Back in the Big City Blues

Phooosh. That's me blowing off the cobwebs.

Um...Is anyone still there?

All of January and most of February went by with me up to my eyeballs in day job work. Shooting and editing and making industrial videos, picking up a few new clients, all the while being sustained by the fact that we (me and a tiny crew) were heading to Trinidad in February to shoot carnival for the crazy Bollywood movie.

I'm back now and having spent the last decade of my life passionately defending living in New York to skeptical Third Worlders, I'm strangely bummed to be here. It could be just the winter blahs. It could be the crummy drive from JFK airport to my Brooklyn pad, a drive lined with sidewalks of dirty snow. Man, from the time the taxi dropped us off, I was ready to chase him, flag him down and head back to the Caribbean.

Or maybe this isn't about winter. Maybe it's about the desire to get immersed in making something more creative than HR videos. At any rate, tonight when I heard Alicia Keys crooning Empire State of Mind, Part Two on the radio, spinning all that honey toned love, I did not "put one hand in the air for the big city", I yelled at her to shut the hell up and changed the damn station.


Photo by Adrian Miles

In the Midst of Battle, a Pause

Yesterday I had lunch with the creative partner on the documentary project that is on hiatus right now. Lately I've been battling pessimism and doubt on the crazy Bollywood project. Our time is running out and because, in the words of Nora Ephron I'm supposed to be the bravest one in the room, though my public face is calm, inside I have raging moments of panic. But it was nice to meet with someone in the same boat, going through the financing dance, finding the money in the same diligent dog work that we're doing. It's weird. I know other writers/writer-producers going through the same thing but most of them let the panic show. Perhaps cause they're less experienced. (This is my director friend's second narrative feature...he's got a feature, and a couple of docs and shorts behind him.)

I'm often at the other end of the conversation, listening and trying to be positive. (The first time writer/producer gripes, "My director isn't getting back to me," "My producer is totally giving me the brush off", "This investor's been sitting on the pot so long it's time for him to shit or get off"), and this brief lunch in this city, this check in with someone I haven't seen in so long who can laugh off the slings and arrows and just keep doing his thing was a real tonic. A modicum of sanity. Fix the script, get the talent, get the money. These things are doable. One foot in front of the other. Onward.

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.