Magic Tuesday

February 12th, 2008Blog1 comment

Today has been a pretty excellent day so far, and it’s only 10:40 AM. I got some good news from a couple sources on a couple of my projects; the strike is over, and my Obamamania buttons arrived in the mail along with a V-Day card from my mom. And the Apple TV update is out. Yes, I got one. And it’s awesome. It holds all of my episodes of Sopranos seasons 5 through 6, perfect for watching forever and ever.

It’s been an excellent Tuesday so far. Plus I’m giving blood today and I’m up for my one gallon pin!

Actors

February 11th, 2008Blog0 comments

I saw a pretty cool show on Saturday — it consisted of older actors doing theater formed from improv sessions. It featured monologues with interesting storytelling, and there was some really fun sketch work going on there. Plus the theater is solar powered. Welcome to California.

It’s cool to see older actors — especially people I had seen in film/TV when I was a kid — working together to construct something new. To be vital. I know a lot of actors, and my advice for anyone who acts is to develop your own material. Create work for yourself.

That said, I have a love/hate thing going on with actors. There are the ones that are great and intelligent that I love working with. And then there are a lot of douchebags.

Some are intentional douches while others are douches w/o knowing it. The constant struggle of going to auditions can make you crazy in the same way homelessness makes a person crazy: You don’t know where your niche — the place of comfort and stability — is. You are a restless wanderer, and this can make you into quite a douche. Really bitter and ornery, a real jerk to be around. This is where developing your own material comes in handy — it gives you a home and project to call your own. Something you can return to no matter how crumby things are going out there.

The intentional douches are the worst. People who arrive in this city without agents, sent here from fly over states by their high school drama teachers. A good friend of mine once sublet his apartment to one of these characters for the summer; when he heard that she was here for a few months to “Break into acting and oh no, I don’t have an agent, do you really need one?” he demanded the safety deposit and first/last months’ rent upfront in cash. Smart. By the end of the summer she had fled back to Nebraska.

Having the look is one thing. Having the intelligence and training to analyze a scene, break it down and then make it come to life better than anyone else — and do it consistently, take after take and note after note — is the thing. If this is a craft for you, if you want to be De Niro or Sean Penn or whatever, your brain will be your most essential organ. You need experience in humanity like a writer needs experience in humanity. It’s an ethereal sort of skill, and when people are still learning to do it — and they’re still hit-and-miss — they can be real jerkoffs to others. Overtly competitive, nasty, and passively aggressive. Somebody once told me that an actor has to act — and when he/she is out of work, he or she acts on you.

That’s why it was really neat to see these older actors doing their thing. When it comes to peoples’ dreams it’s often about how long they can hold on. Most people let go, get realistic. Live with regrets or find a new dream. But it’s really cool to see people hold onto a dream all the way through years of wins and losses, and still find something fun in it.

Any artist/creator can be a real jerk — myself included. I guess with age you can choose to gain a kind of serenity. You can see oblivion coming and decide to calm down, abide like The Dude. Or you can choose to continue to be an asshole. Some old folks do that too. Some days you should be entitled to be a jerk.

But nobody, anywhere, wants to die unhappy.

Knowledge

February 7th, 2008Blog0 comments

The best writers that I know are experts on lots of different things. I can ask a friend of mine what he thinks of ocelots or the parliamentary system or whether whales cry or if House MD really gives people hypochondria. He will give me a plausible answer based on his massive database of knowledge. Otherwise, I can rely on him to make something up that sounds just as plausible.

Yes. The best writers I know are treasure troves of human knowledge. Baseball stats. Geography and geology. History and sociology. Regional accents. And if they don’t know the answer, they’ll just make something up. Or if the answer isn’t very interesting they’ll make something up. Why not? Who’s going to notice?

And besides, authenticity and veracity aren’t mutually inclusive. When people are laughing their asses off they tend not to care about authenticity. The same goes for when they’re rapt over something. It’s funny how human beings are like that. They can put up with a lot over the course of two hours — most of it can be baseline entertaining, but if there are two or three belly laughs in there, all is forgiven.

Super

February 4th, 2008Blog0 comments

Tomorrow’s the big day. I just read that De Niro has endorsed Obama. Considering that he changed the way I pour ketchup from a bottle (the rolling-in-the-hands method from Goodfellas), it’s safe to say that I like his style.

I read it somewhere and have been thinking about it a lot: Entertainment as a commodity.

There’s been a lot of reality garbage on because of the strike. I was checking that out, but I dropped all of it from my TiVo list. It’s a commodity — literally stuff you can have in the background that you don’t have to pay attention to. The same shit, different people: Cat fights, yelling matches, humiliation. Someone trying to spin a singing career out of it and failing. Etc., etc..

This stuff has always existed. Pap. The Romans had parody theater — the equivalent of Mad TV making fun of whoever the current Caesar was.

The bottom line is that people need to be entertained in order to escape from their worries. Thinking about it, the difference between useful entertainment and commodity entertainment is that useful stuff makes you think even more. It illuminates the problems of the individual and the world, and helps you to locate solutions. Useful entertainment isn’t an escape — it confronts. It’s like the difference between parody and satire.

There will always be a need for commodity entertainment. And there’s nothing wrong with making some dough to put food on the table. But in the end, it’s as memorable as a cheeseburger you ate and shitted out twelve hours later.