The Hollywood Reporter Awards Watch

The Hollywood Reporter has a roundtable with six "buzzworthy" scribes who are in contention this awards season. It's interesting to read the content, but reading the comments where editor Jay Hernandez gets all defensive about not including any women on the panel is just as compelling.

His explanation...

• For the record, several high-profile women were invited to participate and could not either because of scheduling conflicts or a lack of interest. The lack of women is also a function of the industry and awards season, when historically (excepting 2008) very few women are nominated.

You can almost decode the subtext. They are too busy ("overwhelmed"). They lacked interest ("not focused enough, probably PMSing"). They aren't in contention so we didn't bother to interview them ("perennial losers so why bother...") Poor Mr. Hernandez seems surprised at the backlash in the comments section.

Look, presenting a diverse face on an industry that isn't very diverse is always going to be a challenge but that doesn't make it okay not to try. And it's naive of the editor to not at least be prepared for the criticism.

Anyone foresee a one-on-one sit down with Jane Campion talking about "Bright Star" in THR's near future?

Sympathetic Characters & the Perils of Backstory

Back when I worked as a reader, when I didn't "get" a character I'd often drop a backstory note about fleshing out the guy or gal in question. The producer I worked for would sigh, like he was disappointed and mutter that I was just like the studio honchos in suits, always yearning to see "how I came to be" scenes shoehorned at the midpoint of a story. He hated backstory with a passion I didn't understand when it seemed to me, fresh out of school, that learning about a character's past was a quick way to "get" him, nay, even like him.

Flashforward a couple years, on a recent draft of the much mutating crazy Bollywood musical, and I understand where that curmudgeonly independent producer was coming from, and how much backstory can be overcredited for making a sympathetic character sympathetic. Very rarely, is a clearly laid out backstory the reason you like or root for a character. Matter of fact, backstory can cripple your otherwise pretty darn compelling main guy.

So how do you create a likable protagonist? Here are a couple ideas from Mary Lynn Mercer's "The True Nature of Sympathetic Characters" which I found on a late night Google. It's intended for fiction writers so you have to chuck the last part about internalization but the rest of it is pretty on target.

• Get rid of self-pity. Readers hate it and furthermore (my opinion now) it's not active and your protagonist needs to be active.

• Scenes of goodness, "saving the cat" scenes that are unconnected to the story

• Melodramatic backstories

• Character's that don't quit. This is connected to that active protagonist. If the character cares deeply enough to continue on the quest when all around is dark, we're going to care about that character.

• Inner weakness. Conflicted characters. They have the drive to see them through the story quest but it must not come easy. Every step is hard but they can't turn back.

• Know your genre boundaries. What's fine and "humanizing" for your hero to do in a Western might be downright death for him to do in a romantic comedy.

Crazy how much the creation of a sympathetic character can have so little to do with laying out explicitly the "ghosts"/backstory of the character's life, right?

Now excuse me while I go cut the part where my protagonist talks about the car crash her mother died in, life in the orphanage and the puppy she couldn't save when the orphanage caught afire. (I kid...kinda.)

Happy writing.

photo by Crail
Originally uploaded by AndyRob

Writing vs. Editing, An Observation

I've been bogged down with the day job, which consists of lots of video editing for the industrial videos my company produces.

We've had so much work I've gained two pounds. This is what happens when I edit. In fact, if I have to keep editing, I'm convinced I will one day weigh 200 pounds, maybe more. It's possible that in the end I will need to be extracted off the editing chair with some industrial equipment and carted off to the hospital for my gastric bypass if this kind of workload keeps up.

It's my fault. I could make better choices but when I'm editing I crave junk. When I'm sitting down at a monitor watching endless footage, I turn into an eating machine. I'm grazing non-stop.

Why is that? I hardly ever want to eat anything when I'm writing. I have my cup of coffee and my laptop and I could sit for hours. Food is an inconvenience. I stop when I get hunger pangs. Editing represents the polar opposite. To some extent I enjoy it too, wrestling with the content, figuring out the sequences, building the argument, I just wish it didn't come with so many calories attached.

Photo by Patrick Swint

Rejection Energizes You (and Other Lessons from Mira Nair)

So after the disappointment of getting my dink from Austin, I needed some upliftment. Luckily Mira Nair provided it in spades at the IFP's Independent Film Conference in New York last week. She described needing elephantine skin to survive the ups and downs of Hollywood. That and amazing self-belief.

With every "No thanks. Not for us," she told herself, "You're wrong. I'll show you." And it's turned out pretty well for Mira. That's the spirit I find myself trying to tap into for the much needed rocket fuel to keep the momentum on crazy Bollywood movie musical going. If making a film is like going to war, it's a mighty long campaign.

Mira's keynote also had two pieces of great advice for Third Worlders...stuff I've felt but not been able to articulate.

1) Make what you make excellently. Do not apologize for its quality by saying explicitly or not, hey this is from the Third World so cut us some slack. For her first feature "Salaam Bombay" she told the story of blowing the entire movie's budget in production, leaving nothing for post. She put all the money in the film ($800,000) and then went looking for finishing funds. She just knew it had to look great.

2) Don't "anthropoligize" or explain too much culturally. If you watch Monsoon Wedding you'll see how much you're thrust into the action. There's no expositional dialogue about why we dress this way or wear this henna, or sing this song. There's no outsider leading you through the action and the work is all the richer and more authentic for it.

