Spaghetti short

A short video about leftovers as breakfast.

Busted Watch: a video short

Here is a 30 second HDV video short about hanging onto a crappy watch just because it still works. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLk8ni9hkKU

mini-review: The Beaver

This is the first of my reviews pulling down DVDs from my own collection. I hesitate to include this one because I notice a disproportionate number of blog posts about Mel Gibson. Strange. I'll hold off any reviews on his other flicks until after I have been through a few others here. Pardon the hiss of sound on this one. The shot-gun mic I was using is not up to snuff. Waste of money. But at least this gets across my glib, flip remarks about The Beaver.

July 21 Murder Near Jobsite

I was working as a sort of guest guard for mostly weekend night shifts during the Olympics at CTV in Scarborough. Most of it was uneventful apart from being told I take washroom runs more often than most guards. I figure over the course of 12 hours three or four is reasonable. On a dark note, I had a couple of unfortunate clashes with the main site supervisor who will remain nameless. The last of which was a matter of which shift I agreed to do. In July he called me at home and asked me to do an additional shift which was Monday 06 August from 1900 hours to 0700 hours. Agreed. Simple enough. I wrote it down on m home calender - Monday 06 August was a civic holiday as well, so it was especially marked in my memory as maybe a possible few extra dollars. The Monday 06 shift arrives and I work it and no problem. My next shift should be Friday. Then Thursday the 9th just after 1900 hours or 7pm I get a call from this supervisor. Maybe he is the account director. I don't know. I've been calling him supervisor. I'm at home chilling and almost went to a matinee of Jaws which would have meant never getting this call. I should have gone to the show as it turns out. Instead of saying what was clearly the truth, "Gee, William, I screwed up and I should have asked you to do the Thursday shift. Can you help us out and come in? I accidentally had someone put you in the schedule for that and posted it but I didn't ask" he immediately starts with an accusatory tone. "William, why aren't you on site? You have a shift." I say no, I work Friday. He says he called me in July and got me to work Thurday the 9th and I remind him it was Monday the 6th. I tell him I guess I can come in at the last minute but it would have been better if I had known. He says it was on the same schedule posted "for the past 2 weeks." At this point I could have told him that Blessing, one of the other guards, asked my last name on Monday because she was apparently in the office correcting the schedule. Unfortunately nobody told me that it was to add me into any other shift. I did not want to bring her into the conversation. The onus should have been on the supervisor to ask me to take the shift, especially since I was a visiting guard and could take shifts from other sites while off. He knew that, hence his call in July, which I contended was about Monday. And I reminded him that I only had one Monday-into-Tuesday shift and it was the one on the 6th. Therefore that was the one he had booked me into. His response was "I'm the BOSS." Even though I agreed to come in, he said, "You are a no-show. You are a NO-SHOW. I am going to make sure (***the company we work for***) knows about it. This is how easily life can go from sane to insane. I reinforced my comment by saying the only times I've been in there on a Thursday were on July 26 and then the following week by accident where I was reminded it was just a one-off and I start my weekend shifts on Friday. FRIDAY. Extra reinforcement of logic. He claimed that he was aware I accidentally came in the previous Thursday and that it somehow indicated confirmation that Thursday the 9th was an agreed-upon shift. I say no, as it was a week away and clearly I came in and worked the MONDAY 6 shift which can't be overlooked. (It somehow did not occur to him to change his story to claim that he asked me to do two shifts; he stuck with the idea that it was Thursday and not Monday he asked me to do. Sheez!!) Now even though it was clearly his mistake, and it was a minor one, rather than accept the slightest responsibility he decided it was easier to throw me under the bus. He concluded - even though I was going to drag my tired ass in for this 12 hour (now it would be 11-hour) night shift - he went so far as to say to me, "I am going to make sure that once this Olympic coverage is done you don't come back." Wow. WOW! That's a pretty hurtful jab, considering that I did nothing wrong. Of course it is tempered by the fact that I wasn't SUPPOSED to come back. He had only decided I was of use as a night-shift gatehouse guard. He had already decided a month previous that I shouldn't be in regular rotation because after touring the complex with him I couldn't immediately verbally give directions to the places I had been. And this is a place that everyone calls a maze. Not to disparage the rest of the staff, because I find them generally nice and the few I've interacted with regularly were quite helpful and accommodating. And there is agreement that the fall-back of a line like "I'm the boss!" does sound like something this glob of shit would say. Maybe he does have friends at our head office who have kept me out of shifts elsewhere. Hard to tell. But for what it is worth, I am not going to be discrete about corrupt supervisors who have become too comfy at a site and become like Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. He may not be chopping off heads of natives but he has an unintentionally comical swagger and the security computer has a desktop photo displaying his precious black fancy car. The sort of car you don't expect a security site supervisor to have. He must have made peace with corruption long ago. Of course, that much is just speculation. A little more charitable than his own speculation about me. The first real offensive call I got from him was on Thursday the 26 (again, the only Thursday I was asked to come in; they don't want to give a lot of overtime) when he phoned me in the gatehouse from his own home to ask about the morning of July 21. He blatantly say, "Not just the cops but I think you should have seen something or heard something. Were you watching a movie or sleeping or what?" I told him even with the A/C on and the radio I likely would have heard a scream if there was one and that I have felt awful talking to family and friends about it and speculating about how a murder could have happened so close by and maybe I could have caught the guy or helped the victim. He left the conversation at that and nobody corrected me. I had to read on-line a news item about the death. Police did catch the killer, partly due to finger-prints on the car that had been abandoned at the roadside. But the murder HAD NOT TAKEN PLACE NEAR OUR PROPERTY !!!!! The victim had been stabbed and killed elsewhere and then driven and dropped in the ditch nearby out site. So in the best of circumstances, the most I would have heard is a car pulling over to the shoulder of a busy street and (hidden from my view by trees) someone dropping a body (whatever that sounds like from half a block away) into the grass slope. And since I can't leave my gatehouse and walk around there is nothing for me to see. According to dickhead, the CCTV cameras show that the killer after dumping the body ran through the opening in the far fence (not on the property) and walked down the court or driveway to flee and may have dropped the knife out there. None of which would read as anything significant in the dead of night. The images I have taken with my still camera (some video setting shots) show how difficult any of that would have been to see. Also, my supervisor would know that I am not the one with CCTV camera access. That is the main console inside, and even when police started to gather on the street and I phoned that guard to pan around he could not spot a body. We helped the police in way way we could and they looked around, but they knew our involvement could only be after the fact and I am certain (considering my own direct interaction with the detectives that night) they knew darn well that the person was not stabbed near us but was dumped and all of our involvement could only be after the fact. I am furious that this goddamn jackass in charge had no problem letting me think I could have saved someone. . . and also had apparent ignorance of what that site looks like from the post I was at.

