Dracula, Lakeside, the public domain and me

Many a moon ago, I wrote a proposal for a new take on Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula. Or I started one.

This isn’t an unfinished project in the never got around to completing sense.

At least not at this stage.

No, I rethought much of the details and turned it all into a feature screenplay called “The Hunt”, which I completed.

Somewhere in this process, the version of Dracula I’d originally conceived for the comic version was turned into a more generic character.

Also there was an older Cuban professor I wrote for Tomás Milian and sadly now definitely never will be.

At some point, I managed to try shooting a rewritten version of a small part of the beginning of the story under the title “Lakeside”, but it was never finished for a whole series of reasons that aren’t relevant to this.

Except that my shame and self-reproach have largely kept this work as far in the back of my mind as I can push it.

But recently I was feeling like exploring my horror self creatively, thought of something I might consider doing, and put it behind the thing I’m working on in line for things to work on.

Then I saw this tweet.

Now, this was not news to me.

Indeed, I’m aware that because the copyright was never filed correctly, it has actually always been in the public domain in the U.S.

But in the moment with my mind softened from self-protection against the project, I found myself trying to remember why I wrote Dracula out of the screenplay. I even left a scene in the short version that makes very little sense without Dracula, but no one ever suggested should be cut.

Hardly any of this is relevant to anything right now, but it’s something I’ll be thinking about if I ever do go back to it.

If you're looking for it, you'll recognize it by the fact that, if I have anything to say about it, it won't be called "The Hunt" or "Lakeside".

Indie TV

I've been obsessed for a long time with the idea of "indie TV" or "indie serials".

I keep thinking one day it'll be a thing, if only a minor thing.

In the early '90s, as shows like Twin Peaks and The X-Files were working in the world of commercial TV in the US and having continuity. I could go into the longer history, but what was important at that moment was that it felt fresh and exciting to many viewers, including me.

And, at that time, I was young and my dreams went to creating series in the system.

I had an original cyberpunk idea that wavered in what I wanted it to be, but was most often supposed to be a series. I still cannibalize the many ideas that I had for that.

One of them I carried around for a while was a guy who was in a padded room that he had decorated ceiling to in crayon drawings. At that time, I'd seen nothing like that. Now, it would be hilariously cliché. Such is life.

I also thought a series telling the complete Robots/Empire/Foundation saga would be good. It's one of the reasons I'm excited for the upcoming Foundation series on Apple TV, and I'm only slightly disappointed that they didn't go with that more expansive idea.

But as time went on, I felt less like that felt like my path.

In the late-'90s/early-'00s, I thought of an idea for a public access show. A workplace sitcom in a restaurant/bar type setting that would revolve around a location. Characters could come and go around the place, which would work well with amateur or semi-professional actors needing to do other things. Of course, well before crowdfunding, there wasn't an obvious way to raise the money. Indeed, for a public access show, the Internet would be a limited help, because the show would only be valuable to people in that specific region.

As time went on, it starts to look possible, formats like QuickTime, RealPlayer and eventually YouTube and Vimeo made the idea more plausible.

And yet, we've seen very little progress in this. I've paid less attention recently than I used to, but I can't think of anything aside from a couple of short run series, most of which have ten minute episodes or so or ongoing fan fiction for things like Star Trek. All of which show that, with the right interest, it could be done, but, as far as I can tell, it never has.

I was Twitter ranting the other day on this subject and thought of a larger than necessary, but woefully incomplete, group of indie movies -

The Hitch-Hiker, A Bucket of Blood, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, El Topo, Pink Flamingos, The Harder They Come, Phantasm, Battle Beyond the Stars, Knightriders, Born in Flames, The Toxic Avenger, Stranger Than Paradise, Re-Animator, Border Radio, Hollywood Shuffle, Deadbeat at Dawn, Slacker, Reservoir Dogs, El Mariachi, Clerks, Cube, The Blair Witch Project and Ichi the Killer

- that could be expanded, adapted or just provide inspiration for a low budget series. In the cases in which it's not obvious how, I sort of roughed some ideas out in my head to see if I thought it could be done. Try it yourself.

