Renee has worked on over 30 films and after many adventures she acquired the arcane knowledge of the Stand By Painter. She has worked with directors and DP’s on such films as Untraceable, The Burning Plain, and Twilight, among others.
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February 2, 2010
My sister and her husband are here on a rare visit from the Midwest, and to celebrate, I asked them to see Avatar with our mother and me. It was to be my second viewing of the film, but I had wanted to see Avatar again so I could study it and have something to say about it in this blog. I knew my sister and her husband would love it, because they’re both gamers and science fiction fans.
However, we got a late start. We had to wait for Mother to show up, and as usual she was running late. Very late. Over an hour and a half late, she finally showed up with several bags of odd, unneeded stuff from the Dollar Store. Why had she spent so much time shopping when her daughters were waiting on her?
My mother and my sisters and I have a running joke. Whenever we get distracted by something during a simple shopping errand, and find ourselves spending an hour or three at someplace like the “wall mirrors” section of Big Lots, we explain it all by looking at one another and saying the same two words, usually in unison: “Pretty! Shiny!” That’s because these two features in any one object are all it takes to grab our attention and hold it for ridiculous amounts of time.
And true to form, our mother had stopped at the Dollar Store for who knows what stupid little item—I think it might have been potato chips (I know, a bad idea) —and something pretty and shiny had gotten her attention at 3:00 pm and the next thing she knew, it was 4:30 pm.
We rushed through dinner and then got to the theater, picked up our 3D glasses, and watched the film. As I predicted, both my sister and her husband were amazed, entranced, and they loved Avatar. My mother and I still loved it, as well.
So what can I say about Avatar for this blog entry? I had plans to analyze the color palette and talk about the quality of light and its continuity through the rising and setting of the several planets in Pandora’s sky. I was also going to check the credits for listings of painters and what part they played in the making of the film as far as live action or CGI effects.
But you know what? For the second time I fell headlong into the world reaching out from the screen and flew with those giant bird-lizards (who strangely enough remind me of my hawk Tennerin), caught my breath again at the luminescence of the forest plants and the seeds from the Tree of Souls, watched the irises of the Na’vi glow with emotion, and the changing hues of their skin, marveled at those lizard’s mottled scale patterns that seemed to shift through the colors of the rainbow as they soared between floating mountains…
And I have nothing of any substance to report. Once again I was completely distracted by the beauty of Pandora. It was all so pretty, and so shiny!
January 25, 2010
It is now three weeks into my time off from the last film I worked on, which I believe has the potential to be a cinematic gem, if not a classic. So much depends on so many things that will take place in the editing room, in the decisions about what to lop off and what to leave in and how to weave one thing into another with beauty and skill that I cannot predict what the outcome will be.
Deep into winter, the Northwest has darkened into near-constant rainy days, and even though the physics of our solar system says the days are getting longer, they still feel too short and dim to get anything accomplished. But every so often a bright, sunny respite beams out from the clouds, melting them away into mist over the river. Gifted with a suddenly blue sky, I spend time on the deck watching my hawk Tennerin, who has been harassed now for several days by a single crow, which follows the hawk from tree to tree, and branch to branch for hours at a time. All the birds, including the blue jays and the doves have been chasing each other and riding the blustery winter winds, living their lives mostly unseen by the rest of us humans. I have to make the effort to look. Now my hawk friend is sitting high above me as I write this, waiting on his fir tree for me to stop writing and play with him down on our empty field next to the river.
I’ve become contemplative and odd things catch my attention, surprising me with their own kind of brightness shining through in the winter doldrums. I recently found myself watching the movie American Beauty and noticed how everything from the furniture to the music to the colors of the costumes worked to make that movie what it is: a classic and one of the most critically acclaimed films of all time. Another aspect of this film that made it work was not clear to me until I tried to explain it to a friend afterward. I was forced to put into words what I had previously only felt, a deep kind of emotional understanding.
