The inspiration for Coulee

One of the writing projects on my list is a screenplay I have been working on for some time. It's called Coulee, and it's about a haunted dam.

A haunted dam? Here's how this came about: some years ago, back when I lived with my friends, Hope and Allison, in a three bedroom house near Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, which we called Old Tony, Hope and I were hanging out one day discussing ideas for movies. In fact, we were trying to come up with the dumbest movie idea we could think of, something I could write without concerning myself about things like authenticity, reason, sense - you know, a typical MOVIE.

One of my favorite silly horror movie tropes is the "old Indian burial ground." It serves as a kind of basic rationale for everything that goes on in films from Poltergeist to The Shining. It also describes, ya know, America.



So, a few days later, while we were still trying to come up with "the dumbest movie ever," I was watching a PBS documentary on the building of the Grand Coulee Dam. Guess what it was built on? Yep, an Indian burial ground. Eureka! Haunted dam!

The idea seemed to me to have just what I was looking for: a completely silly, seemingly ridiculous and even boring premise, yet one that was original, and with plenty of socio-historical aspects that I could invent out of whole cloth. That was the other aspect of the project, that I wanted to write a movie with no research at all - so that everything about it would feel vaguely familiar, but have no real basis in fact.

That was several years ago. Since then, now that I am finally actually working on it, I have gotten fairly far in outlining my story, but the "no research" thing has gone out the window.

Perhaps I should interject here and explain a bit more about why I didn't want to do any research. Movies, to me, fall into basically three categories: Great, Good and Idiotic. Great movies are extremely rare and most people do not even know what a great movie is - I do not mean what people mean when they say, "Gee, the new Batman movie was really great!" I'm talking about masterpieces, like Grand Illusion, Citizen Kane and The Godfather. Most moviegoers cannot identify the difference, but that's fine. It's hard to quantify, but mostly it has to do with singularity of vision, uncompromising commitment and artistry. Not all great films are equal, but they are all on a different level than the merely good.

Good movies are much more plentiful. Most Best Picture winners fall into this category. They are crowd-pleasing, well-executed examples of solid, even virtuoso, craftsmanship. Back to the Future, one of my all-time favorites, is a good movie. It could easily have been an idiotic movie (like BttF2 and 3), though, if all of its parts had not functioned so flawlessly together. On the high end, No Country for Old Men is a very good movie, the apogee of its makers' art to this point; and one of the fun aspects of being a movie fan is arguing about which movies deserve to be called great and which ones are merely good. Personally, I don't think we've had a great Best Picture Oscar since 1974 when GF2 won. There's little question in the minds of cinephiles who care about such things that The Godfather, Part 2, is one of the greatest films ever made. Many of the rest of the films to win since have been good, some of them very good, but some of them have been idiotic (viz., Crash, A Beautiful Mind).

Idiotic movies are failures of imagination and authenticity that insult the intelligence to the point where they are no longer even fun. I'm not talking about, say, Airplane! That's a movie about idiots, but it's not an idiotic movie. It's a good movie because it does what it does, on its on terms, with consistency and panache. I'm talking about most multiplex movies, many sequels and remakes and self-important "serious pictures" that lack chemistry, insight and charm, in spite of often obscene costs.

Anyway, to wind this back to the original point, it's important to note that B movies, exploitation flicks and classic "bad" movies are in no way necessarily idiotic. Many of them are actually good. My favorite example is Showgirls, Paul Verhoeven's howlingly awful big budget Vegas strippers (sorry, I mean dancers) exploitation flick. This cannot be an idiotic film, by definition, because it is so much fun to watch. That may be due to its trainwreck quality, but it's such a consistent trainwreck that it becomes utterly fascinating, to the point that it begins to feel like satire. That has been Verhoeven's defense in the years since, that he always intended the film as a satire of a certain Vegas subculture, or American consumerism, or whatever.

I don't think that flies, exactly, but the film can nevertheless be thoroughly and repeatedly enjoyed as satire, even a self-satire, whereas a truly idiotic film cannot be enjoyed even once.

