Day Three

It feels a little strange and "fakey" to be posting all of this in "live" style, even though I did write all of this down as it was happening, but I guess that's movies for you! Actually, that's Hollywood for you. And this, as well- This is Los Angeles summed up in two pictures:

(The expo is in two hotels near LAX)

For those of you who may not know, In-N-Out is famously good. Everything there is made fresh- the lettuce, tomatoes, onions, etc. are all cut right there, the buns are made of fresh, old-fashioned sponge dough (nothing frozen, no preservatives) and the cheese is real. The fries are cut from fresh potatoes and fried in vegetable oil right there in the store and the shakes are made from real ice cream (this sounds so simple, but in the fast food world, this is pretty miraculous). And the menu is: burger, cheeseburger, fries and shakes. That's it.

So as a former meat-eater and one who is really trying to get back on the full-time veggie bandwagon, this was a pretty big fold on my part. I will occasionally eat it if I feel that I "need" it somehow (sometimes are bodies just let us know), but this was pure, guilt-ridden craving cave-in! I indulged guiltlessly in the fries, though! They really are the best fries in the universe (at least this side of it).

On the screenwriting side of things, day three was pretty interesting. It was essentially a "how-to-pitch" day, with a panel of screenwriters and producers sharing their advice and stories. The most valuable piece of information that I got was that whether they end up being successful or not, everyone has their "first pitch."

One of the writers shared his story, which involved vomiting the night before the pitch meeting. Another's involved having to go to the bathroom so badly that he ended up using an Evian water bottle in his car and inadvertently "spilling" on himself minutes before the pitch. When he tried to explain it to the producers, they wouldn’t believe him (he’s a comedy writer)! It definitely took the edge off!

I also learned that what I will be doing is not a "real" pitch. This is a five minute stone throw that you hope makes ripples that might one day grow into a full 20-30 minute pitch. I’ve lost a lot of my nervousness about Saturday (six pitches in a row).

Another good thing to know is that producers tend to frown upon costumes and props! I guess a few people last year decided to pitch through puppets and wear funky costumes. Never really crossed my mind to use them, but if it ever does, I won’t!

I must add this note: this is an expo packed full of activities. In fact, there is very little time to run in and out of the hotel to get food and whatnot. There is a Starbucks in the hotel, but they charge $2.05 for a SMALL coffee!!! Way to blackmail the fatigued! This was also the case at the Stratosphere. There, it was $2.55 for a small. We’re not talking lattes here, either. Just plain, brewed coffee! I guess these are hotel franchises and don’t need to follow the corporate guidelines (which are still outrageously expensive)!

Day Two

Traffic into Los Angeles was a nightmare! I got stuck on I15 between Vegas and L.A. for about two hours. They decided that the middle of the day was the best time to close down a lane to repave the highway! So there I sat, in the middle of the Mojave desert with 1/8th of a tank of gas left, too much water in my bladder, and stuck in a nightmare of a traffic jam.

Traffic was smooth until I hit the city (though by this time, I was able to listen to my favorite public radio station- KCRW- and know that I was only a few miles from the station, so I was pacified). There was a major jam caused by a car accident. Not uncommon in Los Angeles, but the strange thing about this was that a car ran into an entire funeral procession! As if being in a funeral procession wasn't bad enough! I have yet to figure out what a "sig" alert is, but apparently, it means that you really, really want to avoid the area for which the sig alert was given!

Still, I managed to arrive just in time for the pre-expo party. I met some very down-to-earth people there. I was pleasantly surprised. Not a lot of food (and $3.50 for a bottle of water? You've got to be out of your f*&%in' mind), but good conversations. We'll see what the rest of the expo brings!

So, basically, The Day= Driving+Arriving+Driving+Partying+Sleeping.

