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.

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?