3 day indy car shoot

At the beginning of the week I actually worked as a production assistant again. Taking a break from my unemployment I worked for a company shooting a promo for the Indy Racing League. Everything went fairly smoothly as things go. I got a little annoyed at things here and there, but overall it was a good shoot.

The best part about it was taking the director back to the hotel after the last day had finished. He was very complimentary and interested in what I wanted to do in this here industry. It's nice when someone takes a personal interest in what you want to do. I told him how I'd had a string of not-so-fun production jobs and with the economy the way it is, am looking to get out of this whole ordeal. He didn't want me to give up and ended up giving me a good bit of advice and guidance to help me along, offering to pass my resume around when he got back to New York. We'll see.

On the fun side of things, I ended up driving some of the best race car drivers in the world to their photo shoots and found some pretty interesting things about breaking awkward silences. It's hard to talk to someone whose sorta famous without asking them the usual barrage of questions, so my new trick is to spout off useless information like, "did you know that kangaroos and emus can't walk backwards?" and they're like, "Uhhh, wow, no you know I didn't." Which then leads to other neat and pointless conversation instead of the usual awkward silence that happens when driving people like that.

Anyways, I'm working on a big post about reality TV which will probably end my career working in it--soooooo, stay tuned!

Oh, Oscar, dost thou really give a shit?

Peter Bart is hilarious. I read his lately article on Variety about how he is approaching his oscar voting and how he perceives it all to be going. It's a wonderful insider look at what this is really all about--a concept that even someone like Mr. Bart admits rather blatantly, he doesn't understand. I imagine the editors and executives at Variety told Peter to write something about how he sees the Oscar race to be shaping up, instead he gave a "who knows what the hell" article that is probably far closer to the point than most oscar analysts would like to admit.

I've always agreed that the oscar race is more like a three legged rodeo ride and that what wins doesn't always mean its best, just that it was pretty good. If any of the films win for best oscar, (except "district 9" and "blind side") I will be okay with it. Though, on a personal level, I'd rather not see Avatar win, as I'd like to see Cameron lose to his ex-wife katherine. And that's what the Oscar race really is all about, a personal, vendetta-like experience that pits brother against sister as every vies what what is the "best" when in actuality there really isn't (again, except for "district 9" and "blind side") because even to be nomintated you have to be really good, again, I can't understand why "district 9" and "blind side" got nominated, after soooooo many better films (Star Trek, Moon, Nine, Public Enemies, Watchmen... Hannah Montana) Seriously, "district 9" why? Was it because they had the most viral ad campaign ever made? give me a break for god's sake.

Enough digressing. I'll be spending Oscar night at a fundraiser for the AIMA, which is some acronym for Alabama film makers, though I forget what it is. The Alec Baldwin/Steve Martin act should be mildly funny, and I'm sure the speeches will be same-ole shoe. Doesn't matter, as I expect I'll only be half watching it anyways and no matter who wins, I'll probably say, "well that figures."

First Draft Completed

I've just finished 68 pages of the first draft of a stage play I've been working on since August 2009. I typically don't write stage plays but for some reason I just figured, "Well, what the hell..."

Catharsis is setting in. It's like I've gotten some huge elephant off my chest and I want to shout about it to the world. I've stayed up all night working on this! I'm excited about this next stage of editing and refining, adding and subtracting. It's like I have all my meat finally on the grill and next is the fun part--the seasoning. When I'm done with it, I'll probably have added enough seasoning to make it around 100 pages. That's roughly about two hours with a break in the middle.

Switching gears, I've been mulling over for quite some time about something a friend of my who writes said about story telling. He told me that coming up with the story is art, writing it and putting it into dialogue form is the science. I think he was being facetious and referencing the usage of really bad catch phrases, but just in case he wasn't I have to strongly disagree on that point. Writing follows a natural path. Every story has one other wise they wouldn't be stories. They'd be beginnings without ends, trials with no tribulation, or endings that never actually began. Without the science of story telling there would be nothing compelling about anything. It's not art, it's just common sense, much like cooking. And like cooking what makes stories good is not what the dish is trying to be as a whole but what goes into it. Like, umm, words?

Whoa, I'm hungry.

I'm liking the cooking references but right now I'm too tired to really go anywhere with them. Hopefully one day I'll see this play come to life and hopefully audiences can experience what I've felt and been through in ways I never even imagined. Or, maybe they'll just hate it. I'll take my chances.

