Here's another one: Freewheelin! It's a short that Bryan, Tim League, Kierla (not sure how you spell her name), Lars and myself and few others made for the 48-hour film project. I really like this one. It's a TV show and there's 4 episodes. Jerm Pollett, of Mister Sinus, did the theme music. Sure, it's rough, but it still makes me laugh.
Here's another one from the Fredricksburg vault: Ein Box, a faux German expressionist film shot by two kids in Houston. This is super-8 film that my friend Todd Redilla and I shot sometime in 1993, I think. We both taken a film history class by then and so we saw The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari which is usually held up as the epitome of German expressionist cinema. We wanted to do something reminiscent of that kind of movie. I don't think we really succeeded, but we did make something slow and repetitive and weird.
I keep a lot of old tapes and stuff in storage at my parent's house in Fredricksburg. When I was there a month ago I went through a lot of it and came across some of my old short films as well as some video that I shot as a kid. The piece of video below is from the NBC affiliate in Houston. They had a (very) short-lived fluff segment on their news broadcast called "Hats Off to Houston." The reason it's called that is because the "reporter" who did these pieces of ground-breaking journalism wore a big panama hat, or something that looked like a panama hat. At the end of the segment he would sign off by saying, "Hats off to Houston!"
Anyway, this is somewhat embarrasing but I have to post it because it's so hilarious. I have to explain a few things about this video but I want you to watch it first and then I'll explain afterward.
So when Paul, the reporter, got to my house he said he wanted to shoot me "in motion." He suggested I ride a bike. This felt like a weird suggestion but I went with it because I wanted to be on TV. As I was about to get on the bike he said, "Wait! We have to promote safe riding behavior. You should wear a helmet." I resisted, but he insisted. So I put on the goddamn ugly helmet. I knew I would look ridiculous, but I went with it because I really wanted to be on TV.
After the interview, he said that he wanted to shoot me shooting something with a camcorder. There was a guy working on the carpet in our house so Paul suggested I "practice camera angles" on him. Now, generally speaking, I do not "practice camera angles" normally. (I should also mention that I generally do not get my ideas for films while sitting in coffee shops in Austin.) But there I was, unable to offer up anything better to do, and so I set myself up to look really dumb. Because looking really dumb gets you on TV.
Am I really "addicted to using a camera"??? Do I need a 12-step program for camera addiction? I admit that I am powerless over the camera and my life has become unmanageable.
13 years ago Bryan and Jay Duplass and I were in our first film production class at UT. The class was structured so that each student made three films individually and the fourth project was a group project, so you partnered up with someone. The first project was edited in-camera and had no sound. On the second project we could edit the picture, but still we had no sound. The third project incorporated non-sync sound and the fourth project was also a non-sync sound film but it was a group project so the logistics got a little more complex. All of the projects were to be shot on black & white 16mm film.
Jay and Bryan and I did our fourth project together. It was called SEEN. It was 1994 and Pulp Fiction had just come out. We were so impressed with the way that movie was told, the way it jumped back and forth in time, and so we wanted to do something similar based around the idea of a school shooting. I think the school shooting part of it came from Bryan -- he was inspired by one of Stephen King's short stories. I think it was "Apt Pupil" that he was thinking of when he wrote this.
So I finally digitized the film and uploaded it to youtube. Here it is:
Last night Bridge and I were in my apartment when we heard a horrendous car crash outside. I thought it might be somewhere a few blocks away or maybe on the highway (which runs right by my apartment building) but Bridge was adamant that it might be somebody closeby and they might need help. I don't know what my problem was but I was more or less convinced that somebody else, somebody closer to the accident would call 911 and make sure everyone was okay. Bridge however couldn't sit still, something in her told her that she needed to go outside and see if she could help. So we agreed to go take a look.
This is what we saw directly in front of the apartment complex:
I-10 is in the background at the top. It runs right next to the cul-du-sac where I live, it's elevated about 35 feet, and there is a grassy embankment with a few trees on it that slopes down to the cul-du-sac. The Ford Explorer that is laying on it's side was cutoff by another vehicle and the Explorer was forced off of the freeway. A woman who lives in the corner unit in the building saw it happen. She says the truck flew off the interstate and was in the air before it hit ground and then flipped over to land on it's side.
When we got outside we saw a man with a mohawk lifting an older woman out of the passenger side window (which was now facing upwards). Turns out she was almost completely unhurt -- a few scratches on her arm was all the damage she had incurred. There was a man in the car with her who was also unhurt. They both had their seatbelts on.
