Lust In Translation

As a first-generation British-American, something I've always wondered about.

Netflix vs. the Box Office

Box office success doesn't correlate to rental success.

Disappointed With Galactica

So I watched the first episode of Season 3 and I was hooked. I started at the miniseries and watched the whole show. I skipped episodes after a while, there was definitely variance in the level of quality, but I was really digging it. And then I got to the cliffhanger season-ender that immediately preceded the beginning of Season 3.

I was so disappointed! The new planet was full of doom and foreboding from the get-go. There was nothing about people being excited to start a new life, nobody with any credibility believing in it for a second. What a weak choice! They could have done a whole season about the dream of New Caprica, about how difficult it would be to start a new life on a new planet - it would have been the American dream writ large. And the return of the Cylons would have been so intense if both audience and cast had been deeply committed to this new possibility. Instead it was just like watching an idiot walk into a trap. They looked like suckers for even being there in the first place.

Uh Oh

I had a funny idea for a scene. I have a scene partner in an acting class who's black, Muslim, maybe a little bit of a drama nerd, and in some ways a very typical sweet-tempered Texan. I like rap music, and I was just listening to Redman, and I had this mental image of her coming to the door. If you don't know rap music well, just take it as given that Redman is not the typical music of sweet-tempered, well-mannered, religious Texan drama nerds, and if a given individual of that description happened to be black, that would probably not be enough in and of itself to sway her to becoming a Redman fan.

Redman is rowdy.

Anyway, having gotten this funny image, I thought of a way to amp it even further. There's a New Orleans rap classic whose chorus goes, "I'm the nigger nigger nigger." I know a white guy who loves this song. He used to be a music journalist, it's one of those songs that was huge in New Orleans and I never heard it. Actually this guy's half Indian, half Dutch, but when I translate him into this scene in my mind, I make him an average white guy who happens to be a former music journalist, because it's funnier that way. This is what I picture: I'm rocking out to that song, instead of the Redman one, and my scene partner comes to the door. I'm suddenly embarassed, but it gets a thousand times worse when you hear my roommate, this white guy, in another room, saying the words along to the song. He comes into the room still parrotting the song, suddenly notices the INCREDIBLE faux pas, and goes oh shit.

It would have to be an incredibly compassionate and fair script for a scene like that to work -- but the truth is, everybody knows white guys who listen to rap and are absolutely comfortable with saying the N-word, if they're parrotting a rap song, yet totally uncomfortable with it if they're hearing it said to somebody it might actually describe. That kind of tension, that kind of irony, that's comedy.

Market Research In Parallel Universes

Fascinating article from the NY Times proves once and for all that the network effects of hitmaking renders that process entirely non-deterministic.

Britney Spears Never Went Crazy

She was crazy to begin with.



I've been saying it for years. Every so often she does something I like musically, but let's face it, not very often. "Toxic" and the one she did with the Neptunes, maybe something else. But if you turn the sound off and view Britney as a movie star in the genre of fashion and dance video - which is what any pop star really is - then the number of things I like her in skyrockets. Her music is frequently terrible, but her videos are awesome.



Her insanity, for me, has always been part of her appeal. When she was at her apex, she was working out six hours a day, every day. Can anyone doubt that this is insanity? I have professional training in hypnosis, extensive training, and the most I can manage to do at the gym is an hour and a half a day. That's with a ton of deliberate brainwashing. That's with professional training in brainwashing and deliberate effort to wash my own brain. She was doing four times that much without the benefit of any hypnosis that I'm aware of. She was going on pure unadulterated madness.

And it worked.



For me the moral of the story with Britney Spears has always been that sometimes insanity works. She hit her apex of fame around the same time as I hit the worst starving artist phase of my life, where I just couldn't even bring myself to do anything but creative work I believed in, and yet I couldn't get anybody to take the slightest commercial interest in anything I did. For various complicated reasons I was living in the middle of nowhere with no access to pop culture except MTV. It was a time of immense frustration, and here was this chick who was totally hot, appeared to have all the money in the world, made this terrible music with these awesome videos, and appeared to have absolutely no idea that her music was awful. Britney became totally fascinating to me. Was she a fortunate fool? Was she a crafty shark? How did Britney Spears happen?



One thing I learned was that she was touring shopping malls, playing shows for free, when she was fourteen years old. She tried to get paying concert venues but failed. She tried to get free concert venues, but failed. Eventually she (and her mother) got a series of shopping malls in an area of I think two or three states to host her free singing tour. Can there be any doubt that this is madness too? A free tour of shopping malls? Can you imagine how hard you'd have laughed at any of your friends if they tried to do that when you were fourteen?

