Whereas, this time in L.A., it was like this

Same zone, different girl. Any kind of life lesson in that, buddy?I was there this time to help Andy with the reshoots for his long-awaited feature, Frogtown, for which I am one of the producers. Here, Jason hangs some diffusion while Andy talks to his actors, OS.Every time I go to LA, there's a new brunch spot to try. This one was pretty fuckin' good. It's on Sunset near the Arclight.Had fun with Ben in Venice prior to shooting.Here we are shooting on the boardwalk after hours.Here's Andy, that soulful fellow, with the rig. Frogtown has great potential, more than he realizes. It's hard to find perspective when you're in the trenches.

I'm playing catch-up now: this all happened nearly a month ago. December happened, the holidays intervened, and there was just too much to do. This week, the first of the new year, in which I will turn 35 and in which my son will be born, I am ramping back up slowly to life-speed. There is so very much I need to do - one foot in front of the other.

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.

DIY Days

Last Sunday I attended DIY Days at the 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco. My friend Maria, a classmate from CalArts, suggested that we go, so I have her to thank for getting me off my ass. It was an inspiring day of panels and case studies about very independent filmmaking, alternative distribution and self-promotion for your film projects. We heard from Tiffany Shlain, Arin Crumley, Caveh Zahedi and Lance Weiler among many others.

Here Maria is arguing with her friend, Ben, about whether it makes sense to buy people you're trying to network with, or pitch to, or from whom you want something, a cup of coffee:

My favorite talk of the day happened in the later afternoon, when the schedule was starting to bunch up, so it was not given quite as much time as I would have liked. It was called "Cinema and the Singularity," which title intrigued me enough to encourage me to stay when I had been contemplating leaving earlier.

The question the speakers were asking was rather mind-blowing to me. They asked, "What would singularity cinema look like?" A different way of putting that might be, "What happens when the stories start writing themselves?"

This was meaningful to me because, in a sense, it was a subject of my thesis film, Nervous, but I was only scratching the surface of those issues. The idea, though, of avatars in virtual worlds becoming self-aware and spinning narratives of their own is pretty interesting, if difficult to imagine and technologically unlikely (for now). It's a much more interesting topic philosophically than as some kind of prediction. I have thought about working out a feature-length version of the film, in which case I would certainly come back to these ideas.

As it turns out, though, the panels were not the best parts of my day. The second best part was learning about a crazy, amazing super-pen. I'm an avid note-taker, so this pen was one of the coolest things I have ever seen in my life. The kid who showed it to me was a little nervous at first - apparently he had just been trained by the company and had chosen me as one of his first marks to try his pitch on, so I could have easily rejected his advances. But it was a home run for him because I thought the pen was super-awesome.

The best part of the day was totally unexpected. Faye Dunaway was at DIY Days and I got to meet her for a quick moment, just as she was preparing to leave. Apparently, she is really into DIY cinema and fascinated with new technology, which is pretty cool for a woman in her late sixties. She was very nice and pretty low-key and was cool about me introducing myself as a fan and talking with her for a moment. It was thrilling, because I absolutely love her and several of her films are among my favorites, including Chinatown and Network. I gave her directions to Market Street.

Here she is, on her way out: