at Yale some years before) (see Changing Key). And yet none of this activity and recognition actually gives me a sense of "community." I'm not sure why.
So I work in isolation. That's my sense of what I do. I have little sense of "having an audience." My real audience are my archives at the universities of Oregon and North Carolina, which is to say, I have a stronger sense of writing for future strangers, whom I assume to exist, than for any contemporaries. It's a very different feeling than the feeling of community I had thirty years ago. And perhaps my sense of "a future audience" for my work is an egotistical delusion. I'll never know. If I'm writing only for myself, then that's unfortunate because I don't get as much satisfaction from my work as I did when I was younger. Mainly I get tired. Very tired.
I look forward to finishing the film, putting it online, showing it at Blackbird, and then returning to Alice and my animated chamber opera. Very much look forward to this. Music comes front burner after the film is done.
Of course, I have the strongest sense of all of having lived a charmed, blessed life. It's not hard to find those who haven't.
Friday, October 08, 2010
Interruption
Taking the weekend off to hang with the guests but in truth I look forward to next week when I have three shooting days, close to finishing up.
I am thinking there may be two versions of my film: "a full version" and a "director's cut." That is, if it is longer than I wish, which appears to be the case, I think the only way to reasonably cut it is to eliminate some characters. But I hate to do that since I am working with volunteer actors who have done good work. So there might be a version when I use everyone and a version when I tighten things up at the expense of eliminating a few folks. I know two I could cut, for example, and the main story wouldn't be hurt at all and I'd cut about five minutes. Well, I'll wait until I have it all done and then decide. But I do think eliminating entire characters, rather than tightening scenes, is the way I'd bring it to 90 minutes, which is my goal. I may be looking at around 105 or 110 minutes when I'm done. And maybe it works at that length and my pre-conceived length is just wrong.
I am thinking there may be two versions of my film: "a full version" and a "director's cut." That is, if it is longer than I wish, which appears to be the case, I think the only way to reasonably cut it is to eliminate some characters. But I hate to do that since I am working with volunteer actors who have done good work. So there might be a version when I use everyone and a version when I tighten things up at the expense of eliminating a few folks. I know two I could cut, for example, and the main story wouldn't be hurt at all and I'd cut about five minutes. Well, I'll wait until I have it all done and then decide. But I do think eliminating entire characters, rather than tightening scenes, is the way I'd bring it to 90 minutes, which is my goal. I may be looking at around 105 or 110 minutes when I'm done. And maybe it works at that length and my pre-conceived length is just wrong.
Thursday, October 07, 2010
First Sound Press: Willie Nelson's Crazy. How do You Write a Hit So...
First Sound Press: Willie Nelson's Crazy. How do You Write a Hit So...:
"Willie Nelson wrote Crazy in 1961. He wrote it for country singer Billy Walker, but Walker turned it down. Patsy Cline, a big country sta..."
Nobel Prize Snubs In Literature: 9 Famous Writers Who Should Have Won (PHOTOS)
Graham Greene should be at the top of this list.
Getting better
I'm maybe at 75 or 80% now and as long as I don't have a relapse, recovery should be near.
Father, son, baseball
A nice moment on "Mike and Mike in the Morning" today when Mike G talked about watching the no-hitter last night with his 7-year-old son, who was excited and into it, jumping up and down at every out from the 7th inning on, a cherished moment. Glad he shared it. I recall moments in sports with my own dad, going to see football games at the LA Coliseum. But dad was also into sports I didn't care about like auto racing and boxing, though listening to boxing on the radio is a live memory from my youth.
Wednesday, October 06, 2010
It's loud in Philadelphia!
Relief
Got my class work done, which takes the pressure off tomorrow.
Damn, my new hand pump makes a GREAT cup of coffee!
Enjoying the Phillies game, in sync with a ton of relatives in New Jersey rooting for them as well.
Damn, my new hand pump makes a GREAT cup of coffee!
Enjoying the Phillies game, in sync with a ton of relatives in New Jersey rooting for them as well.
Leisurely work
Lots to do for class and house chores today. H taking guests on a tour, I believe. I'll hang here and try to finish my work so I don't have the pressure to do it before class tomorrow.
Looks like the film may come in at 1 hr 45 mins or so, which I think is too long, so I need to look closely at where I can cut scenes.
I am actually feeling better today. Knock on my wooden head.
Looks like the film may come in at 1 hr 45 mins or so, which I think is too long, so I need to look closely at where I can cut scenes.
I am actually feeling better today. Knock on my wooden head.
Sick House
Ah, the guests arrived sick so now we can exchange germs. Otherwise I've been feeling better ... now to avoid a relapse of guest germs.
Tuesday, October 05, 2010
Office hours
Moving slowly but coughing less -- and nothing to do today but show a film. Home to guests, however. Not my favorite environment.
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