Bridge gave the woman her sweater and then ran and got a chair from the apartment for her to sit on. The car that the Explorer landed on belonged to a guy across the hall from me.
The fire trucks showed up a few minutes later, three of them, and the police as well. None of us could believe that no one was hurt. They took the man and woman to the hospital in an ambulance despite the protests of the woman. The medics said that there could be some internal injuries that aren't noticeable from the outside. So to be safe they needed to go to the hospital to get checked out.
The car that cut in front of the Ford Explorer on the highway which resulted in the Explorer barrelling off the embankment apparently pulled over briefly and then drove away. How can they live with the thought that they might be the cause of somebody's death? The CHP is investigating. Unfortunately the owners of the Explorer don't have insurance. So things get complicated for the three other vehicles that were also damaged. But at the heart of things is the fact that nobody was killed.
My first day in training was tough. My teacher, Denzel Washington, put me in some really challenging situations. At one point I thought he was actually going to kill me, but then he turned out to be my friend.
Seriously, though, it was a strange day. Before today I thought I was somewhat of a tech-geek because I knew some shit about bitrates and I-Frames. Now I know that I know very little about that stuff. The three other guys in my class totally geeked out (in a good way) on stuff that had me whirling like a dervish. I had no idea how complex the DVD specification was. Lucky for me, I don't actually have to know all the nitty gritty details -- I just have to be able to teach DVD Studio Pro.
Another thing I noticed... I'm the only one in the class taking any notes. I mean the instructor is giving us a LOT of tips on how to teach the program and these guys are just taking it in. I think they've taught classes like this before so maybe they know all the important stuff. I've never taught this stuff before so I want to make sure I do the best I can at it.
Went to the MOMA but it's closed on Tuesdays. Watched an awful display of stilted dancers pretend to breath fire on the Lincoln Center Plaza. A junk-boat-sculpture yanked my attention away from the dancers and their anxious antics. Fine with me.
I have an interview at Universal tomorrow. Not sure what the project is but the guy is hiring editors. I'm supposed to meet him on the lot in the Hitchcock building. Sounds suspicious.
I've been writing "Wetback" ... that's what I'm calling my Mexico movie. It's intense and exciting and I hope to shoot it next year. By that time World War III should be in full swing so it'll be safer in Mexico. Actually, I heard a guy on NPR say that technically we already went through WWIII -- it was the Cold War with the Soviets. This new one is WWIV. Whatever. Bush is a cancer and Lebonon is the chemo. Sometimes the medicine is worse than the disease.
Last Wednesday I went to the Ahmanson Theater to see The Black Rider, a play written by William Burroughs, directed by Robert Wilson, and with music and lyrics by Tom Waits. It was first put on in 1991 and now it's back. It was creepy and surreal and half of the audience left after intermission. I loved it. I loved it so much I went back for a second viewing last night. I snagged a quick pic that doesn't really even come close to giving you an idea of what it was like, but here is anyway.
My Grandma Beatrice is going to be on NPR's Morning Edition in Austin Monday! She and her son Russ (my step-dad) did an interview as a part of the StoryCorps oral history project. A portion of her amazing interview will air at 7:45am (CST) on KUT Radio. After the broadcast the interview will be available for download here. It's an amazing story from an amazing women who is now 93 years young. Check it out if you can.
FYI... If you've tried to email me or Bryan in the past few days it might not have gone through. We've had a few problems with our switchfilm.com account but it should be working now. Try again.
Strangely enough it's at your local cineplex. The new film An Inconvenient Truth (starring mega box office action hero Al Gore) is the most inspirational power point presentation to hit theaters this year. (I hear the Academy is considering a new Oscar category.) I'm sure the 3 or 4 people who read this blog regularly have already seen it. Therefore this entry is mainly directed to my mother. Mom, go see this movie. And take Russ with you.
Climatecrisis.net has a carbon dioxide calculator that estimates your contribution to global warming. I was shocked to find out that I emit about twice the national average: 35,000 lbs. Mainly from driving an SUV in LA. So yes, selling my car is a step in the right direction. I'll be trading it in for something that is twice as fuel efficient. It's more expensive, but considering gas prices right now, not that much more expensive. Will post pics of the new Jake-mobile as soon as it arrives.
We had a great time in Mexico! Take a look:
This is the street of Alcala, a main thoroughfare for pedestrians on their way south to the Zocalo.
Santo Domingo at night.
Eating a great effing breakfast.
A refridgerator.
We visited the ancient ruins of Mitla. Here I am warming up for a game of Pelota.