Day One

Eagles on the highwaySwirling whisps of clouds on mountaintops A control burn of a ski area A car overturned in the snow Sipping hot cocoa during a snowstorm in the desert Seeing the lights of Vegas from 100 miles away A communications antenna taller than the mountain it sat on "Writing" seven scenes of my film in my head

These are some of the things I would have missed if I had chosen to fly rather than drive. It was a long haul, but I've done it before and I wasn't really alone. Ten years ago, I had The Beatles, Tori Amos and Sarah McLachlan to pull me through the Rocky Mountains. This time, I had some new friends: Imogen Heap, Cat Power, The New Pornographers and Massive Attack to name a few.

(me and Imogen Heap nad me and Cat Power- I'm not really depressed, I'm just concentrating on driving in the snow while taking my own picture)

I experienced such dramatic changes in climate that I almost felt like I was traveling through Middle Earth! My "One Ring" was self doubt and fear and rather than lembas, I had ranch flavored soy crispettes, but it was still quite the journey.

I stopped in Vail to photograph a control burn and eat some peanut butter sandwiches. I also had to "control burn" some CDs on my laptop. I lost all radio by this point and the rental car did not have a tape deck for my mp3 player (I had one of those adapter things). Technology can be great!

It can also be a burden. Eager to blog, I plugged my laptop in the second I got to Vegas. Alas, the hotel charges $9.95/day for access.

Vegas is the strangest place. Never before in my life have I seen so much religion juxtaposed with so much vulgarity! People "prayed" for their gambling luck and a nearly naked woman was present for everything from a lap dance to a wakeup call to a children's magic show.

I stayed at the Stratosphere hotel, which is essentially a large penis. Everything in the hotel is shaped like this. These objects were even more phallic than the tower itself! They took the pointy tip off of them to make them all child safe, making them all nice and rounded. I saw a child sipping from the tip of a large phallic drink container and my shampoo was even offered in little phallic representations of the tower.

There once was a roller coaster at the top of this structure. That was deemed unsafe and replaced by three "thrill rides" or, as they put it, "The Threesome." One spins you around in a circle over the edge of the building, another slides off the edge and dangles you 1100 feet above the ground. The third is the funniest of all: it is one of those rides where they strap you in, pull you up a tower and then drop you. Not so funny until you see it: The seats wrap around a bright, glowing red tower. Not only do the raise you and drop you once, but they do it repeatedly. From the ground, you see a black ring stroke the tower up and down as people scream orgasmically! This one is called "Big Shot." If you think I'm reading into this too much, the motto for the thrill ride threesome is "Get Down, Get Up, Get Off." You know, for the kids! I rest my case.

An Astronomer in Hollywood- Part 3

(Because everything is better when it's a trilogy) So enter the world of the divorce where people freak out and do things that they normally would not, such as... oh, I don't know... drop their film career, move halfway across the country and go back to school for Astrophysics while working for a makeup counter in a mall? Not that any one of those things is bad, in and of itself, but when all you do at either place is think about how you can use what you are working with in a film (cosmetics)/movie(astrophysics), it's time to do some soul-searching!

So what the hell does any of this have to do with anything? Good question. If you find a blog anywhere that has the answer to that, I'd love to read it.

Just kidding.

With these two seemingly incompatible halves to my film personality, I am once again packing my bags and driving out to the West Coast alone. This time, I will be attending Screenwriting Expo 5 in Los Angeles where I will be pitching my narrative scripts to people with money, in the hopes that they might take a swing. All of this is making me laugh somewhat since the title of my first script is "Stealing First" (as in First Base in baseball- the one you can't actually steal). Hopefully, I won't need to resort to such rule-breaking behavior.

I hope to post to my blog from the road. With any luck, I will have some amusing, insightful but hopefully not tragic views on the world of screenwriting or just road trips in general. I hope to make my next post from the road!

An Astronomer in Hollywood- Part 2

Part I was the first-year film student biography; the "follow your dreams" biography. It ended with me unable to afford CalArts and settling for an in-state film studies education under the guise of a degree in French to make the parents happy. Go ahead and ask how much I've been able to do with a degree in French... The foundation biography picks up where that left off and goes something like this (trimmed slightly so as not to bore):

In 1998, I began working with legendary filmmaker Stan Brakhage as a student projectionist at the University of Colorado. I discovered that we shared many of the same foundations. Although my passion for film was firmly in place, Brakhage opened my eyes to the possibilities in the cinematic medium. We soon became close colleagues and I learned much about his hand-painted film techniques.

