The Drunken Bachelorette

For a couple years I worked in post-production of The Bachelorette.  It was as miserable as it sounds.  Watching unedited interviews was tedious and made one lose their faith in humanity.  It was a little interesting hearing other people talk about how it came out in editing.  (I never watched a full episode of the final product,) and to see it parodied on Burning Love, which starred some of the former members of The State.

But one season there was a bit of enjoyment to distract from the tedium; the year the bachelorette was an alcoholic.

The producers always had wine on the set to add to the phony romantic setting.  There were wine glasses often scattered around set, and a glass of wine was always poured for the subject in the interviews, as well as one for the camera person and the producer.  This one bachelorette, I can't remember her name, always had her fill.

She always finished her glass before the interview was over and typically asked for more, which she often got.  However, one day they were slow and bringing her wine, so she reached over and drank from the producer's glass.  She emptied it.  So she reached over and grabbed the camera person's glass.  She emptied that.  All along her voice became slurred and she became more and more belligerent.

Soon she refused to answer any more questions until they gave her more wine.  They said she'd have some after the interview. The producer asked another question and the bachelorette went silent.  They kept trying to get her to answer the question, and she answered back by tapping on her glass.

That was the one season I actually tried to watch some episodes.  It was so amusing.  Most of the time you couldn't tell that the editors re-edited what everyone was saying to match the narrative of the show.  They had even made it look like one woman quit because she had been scorned when the real reason was because the producers were trying to make it look like she needed a man when in actuality she was a very capable mountain climber who was looking for companionship, not someone to take care of her.

But with the drunken bachelorette, it was hard to hide.  She would slip from speaking coherently to slurring her words to back to normal to sloshed.  You could simply watch and see what had been taped later in the evening and what had been earlier.

The American Game Audition Tapes

About a year after I got to LA, I started developing my first movie.  It was a war film about a group of enemy soldiers during the Civil War who stop fighting for a few days and play a series of baseball games.  The movie was first to be called Ball Hill but it was renamed The American Game.  I would wind up spending the majority of my "career" just trying to get it made.

In 2002 a producer named Alex Barder got involved.  Alex was a real character, and I mean that in every sense both positive and negative.  He was sort of the stereotypical producer: shallow, bull-headed, yet charming and determined.  He was obsessed with the script, and he wanted it worked on day and night.  He would sometimes call me late at night or early in the morning to work on a single line.  I would say this was inspiring, but the changes he wanted made typically involved dumbing it down for an audience he believed weren't smart enough to appreciate a thoughtful movie.  He liked to brag about how sophisticated he was because he liked the movie Amadeus.

Despite his drabacks, he did get it almost as far as it ever got in 2003 when he got a casting director involved named Alyssa Weisberg.  Alyssa had left the industry for a little while, and was looking to get back in.  She worked on American Game to sort of re-establish her contacts.  In contacting the agents and managers she knew, she found that they wouldn't send their well-known actors to a movie that didn't have any funding or attachments.  Martin Sheen stepped in to help, and lent me his name as attached to the project.  Suddenly, those agents responded to Alyssa, and sent their actors.

It helped that Alex was claiming that there was an investor.  It was a partial lie.  He had some investors in Florida who said they might invest once he had some names attached.  That's why we needed Alyssa.  The usual catch 22 had been keeping us from moving further because we needed the actors to get the money, but we needed the numbers to even see the actors.  Having Martin and that half truth got us past that wedge.

For two months we saw a long string of actors.  All we needed were a couple celebrities to get the funding, but the agents had required that we audition their other clients first, and Alyssa wanted to get more actors reading to build up her own portfolio.  I took whatever time I could away from work to go in.  We held the auditions on a meeting room in Alex's building, and met with the big names at a hotel in Santa Monica.

After weeks of this process, I started to get a bit confused.  Didn't we have the names we needed to take the next step?  Nothing happened.  And after a few months and we had finished seeing actors, still nothing was happening.  When Alex moved on to another film and came to me saying that Tom Sizemore was interested, I realized he had no plans to do anything with the actors we had seen.  Known to be abusive and on drugs, Sizemore had nowhere near the star power of others we had already seen.  And so I moved on from Alex.  The movie never got made.

Alyssa went on to great fame though.  Alex later told me the story of what happened.  She was approached by a production company that needed to see some actors quickly.  They didn't have time to go through the audition process, so they wanted to see actors who had auditioned for something else.  She showed them the tape from The American Game.  The producers picked the ones they liked and brought them in for further auditions.