A closer look at the decoration in the stone ruins of Mitla.
Here I am urinating in Mitla. Not really. But it does look like it doesn't it?
Later we went hiking up into the mountains of the Sierra Norte. This is a small house up in the moutains.
These Maguey cactuses are of the type that Mezcal is produced from (a close cousin of Tequila). They are huge!
The view from atop a large rock at the top of our moutain hike.
More delicious food!
Bridget is using telepathy to communicate to this Toucan, whom we met at Cafe Alex while eating breakfast. What are they saying to each other?
We did some watercolor painting during the trip. I'll scan in the paintings later and post them here.
On the trip back I got sick. I didn't actually get sick on the plane here but I came close. I don't blame the food in Mexico for getting sick, I blame my pathetically weak stomach. I've been plagued with a sensitive stomach since I was a kid and I just deal with it. Last time I was in Mexico I was sick just once and then I was perfectly fine for the entire rest of the trip. That's usually how it goes, only this time I got sick at the end of the trip.
Anyway, the trip was a welcome respite from all things Cassidy Kids. Now I gotta work on the script that takes place in Mexico.
I've been woefully remiss in updating this blog, but oh well. Here's what happened. I went to Oaxaca, Mexico on vacation and it was wonderful. Great food, warm weather, cool nights, watched Night Porter at the Cine Pochote, ate the most delicious enchiladas (con and sin mole), painted with watercolor (which is something I have not done in a very long while), and enjoyed the company of my co-conspirator in life and love. What more could one ask? Only this: that we please not get kicked off the last plane out of Oaxaca moments before closing the cabin door.
Apparently the pilot imposed some kind of weight restriction on the flight which required any standby passengers to de-plane the plane. We were the only two standby passengers on the flight and so it was up to us to lighten the load. It would have been fine had we not had prior engagements and appointments that we needed to be back for on the next day. It would have been finer still had I not eaten a strange conglomeration of mixed vegetables the night before and contracted what was quickly becoming a raging battle between my body and all known forms of liquid. The front lines of this battle, ass and mouth, are still smoldering, for they fought their precious War on Contagion while we of the conscious mind were trying to catch a flight to Mexico city so that we could catch another flight to Houston so that we could catch a third flight to LAX. We made the first two but missed the third.
A night was spent in Houston at los parientes de jacobo during which the battle for supremacy inside my weak-weak innards dragged on through the night. The next day we took a flight to LAX which was quite possibly the longest three and a half hours ever recorded by your humble narrator.
In the end I devoted much time and worship at the altar of the porcelain gods. And it seems they have had a little mercy on me, for the battle is now quieted and I am home in this city which seems eternally on the brink of disaster. It is a city whose own population of descendants and transplants from Mexico recently made their peaceful discontent known in the form of a million latino march on the streets of downtown. I would have loved to have been here to see that.
I finally found a place to live. It's a room in an apartment in Palms (near the 10/405 interchange) with two roommates. I'm very happy with it -- the room is spacious, with vaulted ceilings and a private bathroom. And it's nice 'n affordable.
Played tennis this morning. Then cooked some beans. Burned the first batch, so I had to buy another batch. Second batch was a stunning success. Reading Team of Rivals, the new biography of Abraham Lincoln. Watched Junebug which was odd and surprising and enjoyable. Also finally watched Shaun of the Dead -- hilarious.
Tomorrow I drive to Los Angeles where I will live for the indefinite future. I'll be back to Austin a lot this year, at least once a month of not more frequently. I don't think I'll ever really truly leave Austin -- it's where I'd like to live in the long term, where I'd like to buy a house and maybe put down roots. But that won't be for a while -- though hopefully not too long... maybe within the next 5 to 7 years.
So today is all about packing up my belongings and loading the car. Fun! Thist time around I didn't completely wait until the last minute to do everything. A lot of stuff is already packed. Just have to tackle the kitchen, the clothes, and then load up.
Heather Courtney's IndieWire/Slamdance blog is up.
If you're in need of a bit of comedy at the expense of our wily commander-in-chief, check out The Official Parody of President Bush's Weekly Radio Address. I think The Onion is behind this parody. Whoever it is, they've managed to use the menu bars at the left and top from the official Whitehouse website, with working links, which makes it look very much official. Compare it to the real weekly radio address page.
Somehow I caught a stomach virus and I've been sick all day. I went over to Tom Hammonds sound studio to do some sound spotting on TCK and I stayed as long as I could but I just couldn't hang on. Now I'm trying to put the fluids back into my body (new fluids, not the old ones), and get myself undehydrated (or hydrated).
