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Making Your Own Website for Writers and Actors, Part 1

January 28th, 2011Blog1 comment

People often come up to me and say, “Mike, I really like your website. It looks really professional, which is bizarre considering how unprofessional you actually are.” Seriously, around fifteen people have come up to me and said this exact same sentence. And then they flip me off. I think they are all in cahoots.

So I think it’s time for a series of posts on how I made my website, how I organized my content, and why I chose the content that I have on here. I’ve been doing this on my own for years now, so I’ve learned a lot through trial and error.

I’m writing this in the hopes that it will help other people get their own websites up. That way we can all look professional together, even if we actually aren’t.

This Is What Happened Over There

January 26th, 2011Blog3 comments

If the wind scatters your novel in Pittsburgh, Robert
Downey Jr. will chase after it for you.

I spent last weekend in Pittsburgh. Until last Friday, everything I knew about Pittsburgh came from the movie Wonder Boys and from the Fallout 3 DLC titled The Pitt. So in my mind, Pittsburgh was full of super mutants and guys named Vernon Hardapple. Also if you’re in the process of writing a 2,000+ page novel and you don’t know what it’s about, Pittsburgh is a great place to throw it out of your car window.

Anyway: Our good friend Rob Handel, professor in the Dramatic Writing department at CMU, member of 13P and a fellow member of New Dramatists, asked me to read nine graduate student scripts and meet with the writers one-on-one to help them turn their first drafts into second drafts. Rob is a great guy and is a good friend of this blog, and this sounded like a fun trip — so on Friday night I found myself in Pennsylvania.

Fire and Forget

January 16th, 2011Blog0 comments

Writing involves submitting a lot of stuff and applying for a lot of things. Fellowships, writing contests, training programs, etcetera. This is absolutely necessary because you need to get eyes on your work in order to gain traction.

When I first started I was sending stuff out all the time. By rights, you have to. And I used to get really anxious waiting for things — hoping, wondering, anticipating the results.

Eventually I came to terms with this anxiety through a simple three word phrase: Fire and forget. In other words, do the very best work you can, then send it out and forget about it. Once it leaves your hands it’s out of your control, so there’s no use wondering about it. Just fire and forget.

The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate

January 12th, 2011Blog0 comments

This is a documentary on the making of the film that destroyed United Artists studios. If you haven’t seen this yet, you should see it.

And thinking about this now, wouldn’t it just have been possible to split this into two or even three movies and release them a year apart?

The Social Network & Citizen Kane & RKO 281

January 11th, 2011Blog0 comments

image right The Social Network on Blu-Ray is in my stack of things to watch. No, I didn’t want to see it in theaters — I am a bit of an insane superfan of Aaron Sorkin, so I wanted to watch this film in the comfort of my own home where I could PAUSE at any moment to take notes. This was one that I knew I was going to study.

But before I put TSN in the player, I fired up cinema’s most famous fictionalized biopic, Citizen Kane. I like to find echoes and threads between separate pieces of work. This is sorta my job — to discover, and then tie together.