Ah, to hear it from someone else's mouth ...

In 1957, as an English instructor at Smith, [Sylvia Plath] wrote to her brother, “I am simply not a careerwoman, and the sacrifice of energy and lifeblood I’m making for this job is out of all proportion to the good I’m doing in it… I wanted to write first, and being kept apart from writing, from giving myself a chance to really devote myself to developing this ‘spectacular promise’ that the literary editors write me about when they reject my stories, is really very hard.

Also, I don’t like meeting only students and teachers… this life is not the life of a writer… I am needing to apprentice myself to my real trade… how I long to write again! When I’m describing Henry James’s use of metaphor to make emotional states vivid and concrete, I’m dying to be making up my own metaphors. When I hear a professor saying, ‘Yes, the wood is shady, but it’s a green shade -- connotations of sickness, death, etc,’ I feel like throwing up my books and writing my own bad poems and bad stories and living outside the neat, gray secondary air of the university. I don’t like talking about D.H. Lawrence and about critics’ views of him. I like reading him selfishly for an influence on my own life and my own writing.”

I taught this man how to play football.

No I'm joking. Hey this cracks me up.

December 22 @ LACMA

Just so I don't forget:

Giant
Tuesday, December 22 | 1:00 pm
Tuesday Matinees
1956/color/198 min. | Scr: Fred Guiol, Ivan Moffat; dir: George Stevens; w/ James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Dennis Hopper.

A Texas ranching family fights to survive changing times.

Free holiday matinee


More to come soon. Work this day / week consuming time.

Two Soundtracks

I've gotten a hold of these two film soundtracks recently, and they've made me want to watch their accompanying movies. One in particular, for the film "Le Planete Sauvage" (Fantastic Planet), has really tickled my eardrums. Structurally, I can really hear where Air's soundtrack to the "The Virgin Suicides" comes from, and listening to it from that standpoint alone is super interesting in and of itself.



I'm also digging this soundtrack for "Un Homme et Une Femme." The theme is so silly and nonchalant, wry almost.



With the "New Moon" phenomenon of putting together different musical "brands" to attract moviegoers, it is nice to listen to scores made for specific films, particularly in the case of these two, those composed in styles befitting their concepts and instrumented in contemporary musical language. They address or respond to their movies in a deliberate way, be it directly like the first trailer or more indirectly like the second. I think this approach is powerful, and it allows the music to both stand alone and serve as a filmic complement.

I'm curious to have the experience of watching these movies after listening to their soundtracks (as I did, by the way, with The Virgin Suicides). I had not seen that Fantastic Planet trailer until writing this post, so now I'm really geeked.

The Week in Stubs

It has been a very, very good week in movies.

1. Holy Shit.
2. Fun Fun Fun.
3. Going to read Beautiful Losers.
4. They Just Keep Getting Better. Really.
5. WTF?
6. The other side of #1.
7. Yes Yes Yes. Never seen anything like it (including the source material).
8. Rocky terrain, but Hillcoat manages it well.
9. Both perfect and brutal.
10. Speechless.

4 Minutes of Mule Days

Go ahead and watch it first before you read below. You may also want to click on the link instead of watching it in this window if it is too small or strangely cropped by our blog lines. I recommend it in HD, of course.

Mule Days Rough from Ryan Carmody on Vimeo.

This is one day's work, from turning on the computer to writing this article. As you well know, we shot this about a year and a half ago in Bishop, and it has been sitting on an external hard drive ever since. We shot primarily on 2 cameras, but had a third that we used for some special events, and I don't think we have even gotten around to capturing the footage from the extra camera. I don't quite know why it has taken so long for me to touch the project; it might be that we didn't know how we ended up with 25 hours of footage yet still lacked a coherent story. Finances also got in the way, I'm sure.

So, today, I just started editing. I knew I wanted to edit Dale's interview (the clown), and Steve the Announcer provided a nice thematic link. This could be the beginning of the documentary, it could be the middle, who knows. Right now it is the beginning solely based on the fact that it is where I started -- which I kind of like. It is without music, which we plan to add later. I think we would run the credits and perhaps some necessary facts about Mule Days over the "Mule Days" sign at the end of the clip. I am working on a second sequence right now that picks up where we left off that introduces Tucker Slender, the cowboy we originally thought was our main character, in a rapid series of freeze frames.

At this point, I am very much enjoying the improvisatory connections between characters and stories. Part of the weight we felt a year and a half ago came from our efforts to map the entire thing out, to find a narrative between Zack, the child, and Tucker, the old man. Now, I think, I've learned a bit more and am approaching it from a different angle. If every person in the documentary was a sub-plot, with no obvious overarching plot, I'd be enormously happy. Just a series of encounters, some intertwined, some combating, some linked, some disconnected, all within the bizarre context of that weekend. This sounds much more appealing to me than finding a story to edit to. I would rather find the story every day I sit down to edit.