There is the dialogue (or monologue, really) by Ricky Fitts, who is Lester (Kevin Spacey) Burnham’s young neighbor, when he is talking about his video of “the most beautiful thing he’s ever filmed”, which is a plastic bag dancing in the wind. He begins by explaining that the bag was playing with him, begging him to dance with it, like a little kid. Then he goes on to say, “And that’s the day I knew there was this entire life behind things, and… this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever.”
There are the voiceover monologues of Lester Burnham, who at the end describes life as “an ocean of time”, and reveals, “There’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst… And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life…”
These are monologues that are right “on the nose”, which is a no-no in writing, especially screenwriting. But they worked wonderfully in American Beauty because in counterpoint, the ironic, comedic characters played against it in a weird dynamic that forced you, (ironically?) to take the unabashedly spiritual words seriously.
And why not? Annette Bening’s Carolyn Burnham, is a shrill termagant, highly colored and stylized. Her musical loves, though, hint at a deeper longing in her than simply controlling her American Beauty roses and becoming a powerful and fulfilled real estate agent. She forces her husband Lester and daughter Jane to listen to Bali Hai every night at dinner, and Bali Hai has a power, too, as silly as it is. Even if it is from an unreal musical that is stylistically and politically dated and expired, it still says out loud what deep inside we might truly feel:
Your own special hopes,
your own special dreams,
Bloom on the hillside
and shine in the streams.
If you try, you’ll find me
where the sky meets the sea.
Here am I your special island
Come to me, Come to me.
You hear Bali Hai and know that there is a connection between this song and a beautiful, divinely-moving plastic bag. After all the two are neighbors, in an American suburb.
Carolyn’s bold colors, red and blue, cool white in her immaculate kitchen, and Lester’s yearning for a nostalgic version of first, true love all over again in a rock and roll past are given soul-searing force by using music to fix their emotions throughout the film. The actual soundtrack music, composed by Thomas Newman, made the plastic bag scene effortlessly touching. Before I knew who was behind the musical selections, I marveled at the perfection of the pairings between character, plot and popular songs. When I found out Chris Douridas was the film’s music supervisor, I remembered his wonderful, wonderful radio show on KCRW, Morning Becomes Eclectic, where he would pair selections as disparate as a Disney instrumental from Pinocchio and readings by Jack Kerouac with a Bollywood female pop star’s danceable ballads, creating incredible musical journeys with every new show.
Repeated throughout American Beauty, punctuated by the color of vibrant, vicious red, is the notion of your heart opening, stopping, caving in, the roses bursting in nearly life-stopping beauty from the breast of a dancing cheerleader, while the choreography reflects the lights of Broadway in a song that connects, in all its smarmy ‘80’s gilded showbiz glamour with something almost terrible in its secret force: rose petals that for no reason spin out from us at the most surprising, least-provoked moment.
Like the movie I just wrapped, American Beauty changed dozens, perhaps hundreds of times with every decision by writer, director, actor, and editor. It could have been as many as a thousand different movies at the end of the process. Through creative synchronicity, or fate, or simply a connection to something unfathomably beautiful— maybe even that unseen “entire life behind things”, American Beauty went on to win five Oscars, including best picture, director, cinematography, actor, and original screenplay.
This time seeing the movie, I couldn’t, as usual, stop the tears from forming when I heard the plastic bag monologue. Because I knew at the moment, through the process of watching it in creation on film (how I love film, the beauty of it separate from the story, in a way) that it is true, all of it. There is an entire life behind things.
January 19, 2010
Probably all the bloggers on this site and anyone who works in Hollywood or New York in the great business of Show Business knows the name Bernie Brillstein. Bernie was legendary, managing many of Saturday Night Lives’ stars, including SNL’s creator Lorne Michaels and cast members John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and Phil Hartman. Bernie ran Lorimar for years, managed Jim Henson of Muppet fame, produced network and syndicated television and feature films with all the major movers and shakers of Hollywood, and founded the top production-management company of the nineties, Brillstein-Grey Entertainment.
