The Production Manager - Roll on the wrap party

The Standby Painter - The Complaint Department

The Manager - Want to Write Interesting Screenplays? Get Out of Your Comfort Zone

Many people say write what you know.  But to write what you know that is also  interesting — that’s not so easy.  Because at the end of the day people want to be entertained — and to do that your own story needs to be interesting and engaging.

One obstacle to writing interesting stories is that it’s very easy, especially in LA, to settle into a lifestyle where you only talk to your small circle of friends, go to the same three bars, and never leave your neighborhood. Yet to really be interesting you have to get outside your comfort zone and constantly do new and interesting things.

For example, every weekend I will try to do something new and different. And it doesn’t have to be expensive or extravagant. Usually I will just type into Google “cheap/free events in Los Angeles” and see what turns up.  For example, last weekend I typed in “cheap great desserts in Los Angeles” and found a fabulous Thai bakery open until 2 a.m. Or I’ll see an art show downtown or go on a hike somewhere I have never been before. Having intellectual curiosity will enrich your life and your writing — and you never know what you might discover.

Also, I try to read as much as I possibly can.  Books, newspapers, blogs, magazines — the stranger the better. One of my favorite magazines is Texas Monthly — and everyone makes fun of me because why would a nice Jewish girl
born and raised in LA read Texas Monthly?  But I love the magazine’s stories, which expose me to information I wouldn’t know from living in LA.

You never know where a great idea will come from.  So the more you read, the more opportunites you have to discover interesting stories that could be the basis for a great script.

In fact, one of my favorite stories is that of the origins of the film PUNCH DRUNK LOVE. It came from a tiny article P.T. Anderson saw about a man who traded in a lot of Healthy Choice coupons. This little nugget ended up being on a tiny part of the movie but if he had never read that tiny article he might never have been inspired to write the movie.

Start right now to read, discover, travel and experience life so you can write interesting stories.

Tags: Film Blog, Film Industry, Director, Filmmaker, Movie Theatre

The Showrunner - Five Reasons Bloggers End Up Being So F***ing Snarky

#1. I have a director friend. A working director.  He sends “new writings” every month to his inner circle.  These are his “pages”, his personal space for reflection and insight and intimacy – with a self-conscious style that I dig because I have known him my whole life, but I’m …

Tags: Film Blog, Hollywood, Director, Filmmaker, Movie Theatre

The Editor - Techy Gizmos and Great Films

A recent article in The Vancouver Sun, about international film festivals like Toronto and Cannes, has a bunch of directors contemplating the end of the world as they know it (I might add, for those R.E. M. fans in the crowd  “and I feel fine…..”). The piece, entitled “Bending The Movie Genre In An Uncertain Time” quotes filmmakers like Paul Schrader and Jonathan Demme on the transition away from studio-oriented productions and into the scary world of indie values.

Perhaps director-writer Paul Schrader said it best when he described the motivation behind his latest film, Adam Resurrected, at the Toronto festival: “The well-made film is dead,” said the writer of Taxi Driver. “I knew it the minute I saw The Interpreter. It was a gorgeous, beautifully made from from Sydney Pollack - but there was something dead about it. It had no life at all.” Schrader was articulating a view shared by many other filmmakers who’ve watched their métier shift from an expensive and highly exclusive means of expression into a more populist and far more immediate experience thanks to the rise of digital tools.

I’m not sure that I understand writer Katherie Monk’s conclusion in the second sentence. Schrader seems to be talking about content, not technique. I don’t know how you feel, but I don’t see the relationship between soulless films and technology. I’ve been watching films since the 1960’s and the percentage of crap hasn’t seemed to have shifted But then she shifts over to Demme:

When the film had its North American premiere at the Toronto fest earlier this month, Demme said he wanted to give his tragic-comic wedding story a “home movie” feel, and for him, that meant ditching the awkward 35mm film cameras that can only record ten minutes of action before a magazine change, and exchanging them for the lightweight and highly mobile digital brand of camera that can record high-definition tape for an entire hour.

“I never thought I’d say this,” said Demme. “But I’ve lost my desire to work with film. I still worship film. and I hated making the original shift away from the flatbed to [an online digital editing machine called] Avid, but now the technology has reached a point where [digital] looks good. It’s not flat. You can light it. And now, I’m madly in love with it.”

She talks about Demme’s shooting style as it impacted actress Debra Winger’s sense of comfort –because Demme chose to shoot the film with a roving camera, the actress never was quite sure what was being captured and what not. Frankly, I understand her pain. It’s not easy trying to act real in the unreal world of filmmaking. Demme was trying to “listen in” on the real things that people do when there isn’t a camera around. That’s almost an impossibility — the presence of the camera changes everything. It’s the Brownian Movement writ large.

