Wah Do Dem

February 9th, 2010Blog0 comments

Last night I had the opportunity to cruise down to the Ray Kurtzman Theater at CAA — the in-house movie theater, essentially the equivalent of CAA’s big-screen-TV-living room — to check out a screening of Wah Do Dem.

Going in, I had absolutely no idea what this movie was going to be about. All I knew is that it won the jury prize at the LA Film Festival. It’s situations like this that are often the most rewarding for me — when I have no expectations going in and I’m surprised by what I see. I had no idea what The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was about before I saw it, and you can see how special and interesting an experience that turned out to be.

Anyway: Wah Do Dem is about a lovable, slightly askew Brooklyn kid who is about to go on a Jamaican cruise with his girlfriend but is crushed when she dumps him at the last minute. He decides to go on the cruise anyway, alone, and this leads to a journey with equal parts loneliness, humor, music, and mysticism. It was a film that starts out small but keeps getting wider and more beautiful in scope until it totally and absolutely has you absorbed.

It’s a very good movie and I highly recommend it.

I think in any sort of storytelling — TV, film, theater, video games — our objective is the same as described by David Carr of the New York Times (Via Daring Fireball): When discussing the iPad, he notes that “The gadget disappears pretty quickly. You’re looking into pure software.”

That is, the design and implementation of the gadget is so good that its presence disappears and you’re left looking at pure content. Like the way you can get so immersed in a book that you forget that you’re holding a book and reading words off a page — you’re absorbed 100% by the story.

Our goal in storytelling is for the storyteller to disappear and the audience to just be floating, fully engaged in the story.

Last night while I was watching Wah Do Dem I caught myself in that state. It was really fun when it happened. I was so concerned for this Brooklyn kid, lost in a beautiful, 100% REAL (sorry Avatar!) landscape full of good and bad people (and good-and-also-bad people!) that I forgot about the gadget and I was just floating in the story.

When that happens, you know you’ve got a good goddam movie.

Sam Elliott Has Something Important to Say to You

February 7th, 2010Blog0 comments

If Sam Elliott sits down next to you in a bar or on a plane and starts telling you things, it’s very important that you listen.

Because this singular event signals the fact that you have just gone through a life-altering experience (whether you know it or not!) and Sam Elliott is there to gently guide you through the transition.

Sam Elliott will also have a gift for you — something you’ve been chasing for a long time but whose sudden, actual attainment will only serve as a bitter taste of everything you’ve sacrificed along the way.

And then Sam Elliott will bid you a gravelly goodbye and be gone, and you’ll never, ever see him again.

The power was out on my block all of last night, so your Mike Golamco was living like a frontier settler and reading by candlelight.

Reading The Gone Away World by Nick Harkaway is comforting. It feels like someone has taken up Vonnegut’s torch and is running full sprint with it towards some weird, wonderful new destination. This is some dense, fun prose about a post-apocalyptic world in which a war with bizarre weaponry has ripped up reality and created unreal zones all over the earth. But people are still alive and doing their thing, surviving and getting by. It’s interesting and strange and fun. The old man’s ghost is still alive in Mr. Harkaway, and the guy is building and improvising off of what Vonnegut left behind.

A Tome of Creatures Malevolent and Benign

February 4th, 2010Blog1 comment

Today was an excellent day. Got some big news that my home office will be sharing soon. Plus I came home to find a suspicious package on my doorstep. What did it contain, you ask?

The FIEND FUCKING FOLIO, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Edition THE FIRST printed in 1981, courtesy of our good friends Lloyd and Jeanie. This is when you know that certain people are truly your friends: When you offhandedly mention in passing that you used to read the Dungeons and Dragons Fiend Folio over and over when you were a kid and man, you really wished you still had it.

Well here it is, the original freakin book — it even smells like I remembered it. And it only had one previous owner. Yes, apparently this book once belonged to one “Eric Frost” according to a Boris Vallejo bookplate on the inside cover. Eric, you had good taste. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of your Fiend Folio.

Remember people: Mezzodaemons have 10+40pt hit dice. Yeah, I don’t believe in that 3rd/4th/5th edition garbage. Fuck that noise — it’s 1979 Gary Gygax AD&D rules or nothing.

Microsoft’s Creative Destruction: A pretty good op-ed on Microsoft’s continued slide into irrelevance written by someone who used to work there. The main point is that “internecine warfare” is Microsoft’s flashing red weak spot where it keeps hitting itself for massive damage.

One thing to note is that Microsoft’s existence made computers cheap and ubiquitous for the masses. If it hadn’t been for Microsoft, there would be two types of computers: Five to ten thousand dollar machines that are completely closed architectures (the Jobs model) or super-cheap machines running free software that only gearheads know how to use (the Linux model).