pitch in with pitching

Bitching should be part of the heading here, but I wasn't bold enough to do that. All I know about this blog is that I may start posting pitches here for my scripts and videotaped movie reviews. The process of retelling myself a film story helps clarify and simplify it. Some details may fall by the wayside, but maybe this is the way to discover what ahould fall out. Some ideas or details I fall in love with, even directorial ideas that I have already imposed on a script not yet finished. Have to make sure I'm not going out of the way and straying from the dramatic center of a story to include stylish wanking. I've also considered using these blogs for knocking off "four pages" as described by Julia Cameron's book The Artist's Way. Just an excuse to dump out any random trash cluttering up my head soit isn't the driving force of my creative writing or infecting it. But most of the clutter is exactly what I want to generate, so just getting it out of my system and having it sit unread and unusable or having to cull through it all for morstles that might be of use is not enough. I've put a handful of pitches into my virtual office at zoetrope.com and have changed the office name to Pitch Bitch. People do rely on oral instruction and presentation, to a point where may people in autority can barely write an e-mail. That's a hurdle for me, because I'd rather fuss over something than be a less intimidsting version of me. This pitch-focus means less fussing, mainly streem of consciousness description of a project. We'll see if it works. I have such a backlog of scripts and projects. The stories may as well have their structure and be contained even in their most minimalist and conversational form.