I was stuck in the hospital last week for an hour-long visit that turned into a boring limbo of waiting for my ride to pick me up, some twelve hours late (thanks to a freak snowstorm and trapped traffic frozen to a stop on all highways). I had no computer, no cell phone, and nothing to do but read Bernie Brillstein’s book, co-written with David Rensin: You’re No One in Hollywood Unless Someone Wants You Dead: Where Did I Go Right?
Before reading the book, I sort of knew who Bernie was, but he was in the agent/manager/producer end of the big blue Show Business Pool, the deep end, millions of dollars deep, while I am in the technical/camera/set/crew end of the Pool, where the dollars flowing past rarely reach your ankles. Because we’re at such distant ends of the Business, my not knowing him personally isn’t surprising. But what is surprising, though, is how many people he names in his book that I have actually worked with or met in the course of my little nothing job.
So with not much else to do in my hospital room, I went through the names in his book’s index and tagged those that Bernie Brillstein and I both have connections to. Here are a fraction of those:
Matthew Broderick, Ed Burns, Chevy Chase, Dabney Coleman, Harrison Ford, Jim Frawley, Brian Grazer, John Landis, Rob Lowe, Steve Martin, Dennis Miller, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman, Ivan Reitman, George Schlatter, Tom Scott, Martin Short, and Bruce Willis, for a start.
Bernie Brillstein’s stories of how the deals were made that led to the eventual production hierarchies that spawned, finally, the movies I’ve worked on were enlightening. I’ve never had occasion to ponder who first got the money together that brought the ideas or the scripts into the arena of reality, with dollars going out to everything from producers to actors to writers and from them on down to the physical manifestation of the actual making of the film.
But the myriads of decisions based on money were (and are) the foundation of everything I eventually work on, whether it’s an independent film, a big budget feature, or a television series. This book provided a window into how the films I’ve worked on came to be, and where the millions of dollars came from that it took to produce them.
After reading the book, what’s scary, I suppose, is to know how big decisions are made: so many potentially wonderful ideas are thrown away based on a conversation, a misunderstood premise or promise, or simply one guy’s dislike of another guy. Also what’s scary is how it’s almost always guys doing the deciding. Even now.
But as I said, I’m at the far end, the shallow end of the Pool—a long way from big decisions or power and wealth. Even so, there are great leveling forces that connect us all, whether we haul in $35 million for a film or $3500.
What I didn’t mention at the beginning of this blog entry is that I got Bernie’s book for Christmas from my mother, who had found it where many obscure books go to die—-at the Dollar Store. And when I got home from the hospital, I looked up Bernie Brillstein on IMDB and found out that he died in August of 2008.
Near the end of his book, Bernie said: “The other day someone asked me why, after all I’d been through, I even bother to come to work. Easy. I don’t know where else I could have more fun. …And for nearly forty-five years I’ve laughed more than most people I know. Isn’t that what it’s all about—or at least supposed to be? I think so.”
Speaking as a mere shallow-end-of-the-pool, dog-paddling, filmmaking drone, I can’t say whether or not Bernie is right. I just know that, however many degrees of separation connect us, sooner or later we all have to get out of the pool.
January 4, 2010
Back from the holidays and they spun past without my noticing, because in spite of Gus’s film having wrapped, I have been caught up in a non-stop work tornado of to-do lists and long-delayed projects. In fact, I will simply have to check in with this short entry on my way out the door to deliver a countertop to the shop that will alter it so it will fit the island in the kitchen of my latest design job: my flip house.
Meanwhile, though, I am thinking (as always) about where that next job may be. There is a television series coming back this month for another season, and they may need painters—just a couple of them. I am ambivalent about trying to be a part of this, as it will make getting on the next feature very hard to do.
But will there be a “next feature”? With our improved Oregon film incentive, I would have thought so, but the horizon, at least the near horizon, appears alarmingly empty. This is the nature of my business, though, the uncertainty. I have grown used to it, and actually it is a good Zen exercise. Lose any attachment to outcomes as much as possible. I definitely have many things to do to keep life moving, and now is the time to let go of the worry about the next job and just work on those things close to my heart.