So what does this mean for editors?

I’m thinking about this because next Saturday, April 4th, I am giving a talk at the San Francisco Apple Store (it’s at 1pm at 1 Stockton St.)  about Creative Storytelling and my book, The Lean Forward Moment.  Now remember, this is San Francisco Apple Store.  San Francisco. That means that the quotient of tech-heads is liable to be much larger than at your typical Apple Store, and that’s already a higher percentage than at your typical Blockbuster, let’s say.

The decision, therefore, to talk about story as opposed to techy gizmos should be fun. I’ve written on my other blog, Hollyn-wood, about what happens when you pick up a camera which theoretically enables you to shoot unlimited amounts and footage. As an editor, I like more choices as opposed to fewer, of course. But it may surprise you to hear that I’m not at all convinced that unlimited choices makes for better films. In fact, I believe that shooting unlimited numbers of takes and set-ups, often comes from (and leads to) fuzzy thinking.

The Jonathan Demme quote above, worries me. It’s really hard work being an actor, especially when you’re working on the level of a Debra Winger. Not every actor works in the same way, but nearly all of them do not fully inhabit their characters 24 hours a day — on camera and off. It’s simply too bloody exhausting to stay in character the entire time. Most actors who I’ve worked with visibly change as soon as the director yells “Cut!”

As an aside, that transition from character back into person often provides some really interesting moments that are ripe for use in the final film. I often look for reaction shots in that footage, because their performances are often less guarded and sometimes less artificial than when they know the cameras are rolling. This doesn’t work in general, but it sometimes can provide some hidden gems.

That means that, in a world where the actors never know what is going to be used and what isn’t, they must continually be “on.”  And that means that, shooting with a cool file-based camera like the Red, or in formats like P2 or XDCamEX — which record right to cards or hard drives (enabling very very long takes), they can’t get a rest. It’s the difference between a 14-day marathon and a sprint. Wha? You’ve never heard of a 14 day marathon?  Well, that’s not atypical for a low budget film.

The other aspect of storytelling that often gets thrown under the bus in the rush to explore the advances of technology, is that filmmaking involves collaboration with larger groups of people than just yourself. This means that, if you’re exploring five different places in an actor’s monologue for a push-in, that the d.p. doesn’t get a big sense as to what is really important in the speech. It also means that I, as an editor, don’t have a good sense of what the director thought was the key Lean Forward Moment in the scene. This is often exacerbated when the actor, feeling the camera get closer and closer to his/her face, modulates the performance in time with the camera move. That means that he/she has now had to think through five different meanings for the speech. This will often mean changing the actor’s approach to what came before and what comes after that moment.

It’s a rat’s nest, and it’s easy to miscommunicate intentions.

As an editor, I love a lot of options that are delivered with some clear intentions. That’s different than experimenting without a goal. The first option usually leads to a cohesive film, which can take advantage of improvisations and great discoveries. The latter usually leads to a fragmented, scene-by-scene approach to the film’s story, and many missed opportunities.

So, while I fundamentally disagree with Schrader’s feeling that the “well-made film is dead” I do understand what he means that the drive to create populist films has pushed us further and further into technology. That, in my mind, doesn’t make for bad films (technology certainly made SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE easier to shoot and edit) but it can lead to unfocused filmmaking and that is bad.

What that means for editors is that we need to be ever more vigilant about what our stories are and how we focus and shape them. We should never stop asking:

• Whose story is this?
• How does that person change in this scene?
• Where does that person change in this scene?
• How can help the audience to feel that change at that moment?

You’ll notice that not once during those questions did I ask what camera move or special effect was used or necessary. It was all focused on story and character?

And that’s how we’ll continue to get well-made films in this tech-hungry world.

 

Tags: Television, Actor, Director, Film Industry, Movie

The Casting Director - To much of a Twitter may not be a good thing…

Twitter, is a social network that lets you follow people and depending on how much information they give you, you can now literally stalk your friends or celebrities and see what they are doing at any given time. For me, I think that Facebook has enough information about my life on it for the people that I think want to see what is going on in it, to follow me. I have a Facebook page for Matthew Lessall Casting, which I encourage actors to join so that they can get additional info or ask questions. I also video blog for a few minutes every week. I do this because I’m a sharer, I work by myself and sometimes it is nice to get out thoughts and feelings about what is going on at work. While casting “Polish Bar” I included some video while I was casting. I think it can be a good insight to the trial and tribulations of Indie-film casting.