The show was Lost.  Alyssa became the casting director for JJ Abrams, and many of his projects have been cast off of the audition tapes of The American Game.

Why '80s Movies Were So Good

Today, the film industry is wrought with movies trying to relive the glory of the '80s.  You would think it was a golden age, one that is to be relived again and again.  To be clear, this happens every decade where the nostalgia of 30 years prior is glamorized.  It was no coincidence that one of the top shows of the 2000s was That '70s Show.  And in the 1980s, one would think the 1950s were being relived.  This was even the joke in Back to the Future II when Marty goes into an '80s restaurant and it looks like a '50s diner.

But there was a specific quality to '80s movies which made them worth remembering; what inspired so many of us to want to become filmmakers.  What's crazy to me is that, despite all the '80s remakes, producers can't seem to figure out what that formula was.  The basic element of why they were special eludes them.  And yet it was simple.

THEY WERE ORIGINAL!

Despite the '80s copying so much of the '50s, the movies made during that era were still mostly original.  The filmmakers of the time certain drew from the past for inspiration.  Star Wars and Indiana Jones, perhaps the two biggest tentpoles of the decade, were derived from old serials, but they were not remakes of old serials.  They weren't "properties to be exploited," they were original stories that took elements from the past to improve their stories.

Today, when studios try to remake an '80s film to recapture its glory, they are missing the basic element that actually made it special, it's newness.  If you want to truly recapture the '80s, do something original.

Audition Tape of The State

Sophomore year of NYU filmschool, students used to have a pair of classes called Sight and Sound Film, and Sight and Sound Video.  There's probably a similar, yet altered version of it today.

These classes were the true immersion part of film school.  In the film part, students broke into teams of 4 and each made 5 films while assisting the other 3 members on theirs.  That led to 20 films in 1 semester.  In the video course, you did this, plus you worked on 3 live events while working on every other student's live events.  Needless to say, it was an exhausting year; but it was the year you learned the most, and the basis of the whole education.

As my final live video project, I had decided to gather the most funny people I knew to perform an improv session.  Seeing the show No Activity today, I realize that was sort of the concept I was going for.  I had approached a few already who were interested, but when I got to Kerry Kenny, who lived down the hall from me, she told me that the members of her comedy group The New Group, were looking to do an audition tape for MTV's upcoming show You Wrote it, You Watch it.  She asked if we could just tape one of their sketches for that.  I said sure, and adjusted the plans accordingly.

The video at the bottom was the result.  They sent the tape in and got the job.  That later led to their own show The State.  I contacted them as I was graduating and asked to be a part.  David Wayne, who was in charge, at first responded, but when he found I was searching for work, he suddenly started blowing me off.  I later learned that they didn't really have the budget for someone else; but rather than doing the mature thing and simply telling me this, he played the childish game of hiding from me; using the front desk as a screen, and saying he just didn't have time.

I've always believed in the talents of that group, all the way through Reno 911.  But it was very unfortunate that neither David nor Kerry could simply talk to me.  To be clear, I don't believe they owe me anything per se.  They were accepted onto MTV due to their own merits, not because of anything I did directing that video.  But in most aspects of society there is a certain amount of gratitude people have; to pay back to someone who helped them get where they are in the form of at least a recommendation or something.  I've always been disappointed that they couldn't spare that basic courtesy, and to this day continue to blow me off.

What I really should have done was make it a stipulation as part of the video, that if they got the job, I go with them.

Why Watching Online Movie Critics Makes Me Feel Better

Some of the most popular channels on Youtube are movie critics.  Their rise has come because of how much a producer could get with the smaller investment.  A content creator can tape him or herself in a room, or even just record their voice, and let the clips of the movies provide the higher production value.  Since these movies have their own marketing departments, audiences already know what they are.  And since Youtube worked out a fair use clause to utilize movie footage, they could air their reviews and even monetize them.

In some ways I feel guilty for watching so many of these shows rather than searching harder for more original content by people who are willing to take the risk and not ride on the coattails of premade products.  However, I've found that there's something very cathartic about watching the critics slam on bad movies.  There were obvious reasons for this, but as I got to thinking about it, there were more reasons for me that go beyond the usual viewer.