I've whiled away the sickly hours watching "I, Claudius", episodes 7, 8, and 9. Man that Caligula is some kind of devil.
Ever since Santa brought me an iPod for Christmas I've been using it here, there and everywhere, Beatles-style, in the car, with a smile. To play it in the car I've been using one of those little FM transmitter gizmos that let's you tune your iPod onto a station on your stereo. Problem is that you sometimes get a lot of static and since it wasn't a digital transmitter I was always fiddling with it to get it right. And in a place like LA, every singe open frequency on the dial is taken by a radio station and so no matter how much I fiddle with it I ALWAYS get static. So I decided to break into my dashboard, pull out my stereo and figure out a way to connect my iPod directly into it.
After tearing apart my front console, and after doing some research online, I found out I needed a CDRB-10 IP-BUS cable with RCA female ports. Naturally I raced right out to Best Buy and found what I needed. I wired it up, closed up my dashboard and now it works like a charm. No static, no problems. This'll be perfect for the long drive out to LA next weekend. Now I just need a car charger and I'm set.
Special Thanks to Schatz for providing the ratchet set and philips screwdriver. Very Special Thanks to Karen for providing the Kitty Kat flashlight (c/o Nick and Noah) so that I could finish the job in the dark.
The Four Eyed Monsters duo have just posted episode 4 of their video podcast series. It's a nail-biter as it ends with a cliffhanger. They're about to hit Slamdance head on, and watching them brings back memories of our little sojurn to that snowy land of desperation and fame. (BTW, you don't have to have an iPod to download and watch audio and/or video podcasts. You can watch and listen to them on your iTunes. I'm sure most of you out there know this, but I though I'd mention it just in case.)
If you're interested in title design, and even if you're not, you might be interested in this site about Saul Bass which lets you step through each of his works. The title sequence for In Harm's Way sounds really cool.
Been visiting LA for the last couple of days. Last night went to the West Hollywood Halloween street festival. Saw all manner of strange people in strange costumes. One of the most unique was the three guys in hurricane outfits - a 10-foot-in-diameter, cardboard-and-white-fabric affair. Each was named appropriately: Rita, Wilma, and Katrina. They slowly turned in circles while spritzing people with water from spray-bottles. You could hear the nearby crowd try to figure out if this was in bad taste or not. There were also some religious folks holding up signs that said we were all going to hell. I think they were serious.
Interesting link to student journalism radio: War News Radio.
I'm not sure what I did right but somehow my sight is back up. And just in time to report that we are now working on the second cut of The Cassidy Kids. We're working on a very tight schedule now and there's a lot to do. I've started re-ordering scenes and strangely enough some of the scene ordering reflects the way the story was told in earlier drafts of the script. Bryan and I both felt that the work we did on the script was a kind of pre-editing of the movie, and it's proven to be the case. I think we're benefiting from the fact that we went over and over the script, doing everything we could to make it more gooder.
Saw A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE tonight. A very precise movie.
As some of you may have noticed there's something wrong with my blog. It's not working right and I haven't had time to really figure out what the problem is. The main page is up but none of the entries are there. Check back soon and maybe it'll be fixed.
Jonathan Dee has a fantastic interview with David Cronenberg in the New York Times Magazine. His new film, A History of Violence, opens this weekend. The trailer looks pretty great.
I watched Nobody Knows, a Japanese film about four kids whose mother abandons them in an apartment in the city. It was heartbreaking and yet beautiful to watch. It reminded me of some of Truffeut's films. The kids were amazing actors and at times it takes on a documentary realism. Very good stuff, but very sad -- especially for the fact that it was loosely based on real events in Japan.
This week is going to be tough. We have a lot of work to do to get the first rough cut finished. I'll be tweaking the first act of the film while Kyle races to finish a first draft of the remaining scenes to be cut. It's all looking good but we won't really know how it plays until we see the HD footage intercut with the super-16mm. Wish us luck everyone! Please?
The past few days have been spent trying to catch up on my movie watching skills. I rented MASH, 12 Angry Men, and Gunner Palace... and yesterday I caught a screening of Dog Day Afternoon over at the Alamo Downtown. I'm itching to see The Constant Gardner, Broken Flowers, and a few other films out there right now.
A lot of my free time these days is spent doing absolutely nothing. I have to do nothing to make up for all the work we did on the film during shooting. Either I do nothing or I play this new flight simulator that i downloaded called Flight Gear. And that's the same as doing nothing.
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