I can imagine how hard my mom would have laughed at me if I had tried to get her to book me a singing tour of shopping malls when I was fourteen.

Pretty hard!

If through some implausible freak occurence Britney Spears is reading this blog, here's what I have to say to you: go crazier. Quit the drugs, but keep the shaved head. Better yet, turn it into a mohawk. Who cares? It's your prerogative.

Moronic Innocence

So recently I finished a screenplay, and I tried to show it to a bunch of friends, associates, co-workers, clients, and miscellaneous humans who I like for one reason or another. The lukewarm-ness of the reception I got kind of boggled my mind. I've always known that a huge number of scripts circulate the city of Los Angeles (and its gigantic metropolitan area) but it didn't occur to me that people would regard the fact that I, the great Giles Bowkett, had written a script, with the same indifference they would give the news that some random mere mortal had written a script.

Just goes to show how wrong you can be. Of all the people I've asked to read it, I've gotten only one of them to actually do it. One person! Nobody else is even curious to find out if it's any good at all. And these are people who generally seem to have pretty good regard for me.

What this means is that writing a good screenplay is either a lot harder than I ever guessed or a lot easier. Maybe writing a good script is so hard that everybody expects screenplays to suck; maybe writing a good script is so easy that the only hard part is selling it. I really don't know. All I can tell is that nobody seems to even have any idle curiousity about my script one way or the other.

But I think the answer is probably that writing a script is hard. Here's why. This is a screenwriter's advice to other screenwriters, about how to get an agent:

First, write a great script. Now, be very careful to have only one copy of it. Immediately upon writing FADE OUT, THE END, take that single copy and place it in a small, sturdy safe. Close and lock the safe. Take the safe directly to your basement, dig a hole seven feet deep, and place the safe in the hole. Refill the hole. Lock the basement door securely, and then go to bed.

The next day, get up and go to the basement. The place will be lousy with agents, several of them already involved in a bidding war over your script.

That's from a screenwriting site, a post by one of the writers of Shrek.

He also mentions that he told this to a huge classroom full of screenwriting students at UCLA and they were all ready to lynch him, because the implication, of course, is that the script you love oh so much, the one your entire heart and soul have been invested in, the masterwork never equalled before or since, is in fact almost certainly a steaming pile of crap.

Uh-oh.

Fortunately, even though the probability of my sucking as a screenwriter is apparently quite high, I'm definitely a good programmer. Possibly a very good programmer. So that's something, at least.

This Is The Future

Clay Shirky has written some brilliant things about the effect of the Internet on the culture industries. The one industry he identifies as being least affected by the Internet? Movies. Because although technology makes many things more efficient, the major challenges in filmmaking are logistical, interpersonal, and artistic, and technology can really only help with logistics, and with making special effects cheaper. Long story short, making movies is hard, and will stay hard.

Distributing movies, however, that's another story.

Effort

Had an acting class tonight. First class. I didn't perform, just watched other students doing their pieces. A mixed bag, including some obviously talented people, but there was one girl there who just utterly pwned the entire room.



She was very smart, I think, but it wasn't anything to do with her intelligence. She was sexy, but that wasn't it either. She was just working her ass off from the moment she started to the moment she ended. Or more accurately, from moments before she started until moments after she ended -- and when she was done, and the teacher gave his critique, she was working her ass off through every second of that as well. Instead of bowing to the teacher's authority or striving to be independent, or just sitting it out and not even listening, all of which are tempting responses to a teacher's critique, she was working intensely to get every last ounce of useful information out of every single word. There was no high school power dynamic running through her head; it was all about working.

If there's one thing programming and acting have in common, it's that talent isn't what makes success. Talent is a necessary prerequisite for success, but hard work is what actually makes it happen. In schools, when I was a kid, they got everything backwards. Good grades meant you were smart, bad grades meant you were stupid, and the consolation prize was a star for effort. Research has shown, however, that praising kids' intelligence is actively counterproductive, while praising their work ethic encourages them to develop it. The prize you get for effort shouldn't be the consolation prize. It should be the only prize.

Because that's pretty much how it is in real life.

Wrote A Screenplay

I finally finished a screenplay. I started it in January or possibly December. Unless you count previous attempts at writing the same screenplay. I've written it several times. This is really the first good version. I know that one of the main scenes, I was working on it in 1999 or 1998, because I remember a conversation about it with my roommate and my girlfriend at the time. So I've been working on it off and on for at least 8 years. Possibly more.

It's weird. There's a sense of triumph to this, on that level it's very satisfying, but there's also a sense like you get when school's out for the summer, and you've gotten used to the freedom, but you've gotten bored of going to the movies with your friends or getting stoned, and you're wondering what to do with all the time on your hands.