With Coulee, my original intent was to write an idiotic movie that was secretly a good movie. My fantasy was that the movie would be made as a B movie, with second-rate everything, but would also function (perhaps for the kind of viewer who can appreciate Showgirls) as a good movie if you had the right attitude when you watched it. Now I'm more focused on writing a good, thoroughly silly and funny, but also scary, movie.

I thought that by doing no research I could create something that would function on those two different levels, while being essentially and completely artificial. A lot of movies that were heavily researched feel this way, too, and that was the point. The underlying idea had something to do with basic questions about the relationship between art and authenticity.

What I mean is that, given the artificiality of all movies, why do some feel more authentic than others? Is it a function of the degree of literal truth-telling on the part of the filmmakers (i.e., a movie about a historical subject that is shot in the actual castle where the events took place)? Or is authenticity more about emotional or human truth, irrespective of technical accuracy? I'm inclined to believe the latter, which suggests that even the most outrageous, only-in-the-movies situations and behaviors do not matter nearly as much as execution, emotion and imagination. Think about the experience of seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time, for example.

But I do not have quite the imagination and knowledge to do what I need to do with no research. I need information to inspire me.

I've set Coulee to the side, briefly, as I've hit a wall with the story momentarily, but it's one of my chief writing projects right now and I will soon resume. I think I am about at the point where I can begin writing the script itself and see where that takes me.

A Dark and Stormy Knight

When I went to the movies Thursday afternoon, it was to see The Dark Knight again, this time in IMAX. I had wanted to see an art film, something that wouldn't come to Alameda, but San Francisco let me down on that one, as usual, for the time frame that I had. I really wanted to go to the Castro Theater to see The Exiles, but there was no matinee. I too often go to the movies and see crap, because that's all that's ever playing, but I need better films to come to my theater, because I am lazy.

Unlike seemingly everyone else in the entire world, I do not think The Dark Knight is the greatest movie ever made; anyone who does is just being willfully ignorant. I'm pretty sure I don't even think it's the best superhero movie ever made. I don't even know if I could say that I like it better than Tim Burton's Batman from 1989.

But on my second viewing, I did like it better than the first time and IMAX is a pretty great way to see it. Since only some of it was shot in IMAX format, the film only took up the entire screen during those scenes. The gigantic size did not make up for the tedium of the last forty minutes of the film or the pretentiousness of the dialogue throughout or how seriously everyone involved seemed to take the whole overblown enterprise. But the best action scenes were enhanced, that's for fucking sure.

Still, I will never understand why we're not allowed to actually see the action in action films these days. Very often there are so many close shots that are cut together so quickly, that all sense of dynamics, physics and causality are lost. Look at, say, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (which is relatively recent) or The Empire Strikes Back or even T2, or Bullitt, or just about anything made before the last ten years and compare the shooting and cutting of the action scenes to any of today's blockbusters. A lot of shit takes place in wide shots where you can actually see that your heroes are in danger, rather than closeups that telegraph this information with a grimace and a flash-pan, as is the trend today.

Michael Bay's Transformers may have set a high water mark for this kind of incomprehensible shooting strategy; Dark Knight is not nearly such a problem and much of the action is shot quite well. It may be that, when Nolan runs out of ideas, it's more obvious because other moments are so kinetic or graceful. There were too many scenes in which he swirls the camera furiously around two characters talking with gruff intensity at each other, which seems like a cheap attempt to cancel out cheesy, self-important dialogue with false urgency. How about just cutting the fucking scene? No one would miss it, dude.

In my opinion, if you want to see a recent film that gets it fucking-A right, that exemplifies the balance of mise-en-scene and montage necessary for a pure cinema of kinesis, as I refer to it, (usually but not always in reference to the "action" genre), it's Quentin Tarantino's half of Grindhouse, his mock-sexploitation feminist revenge-fantasy car-racing movie, Death Proof. Setting out to make a B movie, QT fails spectacularly at it because he's a cinematic virtuoso who can't help but do it right, even when he claims he's trying to do it wrong. The rest of these guys need to go back to school.