So, I wake up every morning to see my hawk Tennerin sitting outside of my bedroom window waiting for me. Then I go down to the river, put some food out for him and spend some time hanging out and filming him. After that, I go back to work on the flip house, which is just down the street. I’m trying to get Tennerin to follow me over there, but he seems to have hawk business across the river most of the time. I also have to get back to my nonfiction writing and the research and reading that goes with it. Through all this, I rejoice in the knowledge that I no longer have to get up at 4:00 am these days.
Next time I will discuss a book written by someone at the other end of show business, on the management/agent/producer side and how much we happen to have in common, but for now, it’s off to the countertop shop.
PS I would like to thank both of the people who commented on my last blog entry. I’ve checked your websites just briefly, but I will be back, and will be in touch. Synchronicity rocks!
December 22, 2009
When you have spent long hours shooting in a tree-shaded graveyard, a very old one with residents who passed away in the mid-1800’s, your thoughts tend to wander along some strange pathways. We have been working hard, filming among and between all kinds of grave markers, some with inscriptions that quote bits of scripture or poems, others that mention angels. One, on a child’s headstone from 1889, said simply: “Ours to love for a short while.”
There are statues and obelisks, marble upright slabs, small, worn square markers on the ground, little fenced graves, flower-decked graves, bare ground graves, rolling hill after rolling hill of gravesites.
So you get to thinking about life, and about death, and about meaning. Is there any kind of meaning to our lives? Is there anything after our lives? I am a believer in synchronicity as a sort of indirect proof of meaning in our own personal existence. Synchronicity is a term coined by the psychologist Carl Jung when he noticed how outside events sometimes matched one’s internal thoughts, or personal events.
Jung’s famous example of synchronicity at work concerned one of his patients, a woman who was overly rational and so restricted in her thought patterns that in Jung’s opinion, she was not making progress in treatment. One day during a therapy session, as she was describing her vivid dream from the night before about being given some jewelry shaped like an Egyptian scarab, Jung heard a scratching at his window. He opened the drapes and saw a scarab beetle, a very unusual visitor to his country, apparently trying to get into his office. He opened the window, took the beetle in his hand and presented it to her with the words, “Madam, here is your scarab!”
The strangeness of the concidence lay in its connection to the conversation between patient and therapist in their seesion at that moment and to the woman’s dream of the night before. Although the dream did not cause the scarab to appear at the window, the external world seemed to somehow meet with and connect to the patient and psychologist at a deep, meaningful level. The woman was deeply affected by the event and Jung believed it helped her to evolve in her therapy. So, synchronicity is a coincidence that seems to bear with it a meaning to the person experiencing it.
There are certainly levels of synchronicity. Some are mere “isn’t that odd—I was just thinking about gold-plated cuckoo clocks and here’s a picture of one in the magazine I picked up in the doctor’s office…”. Others are very moving, heavily freighted with emotion. At the graveyard last night I experienced both.
I had been thinking about Tennerin, my hawk, mulling over the realization that he had probably never killed a bird, since I had recently read that most red tail hawks do not pursue and catch avian prey, concentrating on small mammals, instead. Just then I saw what I thought was a snowflake drifting down from above. As it caught the light, it revealed itself as a tiny feather. I saw another feather slowly float past.
A few yards away, our camera operator called for me, his voice urgent, so I ran up to camera with my bag, thinking he needed something paint-related. Instead he pointed up at a large branch directly above the camera and some of the crew. “Is that a hawk?” he asked. “It’s eating a bird!”
Sure enough, a small raptor was perched above us, plucking the feathers from a dead bird as it ate. I told him it was some kind of falcon, probably. We speculated. A kestrel? A merlin? The little raptor was backlit and it was impossible to tell. That was an odd coincidence. I think about Tennerin often, of course, and everyone on the crew knows I have a hawk, so naturally they would call me to identify the mystery bird.
