Donut Seeds
I like to explore a story in miniature form before I go ahead and write it as a full-blown feature or play. I think this really helps my process before going big.
When you learn to play the classic board game Go, you start on a 7×7 grid. As you master the game you increase the grid size until you’re playing on the actual grid size of 19×19.
I write the same way. I start in the small scale — usually a 10 minute play or a one act. This helps me get the relationships right, figure out what the central conflict is. Then I put it in front of an audience and readers to see what I have. It’s easier for a person to digest a shorter piece of work. Plus writing a short piece requires you to begin the action immediately. Doing so helps you understand exactly what the necessary actions are — brevity demands immediate focus.
For me, developing the center of a piece is the most important aspect of writing. From that center will radiate all the themes and details that surround it; starting small and developing a core of strength allows me to expand a story to its final form.
Plus if something doesn’t work when it’s ten minutes long, it’s not going to work when it’s a hundred.
Today’s Sadness: “If you love that video game so much, why don’t you marry it?”
Disney’s “UP” Has Everything I Need
- An Asian kid
- A talking dog
- A flightless bird that mocks you
- Ed Asner
- Dogs that fly planes and shoot machine guns
- A first act that reduces even the most stone-cold gangsta into a blubbering mess
Yes, it’s almost perfect. 99% perfect. But to be absolutely perfect, the only thing that it really needs is…
Yes, Gymkata: The martial art that comes from gymnastics. I’m not making this shit up. Look it up on IMDB.
Check out how much ass is being kicked in the Gymkata movie poster. Those ninjas didn’t know what hit em. They’re going down in a spray of throwing stars and shit. Gymkata kicks so much ass that it tore a hole through its own motherfuckin poster.
There is no Gymkata in Up! If Up had Gymkata in it, it would surpass Citizen Kane on my list. Then Up could only be surpassed by Citizen Kane with Gymkata in it, which would totally be the best thing ever.
I Am Cat
I’ve got a lot of homework this weekend, as usual. Reading, outlining, revising.
Some of my favorite haunts — the libraries at UCLA — have cut back on their hours due to budget shortfalls. They aren’t even open on Saturdays anymore, which is a major hit.
This is kind of a tragedy for local nerds. They have nowhere to go on Saturdays, so you often see them wandering around confused. Playing Dungeons and Dragons on street corners, angrily emailing Mythbusters from their own computers at Starbucks.
I wonder if total university productivity will go down. If GPAs will drop. I wonder if — now that said nerds are unprotected on Saturdays — incidents of nerds getting beat up will go up.
All You Need to Brighten Your Day: Here are many videos of US soldiers being welcomed home by their dogs. Contains super-happy dog noises and butt-shaking levels of tail wagging.
Don’t Pick Up Giant Monsters
Don’t give him a ride.
Tribeca All Access Submissions Are Open: You should apply to this. Take that feature script of yours, polish it up, and send it to them before December 14th. The people that run this program are really great — they really take care of you. If you get in, you’ll be in New York City in the heart of a vibrant and exciting film festival. I did the program twice — the All Access version and the program for returning alumni, and from these adventures I pulled out all the contacts that have made the biggest differences in my career.
Apply. Do it now. Why are you still reading this, seriously? The only other bullet in this post will be something completely silly — about an online store that sells fridge magnets shaped like bacon.
Here is your Bacon Balm.
I want everything from this store. For Christmas I want a giant box with everything that this store sells in it. Every day I will pull something out of the box and play with it and giggle.
The Dobler Effect
The Doblers are coming. And they will not sell anything, buy anything, or process anything.
They will not sell anything bought or processed, buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold or bought. They will not repair anything sold, bought, or processed.
They are here to hang out with your daughter.
So I had a work meeting the other day that was devoted to a discussion about robots and clones.
This is why writing is the greatest job on earth. Imagination is the only true unlimited source of power, and writing is one of the only professions that harnesses that power in a pure form. Actors, directors have to start with something before they can create. A writer starts with a blank page — nothing — and turns it into something.
Also talking about robots and clones for an hour is arguably the best way to spend an hour of your time.
Yes yes, vampires are hot right now. But mark my words: The next big trend in film/tv is walruses.
