Moviemaking at 49

I'm about to turn forty-nine years old.

I kind of like this. It's a great time, in principle, to ignore the idea of focusing on your career and put more energy into the things you enjoy. Play guitar, take up woodworking, paint or just start walking or doing yoga.

It's the main reason I like the idea of writing prose instead of screenplays. It feels like on of those activities you can retire to. Do for the sake of doing it.

Now, if moviemaking is what you love, that's harder.

Moviemaking inevitably costs money, but that's mostly true of the other things, too. You have to buy a guitar, you have to buy paints and supplies, wood, whatever. I've certainly known plenty of people who sank plenty of money into any of these.

But movies generally need people and people inevitably have their own needs, their own dreams. This can be one of the best, most inspiring parts of the process, under the right circumstances, don't get me wrong.

It is, however, the opposite of what you want with making stuff in your garage and seeing how it turns out.

I have a sidenote here. I had an idea to do a Conan the Cimmerian story in a similar style to what The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society had done with Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness.

While, after some research at the time, I decided that the story I was looking to do, Beyond the Black River, was in the public domain, I reached out to the legal department of the Conan properties and found that, as I suspected, they didn't hold that position and, while they would support, or not fight, any non-commercial movies, the specific Call of Cthulhu reference was a point they noted would be too commercial for them to avoid legal action.

So, I decided the whole thing wasn't worth my time and effort. Mind you, I'd have been happy for the whole thing to be a money pit that just led to me meeting some like-minded folks, collaborate and work on our craft. It's really what I hoped for out of it. Just like a guy going to his garage to make furniture on his weekends. And in the same way that guy can enjoy making his furniture in his garage for love of doing, finding out he'd be in legal trouble if he tried selling it, it just dampened my enthusiasm.

I'd still like to do something like that. Not a retro-Conan movie, but something that I could do for the pleasure of doing it. The grown-up version of going out with your friends with a Super 8 camera, as all the stories go.

Can kids even do that now or is it ruined by everyone wondering if they can get it up on Vimeo or starting a Patreon and monetizing it or even just putting it up on YouTube for the "likes"? I'm sure that's great for a certain personality, but I'm betting someone is really missing the opportunity to find their strengths or is giving it rather than deal with that.

I'll say that the reason I don't have that kind of experience from my childhood is because there was a general feeling of discouragement from the adults in my life. Nothing exceptional. No one exactly forbidding me.

And, I know, lots of the stories of successful moviemakers involves them overcoming that by pure force of their will. Indeed, the fact that our most popular storytelling media demand very specific personality types is another subject that needs to be addressed.

Indeed, and I don't think I've told anyone this before, but not for any particular reason, my friend and I were deep in planning a remake of Star Wars in the same vein as Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation, which ended when we couldn't answer in any kind of concrete purpose to make it. I'm not sorry in the least that we never made it, but I wish we'd continued planning. Maybe even shooting a couple of little sequences would have been good for us, I think.

I always come back to animation as a way I could do something on my own, and I can't rule out the chance I'll go back to that plan.

I'm also considering going back to school, which would be something interesting in that regard.

On the other hand, more people who are young and fresh are more likely to bring the "Let's get this into festivals! Let's turn that festival appearance into a chance to make a big studio whatever!" energy that I don't want to be part of.

We'll see where all of this thought goes.

Politics (I guess)

Starting a blog with the intention of avoiding politics around the time of a presidential election is a dumb idea, I guess.

All I know is that when I read James Carville unloads on the Democratic Party by Sean Illing, I think how much of an idiot James Carville is, but then he helped get Bill Clinton elected and that succeeded at getting a punishing slough of Republican bills deregulating banks and accelerating mass incarceration, ending welfare, of any president from up until perhaps Trump, so Democrats would be fools to think he's a friend to their goals.

So, if you know Democrats, you know they're going to take this bullshit very seriously indeed.

In the meantime, I read An Unsettling New Theory: There Is No Swing Voter by David Freedlander and think, that matches pretty close to my experience of the events of my lifetime. Mind you, I think these things are more complicated than any one theory can hold.

