Just a quick one:

2012 is shaping up to be a pretty good year at the movies.

I already love more movies this year than in 2011.  Here's the quick list:

The Grey
Chronicle
Cabin in the Woods

We are approaching the fifth month of the year and there are still so many exciting movies still to be released.  I am so glad to actually be enjoying movies again.  Here's a quick list of movies I'm really excited for:

The Sound of My Voice
Prometheus
Brave
People Like Us
The Dark Knight Rises
Premium Rush
Lawless
Looper
The Master
Lincoln
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

SIGH

I'm moderately excited about The Avengers, GI Joe Retaliation, Expendables 2, Total Recall, My sister's sister, skyfall, life of pi, Django unchained, the Great Gatsby and a bunch of others but for these I'm not holding my breath.  It is hollywood - land of expensive mediocrity after all.

So yeah, here's to going and seeing films in a theater in 2012.

On a side tangent I really wish I had a higher viewership.  I really would like to take a pole of 13-25 year-olds to find out if Reagal Cinema's plan to allow texting in the movie theater is a good idea.

Some say - It's a movie, you paid for a ticket -  should pay attention and not distract others around you with noise or light.

Others Say - It's so constricting--- so what if I want to text my friends, talk on the phone, check my stocks,  e-mail, and look up everything I can on that hot actress up on the screen.  I do it at home, why can't I do it in the theater?

I personally think it's stupid and annoying, but this just might be my "get off my lawn" moment come way too early.

Positive Thinking Doesn't Work

One of my favorite blogs to read in my down time is LifeHack.org.  I can't tell you how many story ideas I get come from bloggers.  Questions like: "Why is this person writing this right now?" and "Why is this resonating with me right now?" can lead in some really productive directions.  

In any case they posted an article on 4 Reasons Positive Thinking Doesn't Work (and What to do Instead).   In a related factoid, (I can't remember where I read it but)  there was a study done recently which basically confirmed this premise.  If you spend time imagining what you most desire, you will be less compelled to experience it in reality.  The research suggested that the fantasy is as good as reality in these cases.

But when reality finally rams its ugly phallus through your ears making you face the realization that the day dream is no longer attainable, you end up with shit like this:

In real life you have to work hard to attain any kind of success.  And now that only 1 our of every 2 graduates are getting decent jobs out of college it no longer just applies to the arts.  The really remarkable thing is that the harder you work for it the sweeter the success feels at the end.

Now, I like working hard --  I like picking my writing apart, figuring out why it sucks and moving forward.   I tend to be my harshest self critic.  A person with a "It'll turn out all right in the end" or "rainbows, unicorn farts, and prayer will fix it" kind of attitudes really piss me off.

"No you don't understand --  I have a draft due to that prospective manager or agent in a week and I need to get it done."  Is not a defeatist statement and it can't be fixed with positive / wishful thinking.    My first reaction to this is, "how dare you trivialize the mountain of work I have to do."

(SIGH) -- The loved ones mean well.  

And they do.

When you (and by you I'm really writing to myself here) spend too much time in critical mode, it can lead to a downward spiral of negativity through every aspect of your life.  There must always be a balance.  The positivity comes in the form of perspective.

Feelings Toward School

This was a letter I wrote to a friend of a friend who is about to graduate high school and wants to be an actress.  She is talented enough to get into AMDA, but couldn't afford to go.

So you can't afford to pay for your school.  As an actor you need to realize that this is the first in a long long line of disappointments and denials. even successful actors hear "No" or "You can't" a thousand times more than they hear "You got the part" - The hardest aspect of the job - isn't acting, it is withstanding rejection and other pitfalls.  When I first moved to LA someone told me that every "overnight success" is ten years in the making. 

Take heart there are always alternatives. 

The best part about school is that it is a relatively stress free environment that is structured to make you learn. Finding a play or film to act in is easier in an educational setting than the real world. Networking is easier. And there is Homework - Are you really going to read a biography of Bertolt Brecht on your own instead of watching TV? What if you have a paper due on said book? The point is that education sets up incentives that real life doesn't. And a degree from a good school will unlock doors and give you opportunities that will otherwise be closed to you.

And there are plenty of better places than AMDA. I would hate to break it to AMDA but studying only musical theater and dance is really limiting for someone trying to enter a contemporary entertainment industry. If you've got good grades USC, NYU, Cal Arts, UC Irvine, Southern Oregon Uni... all have good acting programs and have carry more academic weight than AMDA does. If you don't have good grades, there are community colleges that you can use to get into the better schools. 

The other alternative is not going to school - Speaking as someone about to finish a masters in screenwriting that will cost me over $100,000, sometimes the schooling can be a hinderance to success. I say will cost me because the majority of that 100 grand I borrowed (student loans). For the next 30 years, I will be paying about 800 dollars a month for this education. That is on top of rent and bills and everything else. This makes it hard to take time off do other things that could further a career in entertainment or other life goals for that matter. Despite all the great promotional material, and other things these schools say - No School (not even the best school in the world) guarantees a job or a the part of your life in a show that'll make you famous/rich/successful.

If you want to be an actor - move to LA or NYC get a job with a flexible schedule and start doing any jobs that will get you on set. (Production Assistant, Extra) you can find these online with a quick search. Volunteer at places where you will meet other actors, writers, producers, directors, and other creative folks. Buy some books (or better yet get a library card and borrow the books) on acting, improv, play scripts, tv scripts, movie scripts - read as much as you can. Take classes in improv (UCB, Second City, Groundlings) or acting (ask around - private teachers can be shady). There's nothing like practical experience. Stay away from credit cards, embrace a thrifty life style, and realize that success (whatever that word might mean to you) will take a longer than you think. 