She's Gotta Have It and From Dusk Till Dawn are obvious other examples where they have made expanded shows, although with substantially increased budgets as well.

I also wish there were more examples of indie space opera. Perhaps I should have used Space Truckers as my Stuart Gordon selection. Indeed, I have a specifically indie, specifically space opera idea that I'd like to work out with a group of people one day.

But why aren't there indie series of note yet?

YouTube is filled with indie versions of "reality TV" and the advantages of that are obvious.

But now, when you could raise an initial budget for a pilot and then have a Patreon account or any of a variety of similar ideas, to continue it, I'm not sure I understand why there seems to be no indie drama serials at all, even only modestly successful or wild attempts that got attention and crashed. Or am I missing them?

Some of those ideas would be bigger challenges than other, but look at Clerks up there, which was at least some of the inspiration for that public access idea I touched on above. All someone would need is regular access to a location. That could be hard for some, but some other aspiring moviemakers parents own a store or a restaurant or an office. If you're able to play nice, you could make that work on regular overnight shifts. Or, if you did a Space Opera, as I said, you could build a couple of sets and use them creatively, like they do for those Star Trek fan shows or do CGI, if that's your skill set.

As should be clear, I'm wondering for my own creative purposes.

I watched the famously disappointing Veronica Mars movie and then the excellent fourth season that followed it and wondered if the issue was whether a longer serial format was what the characters and situation needed to play out properly, which led me to wondering if the project I'm working on plotting, outlining, planning and whatever else might have that exact problem, and I'm not sure what that means quite yet.

But more importantly, I think about what a positive creative force independent movies have been and can be and, as a viewer, I'd like to see serials added to their toolbox.

So, the most important question is, are these out there and I'm missing them?

If they aren't, as it appears to me, is it for lack of trying or is there something wrong with the entire concept that I'm simply not seeing?

Or are all of the streaming services out there leaving everyone "saving themselves" for the next one that they can pitch to?

I wish I had any kind of answers here.

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.

Creative choices

So, I have a creative project I'm working on that I'm super pumped about. I've been putting words down in some volume and all of that, but now I'm having this --

You see, it's a project whose natural home is as a movie, or series. Without getting into details, as Stephen King put it in On Writing, I'm writing with the door closed, not because I'm afraid of my idea being stolen. Honestly, the idea really is fantastic, but this feels more than anything I've ever had like it's my inspiration that's driving it and making it so exciting to me. I don't know what someone else might do with it, but it would definitely be different than what I'm doing.

Despite that, it feels like it's ideally at a scale that I'm not sure I could recreate. If this were 1992, I'd be imagining I could pull that together in some way, because the indie dream was alive.

But for a nearly 50 year old guy in 2019, it seemed like a lot of steps that might be higher than I know how to climb. My knees aren't what they used to be, after all.

I've thought a lot about ideas that could be made on a micro-budget and make that part of the aesthetic of the work itself, but I couldn't imagine a version of this that would work that way in my head.

So, I'd started writing it as a novel.

Now, for me, the tradeoffs between moviemaking and novel writing is one I'm always torn about at this point in my life. What with the aching knees and such. So, I was able to start writing it as a novel and, unusually, not hating my own prose writing that much. Like maybe I could get it somewhere that would work eventually.

But then I was listening to the Adam Conover podcast, as I'm wont to do. He had Matt Stoller, author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. I haven't read his book, although I have read The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by Tim Wu, so I come into the discussion of the dangers of monopoly with at least that much information.

So, this discussion, however, is specifically Why Monopoly Power is Killing Hollywood, which felt a little like reinforcement of the reasons I didn't want to even start this as a movie project, but on another felt like a gauntlet being thrown down. This is especially true considering the themes of this project.

None of this should be interpreted at reflecting a decision. Or a question for anyone else. Just an explanation of my own thought process.

Also, I highly recommend Stoller's It's Time to Break Up Disney: Part One and Copyright, Antitrust, and Disney's Monopoly.

Lakeside thoughts

Some thoughts I have about Lakeside, my unfinished short movie, my life surrounding its making, Seattle, Austin and my future in creating.