In 1999, I traveled with this newfound passion to Paris where I studied experimental films with filmmaker Pip Chodorov and began my first animation projects using a Super-8mm camera. I furthered my film studies by traveling to the Cannes Film Festival as an intern. I lived in France for six months while I wrote my thesis on the films of François Truffaut, for which I graduated cum laude (see above comment on "degree in French").

Upon returning to the States, I was eager to apply this knowledge to my own film work, but desired a distinct voice. Serendipitously (because this was a grant application and it is important to have at least one six-syllable word), I was called upon to aid a physics professor with a presentation involving crossed Polaroid filters on an overhead projector. Under normal conditions, this would block out most of the light and the result would be a black screen. However, the demonstration was to show the properties of birefringent (double-refracting) materials, such as liquid crystals. The result was a screen full of vibrant, changing colors, produced by the bending of nothing more than a plastic fork. I was presented with the final piece in my desire to find beauty in the mundane: polarized light.

My imagination was ignited by the possibilities within this newfound world. I realized that the technique used to project these materials onto a screen could be modified in order to film them. I acquainted myself with various birefringent materials readily available in the world around me: plastics, soaps, liquid crystalline paints and cosmetics. I experimented with different lighting and equipment setups. Bending, twisting and congealing became my new brushstrokes. I soon had complete control over the color spectrum. My medium became light itself.

I moved to New York where I gained access to an optical printer and made my first films. “Gossamer Conglomerate” (below) made use of cut pieces of birefringent polyester splicing tape, placed upon clear film leader destroyed by "vinegar syndrome." I shot the film through crossed Polaroid filters, which isolated the vibrant colors of the splicing tape. By applying these fresh film materials to the decayed leader, I made film that represented the life cycle of film and its rebirth as a new and personal work. It was suggestive of a butterfly’s flight from the darkness of the chrysalis.

In “The Light Touch Dust Nebula,” I painted upon this colorless film leader with thermotropic liquid crystal paint. Used in mood rings, this paint changes color with heat. As the film sat in front of the lamp of the printer, the paint changed color in each frame, giving the image the look of twinkling, luminescent dust.

Finally, “Munkphilm” (below) employed plastic that I had melted onto the same clear film leader. It was a cinematic meditation on melted plastics in a plastic medium.

I gained employment as an optical technician and film and video artist at a film laboratory in New York. I was granted me access to film equipment and various emulsions. I collected objects that would ordinarily be thrown away in order to expose their beauty under polarized light. In this unique and ambitious recycling program, a discarded plastic wrapper or spool of unwanted film became a prism. To make my film “Ether Twist,” I used these bits of discarded materials along with recordings of very low frequency (VLF) transmissions from aurorae, thunderstorms and sun spots.

I created “Snow Flukes” (below) by applying heat-sensitive liquid crystal paints to a 1920’s silhouette cartoon that had been abandoned in the film vaults.

From strips of discarded lab tests, I created “Sweet Intuition,” meticulously cutting out thousands of 16mm frames, pasting them on 35mm film with birefringent glue, and filming them through crossed-polarizers.

I set out to complete my most ambitious project to date: “The Galilean Satellites,” a film series dedicated to Stan Brakhage. The films explored the possibilities of life on the four largest moons of Jupiter, discovered by Galileo. Just as his discovery changed the popular view that the Earth is not the center of the solar system, I hoped to offer the view that the amazing beauty seen on this planet is a common thread connecting the Universe. This series of four films incorporated several birefringent materials upon recycled film stock and original footage. The soundtrack consisted of radio transmissions from various space probes of the atmospheres of celestial bodies. In this way, I was not only exposing the unseen vibrancy in seemingly ordinary and colorless materials, but the unheard symphonies emitted from seemingly silent objects. I hoped that they would be, as Jonas Mekas would later comment upon seeing them, "The true music of the spheres."

A Still From "Polymer"

Today is one of those days where it's better not to write...