When my own scripts and projects got rejected, I was willing to accept that there could be something better.  Whatever they did choose would probably be a better film, something that I would aspire to with my own writing.  Whenever a film got accepted into a festival mine didn't get into, I thought the same thing.  Then I would watch them...

My discouragement came from the fact that there was nothing to look up to; nothing to aspire to.  What I had presented may not have been perfect, but it was certainly better than what they were choosing.  Added to my frustration was the fact that I was then told that no, I was wrong.  The production companies, studios, and film festivals were right in their choices.  After all, they were the ones in power.  They made more money than me.  Their careers were going great.  They're right and I'm wrong.

Channels like Nostalgia Critic, Lindsay Ellis, Red Letter Media, and Your Movie Sucks beg to differ.  In fact, they've specifically taken on some of the movies that I got rejected in favor of.  Being outside of the industry, they feel no need to conform, or kiss the ass of anyone "important."  They actually scoff at Hollywood's self-importance.

THAT is cathartic.  It may not give me a career or change Hollywood, but it definitely makes me feel better to see movies that are objectively bad and producers who believe they're right about everything get called out on their bullshit.

The Screenplay Formula and Why Movies are so Homogenized

You might hear a lot of people question why so many movies have such a similar tone; as if they're all of the same genre, or made by a few filmmakers with exactly the same tastes.  You may have noticed this yourself and added your voice to the plethora of bloggers, vloggers, and other fans who have expressed their frustrations at how all movies seem alike now.

This might seem a bit like the old man going, "it' ain't like the good ol' days," but there's a strong truth to it, and a reason for it.  As an example, when Star Wars and Star Trek movies came out in the late '70s and early '80s, there was a strong distinction between them.  You went to Star Wars and got an action packed adventure.  You went to Star Trek and got an intriguing mystery.  Even the action scenes were completely different.  In Star Wars you got fast cuts with small ships or individuals shooting rapid fire shots at one another.  In Star Trek you had longer wide shots of large ships laboriously turning on one another while their crews discussed the best way to win.

Neither style was better.  It was like going to a restaurant.  No one wants the same food every day.  If you want Mexican food, you go to a Mexican restaurant.  If you want Italian food, you go to an Italian restaurant.  You switch it up to have a variety.  Hell, even films made by the same director had very different feels.  Take for instance Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark versus Jaws.  Their tone and style was so different that they seem like they're made by completely different filmmakers.

But now you could replace the title of one film with another and hardly anyone would notice.  In computer gaming terms, it's like changing the skins.  So what caused this?  Well, there are numerous theories, and I'm sure many of them have truth as any subject of this magnitude will naturally have a lot of answers.  But I've come to believe there's one overall reason.

Screenplay formulas.

For decades, filmmakers and theorists have been trying to narrow down what makes a film "work."  Understanding this will cause filmmaking to be less risky, and solve psychological mysteries of taste.  So people set about writing books on screenwriting, observing what has been respected and loved in movies, and trying to capture the reason for the magic in them.  The result of all this research was a multitude of formulas.  Books from Adventures in the Screen Trade to The Foundations of Screenwriting to Story to the Writer's Journey all try to identify the genie in the bottle.

These books do provide a basis for good practices in screenwriting.  For instance, they remind a writer to not linger too long in their introduction of the characters and the situation.  They provide guidance on moving the plot forward, and ideas for creating dynamic story beats.  These are positive guidelines to follow.

The Hypocrisy of the Academy Award Popular Film Category

This year the Academy Awards tried to add the popular film category; an attempt to appease viewers that ultimately got mocked and failed.  This category is widely seen to have been added because of two things: the popularity of Black Panther, a bandwagon upon which the Academy wanted to jump without actually considering it for best picture, and lower ratings of the show in general.

I'm actually not going to talk about whether or not Black Panther deserves to win, or even a nomination.  It was a very good movie, and it also had some glaring flaws.  Most of all, though, the whole subject of its merit brings out the absurdity of what a "best picture" is.  Can we really declare a single movie to be the best when there are so many genres and styles?  Isn't it like comparing apples and oranges to a degree?

But what I find particularly ludicrous is the hypocrisy that created this apparent need for a popular category.  The idea that something popular needs a separate category from best implies that if something makes a lot of money, it is inherently inferior to something that doesn't make a lot of money.  While certainly the motivation for wealth can be separate from the motivation for art, the idea that something that is popular can't be great is the very wrongful thinking that caused Hitchcock to never win a regular award, and why one eluded Spielberg for so long.

