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.

Tarantino, Pulp Fiction and the art of listening

I don't want to use this blog for movie reviews as a rule, but I find this set of thoughts pretty interesting and want to put it down for posterity.

I've been reading You’re Not Listening by Kate Murphy and at one point the author refers to Aaron Sorkin's writing as representative of the modern tendency for talking to be all about ourselves and talking over each other in effort to continually say something clever. I remembered that I had a friend who was a big Sorkin fan and when he read one of my scripts he commented with open surprise and obvious, but unspoken, disappointment that it wasn't filled with more snappy and clever dialogue, which I found dissatisfying as a critique, direct or implied.

I tried now to think what the modern examples of movies about people listening and thought of Quentin Tarantino, of all people. I thought about Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, The Hateful Eight and Jackie Brown, which I recall as very listening positive, perhaps even intensive, but what about Pulp Fiction? This spawned a million imitators, all of whom led with clever, or "clever", dialogue and people spouting forth quotes. Certainly, that is about talking.

But I wondered if I was remembering wrong. The screenplay, and the deleted scenes, include a scene in which Mia asks Vincent questions to find out who he is. The lesson Jules ultimately learns could arguably be that in really listening to the words he's been say he gains the wisdom and direction that he lacked when he merely spoke them.

It turns out, it's even more than that. Butch is introduced in a scene in which he's only shown listening. In a later scene in which he listens to another long speech, we see the person, Christopher Walken, speaking a lot more, but we're given a lot of queues that he's listening intently, including the conclusion of the speech cutting to a visual and dramatic punctuation of his continuing to listen and turn the words over in his mind decades later.

Almost all of the major scenes of dialogue people remember aren't framed around the speaker, but the listener and the clues that they're listening.

When awkward silence is recognized and noted, Mia demands the Vincent returns with something she can listen to.

And, in a touch that would be on-the-nose if the listening theme were explicit, or likely to be conscious, the character who demonstrates the worst listening skills, Brett, is the character the movies text seems to show the most contempt for. Marvin might come to a more ignoble end, but even Vincent recognizes that was undeserved.

I was watching it for evidence of this, so I know that confirmation bias is a factor in all of this, but it's really interesting to me how incredibly well this theory holds up.

What I note is that, while the 1994 Tarantino called Rio Bravo his favorite movie and Howard Hawks, with his famous clipped style of characters who regularly interrupt and show off their verbal acuity, as his favorite director, people here almost universally look thoughtfully and carefully engage with what everyone else is saying, even when they ultimately dismiss it.

(I probably need to revisit Rio Bravo as part of the Western 2020 I have going for myself this year, and see that I'm not giving it credit for the listening its characters do, but it remains that them bantering is what it's known for.)

Seeing how well this holds up will be a good reason to go through the Tarantino oeuvre this year, too.

Twitter and social media

I quit Twitter and Facebook a while back.

Most days I am happy with this decision. I'm not only happier, I'm also happier with who I am as a person.

I'm on Instagram, which I'm frustrated by in some ways, especially it being owned by Facebook, but it has most of the people I missed most out in the Internet ether. I tried to do Tumblr instead, because I like the functionality and lack of Facebook ownership marginally better, but too many people I know either never went there or migrated away at some point, so my support was largely lonely.

I'm also, for whatever it's worth on Letterboxd and Goodreads, which have only limited social benefits (or deficits). I'm also on LinkedIn, although, like everyone, I have no idea why, except, I guess, it's my key connection to a handful of people I don't wish to lose all connection to, even though we don't actually make any contact through it.

Similarly, I'm on Stage32, which sounded super promising when it was introduced to me, but I don't think I'm connected to even a single person I've had any social interaction with ever there, so I'm on it because I've never deleted it.

I haven't deleted my Quora, but all of their recent changes to make it more profitable, or whatever their motivation, have made it an intolerable hellhole in my opinion. That was too bad, because it was nice for a long, long time as an alternative tothe toxic environment of social media.

But the other day, I found myself wanting to update my Letterboxd account, including my picture, and was informed my picture there was attached to my Twitter account. So, I created a new Twitter account.

Then I was involved in a discussion with people who were super pleased with Twitter and their activity there. So I peeked in through my new account that I set up just to peek in. I looked at the accounts of some of my favorite people who are not on or at least not active on Instagram.

Now, I want to be clear, this was kind of a random assortment of people. And these were people who, if some combination of them got together at a bar or coffee shop near me on a regular basis, I'd be unbelievably excited to go every week. I'd update my life schedule to make it work. I'd travel a mildly inconvenient distance. All of that.