For me, Twitter, is over-sharing. I signed up under an alias, because I wanted to see what it was all about and which actors are on it. To my surprise, I can follow actors, agents, managers, PR folks; the list goes on and on. I am not sure why a celebrity such as Ashton Kutcher thinks it is a good idea to display so much of his life in the public domain. I assume at some point Mr. Kutcher wants privacy in his life, but clearly putting Demi Moore’s backside on Twitter and having it splashed all over the news doesn’t bother them, they think it’s funny. And I guess, if I were a College student I would think it is funny too, but at what point does all of this information become too much over-sharing? I think actors need to be careful about the info they give out. They are most prone to stalkers and if I was obsessed by Mr. Kutcher I could figure out based on his Twittering where he was in the world, what he is doing on set of the film he is on, cross-reference the director he is working with and see that he is Twittering and posting pictures from the set and then figure out where he was and stalk him…

When you place yourself in the public domain by writing blogs or posting videos or pictures or now, Twittering, every time you do that, you are not just sharing with your friends or the adoring public of gazillions of fans that you think you have, you may also be causing some damage to your personal privacy down the road.

At the gym last week, a woman stopped me and introduced herself to me, she recognized me from the video blog I do on Facebook. I was flattered, and we chatted about her career as an actress and she was so lovely and complemented me on being “brave” to let the public see what really goes on in my head/office (it’s the same thing to me). I thanked her, and then I felt strange. I was happy that the blogging and video blogging was doing what I wanted it to accomplish, but at the same time, I was in sweats and looked like crap and was probably smelly from running on the treadmill. My point is, I realized the power (as lame as this may seem) of posting information on line. It does reach people and one does not have control of over whom it reaches.

I just think we should all think about that for a while…

Tags: Film Blog, Television, Movie Blog, Movie Theatre, Hollywood

The Production Manager - Reality Bites back

After recently being laid off from my last job due to budget cutbacks (i.e. the boss having run out of things to blame on me), I have got a few weeks work on a well known reality show….

As per usual, the phone call came out of the blue and at the last minute.  I’d heard about the job through a friend and interviewed a couple of weeks earlier. Despite being told I’d hear back within a couple of days, I heard nothing and presumed correctly I hadn’t got the job. The PM position went to an MTV girl but they called in a panic a week later needing a senior coordinator to manage the schedules. It’s not my usual position but in these times, who can afford to turn down work? So I took it, starting 9am the following morning at a location ‘to be disclosed’.

I got a call late in the evening while having drinks with an old colleague; the team was to be based in the Lower East Side and I should head there to be met by the PM in the morning.

Of course, I was excited to be working so soon after being let go and I drank way too much, went to bed wayyy too late and arrived on set knackered and just a little nauseous. In the lobby I correctly identified the PM who didn’t seem to have a clue who I was but took me upstairs anyway with a bunch of hyper active PA’s.

Upstairs in our make shift production office there was carnage with kit brought over from LA spread liberally across the office. There were a shit load of people in the room, rushing about like loons and I knew instantly it was going to be one of those shows… Eventually we managed to get everyone together and have a production meeting to go through the schedule.

There was instantly tension between the producer and the DP and the entire schedule was questioned before the day had even begun. After a polite argument everyone agreed to keep to the schedule as it was and off they went.

I spent the entire day trying to get details about the schedule both for the week and for me. I was just asked to come in and work, no idea how long. Eventually at about 8pm, when everyone had returned, wrapped and gone out for dinner, I was able to get the PM to spend 5 minutes with me giving me ANY information to put into a workable schedule.

At about 10.30pm, I was finally able to produce the call sheet, just 12 hours to write one document, which was held up by lack of information, lack of attention and okays from 4 different people. No wonder people in reality are working 20 plus hour days.

This is NOT going to be fun

 

Tags: Filmmaking, , Movie Bloggers, Filmmaker, Film Industry

The Script Reader - The Footloose Remake (Kids Today)

(WARNING: My choices in these days when i am actually busy are between writing clean, well-edited blogs never, and writing blogs with the occasional typo sometimes. I chose the latter. Apologies in advance.)

In addition to making 17 Again, I heard that Zac Efron is going to star in a Footloose …

Tags: Oscars, Television, Director, Hollywood, Movie Bloggers

The Business Affairs Assistant - The importance of confidentiality

I realize that my taking this stance on this topic is going to seem a bit hypocritical coming from me, a blogger concealing his (her?) identity to reveal things about his/her workplace, but I actually have no intention of saying anything that violates my confidentiality agreement; my anonymity is merely …

Tags: , Oscars, Movie, Movie Theatre, Television

The Standby Painter - Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid

Be Afraid.  Be Very Afraid 

This should be a happy time, a wonderful life I’m living right now.  I’m finally on as the standby painter for several months on a Harrison Ford feature.   There are other big names, a good budget, a fine story, lots of hours, lots of overtime, no …

Tags: Movie, Film Industry, Movie Blog, Filmmaker, Film

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