Pet Peeves - film and ads

I had in mind a topic to blog about which had nothing to do with what is now the first pet peeve on my mind. First, I'm sure some insufferable boob is going to say, "If you don't like ads there is nobody forcing you to use the website." That is the kind of remark that deserves a slap in the head with a dead fish. I finally make my way to google and blogger and click "create new post" and lately what I get is a blank screen with nothing but an ad banner and at the bottom a "send feedback" button which I may have use for. If I want to actually see where to put my subject line and the body of my blog entry I have to click refresh. This I find out purely by experimenting. When I sign into a hotmail account, I see at the top an indication like, "a password is not enough," which looks like the name of a philosophically horrific song raising money for internet stupidity. To circumvent that I have to highlight the address bar and either go to another site or type hotmail again and then I am in. So I'm learning two things from msn in that case: They want to force me to give them a phone number or credit card or some other perhaps false verification of identity for an account I have had for 13 years (which is something I don't respect) and the security of their stupid system can be gotten around (which I also can't say I respect). I have heard that something on the horizon will replace hotmail accounts entirety, but have received no alerts and it may have merely been hype for the new service. Some of us have records of hotmail messages archived in such a way that there would be a loss if they were deleted. I don't know how to fight these things without seeming naive. What I had in mind was to talk about filmmaker pet peeves. Mainly the way that aspects of production are played off without context. An actor brags, "We don't need to use monitors or video assist. The camera man can do that. And I don't like the director looking at a monitor during the take. He should be looking at me." Or somebody says, "Oh, out director doesn't bother with storyboards. He just makes up his mind as we go along. That keeps it all fresh. he doesn't need the crutch of storyboard sketches." There seems to be nobody responding to those kinds of sound bytes, and so they are taken at face value. This drives me nuts. About the actor saying a director should be looking at him/her during the take, the actor is important but so is context and perspective. Even if the director is ONLY concerned about the actor, the lens and the lighting and the way the actor is framed and frankly whether a moment within a take is actually IN FRAME at all are all elements of that. And the actor's job is largely concentration. If the reality of the director standing there in his/her eye-line and staring at them is important, that actor has problems ACTING!!!!!! There IS NO director between action and cut, only your character and whatever other fictional person should be imagined there. Furthermore, the director has to sign off on the shot. It is nice if other people do to, but the director HAS TO be able to give the minimum direction of YES or NO. The director can sign-off blindly and take the cinematographer's word for it, but chances are the cinematographer might not be operating the camera either and if HE isn't using a monitor to at least see how the lights interact with the scene then it would come down to the camera operator's sign-off. However competent or extraordinary each member of the crew may be, the director should WANT to be the person who signs off. Especially because there may always be one detail that shouldn't be taken for granted and he should have to take responsibility when it comes to edit and there are no surprises about something being there you don't want or something missing that should be there. About the storyboard, this is not spelled out enough. The kind of storyboards to avoid are the ones that a studio might give to the director of a tent-pole film and say "just shoot this." A good storyboard for s similar size film might be Paul Verhoven's personal storyboards for Starship Troopers which depict the shooting plan pretty much as it emerged on screen, and with the added benefit that he happens to be an excellent draftsman so the illustrations are true to the subjects. Whether it happens all the time or not, I like the idea of the director drawing each frame within a shot and having a plan. If a movie were 100 pages of screenplay, I estimate that two and a half weeks of 8-hour days could be spent on the director doing the first pass of thumbnail storyboards for a feature. That is thought and time and close regard of the scenes that will not be spent during the high tension of making the movie itself when time is of the essence. Plans can be modified or adapted as circumstances change, but having done storyboards makes a person mentally prepared for how to use the camera as visual reinforcement to contain the relationships and moments of the story. They can also help narrow down locations. If someone expects to be a beggar and not a chooser with locations or sets, they might compromise the best way to shoot a scene. For example, being unable to get the camera far enough away from the actors to blur out the background because the location is too confined might be something that they are willing to compromise or it might be an argument that can be defended persuasively with storyboarding (and with pointing to the sketch and explaining "this is the character and this is scribble is the blur because he is isolated from others and should have his own focal plane"). The camera (except in faux documentary style which I dislike) should not be playing catch-up with the actors. There is nothing unusual about giving the actor the edge of the stage and the confines in which he/she has to work. Sometimes it will be just their hands acting in close-up, sometimes just the face, and sometimes head-to-toe body language. The actor's requirements include technical competence. They can certainly bring something to the table, and may have a better-motivated start position or an idea of how to be introduced. But even those are best as early discussions instead of last minute so their implications can be applied throughout the story and not as a whim or as a concession to a star's ego. If you are lucky, Samuel L. Jackson has a character-motivated way to first show his religious character in Black Snake Moan, in a prayer-like position leaning on a vehicle. If you are unlikely and actress doesn't feel like wearing the hat the movie is named after and scenes that have already been done with it have to be abandoned, as detailed in "Claire's Hat" the bootleg documentary by Bruce McDonald. I'm sure there are other examples but those were the ones I had to get off my chest today. In case anyone is reading.