And if you decide at some point you want to go back to school, or do something else- it will ALWAYS be an option. The time to take chances and make mistakes is when you are young. 

This is just my epic 2 cents. I wish you the best of broken legs as you decide your future. 

Writer’s Calisthenics

These are some tools to help exercise the writer’s brain and to help hone craft.  You can do any or all of these in no particular order.

1.  ACTIVELY READ (I know super obvious) - Read as much of the type of writing you want to do (Novels, Short Stories, Plays, Screenplays, etc).  If you want to do it all, read everything.  The trick here is to Actively read, don’t just let the suspension of disbelief take over.  Think about what each sentence, section of dialog paragraph, and slug line is good for in the grand whole.  Where is the story going and how does it take you there.

2.  FOLLOW ALONG  - Watch a movie with the screenplay in your lap.  Pause when you need to. The point is to see how a scene is describe on the page and how it actually turned out.  

3.  OUTLINE - Watch a film over and over to create a 70 beat outline from the finished product.  You can find out more about 70 beats here. This is a great exercise to learn how to structure a story. 

4.  SETUP & PAYOFF - While watching a movie make a list of all the setups and payoffs in the story.  They just introduced a teddy bear and you know it’s going to be important - That’s a set up.  What actually happens with the teddy bear is the payoff.  These can be big and small but always push action forward.  One of the best movies for this exercise is The Apartment with Jack Lemon and Shirley McClain.  Setup’s and Payoffs in screenplays are an elegant way to tie the scenes together into a cohesive whole.   This will show you how they work.  

5.  USE A TYPE WRITER for free form journaling.  I have a theory that word processors make people lazy.  (I’ll spell / grammar check it later.)  Learning to writing with a typewriter is like learning to ride a bike without training wheels.  It is physically harder to press the keys, make a mistake and you have to retype a whole page, formatting isn’t automatic, and if your unsure about how to spell a world or how to write a certain sentence stop and look up the rule.  I’m not saying do everything on a typewriter - but use it like a treadmill or weight machine.  

6.  GO BACK TO GRAMMAR SCHOOL - I’m not a grammar nazi, in fact I’m sure some of you are rolling your eyes at this blog’s egregious grammatical mistakes.  The point here is - grammar for writers is like paint to a painter.  You can’t teach creativity, but you can teach grammar.  It is a tool of the craft that must be mastered if you want to be taken seriously as a writer.  A great story and perfect spelling and grammar are not mutually exclusive.  There are some great books - Strunk and White, Woe is I, Eat Shoots and Leaves, etc.

 
7.  TRANSCRIBE - There was a director (I think it was William Wyler, not sure)  who would re-type the screenplay before going into production.  By doing this he would discover things in the screenplay that he would have otherwise grazed over.  Find a screenplay or a chapter in a favorite book and re-type it.  This one is kind of like putting your fingers in an idol’s brain.  It’s also a great ego buster.  Everyone can get used to writing stuff this good.  

Battleship is a Turning Point

According to deadline the new movie Battleship which has been getting massive amounts of negative buzz here in the states opened in a bunch of territories around the world almost a month ahead of the U.S. release.  And it is kicking ass apparently -- Read more at: http://www.deadline.com/2012/04/battleship-goes-to-war-overseas-1-almost-every-country-where-it-opened/#more-255810

Now it's not surprising that American blockbusters do well overseas.  Our movies are flashy, fun, and our special effects look better because we spend more on them.  For much of the last ten years the majority of a films proceeds has come from foreign box offices.   But  by releasing a movie a month ahead of the american release they make the film susceptible to piracy that will poach "meh, yeah, I'll check it out" crowd.  That combined with the "John Carter in gunmetal grey" buzz about the film will likely mean a flop for the Bismarck, I mean Battleship.

Now the buzz is bad because, come on - it looks like a transformers clone based on a board game with a generic 'must save the planet' plot and action figures for characters.   The lack of depth will make people who complain about the dumbing down of movies, point to this one and say, "See!!! Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!!!" until they are blue in the face.

Now films are expensive and Producers need to make their money back.  They like things that are safe - especially when they are spending more than the Gross State Product (GSP) of Louisiana ON ONE FILM.
Contrary to the popular believe that, "movies are stupider now because we americans are stupid," much of the simplification of plot has come from Producer pressure to make the film simpler so that they are easier to translate and / or don't require an audience to do a lot of reading to follow what's going on in a foreign market.

Now that the studios are releasing Battleship in the US last, this  strikes me as the first time a hollywood studio has basically said, we don't give a shit about the american box office.  Battleship's primary audience is not the US.  This strikes me as ironic and backwards.  Will this trend continue with hollywood making movies exclusively for foreign release? Will Hollywood start making movies in Mandarin or some other language?  As consumers of media do we americans no longer matter as much?   I might be wrong, I drive a car from a japanese auto maker that was manufactured in the US so maybe it does work.

I just think that some savvy Producer who knows deep down an audience just wants to be wowed by a story will see this as an opportunity to make something US market specific.  Some of the best movies ever made were because of some tricky budgeting.  In the Heat of the Night was one such movie.  It was green lit when the producers got the budget down low enough that they could afford to not play the film in the south.  Why they couldn't play the movie in the south is for another topic all together, but it is important to remember that there is more to making films than just stringing together a few explosions and collecting money.  Is it too much to ask for a little emotion and a more engaging / thought worthy level of conflict that is tailored to just the U.S.?   Something I can connect to that demands my attention and forces me to stop checking twitter in the movie theater.