I suppose I can get back to learning Cantonese. Or obtain a social life. I had one of those, once. It was nice.

Drinking Yeats

My family's Irish on my mother's side, and not Irish as in Chicago Irish, or Irish as in Boston Irish -- Irish as in born and raised in County Waterford in Ireland.

This is being Irish. My great-aunt Greta read tarot cards for people in her village. One time my mother and my aunt, young girls at the time, watched her read the cards for someone, and asked her afterwards why she had read them incorrectly. Greta replied that such terrible things were going to happen that she could not bring herself to say them. Soon they all happened. Another time a woman from the village came by to get holy water which Greta had promised her, claiming it would cure her warts. Greta had forgotten all about it, so she ran upstairs, emptied a bottle of aspirin, filled it with tap water, and said it was the holy water she had promised to provide. A week and a half later, the woman's warts were gone.

St. Patrick's Day is a very nice thing, but there's a lot more to being Irish than alcoholism and red hair. I really don't drink at all, and my hair is brown, but when I'm telling a great story and I fill it with lies because I know they'll make the story better, I'm being Irish. When I'll fight someone to the death over something that doesn't even matter, I'm being Irish. Irishness is a passionate and moody thing.

DREAM OF A BLESSED SPIRIT

by: W.B. Yeats

All the heavy days are over;
Leave the body's coloured pride
Underneath the grass and clover,
With the feet laid side by side.

One with her are mirth and duty;
Bear the gold-embroidered dress,
For she needs not her sad beauty,
To the scented oaken press.

Hers the kiss of Mother Mary,
The long hair is on her face;
Still she goes with footsteps wary
Full of earth's old timid grace.

With white feet of angels seven
Her white feet go glimmering;
And above the deep of heaven,
Flame on flame, and wing on wing.

It's true that the Irish drink, and it's true that we'll take any excuse to party, but that means something so different in America. So different as to be virtually meaningless. To drink like an Irishman is not to be able to hold your liquor; it's to go where Yeats goes. Yeats can get there with words, while the average Irishman has to travel by lager, but it's the same destination. It's a painful place and a beautiful place. When I hear Americans say they can drink like Irishmen, I honestly don't know whether to envy their ignorance or pity it.

Why Stealing Is Absolutely OK

I just saw Lost In Translation the other day, and immediately watched it again last night. I'll probably watch it a third time this weekend. I went and downloaded Roxy Music "More Than This" after I saw the movie, but the irony is, I can't really listen to the song all the way through, because it totally brings back the emotions of the movie, and that movie was very powerful.

So anyway. I always liked that song, the Roxy Music song -- "More Than This" -- before I saw this movie, but I never really respected it. I always thought the melody on the verse stole really blatantly from the Moody Blues song "Your Wildest Dreams." But after seeing Lost In Translation, my attitude is totally altered, because where "Your Wildest Dreams" wraps its romanticism in an escapist wistfulness that makes it safe and harmless, "More Than This" gives you the same romanticism without any shelter from its consequences. There is no escapist wistfulness to it; there is simply love, or, alternatively, death. This ties in with the movie, of course, but that's the point. Roxy Music totally stole from the Moody Blues, in terms of the melody, but the relationship between "More Than This" and Lost In Translation is what makes it impossible for me to listen to the song without a strong emotional reaction. The emotional reaction is a reaction to the song, but it's really an emotional reaction to the movie. Or is it? I'm not sure. Maybe it's really an emotional reaction to the movie; maybe it's that the movie made me realize what the song was about in the first place. I'd never actually listened to the lyrics before; Bryan Ferry's voice was never really clear enough that I could tell what the words were. Was it simply the transference of the emotions from the movie, or simply taking it seriously enough to listen to the words for the first time? Either way, I have a new appreciation for it.

This is why stealing, in anything creative, is totally OK. Talent borrows; genius steals. If Lost In Translation made "More Than This" into its song, "More Than This" is a richer work for having been stolen.

I guess this is obvious, but if you're ever doing any kind of creative work, and holding back on an idea you have because it's a variation on something that originally came from somebody else, screw that. Go ahead and do it anyway. That's the meaning of "talent borrows, genius steals." If Lost In Translation had been less of a movie, it would have borrowed the distant echoes of Roxy Music's thunder, instead of stealing its lightning.

Truth Still Stranger Than Fiction

Had a lot of time on my hands yesterday; found a screenwriting blog explaining how Anna Nicole Smith's real-life story couldn't be made into a movie, because it would fail every plausability test there is.

R2D2 Dream

There's a conspiracy theory which says R2D2 is actually the mastermind of the entire Rebel Alliance. I read this yesterday, and last night dreamt a whole little movie about it.