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.

The Dictator, Mel Gibson, History and Comedy

The Dictator is an outstanding satire which is not burning up the box office in America as it should and has gotten temped ratings on rotten tomatoes. Too bad. A movie that swings for the fences will impress those it was meant to impress (people like myself who find it refreshing) and will alienate people who are either strict formalists who insist a movie can only be a satire or a rom-com. It will also annoy morons, but we'll leave that aside. I love the fact that this is both a satire and a somewhat disingenuous rom-com with a protagonist who gets to do heroic deeds and still has a back-story and attitudes that are off-putting. Too many movies are running for office. This movie expects you to know when it is giving movies the finger. Some people don't get it. I got it and appreciate it. This is the sort of movie I would like to be doing. Get the Gringo appears to be released somewhere and I like what I am hearing about it, that it has the quips of a Lethal Weapon and it has a tone like Robert Rodriguez flicks. I look forward to Machete Kills, in which Mel Gibson is supposed to play a bad guy. This all happens around the same time Joe Eszterhas is coming out with an e-book called Heaven and Mel which will fine-tune his own spin on the creative falling out he had with the actor-director over the Maccabee script. I have only the other day heard that he released audio of Mel's alleged rant to him in Costa Rica, but it is clearly from another room and kind of low key as rants go. Mel yells at him for not writing a darn thing over 14 months of being employed to do a screenplay, then yells "Who wants dinner? Yum!" or something. No big deal. He also apparently appeared on Jay Leno and (appropriately) made light of it. It is a shame. I have a copy of Basic Instinct which is entertaining. I also have a book, "The Devil's Guide to Hollywood," wherein one presumes our guide is Joe. After the downbeat visit to Costa Rica (where another writer was having better luck writing with Mel, one Randall Wallace who wrote Braveheart and directed Mel in We Were Soldiers) Joe did finally whip-up a screenplay draft. But it was apparently slip-shot and not reflective enough of what Mel wanted. Warners rejected it and then Mel rejected it. Warners had already paid Joe for the work thus far. Now without Joe's spin, it is the tale of a screenwriter who hasn't cranked anything out since An Allan Smithee Film, Burn, Hollywood, Burn in 1997 if you don't count the 2006 foreign polo film Children of Glory which has three other credited screenwriters and I've never heard of it. Getting his draft of the Maccabee script rejected by Warners would be such a blow to this latter phase of his career he knows his posterity is at stake so he has to make something else of it. Why Mel or Warners chose him to work on this material is unknown. Maybe this time-honored story of Jewish history needed a "Showgirls" touch. Joe wants to amp up the perception that Mel Gibson is not only a lunatic but anti-Semitic. Is The Passion of the Christ a slam against Jews? I didn't feel it as such when I watched it. And it didn't motivate anyone to go out and commit acts of violence against Jews either. It is a very contemplative film. I don't know if Hindus deny that Hindus killed Gandhi or whether the Nation of Islam says their members had nothing to do with killing Malcolm X. The facts don't seem to be much in dispute. People see evil done do Jews OSTENSIBLY for the killing of Christ and therefore can't suffer the fact that not only a Jew named Jesus got crucified and that some high-ranking Jews insisted on it but that crucifixion was common, as was public flogging. I have not heard any dispute of the line "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do" spoken supposedly by Jesus, which would (one thinks) wipe the slate clean for all of JC's persecutors. But even then to not know "what they do" is to assume they don't realize they are killing the Son of God but believe they are merely torturing and killing an ordinary person for blasphemy. So any way you slice it, people have been barbaric and stupid throughout history. Hopefully we will get to see Randall Wallace's Viking film which might very well push Viking violence to the limit. It's a little too easy for people to whine that they don't agree with their employer. It creates a climate where famous employers can't write you a letter or an e-mail without fear that you will release it to the public. I likely will read Joe's e-book, but I already don't respect it. Sascha Baron Cohen (The Dictator himself) has made a couple of digs against Mel Gibson but they are inspired digs. I can respect both in that case. Gibson is made an easy target for accusations of racism. Hopefully meanwhile I will soon find a copy of Get the Gringo. Apparently it is in theaters overseas.