But on Twitter?

As Marshall McLuhan taught us, the medium is the message. Twitter is a place to declare things not to listen.

And, yeah, I'm not still not feeling that right now.

Even if you're declaring something I agree with like, "Hey, Neil is awesome!", who cares? I've had altogether too much declaration at this point in my life.

I'm leaving that new account up. I might post blog posts there, because, why not? I might leave it for the eventuality that I find having a Twitter account necessary and/or more desirable. I certainly left my original Twitter created and unused for a long time before using it to any extent. Perhaps that'll make sense again.

Or perhaps I'll be that careless with my own needs again.

Who the fuck knows?

My war on cars

I don't drive.

For much of my adult life this has been something of a point of shame with me.

The first thing you should know is that I'm not very good at it. I struggled in driver's ed, but probably could gotten through if the complications in my family life at the time hadn't interfered with whatever was needed to get that taken care of.

I've tried off and on to finish gaining that skill and the dictates of some relationships made it so it was occasionally difficult and perhaps even unreasonable of me not to have done so.

But here's the thing I realized. I'm temperamentally incapable of being good enough at driving for my own comfort. I can't hold the right level of attention to do it regularly.

When I tell people that, I only rarely acknowledge that I don't actually think that puts me in some tiny percentage of adults in the world. I'd guess I'm somewhere in the middle, if I had to guess. Perhaps a little below the median, but not massively. I simply don't think most people are safe controlling a motor vehicle, at least on a regular basis.

I also think most routine driving makes people worse human beings. I don't mean that as a bit of rhetoric. I think our brains are not evolved to understand the morality of controlling a giant iron machine that travels 10-100 times faster than our body can and that, while doing it, literally everyone loses some degree of their essential morality.

That's probably considerably less true on awesome road trips on long stretches of scenic highway, where the entire experience is freeing and not especially demanding.

But everyone is stupider and angrier while doing day to day commuting and driving about.

I was just reading, Owning a Car Will Soon Be as Quaint as Owning a Horse by Kara Swisher, because I heard her on the War of Cars podcast. I agree with most of her points here.

Here's the thing, I know that most people think driving is essential to their life, but I'm not someone who has ever lived in some community that's friendly to non-driving. I've lived mostly in Seattle and Austin, sprawl and cars, among other people who are largely confused by my lack of driving.

But, as I live longer, I find I'm even more confused by everyone else's commitment to driving. It's a perspective thing. They see it as freedom, I see it as slavery.

Because, while I haven't driven, I've lived in households where cars were an important part. Where we made payments on a car, paid insurance and licensing, gas and maintenance. Honestly, for people who aren't specifically fans of them, who enjoy the care and feeding, I can't imagine what makes people take part.

The degree I'll go is to say, I suspect private car ownership is going to go the way of cigarette smoking as a cultural artifact.

There will continue to be mystique of James Dean or Burt Reynolds driving like there is of Humphrey Bogart or Lee Marvin smoking. But, increasingly, you, as a member of the general public, doing it became more frowned upon.

It creates foul smells, makes the air worse for the people around you, endangers their health, and, as mentioned, has a negative impact on your personality. Thinking of the real life act becomes more difficult to view as innocent the more you consider the overall effect.

It's not a new comparison for me. For years, I justified my own smoking by saying at least I evened out my poisoning of the environment by not driving. But I quit even that a couple of years ago.

To age myself, I've gone from a world where most non-smokers I knew kept an ashtray in their house for when smokers came over to one in which most smokers I know don't even smoke in their own house anymore because it increases the health risk and makes their smoke smell even more noticeable when they go out. I think there will be a similar shift from those of us who don't drive being seen as being troublesome and burdens on the drivers around them to people who insist on having their own cars being seen as burdens on the rest of us, our roads and our air.

Honestly, I think as more people give them up, more work will be done finding solutions to the problems we use cars to solve now. I'm not among the self-driving car converted, although I do believe they could, at some point, be a part of a larger group of things we all incorporate into our solutions. I think the things a post-car ownership world would be aiming for would not all be addressed if we all mostly going about the same lives we do now in self-driving cars instead of driving, aside from the problem of people being assholes when they drive.

I know my bias on this is based on a series of coincidences that make my life. All of our biases on everything are. We just forget that most of the time. I think as more people's experience changes, I agree that people will move in this direction, though, and the world will be better on a vast number of levels for it.

Honestly, we're all just in that world, but our predecessors building a society around the needs of private car ownership and driving was at best foolish and more likely utterly contemptible. We should do better.

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.