LOST

I'm about to watch the last season of LOST. What an incredible show this must've been to work on! I really want to work for people making content like this. While I think every project turns out to be a bit of a cluster fuck, working on a cluster fuck in Hawaii on a show as complex as this with actors as cool as these would be really cool. We'll see how it goes, I'm really excited! Can't wait to see how it all turns out!

Miramax Shuts its Doors

Big news today. A giant in the film world Miramax has closed down. Although the move has been suspected for quite some time since the departures of it's founders Bob and Harvey Weinstein, it had always been a big question as to whether or not its parent company Disney could maintain it in their absence. All told exec Daniel Battsek ran the company the best he could, aquiring films like "Tostsi," "The Queen," and "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" (a personal favorite) but it seems the out-of-sorts film company was always at odds with its owner -- like a teenager rebelling against a parent.

Variety says that speculation is now back on the Weinstein brothers as to whether or not they will make a bid to buy back the company and rebuild it but many are unsure. For the moment Miramax will remain in the distribution business with 7 movies slated to come out this year and early next year.

I don't want to sound like a cliche and say something to the effect that all the other news media outlets are saying about how this is "the end of an era" because the truth is: it's the beginning of a new one. Miramax has had a good 20 year run and it could possibly do another 20. the way things look they could certainly do better than Disney's other studio arm, MGM has done. In any case, whether it does or not is besides the point. The show will go on. It always does.

Day Playuh!

Yesterday I worked a corporate training video shoot of a guy reading a teleprompter talking to an audience of stock brokers about how they should manage retirement funds. I acted mainly as script supervisor and personal assistant. I wish everyday would be like that--a very painless 6 hours. What made the day better was that I was working with two guys from "Lifted," the movie I was working on when I first started the blog! They weren't any two guys either, they were one of the producers and the director of photography, two wonderful gentlemen, very professional and easy to work for.

A friend of mine says that when you come off of a feature film project you're sharp as razors. I think she's right. It was nice because for the first time in a while I felt really good at my job! I'm not saying that I'd like to do videography work for the rest of my life, but some solid days here and there would really slow the encroaching grey hairs that are popping up in my hair line...

This week at Sundance

For those in-the-know, the acclaimed and highly criticized Sundance Film Festival is going on this week in Park City Colorado. It's the first major film festival of the year and depending who you are--the most important. Sundance unveils the first of the years top films but it's not without a stir. It's among one of the longest running film festivals in the world and competition to get in it is some of the most ferocious there could ever be. A lot of the criticism in recent years has been Sundance's focus on films that are not truly "indie" but more or less platform films for Hollywood stars pushing their prowess in more edgy, dramatic or quirky films whose only distinction from a studio film is the bureaucracy in how it was made.

So what is indie anyways? Is it story? Is it the cast? Is it the budget? Are some directors more indie than others? No. Indie simply refers to a movie that gets it's financing from outside the corporate studio system. Because of this, indie films generally tend to be a lot smaller, and about much more niche topics than the broader, higher budget Hollywood cousins. In short though, the studios are risk averse, they let others do the work for them and test out new ideas and when one sticks, they snatch it up (example: Juno, Little Miss Sunshine) Despite all this, Sundance still is a relatively decent platform for movies that are a little outside the box to make an appearance.

One movie I'm really pumped about this year is a film called "The Kids are Alright," a comedy, which focuses on the story of the children of a lesbian couple who go out to find their birth father. Aside from the subject matter the other hook for it for me is the title of the movie is taken from a song by "The Who," one of the best rock bands of all time! Sundance is a huge boost for these sort of films. Movies like this could go either way if released conventionally. First in trailers, then commercials, then in theaters. What film festivals like Sundance do is spark interest and create hype for audiences to get motivated in seeing things that are slightly different than normal. They rely heavily on the "bandwagon" effect which comes mostly from reviews from notable print and television media outlets and the internet.

Other interesting things at Sundance is a film called "Toads," which is a 3d nature documentary--the first of its kind. There's much hubub about whether or not Sundance should even allow 3d, after all--how indie is that? To answer, Indie is all about putting technology to the fullest, not matter how small the budget is, and raising the standards of what we expect is possible out of the wonderful story telling platform that is film-making.