[Rachel] Bitecofer’s theory, when you boil it down, is that modern American elections are rarely shaped by voters changing their minds, but rather by shifts in who decides to vote in the first place. To her critics, she’s an extreme apostle of the old saw that “turnout explains everything,” taking a long victory lap after getting lucky one time. She sees things slightly differently: That the last few elections show that American politics really has changed, and other experts have been slow to process what it means.

In the 24-hour news cycle world that Ted Turner brought us and Al Gore shepherded forward, we are all hungry for an answer that can be summed up in teaser promo spot or a clickbait headline, but I don't think the answers can be found on any of the news networks or, for the most part, on the Internet, because the business of neither is helped by people gaining anything like an understanding of their world.

But, yeah, I feel like you can look at that group of people above, and, even if you can't put your finger on what it is, see what they lack, even though large swaths of party members thought each of them were "electable".

And now we have Mike Bloomberg jumping in. I'll probably vote for the Democratic nominee in November, even if some will make me grit my teeth a lot. In a race between two billionaires, however, I'll only vote for The Guillotine.

I know that any mainstream Democrats who accidentally stumble of this post will think I'm being a dick in some way and that any Democrat is better than Trump, and I'm saying the choice between two billionaires is morally indistinguishable from one between two Nazis. You could say that one is smarter, more competent, has fewer disagreeable beliefs or is even a nicer person than the other, but both have interests that are deeply contrary to mine.

I know that many people will say that's not a reasonable line. I have alleged working class champion John Mellencamp interrupting my YouTube joy to champion the glories of plutocracy, so I know they're out there. And I know that, in the unlikely event that he makes it, the Democratic scolds will be out in force explaining it as well. I'll just never buy it.

Frankly, the scolds have made me somewhat regret my decision to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016, despite my many moral reservations, rather than to feel bad about those who made another choice. The fact that she hasn't caught fire from the white hot rage those people should be feeling toward her and her absolutely incompetent campaign is a tribute to how far separated they are from me, which leaves them in poor position to scold or instruct me.

I genuinely think she should be specifically, individually held responsible for all of the evils of the current administration. The extremity of her laziness and overconfidence should make it unsafe for her to go in public again.

She chose Tim fuckin' Kaine!

Fuck her!

Sure, it's no Gore picking goddamn Joe Lieberman, but still. Tim fuckin' Kaine!

Those mainstream Democrats really do love sticking it in and twisting it on the party faithful, don't they?

Don't get me wrong, I agree very much with Mitt by Mark Evanier.

Here's my take on it. I believe that at some low level in our government — maybe some folks who sit on a city council somewhere — men and women act out of conscience and put the needs of The People ahead of their own careers and certainly their own parties. But it doesn't happen much higher than that. Probably at the state level and certainly above it, there is only one consideration: "How will this benefit me?"

They may put personal wealth ahead of personal power or vice-versa. They may care about fame more than money. They may even convince themselves that's what good for them is good for their constituents and for the nation. (That's kind of the Alan Dershowitz defense of, I suppose, all wrongdoing.) No matter why they want to serve, when it comes time to vote Yes or No, they vote based on what's better for themselves. That may or may not match up with what's better for the majority.

I do not mean almost everyone thinks like that. I do not mean everyone except the candidate I support. I mean absolutely everyone and I don't think I'm being overly cynical to say that. It includes Trump, Obama, Biden, either Clinton, Sanders, anyone named Kennedy or Bush…and of course, Mitt Romney.

This is handy to have in mind. It's easy to make one cynical, which is how many people take it, but it offers a certain clarity. If none of them are "on my team", then I only have who will find it in their best interest to do things I believe in. I'm not not tied to any feeling of loyalty to them that I don't feel they have toward me and people like me.

I can look and see that Carville is just Karl Rove Lite™ and his arguing for "centrists" might serve his interests, but it definitely doesn't serve mine.