Spock and a Buick
I was finally able to carve out some time to play some video games. If my eight year-old Atari 2600-having Me met the Me I am today, he would be quite disappointed. “What, you’re an adult and you have free will and you don’t make time to play video games?” he would say, then punctuate this all with a very loud “FUCK YOU MAN!”
Yes, fuck me man indeed.
So here’s what’s crackin in my 360 and PS3:
Katamari Forever: Yes, it’s more of the same. Yes, it’s mostly replays of levels we’ve already seen. Yes, even the music is the same but remixed. But I’m crazy for rolling around a giant ball of junk and picking up more junk with it. I think these games have always spoken to the de-cluttering control freak in my psyche. Plus the scale can now go from house-sized to astronomical within the same level — IE, you begin picking up bunches of bananas and as time runs out you’re picking up Albania and Serbia and stuff. That’s pretty neat.
Dragon Age: This new BioWare RPG has some of the best voice acting I’ve ever heard in a video game. Plenty of British people saying wacky things in amusing, dry ways. Plus the writing is charming and interesting to hear. It’s like if Xena was being written by Joss Whedon. The combat is tight and fun, and leaves your victorious characters spattered with blood — which makes any cinematic cut-scenes that play immediately afterwards kind of interesting to watch. “Hi, oh, uh, you’re covered in blood… I HAVE A QUEST FOR YOU”
Borderlands: This is the game. “Diablo with guns”, meaning that it’s for hardcore loot whores. You wheel around the place blowing away mutants and scavving their sweet, sweet loot. The game claims to have 36 billion variations of guns and I believe it. It has a great cel-shade style and an atmosphere best described as akin to being Fallout 3′s whiskey-breathed, wife-beater-wearing half-brother from Deliverance.
They Fight
Fighting Video Games Make Fundamentally Flawed Movie Adaptations: Now joining the recent Dead or Alive and Street Fighter movies are new adaptations of King of Fighters and Tekken. Whether these two new films break the trend of bad video game adaptations remains to be seen; however, the track record for fighting games-as-movies has not been good.
I think that fighting games are terrible properties to be turned into movies. It’s simple: The medium of film calls for a tightly focused story that tracks one or two characters. But fighting games offer a smorgasbord of characters that the player can choose to control — usually 12 or more. In a film adaptation, the question comes down to who you track. Do you try to track all of them? A group? One? Which one? And how do you put them into a situation that requires fighting without making such a story ludicrous?
Plus the backstories of fighting game characters are, by their nature, two dimensional because they have to be. When you play a fighting game, you have to choose between playing as “the tae kwon do guy” or the “giant slow, high-damage wrestling guy” or the “quick sexy lady”. Every character detail needs to be purely physical and visual so that players know what style of play they’re going to get — a quick dude that does a little damage or a slow dude that does massive damage. As a result, any extra information is absolutely unnecessary — there is no reason to create a complex backstory. Plus you couldn’t get a deep backstory to read anyway because all the players want is FIGHTING. Cinematic cut-scenes? Skip ‘em. The players just want to fight.
Thus the developers’ primary concern in making a fighting game isn’t story — their goal is to push polygons and create compelling, non-button-mashing gameplay. It’s not their job to think about story, because any story only gets in the way of the actual fighting.
So now think of the poor screenwriters who have to adapt these things into movies. Who do you track? How do you invent a backstory for these silly, surfacey characters? How do you adapt the material that already exists (“BISON IS THE LEADER OF A GLOBAL CRIME SYNDICATE HURF BLURF DURR”) and make it interesting and engaging? It’s literally like being given a bag of twelve action figures and being asked to construct a story that involves all of them — with the added pressure of knowing that the upstairs guys are going to spend $30 mil on this thing and really, really, really don’t want to lose that money.
It’s not a game you can win. It seems like the only way out is to just not play.
Westside Tavern — my current It Place for meet ups and edibles. The burger is quite good, but the pot roast is the thing. It’s a bone-in slab of meat nestled on a pillow of mashed potatoes — the sort of thing that you usually find tipping over Fred Flintstones’ car. The flatbread with shiitake mushrooms, bacon, and asparagus is also pretty great too. Nice atmosphere, plus if it gets too crowded you can levitate upstairs to the usually empty wine bar in the movie theater.
My Work in Print
Year Zero
Available from Samuel French and Amazon.com
Cowboy Versus Samurai
Available from Samuel French and Amazon.comFor a complete list of books containing my work, please click here.