But what of you, Academy Awards?  Isn't the major reason why you're doing this so you keep your audience?  We all hear you every time you complain that the audience numbers are shrinking.  If the Academy Awards really believed that art and commerce are so separate, why are they so concerned with their own ratings?  It seems to me that if you're going to frown upon popular films that make money and smugly hold films that don't on a pedestal, then you shouldn't be so concerned about your own wealth.

But if ratings are so important, maybe stop looking down on those producers who are literally doing the exact same thing as you.

The Hollywood Reporter and Titanic

I worked at The Hollywood Reporter as a temp for a couple years.  While there, I listed films that were being made, as well as box office results on Mondays.  The most interesting of these was when Titanic came out.

First, as it was coming close to release, everyone was certain it was going to be a failure.  I mean everyone, including people who would deny it today.

One might think that this was proven wrong on opening weekend, but it wasn't.  Titanic was not a huge success when it released.  In fact, its initial numbers were... adequate, but certainly nothing amazing.  All those reporters and editors who had predicted its failure chuckled and went on wondering what would be the next big film to come out to fail or succeed.

The next weekend, Titanic did just sort of okay, and they dismissed it.  It was slowly sinking, just like the ship.

The problem is, it stayed put more like a buoy.  The following weekend it did okay.  Then the next weekend it did okay.  Then the next, and the next.  It stayed at about 20 million each weekend.  That's not great results for an opening, but for a fifth week, sixth, seventh... unheard of.  It just kept making a basic, steady amount of money, never dropping.  And from remaining like this for such a long time, it wound up being the largest money maker of all time.

It should serve as a lesson to those who only look at opening weekend box office, but does it?  Most assuredly not.

Titanic's Special Effects Team Expected the Film to Fail

A few years after I had graduated, NYU invited alumni in LA to go visit a special effects studio called Digital Domain.  The company had offered the tour to us, and it was a fun time.  Digital effects were new, so it was unusual to see so many computers creating the images.  The one I remember passing was a sailboat being passed by the Titanic.

We went into one room where they had very recently done the effect of the Titanic hitting the iceberg.  The model of the ship had been attached by a chain to one truck, and the iceberg was attached to another truck by a chain, and the two trucks drove quickly in opposite directions, crashing the two props together.  So high tech!

Afterward, they took us into their meeting room, which they called "the whale's belly."  It was a big wood structure that was supposed to look like a whale's belly.  There, they told us the real reason they wanted to give us this tour.  They closed the door and were very secretive about it.  They said the movie they were working on was going to fail miserably.  They had been working for James Cameron for a while, and they believed this was going to be his downfall.  When it happened, they were prepared to start their own production company, and they wanted to have projects ready to go.

Since they were a special effects studio already, they wanted projects that would heavily involve special effects.  So they asked us to gather up our ideas for movies and/or TV shows that would involve a lot of special effects.  I immediately started thinking of something.  It made sense to do so; after all, it had been Star Wars that got me interested in making movies to begin with.

I began running this through my head, and I continued to think about it as we went to dinner at The Rose next door.  What I came up with were the very first inklings of the ideas that would become Relic Worlds.  It was nothing like it's become since then, but it was the initial idea.

I pitched the concept with some scenes and a summary to them soon after.  The man who had initially told us to pitch ideas to him, Steve, responded saying it sounded good, and he wanted to speak with me further about it after the release of the movie.

Titanic, of course, wound up being a huge hit.  Steve stopped responding to me; and to this day, I'm sure he denies ever having said Titanic would fail.

M. Knight Shyamalan Martial Arts Pic from NYU

When I was at NYU I was hired for a short time to take photos around campus.  Supposedly it was for a yearbook they were doing, but I don't remember seeing any such yearbook.  At any rate, it was experience and a small amount of pay, so I did it.

At one point I was photographing the fencing team, a sport of which I partook.  A small martial arts class took place on the other side of the room, and the coach approached me and asked me to photograph his team.  I did, and I exposed the photo and sent it on.  I don't know if they used it or not, but years later I noticed something interesting.

I read an article that said M. Knight Shyamalan had been in a martial arts class at NYU.  I thought, hmm, I wonder... I looked at the photo and found that he was in the martial arts pic.