There was only one thing that bugged me about the keynote. The moderator kept trying to bring the focus back to Mira as a woman director/filmmaker and she seemed determined to steer clear of that pigeonhole. "It's not like I consciously decided that I wanted to make movies about women and walk around wearing orange pants," she said sitting up on stage at an F.I.T. auditorium, wearing a rather fetching pair of said shimmery orange pants. And then she quoted from what another interviewer said of her work, "I don't make political films. I make films politically."

Perhaps making films politically speaks to her commitment to the collective collaboration involved in filmmaking. (She told a charming tale of how she and her crew would perform a ritual at the start of each day's shooting of The Namesake, breaking a coconut and blessing all the equipment, down to the dolly tracks...since every item is important. "The carpenter has to show up to build the throne for the actor to sit on," as she put it.) Or maybe it's a nod to her ultra-realistic, documentarian roots on display in "Monsoon Wedding."

Whichever it was, it didn't stop her from plugging "Amelia", her first big studio movie, starring Hilary Swank, which opens October 23rd.

New York Times on Facebook Fatigue

Because I'm so contrary, I guess I'll make the leap to facebook at the precise moment interest in the social media site is beginning to flag...well according to the New York Times anyway.

Third World Girl & the Jay-Z Shoot

A couple Fridays ago found Third World Girl in front of Jay-Z's 40/40 Club meeting a potential DP for the Little Movie I Want to Direct. He's interested in the script, has solid credits and a healthy cynicism for the pitfalls between excited newbie director and the money in hand that a director needs in place to shoot a feature.

Anyway, he was just back from Europe and because we hadn't got a chance to meet up all summer, he suggested I swing by the set of Jay-Z's video shoot for Rocawear and say hi.

My first instinct was to pass on the offer...I'm not sure why, apart from the fear of seeming like a fraud. In the current issue of Moviemaker magazine, Lynn Shelton ("Humpday") talks about feeling like you're living someone else's life after she got a standing ovation at Cannes. I know this is on a way smaller scale but I had a similar reaction to the DP's invite: I do not live the life where I swing onto video sets and say hi, looking all fabulous and pulled together and artist-like.

But in my quest to grow, I'm challenging myself to do the things I would not usually. That means putting my shy, hermit writer self in front of people I wouldn't usually and getting over the fame factor. So yes, dammit...I was swinging by the Jay-Z set and saying hi...if I could find it.

I didn't know where 40/40 was which shows you how sad and unglamorous my life is, but I eventually found it right by Madison Square Park with a couple teamsters and grips hanging out by a truckload of equipment. They seemed to be talking about California vs. New York, the benefits of being in the union, and the cost of the production. Which cost more: a $20,000 light or the line of video girls in front of the club whose job it was to whoop it up when Jay emerged from a yellow cab.

It was all so ordinary and dull that I instantly felt at home. I remembered that at heart, a shoot is just a shoot. Nothing was more shocking to me than my first one as a freshman at film school... up at 5 a.m. on a cold winter morning, P.Ai.ng for some grad students, bored stiff and deciding what I really wanted to excel at was pre-production.

Anyway, a wonderfully polite P.A. helped me find the DP who was shooting a rehearsal alongside director, Spike Lee (yes Spike Lee!) so I had to wait it out with the teamsters and P.A.s. who all seemed to have Caribbean roots. I almost wanted to take out a piece of paper and start taking e-mails to add to crazy Bollywood movie's fanbase.

When the DP finally got a break we had an extended conversation about the problems of film back home, the competitiveness, the cut throat nature, the fact that the gate keepers for content often don't have a coherent criteria or the level of discernment to judge projects submitted to them for funding. He stressed the importance of moxie and hustle...and not rushing.

"What's the difference between shooting this movie in 2009 and 2010?" he said. "Is the story going to be any less relevant?"

It's exactly what I needed to hear. For weeks it's been nagging me that I've been splitting focus between crazy Bollywood project that we have a tight window in which to shoot next year and this other supposedly "small movie" that was supposed to be a quickie shoot early in '09. Production companies have several movies on a slate, was the argument. But production companies have infrastructures. Third World Girl is essentially a girl with a cell phone, a laptop and a home office.

So Little Movie I Want to Direct gets pushed back to 2010 and I can really focus on making crazy Bollywood movie happen. And what you realize standing watching a crew of twenty folks light a scene for a thirty second commercial is that you better get the prep right cause you're responsible for a whole army.

I didn't stick around long after the DP went away to shoot yet another rehearsal. Jay-Z was nearly there, on the turnpike, but it was late and I'd had enough of the monotony, the awful slowness that production can be...when it's not your baby. Plus, I didn't want it to look like I had nothing to do. I had to go home and work on making a movie. Hanging with the Jiggaman, that's jello.

Oh My God. What Did They Do To "Hot Tub Time Machine"?

I read "Hot Tub Time Machine" a while back in the glory days of Scriptshadow's site (when you could still read scripts) and really liked it. It's a ridiculous time-traveling comedy about a groom and his buds who, at a lame bachelor party, get into a hot tub that takes them back to 1987. So like "The Hangover", it's one of those "get the groom to the church on time" movies, except of course they're stuck in a whole different decade!

But the trailer for it they just released is terrible. Unfunny, cliche, visually bereft. I didn't laugh once and I'm not sure about the casting. The chemistry between this set feels odd...to quote the folks over at Vulture, in what universe would these four be friends?

Man, I'm worried for the movie, especially since it's already got the dubious job of proving it's not "The Hangover's" leftovers. I sincerely hope they just started shooting and had little to pull the trailer from because trailerworthy moments these are not.