The most interesting problem thus far is balancing my personality as an editor with that of the story. A part of me wants to take a more objective, observational stance on the people, but I think that does an injustice to the hilarity and strangeness and uniqueness of the Mule Days atmosphere. I like the challenge of conveying that undercurrent simply through editing, while still maintaining the people without manipulating them. I try instead to condense, amplify, or highlight their lives in a way that rests behind their stories. In a way that props them up.

Expect more soon, who knows from which direction. And, although it might be difficult to form an opinion about a short, isolated clip, I would love any feedback.

Portland 11/18.

Most of my favorite moments from last night, the first night of shooting my Noah/Dingo documentary, are on tape. It was a great night, unusually punctuated by Wolfmother attending the sideshow. I didn't realize it was Andrew Stockdale who had correctly identified a fan up his ass during What's Up Your Ass until I came from the post-show wrap with several of the performers and discovered Stockdale teaching Stephanie how to 'gypsy dance.'

The best part of this story is that we couldn't remember his name and kept calling him Wolfmother. The best moment involving the best part is when a too-drunk Stockdale attempted to shove a sideshow residual ping-pong ball down the throat of Dayna. He's so forceful/playful that he knocks Dayna off the bar stool; Noah, Stephen, Stehpanie, and I attempt to keep her from hitting the ground while Stockdale keeps trying to shove the ping-pong ball into her mouth, and Dayna is yelling "No Wolfmother, no. Wolfmother is attacking me!"

I won't dwell on the fact that Stockdale wanted naked-electric-rock-guitar sex with my girlfriend and friend's girlfriend (a champagne soaked threesome playing in his mind, I'm sure), or that he used Ikea furniture as a leverage, being that we shot 3 1/2 hours of footage last night alone. And the guys are both willing to have us over to film additional footage. Very excited about the documentary.

Script Response.

I read the script not one time, not two times, not four times, but three times; and then I spent longer than I expected thinking about and preparing this response. I lost a reading day but it was totally worth it. This is my response, in its own post because it sometimes wanders into more general topics:

I try to avoid banter with my dialogue. This is my personal preference. For example, I first noticed it here:

CHARLIE
When I get paid, you get paid.

DMITRI
You got paid last week.

That's tough. As a writer that's tough. You want that zing, but you do it at the expense of naturalism. It feels like as a writer you saved it for a punchline, when that information would either be at the beginning of a real conversation, or it would surprise Dmitri. Or it's a ritual between them. But as it is it's banter. Do you know what I mean?

What follows is more banter, and I think Dmitri becomes Charming Foreigner. It's transparent in your writing, knowing you, when you're writing from inspiration and when you're moving your characters forward. I don't know what it's like to read this and not know you. I don't know how knowing you tints my perception.

It sometimes works as a portal into the lives of these three characters, and when it does (and it seems to me that's what you're wanting) it's awesome. I love Charlie's window tinting obsession. I love the beginning of the script. I basically love what's happening and what your intentions are. I think you have nice characters, but they develop like they're in a skit. That's what's nice about the window tinting jokes: they break up what would otherwise be motif cycles. The jokes connect us to the beginning in a surprising way, and this to me is much more engaging than the running topic of payment.

I think that, like in editing, a good idea would be to take out everything you aren't 100% loving and re-write the scene. Leave only what you love. Just so you can see another way it could play, you know, and you may find that your structure was already perfect, but you can explore new possibilities with your characters by doing this. Eliminate what you've already tried and open your characters into new territory. That's a writing technique I use, it may or may not work for you.

As for the Charming Foreigner - my experience is that people who have the gumption, the drive, and the courage to move to a foreign country aren't like this. They're not exclusively one thing. Not that they can't be charming, but they also have an edge somewhere. Most travelers have an edge. They're usually shrewd, sharp motherfuckers. Think about how they would have to be in order to move alone like that. Dmitri is a moron. You should end the script with him drowning by rain. I had a friend in OC, Arturo, wife and son still back home in Russia, who was a crafty businessman that sold cigarettes, duplicated cell phone numbers, and committed manslaughter. That's an extreme case, and another type of cliche, but the guy was a character, he was a person with roots and dimensions. You assign Dmitri characteristics, but you don't let them shape his personality. Who was he in Russia? He was a bike rider, okay, why can't he use a broom? I don't know a bike rider who can't use a broom. Maybe he's the one who can't, fine, but what in the script points to a possible reason? Are you simply using the line to express Charlie's mentality?

Don't let the lines lead you, let the characters. Know your characters and let them surprise you. Oddly enough I'm reading a Russian novel, Anna Karenina (it's pretty obscure), right now, and there's a terrific segment from the introduction, which I'll type after the colon, because I think I'm unintentionally paraphrasing it right now:

"His own conflicting judgments leave room for his characters to surprise him, lending them a sense of unresolved, uncalculated possibility. Pushkin, speaking of the heroine of his Evgeny Onegin, once said to Princess Meshchersky, 'Imagine what happened to my Tatiana? She up and rejected Onegin..I never expected it of her!'"

Lots of great people in one room

Skip Spence! What a beaut!

Record Club: Skip Spence "Little Hands" from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

Diggin on this.