Thanksgiving reading
Some of the things I’ve been reading while at home over the break:
- Cal Newport has a new book that I can’t wait to read.
- Amazon launched a cloud-based screenwriting app. I would never trust stuff to just live in one place–I need to have redundancy in backup (hard drive + cloud) but I might look at submitting some scripts to Amazon Studios.
- “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us”
Identity and the other
From Why We Should Mourn and Cheer Grantland’s Demise by Fredrik deBoer:
In the era of the internet, our opinions often feel like what we are, like we have no self aside from our opinions. And what better way to define a self than by contrasting it with all the selves it’s not?
…and…
As is typical of 21st century life, we have a far clearer picture of how to be a loser than we do of how to be fulfilled and happy.
Reminds me of The Last Pyschiatrist.
Kiarostami on curiosity and cinema
But producers and directors of cinema have decided that the seats in the theaters have been made to transform people’s minds to lazy minds. As soon as they enter a theater they must become moron consumers who must be fed information. Those same people, when they leave the theater, when they look behind the curtains they are curious about their neighbors, they can guess if their neighbors are siblings or a couple, how old they are, what their occupation is. They are curious about each other and they can understand each other without being fed information. Why should it be different in cinema?
Don’t surround yourself with smarter people
There is an idea that I have been guilty of uncritically parroting and promoting in the past: surround yourself with smarter people. Another popular version is never be the smartest guy in the room.
Beneath the humblebragging in both versions… there is a basic logical issue: If the smarter people are dumb enough to surround themselves with the likes of you, they are dumber than you, which means they’re smart and you’re dumb. Wait. What?…
My alternative to the heuristic, which many of you have heard in off-blog conversations, is that I am only interested in people as long as they are unpredictable to me. If I can predict what you’ll do or say, I’ll lose interest in you rapidly. If you can keep regularly surprising me in some way, forcing me to actually think in unscripted ways in order to respond, I’ll stay interested. It’s reciprocal. I suspect the people with whom I develop long-term relationships are the ones I surprise regularly. The ones who find me predictable don’t stick around. We’re not talking any old kind of surprise, but non-sequiturs. Surprises that you can’t really relate to anything else, and don’t know what to do with. Mind-expanding surprises rather than gap-closing surprises.
— Don’t Surround Yourself With Smarter People by Venkatesh Rao
Timelessness in writing
If you shoot for timelessness in your writing, consciously orient yourself to the upper realm, the shining truths and the inexhaustible symbols etc., you will — by a kind of law — produce drivel. You will waft and drift and never get a toehold. If, on the other hand, you bet it all on the particular, really dive unreservedly into specificity, with no thought for higher things, you will find — inevitably, magnificently — that your novel about three plumbers in Milwaukee in 1987 becomes a singing blueprint of human significance.
– James Parker in Should Art Be Timeless or Should It Speak to Something More Current? (via)
Only people who don’t give a damn have style
Canseco has been described as a charmer and a clown, but in fact he is a rogue, a genuine one, and genuine rogues are rare, inside baseball and out. It’s not enough to flout the law, to be a rogue–break promises, shirk responsibilities, cheat–you must also, at least some of the time, and with the same abandon, do your best, play by the rules, keep faith with your creditors and dependents, obey orders, throw out the runner at home plate with a dead strike from deep right field. Above all, you must do these things, as you do their opposites, for no particular reason, because you feel like it or do not, because nothing matters, and everything’s a joke, and nobody knows anything, and most of all, as Rhett Butler once codified for rogues everywhere, because you do not give a damn
…and this…
We have no style, you and I; only people who don’t give a damn have style.
– “On Canseco” from Manhood For Amateurs by Michael Chabon
Really enjoyed this book. And Canseco would’ve made a good Godard character.
Some very good tips on screenwriting
Some very good tips on screenwriting from @briankoppelman:
6. Of the many supposed rules of writing, the only one that’s legit is ‘write every day.’
and
60. Many of us have what gamblers call leak – a habit or enthusiasm that knocks us off course. Figure out what yours is and close it.
(via)
Creativity vs. imagination
Unlike creativity, imagination is an appreciative skill with an external locus, rather than an instrumental capacity with an internal locus. To notice a pattern in current events that could serve as a premise for a movie is imagination. To be able to develop that premise into an actual screenplay with compelling characters, fresh dialog and an engrossing plot is creativity. You feed creativity by making things. You feed imagination by being curious about things beyond your own shadow.
Write what you feel bad about
Budding writers are told write what you know. They should be told write what you feel bad about.
Why I made a web series and not… something else
I’d be lying if I said that I’m a huge fan of web series. I’m not. I’m a huge fan of some web series, but I don’t seek out or watch web series in the way I seek out and watch good TV shows of films.1
So that might be a little rule breaking. Novelists should read a lot of novels and filmmakers should watch a lot of films, right? I don’t personally know anyone that watches a lot of web series. And Words Fail Me was more of a series of short films than a serialized story, for whatever that’s worth.
But I had a few reasons for making a web series, as opposed to a short film or a feature film.
One reason is that I eventually want to make a feature film.2 I had a lot of the artistic tools necessary for writing and directing feature film, but I was lacking in production experience. In fact, this was the first thing I ever directed, aside from a few improv shows, which is a fundamentally different kind of directing (usually called coaching).
I had read a lot of blogs and several books on film production and I had been on many sets as an actor in friends’ projects, student films, and one professional set of a commercial. So I had some familiarity with the process but the best way to learn any craft is to just fucking do it and make mistakes and learn from the mistakes.
I wanted to experience the filmmaking process from start to finish, but on a smaller scale, and this was a great way to do that. You get more or less the same learning with much smaller financial and time risk. A smaller project meant I could fail faster. You get all the experiences of a bigger project, things that you might not run up against when filming a short—trying to schedule multiple locations and multiple actors and a crew, feeding everyone, and a release plan that’s pretty low-budget but still involves a fair amount of planning.
The upside is that you uncover areas of risk without putting a lot of money on the line. There are a lot of things that, when they go wrong, can ruin any filmed project, but there are also a lot of things that can go wrong without ruining the project. The goal was to identify the former, which I call fatal risks, because those are the ones you want to insure against, prevent, and avoid.
Here’s another reason, which is more more existential than practical. I had been wanting to do more video work for a while, since mid-2013 and after about a year of saying to myself and my friends that I wanted to do more of it, I finally got sick of myself talking about it and decided to just shoot something.
“Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.”
–William Blake
I read that quote in a great little book that I read a long time ago, called If You Want to Write.
I try to be careful about sitting around wanting to do something for too long without doing it—the risk is that I create a sort of inertia for myself. I don’t want to be in the habit of not doing what I want to do. So after I can sense the inertia building up for a bit too long, there’s like this internal pressure for me to either drop it entirely and forget about it or to just fucking do it already.
And finally, I wanted to make something that I was proud of. I wanted to look back at what we created and have it stand as something that I’d be happy to let anyone see as a sample of my work. And more personally, I wanted to be able to watch the episodes and laugh. I definitely accomplished this goal. In fact, I accomplished all the goals I set out to accomplish.
Thanks for reading and thanks for watching.