Microsoft provided the middle ground — the accessible, affordable, user-programmable “good-enough” PC that most people need. This is the Jay Leno of PCs: Satisfactory but without an edge or any innovation. They turned computers into commodities, which is what people really needed. For the time this was a good thing.

But the question going forward is this: Do we see computers like we see appliances (toaster ovens, microwaves, etc..) or do we see them like we see cars? Are they going to continue to be viewed as mere tools, or are they material projections of how we view ourselves? And I’m not just talking about price or flashy style — I’m talking about usability and performance. Because if we continue to move towards the latter as a culture then Microsoft needs to get its act together and figure out how to build products that people don’t just need — it needs to build things that people want.

This American Life has its own iPhone app: Now you have super easy access to nebbishy hipsters sharing their embarrassing slices of life with you.

Every Place Can Be a Safe Place

February 3rd, 2010Blog0 comments

I was told something recently that makes a lot of sense: You’ve got to find your “safe place” for writing. This is the place where you aren’t thinking about whether something is going to sell or not, or whether you need to do your laundry. This is the place where the TV and Internet aren’t trying to sell you anything — the place where you don’t have to worry about your kids (for those folks that are a little further along than I am) because you know that they’re being well cared for somewhere else.

This is the safe place where you can write. It is essential to define the boundaries of this place so that you can go in, get your work done, and then re-emerge into the rest of the world feeling accomplished.

I’m trying to define my version of such a place using 21st century thinking: That such a place doesn’t have to be a set physical location, but can be any place where I have my National Brand No. 43-571 notebook* open and I’m holding a pen. For me, the safe place is the page itself because I can write anything there: Try anything out, experiment, think out loud on paper — and anything I write there can never be wrong because it’s not supposed to be absolute or final. It’s a place to just write without second-guessing myself or attempting to attain perfect results right away.

For me, safety is the ability to experiment and play; it’s the ability to ask questions and explore thoughts. Structure, organization — those can happen later. In fact, if I do have a structure present it’s OK to use these notebook pages to go ahead and write stuff there that’s the real deal — but it’s always okay to use the space to doodle.

And when I’m done, I close the notebook. I can go do something else. But if I get an idea or something strikes me, I can open the notebook and I’m in my safe writing place again.

* Probably the most perfect writing notebook I’ve ever encountered. They have a hard cover so you can open them and write without placing them on a solid surface; their pages are numbered for easy indexing, and they’re made in Canada by good, honest, hard-working people who love hockey and neighborliness.

I read a lot of scripts. Often it’s extremely helpful to read the scripts of movies that I’ve seen so that I can see the film’s blueprint. It’s also interesting to examine the structure of the story and of its scenes — and it’s extremely interesting to see how the film’s action’s are described by the screenwriter on paper. For instance: “His lips are shaking, rain spilling down his face like tears” — from A Beautiful Mind by Akiva Goldsman.

Vice versa, when I’m watching a movie or TV show I often think about how I would describe on paper the action that I’m seeing on screen. I try to do this using phrases that are as kinetic, descriptive, and brief as possible, sounding out the beats in my head between action and dialogue. These days it’s pretty much automatic. I remember my old high school videography teacher telling us that his constant automatic analysis of film/tv ruined his enjoyment for such things, but for me the analyzing-while-viewing tends to add to the fun.

Anyway, I’m reading Up in the Air right now. I liked the movie, although at the end as the protagonist Ryan Bingham stared up at the destination board, totally lost, I kept thinking, “But… You’re a very handsome man! You look like George Clooney!.. You could totally get any lady in that airport and live happily ever after!” So that sorta killed the angst for me.

But if they had cast Paul Giamatti or Philip Seymour Hoffman in that role I woulda been like, “Yup. You’re gonna die alone.”

My First Day as a Professional Nerd

February 1st, 2010Blog0 comments

So today was my first official day of full time writing. I was supposed to take a bit of a vacay over the weekend but I can’t not-write, so I did some writing anyway: Just some really simple stuff — worked a few things out on paper.

But today was the first big day. I’m hammering out a template of how each day should go from now on — a way of retaining discipline and structure. So I had myself a nice long morning run and got a haircut afterwards to start out this new chapter fresh. Then I spent most of the day in the library doing research. Sending emails, looking over my project list. I’ve come to realize that my job title is now “professional nerd”.

I had a late lunch/early dinner with friends: Doughboys is open again! You can’t keep a good doughboy down. All your favorites are back, although they ran out of my favorite (BEEFY MAC) today. But the red velvet cake is still in full effect.

Speaking of which, they’re opening a Barney’s Beanery in Westwood. Believe it!

Then I came back home and consolidated some stuff on my computer, then went out to have a drink with one of my agents. She said, “It was your first day!” and gave me a hi-five. At this mixer I ran into a good old friend who is now helping me put the word out on the street: I’m single, ladies!

Yes, I could get used to this lifestyle.