Still, in a graveyard entirely deserted except for one spot, and that one spot filled with fifty or so people talking and moving equipment about, the little bird of prey had chosen to perch on the one branch that ran directly above the camera. We talked about it among ourselves for a bit, then forgot about the bird once work took our attention elsewhere.
Darkness fell and we began the long series of set-ups that would take half the night to complete. The temperature hovered around freezing, and the rain fell off and on while the graveyard dust turned to mud. I finally went inside one of the warming tents for coffee and overheard a man in uniform talking about the cemetery. He said that it had recently become a county park. That fact surprised me.
The speaker was in dark green and wore a silver star, meaning he was a ranger. He was stationed at the cemetery, and when I told him about the mystery bird of prey he knew exactly who it was: “That’s one of our merlins. We have a pair that lives here in the cemetery.” Intrigued by the conversation and his knowledge of the graveyard, I joined in to learn (remember my last entry about how much we can learn from the people who populate our locations while filming?) that the county had made a deal to include the less popular parks (like the cemetery) along with more valuable parks in an all-inclusive package deal. The ranger said that one of the more popular parks included as part of the deal was Oxbow Park, which lies some twenty miles southeast of our graveyard.
I told him that I had been impressed by Oxbow Park myself when I had filmed a show there. The park was an amazing 1200 acres of natural features, including climbing rocks and a wild stretch of the Sandy River gorge flanked by a forest of huge, second-growth trees. It was a lovely place. What I didn’t mention was that I had seen something so disturbing there that it had haunted my memories of the park ever since.
The day we shot part of Twilight there, I heard the osprey first before I saw it. The osprey cry is a high, unique call that actually seems to echo off the sky itself, as if the air has become a parabolic surface, bouncing the bird of prey’s voice from one horizon to the other. The huge white raptor with its distinctive and stylish dark head crest flew over us repeatedly that day, checking us out, obviously curious about these busy humans. It would perch on the top branches of cedar trees and watch us as we bustled around our our trucks far below. In between studying us, the osprey would take off and fly back and forth across the river, looking for fish.
I saw it dive, once, and it split the waters surface, disappearing entirely, only to rise up like a phoenix and give that queer, osprey shivering of each and every one of its feathers to shake off the water so it could return to the sky.
As I watched the bird, I noticed a long, shiny filament hanging from one foot. It was a fishing line, wrapped around the leg with a hook embedded in the osprey’s claw. This was an awful discovery. It meant that the raptor’s claw would become infected, and he would lose the use of it. He would eventually starve, and it would be a long, slow death. I told the park ranger there about the bird, and he agreed it was a fatal condition, but we both realized that nothing could be done, since the wild, free-roaming “fish eagle”, as it was sometimes called, couldn’t be caught and treated.
Ever since that show, almost two years ago, now, I have touched on the memory of that doomed osprey and felt the sadness all over again that we had caused such a proud and beautiful creature’s death through our human activities and thoughtless consequences of our presence.
The graveyard’s ranger was going on about the wildlife in Oxbow Park. He had occasionally worked out there for a day or two at a time. Bears came to the river to fish, sometimes, he said, and a bobcat had apparently established a den above the rock cliffs. He himself had even helped rescue an osprey with an infected claw caused by a fishing hook—
“When was this?” I asked suddenly.
“About two years ago.”
“I know that osprey!” My voice was so excited that the producers looked up from whatever they were doing on their iphones.
The ranger told me that he had brought the bird to a rehabilitator and they had called to let him know when the bird was well again. As the raptors’s savior he was on hand when they released the now-healthy osprey back into Oxbow Park.
So, I had met the only man on this planet who could have brought me the news of my often-remembered and mourned osprey’s eventual rescue and ultimate survival. I no longer have the same feelings about Oxbow Park. When ever I think of it now, I will be happy, not haunted. Thanks to a welcome synchronicity in a dark and rainy graveyard and the camaraderie of filmmaking in a vast, but connected community.