It starts off with a great Rebel leader, who is damn near killed. The other Rebels put his brain in a droid to keep it alive. Before they even install a vocalization unit, their base is attacked by stormtroopers, who kill everybody. Only the "droid" survives.

That isn't really a whole movie, I guess, just the beginning of one, but the funny thing is, it was a really intense dream, and it was actually the only good Star Wars movie I'd seen since Empire Strikes Back.

Ayn Rand

I love Ayn Rand, but this is beatifully dead-on:

Her books are simultaneously so laughably awful and so batshit insane that you just want to lock them in a room with the Left Behind series and let them fight it out.

Charlize Theron's Oscar

I think I just figured something out.

Charlize Theron's life is an interesting story. When she was 15, her mother shot and killed her father in an act of self-defense. No charges were ever filled.

In 2004, she won an Academy Award for her starring role in Monster, where she played a serial killer -- a roadside hooker who shot and killed one of her clients in self-defense, and then made a habit of shooting and killing her clients and justifying it as self-defense.

According to an article on Theron's web site, she studied acting with Ivana Chubbuck. Ivana Chubbuck embraces the theories of acting which emphasize drawing on personal traumas, theories which are sometimes derided as "acting as therapy."

Monster is an amazing film, and Theron's performance in it is an amazing performance. But you have to wonder, did Charlize Theron get an Oscar for playing her mother? An acting teacher who emphasizes drawing on personal traumas, an actress whose mother killed her father in self-defense, and a script whose pivotal moment comes when a woman kills a man in self-defense?

Really the only other movie I've seen Charlize Theron in is The Italian Job -- in which she plays a woman who wants revenge for the murder of her father.

I'm a computer programmer, and my other blog -- my programming blog -- has about five times as many entries as this one. But I've studied acting, and I've observed that it's hard. One acting teacher I had said it's all about integrity. You have to really experience the emotions involved to make your performance real. Michael Caine says in his book that it's even harder on screen than on stage, because a camera can catch the slightest twitch of your eyes, and a projector can make that tiny motion eight feet tall. I think what's going on with this actress is, she's picking her roles by asking herself, "what do I need therapy for?" -- and as crazy as that may sound, it's actually very courageous. You need authenticity in front of a camera in that line of work, and if you get it by reference to experiences and emotions that intense, that's remarkably brave.

Monster is a movie with a sad ending, about a messed-up person doing messed-up shit. But there's something inspiring about it anyway. I think it's probably some kind of subconscious awareness -- perhaps subconsciously the viewer can recognize Charlize Theron's courage in what she's doing? I'm not sure.

Awesomest Cupcakes EVAR

Moral Ambiguity Means Good Action

Noticed something interesting. The most spine-tingling moment of Terminator 2 is the moment where Sarah Connor's escaping the insane asylum, and John Connor arrives to rescue her with the Terminator. The core conflict in The Fugitive isn't the conflict between the good guy and the bad guy; it's the conflict between the good guy who escapes from jail and the other good guy who's chasing him. This is almost exactly the same dramatic structure as the escape and chase scenes in The Rock, which have to be among the best such scenes in the history of the movies.

There's a stereotype that action movies are all about moral black and whites, and therefore they don't have any intellectual stimulation to match their frenetic pace, and that to some extent the frenetic action is there to cover for the lack of ideas. There are certainly action movies for which this is entirely true, but the best action movies include subtler conflicts as well, and the irony is, these subtler conflicts are actually more exciting to watch.

Awesome Dream

I've been using hypnosis and doing meditation for a very long time, in various forms. For the past few months I've been using a very structured approach based mainly on hypnosis MP3s, visualization exercises, and NLP. One very interesting side effect is that my dreams have become both more vivid and more useful.

I've been wanting for a while to come up with a way to do Macbeth as a sci-fi/fantasy screenplay. Last night, it came to me in a dream. Best of all, it incorporates something really smart I got from somebody else.

When I was about 20 or 21, I lived in a building which was organized as a sort of refuge for artists. One of my neighbors was an actor. He was only a couple years older than me, but he was starring in a production of Macbeth as Macbeth. I was like, wait, and he was like, I know what you're thinking: I'm young for Macbeth. And then he explained his theory that Macbeth actually makes more sense when you see it as the story of a young man than an old one. What's Macbeth's tragic flaw? Ambition; ruthlessness; impatience. These are all things you can find in young men in real life every day.

The story's far from written, but I thought this was worth blogging anyway, because of my friend's perspective, and because of the dream factor.

Fascism Is Stupid And Insane

Jesus fucking Christ.